Part Two

 

By Eric Wrisley

 

Jim Dickinson

Photo by Joe Presdeo

 

Last week we began our conversation with Jim Dickinson (if you missed Part One click HERE to read it now in our ARCHIVES). This week we pick up the conversation with the legendary producer with...

 

Eric Wrisley for BluesWax: We talked about Bob Dylan earlier. I have to ask you about playing with him. I'm a huge, huge Dylan fan.

 

Jim Dickinson: How could one not be?

 

BW: So you played on Time out of Mind, and I noticed looking at the personnel listing that you played keys, but a lot of other people played on that, too, including other keyboards.

 

JD: Well, really it was only Augie [Myers]. There was twelve musicians on the floor; six of them were guitar players and three of them were drummers. There were three full drum kits set up. It was completely insane.

 

BW: And it was all done live?

 

JD: Simultaneously, yeah. He punched in...you could drop in a word. He'd tickle himself and have to laugh and have to come back and punch in words. And that was only two or three times.

 

I think I overdubbed one semi-solo. Although none of them are solos, it's all just atmosphere. 

 

BW: What were those sessions like? Was it mass confusion or was it orderly?

 

JD: Well, it would be like an hour of sheer chaos and then eight minutes of beautiful clarity. And it was like flipping a switch between the two. In many cases, we took the rundown, the first cut, we would go on and take two or three more cuts, and Dylan would go back to the first one.

 

There's something in the spontaneity, which he really likes; I totally share that with him. The first time you get through...I learned it from the Rolling Stones session. After the first time they got through the song without a major screw up, Charlie Watts just gets up from the drums and walks away, and then it's over.

 

Nobody says the words, "Should we do that again, could we do that better." And had I not seen that in 1969 with the Stones, I'd have had no idea what to do with Alex Chilton and that Big Star record, that's the one...the reason I'm working today. And it's all about the spontaneity.

 

BW: So the mass confusion, while it's there, it...

 

JD: It's part of the creativity. And order from chaos - that's what any good producer does. And oh, you should see a Quincy Jones session. It's just people, a flurry of people all around. And in the middle of it is Quincy Jones and he's just this serene, smiling, godlike figure, you know, who is in utter control. In many cases unspoken control.

 

Like in Dylan's case, on Time Out of Mind, Dylan was in unspoken control of 23 people. And you know, people will tell you, "Bob Dylan - it's all a fluke, it's all just random crap that happens..." and well, that's just absolute garbage. It was like being hypnotized.

 

BW: Does he run the sessions himself?

 

JD: No. Unspokenly. But everyone does what he wants them to and they run the session kind of. It's beautiful.

 

BW: So it's a group thing?

 

JD: Yeah. And it's alive; it's living there, where the sum is more than the parts, and all that crap.

 

BW: When you listen to that disc and look at the personnel listing, it's incredibly sparse by comparison. With that many people, you would expect it would be just a jumble.

 

JD: But everybody's barely playing, see. Those six guitar players, the only two people who are playing "lead" are [Daniel] Lanois himself and Dylan. The others, Duke Robillard, and what was the other guy's name from Nashville who is just a consummate musician, sitting there waiting for one note. But that's the definitive note.

 

Two steel guitars! I never in life, not even on the worst hillbilly session in the world had I ever seen two pedal steel guitars played simultaneously. And there's Cindy Cashdollar who literally wrote the book, I mean go out and get the book [on Western Swing steel guitar], she wrote it.

 

And what's his name, Bucky Baxter who was playing with Bob at the time. They would suspend chords against each other that you could hear in the room if you take off the headphones; that wasn't even going to the tape. And yet all of that is part of it.

 

It's just like the high-hat on the Jerry Lee Lewis records that you can't hear. Everybody in the room can hear it, it's just not going on the tape. So it's having its affect, you know?

 

As these chords were, but they're not on the record.

 

BW: That's a pretty amazing thing to have that going on. Especially in a day when everyone goes in and records their piece and then someone puts it all together.

 

JD: Oh yeah, in this day and time, it's a miracle. 

 

Actually, Lanois brought in a ProTools man. It was the first night I was on the session. It had been going on for a while when I got there. And this guy was setting up his ProTools rig in the control room, and Dylan asked Dan, he said [subtle Dylan impersonation], "What is that?"

 

And Lanois kinda whispered to him, and he said, "Get it outta here." [Laughs hard] They sent him home. It was that simple, too, just "get it outta here."

 

BW: Let's talk about your new disc a little bit. Your kids play on it with you. It seems like there's a point where children become a little more like peers with their parents, instead of that subordinate relationship. When did that happen with your boys?

JD: Musically, they're way beyond me. They're much better than I ever was. But they still require production. When Luther, my oldest boy, when it became obvious that he really wanted to do it...I tried to discourage him until I realized I couldn't. And then I figured I gotta help him.

 

The younger boy, Cody, the drummer, the only decision he made was which instrument. He has an enormous musical gift. Luther went out and got everything he has. He learned it all, taught himself. I told him, "If I teach you, then you'll play like me." And Rock 'n' Roll, per se, is self-taught. I firmly believe that.

 

God, save me from people who have learned it in school. Bad experience after bad experience with that, because it's an internalized, self-taught thing.

 

In the studio, they still need me; they don't need me anywhere else.

 

Jim Dickinson's Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

Click Cover For More Info

 

BW: What's it like to play and record with them, and what's it like to watch them do what they've done?

 

JD: Oh, I couldn't possibly be more proud. They're both such good players. In the studio, of course between brothers, a sibling thing happens anyway. I had heard that before. I guess the first time I was aware of that was with the True Believers, as a producer.  Where Alejandro and Javier [Escovedo], the two brothers, with two very dissimilar voices...yet if you put them side by side on two VU meters and turn the speakers off, the meters were moving identically. And believe me, it was unconscious, because they were trying not to be like each other.

 

The sibling thing happens, but when you take it the depth of another generation, then the family thing happens. I guess it's bigger in Country music and the Blues than it is in Pop music, but there's all kinds of rich references for that family thing happening in the studio. Because we can communicate really un-verbally. And in my case, they've been so exposed to my musical tastes that they know what I want and they give it to me. It's a dream come true working with them.

 

As they were coming up as children, probably their most influential phase for them was when I was doing the soundtrack work with Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner. I would bring those tapes home, you know, those rough mixes and whatever, and they would disappear.  And now I know where they went. 'Cause they can do it.

 

BW: What else is special about this disc? You aren't one to release a lot of things rapidly. Why now - what brought it about?

 

JD: I see the light at the end of the tunnel, man! Time is runnin' out. I don't have a lot more to say artistically, but I do have a little more. I've been more comfortable in a secondary role, as a sideman or as a producer who really is the "man behind the curtain." But now that I feel that my boys are established, I do feel like I have a little bit to say artistically, and this is some of it.

 

"When I'm in the studio,
 although we're separated by time and space,
I'm utterly aware of them [audiences]."

 

BW: Not specific songs, but tell me in general what you like about this disc then.

 

JD: Well, the way it ended up different than it started is probably my favorite thing. Initially I was just going to do all chestnuts, just all old songs. Maybe that had slipped through the cracks, or maybe that I was interpreting. Halfway through, David Less, the co-owner of the label said, "Do you have a protest song? The world is so screwed up that I'm asking all my artists to do a protest song." 

 

And I said, "as a matter of fact, I do." So I did "Redneck, Blue Collar," which is the first cut on the record, which was written by an old friend of mine Bob Frank. There's a Bob Frank song on every one of my records.

 

But what happened after I did that, it turned a corner, and I cut three more new songs that are equally obscure, and it caused the record to not just be a Jim Dickinson songbook.

 

BW: David co-produced with you...having been in the producer's chair so long, is it difficult to have someone else in that spot?

 

JD: Well, self-production is a myth and, unfortunately, I've had to do it. It makes me uncomfortable, so I welcomed his input.

 

On my last record, Free Beer Tomorrow, the hardest thing for me to do was for me as a producer to get from me as a session player what me as an artist wanted. That was hellish.

 

BW: I know you did some shows in New York recently, are you going to tour to promote the record, or be playing dates out?

 

JD: God, no. I told them I'd do the shows in New York, but that was it. Live music is just not my thing. If something happened with the record, God forbid, I guess I'd have to go out and play. The studio is my domain. When I'm playing live I don't even feel the audience, you know. When I'm in the studio, although we're separated by time and space, I'm utterly aware of them.

 

BW: Have you played live regularly at all?

 

JD: Well, I toured with Cooder, back in the day, and it was a mistake. The only touring I've done that I really don't regret was with Arlo Guthrie, because it was such a learning experience. He was so interesting that I don't regret that. The rest of my live playing is... not much. My favorite gig was a wedding where no one even knew who we were, and the rest of the musicians didn't know each other.

 

BW: Are there people that you still want to work with or play with?

 

JD: Sure. Not as many as there were. And Dylan was really the top of the list. After I managed to play with Johnny Cash, Dylan was the cherry on the ice cream sundae.  There's still a couple I'd like to work with for various reasons.

 

Part of the joy of what I do is the spontaneity of what comes to me when the phone rings. That's part of the thrill of it. Right now, there's nothing I'd rather do than to walk into a room full of people I've never met and start to record music I've never heard.

 

I hate pre-production, because I work on instinct, and the more you think about it, the less instinct is involved.

 

BW: I have one more serious question...

 

JD: [Laughs] In the immortal words of Mick Jagger, when you're talking about Rock 'n' Roll, don't you think "serious" is a bit much?

 

BW: [My turn to laugh] Well, it's a little bit of a heavy question: if you could be remembered for one thing when you're gone, what would it be? People would say, "Jim Dickinson was..."

 

JD: He made good records. I think I make good, limited-appeal records. And every once in a while, I make a real good one. And that's about it.

 

My claim to fame, if I have one, in Rock 'n' Roll history is in "Brown Sugar." The line, "hear him whip the women..." he sang it when we tracked, but when he overdubbed he kept forgetting it. Charlie Watt's made me remind him of the line, and he put it back in. I think it's a good line. If I'm a footnote to Rock 'n' Roll history, that's it.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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