by Jochen Markhorst
X No one had any idea what to do
Quincy Jones knows exactly what he is doing when he invites Pete Townshend for a session: a rock god’s guitar solo in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” breaks open the gate to the MTV audience.
Townshend declines the honour, but second-choice Eddie van Halen ends up being an even stronger choice. Jones and Jackson get more than they asked for; “Beat It” is one of the best-selling singles of all time, Eddie’s guitar solo one of the most famous of all time. The same is true of Clapton’s contribution to Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, or Jaco Pastorius’ bass magic on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, or thousands of other guest players: the producer (or artist) knows what he wants and invites a guest who can bring it to bear.
With Dylan, it works differently. Conversely, almost. When Mike Bloomfield describes his experiences, he unintentionally underlines the importance and influence of the session musicians present:
“You wouldn’t believe what those sessions were like. There was no concept. No one knew what they wanted to play, no one knew what the music was supposed to sound like— other than Bob, who had the chords and the words and the melody. But as far as saying, “We’re gonna make folk-rock records” or whatever, no one had any idea what to do. None. […] No one understood nothing.”
(If You Love These Blues: An Oral History – Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom, 2000)
Weird with any other musician, but not with Dylan; we know identical testimonials from, say, Charlie McCoy (on Blonde On Blonde), or Kevin Odegard and Eric Weissberg (Blood On The Tracks), or Augie Meyers (Time Out Of Mind). The most quotable comes from Blake Mills (Rough And Rowdy Ways, so more than half a century after Highway 61 Revisited):
“Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference.”
(interview Belgian magazine Knack, 9 March 2021)
That consistency nuances the standard narrative about the sweeping mood switch of “Phantom Engineer”. More or less official (in biographies and reflections such as Clinton Heylin’s Revolution In The Air) is witness Tony Glover’s testimony from the booklet accompanying Bob Dylan: The Collection, that 2006 “digital album” on iTunes:
“As most of the musicians and crew split [for a lunch break], Bob sat down at the piano and worked over “Phantom Engineer” for an hour or more. When the crew was back in place, Bob ran down how he wanted it done differently—and in three takes they got the lovely version on the album, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh,” with some tasty guitar and piano builds in it.”
… the more or less official historiography describing how the lone sparrow Dylan diligently shuffled chords, tempos and words for an hour in that huge Columbia studio space to arrive at that brilliant final result.
Heroic and romantic, but it is not very believable. It is totally at odds with Dylan’s working methods as we know them from all the testimonies of session musicians. The decisive factor in the magic of Dylan’s greatest masterpieces always turns out to be the input of the session musicians present. And a huge difference between 29 July-before-lunch and 29 July-after-lunch is just that: two different musicians.
Bassist Joe Macho has been replaced, according to official documents, by Russ Savakus. Savakus is a jazz musician, and has no name in the rock world (yet). Bloomfield noticed this too: “They had a bass player, a terrific guy, Russ Savakus. It was his first day playing electric bass, and he was scared about that” (in the wonderful tribute to Bloomfield If You Love These Blues: An Oral History by Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom from 2000). It might explain why we so often hear the bassist grinding irritatingly against a fret in the afternoon takes; after all, as a jazz musician, Savakus usually plays a fretless double bass.
Even more doubt-raising is the testimony such as that of Harvey Brooks (a.k.a. Harvey Goldstein): “I played in the studio on Positively 4th Street, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Tombstone Blues,” he tells Record Collector Magazine in 2010, and also Colin Irwin, in his thorough reconstruction Legendary Sessions: Highway 61 Revisited (2008) reports his finding that Savakus, after painfully struggling with “Tombstone Blues”, drops out midway through the day. Confirming Brooks’ statement, who explains that Al Kooper called him midway through the day because “Dylan was having a problem with the bass player”. That afternoon session is Brooks’ first experience with Dylan (“That was really my entrance into the world of pop music, folk music. Never heard of Dylan”), and the remainder of his recollection also is in line with the stories we know from others:
“There was no guaranteed time structure or chord structure. It was in flux. Dylan’s basic instruction was just, ‘Follow what I’m doing.’ He never said anything about chord changes. He’d be writing some of the lyrics for the next tune as we were doing that tune. He would just start it off and we’d start playing it. And all of it was one or two takes, three takes maybe.”
And for the other replacement, pianist Frank Owens, a studio session with these long-haired blues beatniks must be equally uncomfortable, although he has at least some experience with them. Owens, who earns his money mainly as an accompanist to such luminaries as Lena Horne, Johnny Mathis and Petula Clark, has already been called before by producer Tom Wilson a few months ago: we hear him on “Maggie’s Farm” and he is also listed on “On The Road Again” (but that really seems to be Dylan himself on the piano), both recorded for Bringing It All Back Home on 15 January 1965. It makes little impression on him, as evidenced by the recollections he recalls when asked in The Paul Leslie Hour in 2017. According to the recording sheets, Frank Owens was paid four times for a recording session with Dylan in 1965, but he himself only remembers one with certainty:
“There were several sessions but I was on at least one of them. So I think I’m on Highway 61 or Like A Rolling Stone or one of those things like that, you know. So that’s me, yes. I did do that.”
… so those Bringing It All Back Home sessions he doesn’t remember. As every memory, every anecdote he brings up in that long radio interview with Paul Leslie only is consistent with the stories we know about the recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”. He half remembers what the producer’s name was (“Tom something or other I can’t think of his last name” – so that must have been Tom Wilson), he remembers how “Al Kooper got in on a fluke. I don’t know how that happened you know, but he wasn’t supposed to be on this session”, that Paul Griffin played organ, and of Dylan he remembers: “He was going to sing I think it was Like A Rolling Stone, so he had a piece of paper and he would jot down the lyrics of what he was getting ready to do next.” Nor any word, for that matter, about the recording day six weeks later, where his name appears on the afternoon session’s recording sheets for “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” and for “Positively 4th Street”. Nor about the session a few days after that, 2 August, the evening session that yields the H61 recordings of “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”.
Still, we really do seem to hear him. From that first July 29 afternoon take, a splashy tack piano with ragtime runs and vaudeville accents suddenly flutters between the verses. There is unmistakably a Scott Joplin-adept at the keys here – this is the same pianist as on “Maggie’s Farm” in January and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in August; this is Frank Owens.
Playing what needs to be played.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 11: Dylan opted for the slower version
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door