Jim Dickinson

 

Part One
(Part Two)

 

By Eric Wrisley

 

Jim Dickinson

Photo by Joe Presdeo

 

Jim Dickinson is a guy who has been around the spotlight far more than he's been in it. He's been a sideman. He's been a session player. Perhaps more than anything, he's been the "man behind the curtain" - the producer. The list of artists he's worked with is a mile long and includes the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, the Replacements, and The North Missisippi Allstars (whom he's "produced" in more ways than one!). The list goes on.

 

As a front man and solo act, he's released three albums: Dixie Fried [1972], Free Beer Tomorrow [2002], and this year Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger [2006]. If you do the math, you'll see the cycles are getting shorter. Jim says he's got a little more to say artistically and "this is some of it."

 

What you might never know from all of this is that Jim Dickinson is a talker. We slipped into an easy conversation about his career, his family, me blathering about music I like, and a little about his new record. It seemed like no time had passed, but by the end of the conversation it felt like I'd known the man forever.

 

Eric Wrisley for BluesWax: So you just got back in town from out west. Where were you out west?

 

Jim Dickinson: Tucson. I did part of the Tape Op [Magazine] convention and then my manager lives in Tucson, he had a session out there with the Tony Furtado sessions that I did a couple of days on.

 

BW: I hear a lot about you as a producer...so I wanted to talk about that a little bit first. I don't know if you've seen the movie Wag the Dog, but in that movie Dustin Hoffman plays a movie producer. At one point, he comments that no one ever really gives credit to the producer. He says, "Producing is like being a plumber: if you do your job right, nobody notices..."

 

From your perspective, what's the most important thing about producing?

 

JD: Finishing. Nobody else has to finish, you know. An engineer can work forever; an artist often wants to work forever, but a producer has to finish. And, man, you gotta know, of course, when it's done. If you keep going, you'll ruin it. It's like cooking, you just gotta know when it's done, and then be finished.

 

BW: Are there things that you look back on and say, "Oh, I could have done that better"?

 

JD: Well, there's always stuff, you know, you gotta walk away from them, for sure. There's always things that you would do differently. The only thing as I look back generally, the major thing that I end up regretting is personnel. Like somebody else might have performed this task a little better than whoever I used. Sometimes I think about that. But you gotta walk away from 'em.

 

BW: When you hear or see others' work, do you think, "Oh, I could have or would have done that better"?

 

JD: Well, you can't help but listen to it and...it's like wanting to stick your hands in the speakers and touch the faders. You can't help but listen to somebody else's work and wish you had your hand on it. Oh, yeah, sure!

 

BW: You've been around 40 years. What's changed in the business? What's different now than it was 10, 20, or 40 years ago? For better or for worse...

 

JD: Seriously, the biggest difference is, up through...I guess it started changing in the late 1970s, early '80s...but the record companies, the business side of it, left the creative side of it alone for a long time. And you know, the corporate suits were afraid to come around the creativity because they thought they might change it, and something might happen and it would be their fault.

 

That has changed radically. They're not only in your face, they're up your nose now. Expectations have changed, you know the idea of multi-platinum sales that came along with Michael Jackson stimulated a greed explosion that I think has all but destroyed the business.

 

"I don't like lines around anything,

and drawing lines around music is just not right."

 

BW: Without that, what do you think might be different?

 

JD: The regionality wouldn't have disappeared. When they saw that they could sell 30 million of anything, they went crazy. And to me, the idea that that many people should like the same thing is an illness.

 

I yearn for the day when you could listen to a record, like a single, and point your finger at a map and say, "This came from there, this came from there." Instead of one size fits all, which I just don't buy into.

 

BW: I know you've worked with Jimbo Mathus, who really characterizes himself and his music not as Blues or Rock 'n' Roll or whatever, but as "Mississippi music." Even though it takes a lot of forms and faces, there is something that binds it together as being from "here."

 

JD: Well you know, I've spent most of my life in Memphis, and Memphis has had for eons an identifiable musical vibe, which you could feel and hear right away. It means a whole lot to me. I hate to see that disappear.

 

And the compartmentalization of everything about the rules, you know, like what we call the "Blues Nazis," you know - this is the Blues, that's not the Blues. Now it's struck Americana, now there's the "Americana Police." "Oh, well, this isn't Americana, there's no steel guitar."

 

Somebody told [Bob] Merlis that my record Voodoo Tiger is not Americana. Hell, I helped invent Americana. Tell me I'm not...

 

And the Blues thing...Mississippi is a good point, although I have my problems with their marketing philosophy, Fat Possum is a miracle. They've created literally a miracle marketing a totally regional sound. Yet how many people will sit there and tell you that it's not the Blues. Well, what the hell is it?

 

T-Model Ford - I had people tell me that T-Model Ford is not a Blues artist. Well, you go tell him that and see what happens.

 

BW: What is he then?

 

JD: Yeah, exactly, what is he, a Martian?

 

BW: I think it's that the "Nazis" or the purists want ownership of it. And to allow something to take different forms means giving it up.

 

JD: That's a good point. It's theirs. And if it gets outside of a certain parameter, it threatens their ownership. But that's a sickness, it really is. I don't like lines around anything, and drawing lines around music is just not right.

 

BW: If you weren't making a living in music, what would you be doing?

 

JD: [laughs] You think I'm making a living? [I laugh]

 

I have no idea. That's truly the miracle of what they laughingly refer to as my career, it's that there was a place for me. And the only way I could explain that, and believe me, I've thought about it a lot, is...they talk about hits, "Well, is there a hit on your record?" I tell the companies hits are in baseball. My manager hates that, he says, "Don't tell them that anymore."

 

Anyone who tells you they know what a hit record is, is a liar; unless that man is David Geffen or a few other people who honestly know, somehow. They have deals with the devil or something, they actually can hear or predict a hit record. Clive Davis can. But no one else can.

 

The only thing you can be sure of is that whatever is a hit today, in six weeks won't be. And in six weeks the public that made that a hit will demand something new. And that new thing has to come from outside the box.

 

Which is the reason that people like me get to work. The non-creative side, the suits, know that whatever it is that's coming is coming from outside their world. So they have to tolerate crazy people.

 

BW: Yeah, because they can't do it, they have to put up with what it takes to get it.

 

JD: Yeah. One of the interesting things that happened in the corporate takeover in the late 1980s was, of course, the first people to go were the creative ones. That's the first ones they got rid of. It was, "Well, get all of those freaks out of here," you know? All those people with their damn posters on the wall, let's make them leave. And it took them a while to figure out that they had factored out creativity.

 

The people who are running the show now, they're not stupid people, they're just not music people. And if anything, it's a little better than when the lawyers and accountants were running things, which was the first transition. Then we got into the multi-corporate money moguls, which is who is running it now, by committee. Which is a nightmare, 'cause everybody has a damned opinion. For a producer, that's murder.

 

BW: Right, because then your opinion, which should carry a lot of weight, begins to carry very little.

 

JD: Yeah, you're just one of many. Of course, they could all be right, that's the problem.

 

BW: And you don't know.

 

JD: You don't know till it's over.

 

BW: At your age... you're almost twice my age. OK, that's not exactly true...

 

JD: Yeah, it was rough for me. At first, the artists were young enough to be my children. Now the A&R people are young enough to be my children. It's terrible.

 

BW: Well, at my age, I know that new music I've listened to over the past five years or ten years often doesn't stick with me like the music I listened to when I was a teenager. What sticks with you over the years?

 

JD: This is kind of hard to admit, but most of all the thing that sticks with me is the sound per se. I know you're supposed to say, "It's the song, it's all about the song." Well, it's not all about the song! 

 

Sometimes it's about the abstract feeling. It's harder and harder to get that. I think that's what's happened with the digital domain. In the digital domain, which we're all trapped, 'cause of course we're listening to CDs...you know I've got buddies who say, "I stay analog right up until the master." Yeah, well then you're fooling yourself, aren't you? 

 

I digitize it as soon as I can, 'cause I want to know how bad it's gonna sound. But you don't have that warm fuzzy feeling that you had when you were sitting there listening to an analog disc. It simply is not there. It's not gonna come, it's two different listening experiences.

 

What you do in the digital domain is you endure the listening in order to hear the music, and the material and whatever is there, the message. But you sit there and endure this thin, brittle, artificial, not of this world technique of reproducing sound. There's no way to aesthetically enjoy like you could that record in 1983. You had a whole different feeling. You had a feeling of discovery and that's been destroyed by the Internet. Where you could find a record and it would be yours, and "I found this thing, and nobody knows about it. And I can turn my friends on to it and we can all enjoy it together." Well, everybody gets the same information at the same time now. It's all readily available, there's no obscurity, you know.

 

BW: The world's really small these days. Bands that might have been a moderately successful local act twenty years ago now have their moment in the sun. I think it fades quickly, but they have it.

 

JD: Oh yeah, it's over as fast as the download. They used to say 15 minutes of fame, hell, give me 15, you know, it's more like two or three.

 

Jim Dickinson's Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

Click Cover For More Info

 

BW: If you were on a lifeboat and could only keep five albums, what would they be?

 

JD: Oh... Sketches of Spain [Miles Davis] at the top. Amazing Grace by Fred McDowell, which is a Gospel album on Testament. Weary Blues by Langston Hughes with the Charlie Mingus Orchestra. Ohhh... Best of Jimmy Reed, and uh, Joseph Spence, Happy All the Time.

 

I'm not sure about Jimmy Reed, that just kinda popped into my mind. It was Bill Putnam, see, he was the engineer. And again, it's the sound there. Of course, the music's great, but what keeps Jimmy Reed from sounding like the rest of the dirtball Blues from that era - Bill Putnam did.

 

He recorded it like it was a string quartet. Why is The Beatles' first record so great? 'Cause it was recorded brilliantly.

 

BW: That's a different way of listening to music than how I usually think.

 

JD: Well, you know, it's not that new to me. It's not like something that I jaded and turned into. I was pretty much always listening to sound as a kid. It was what drew me into the more bizarre genres of music; it was the sound, not so much the material.

To be continued...

 

Eric Wrisley is a contributing editor at BluesWax. You may contact Eric at blueswax@visnat.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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