Free Night Beat by Mikal Gilmore Page A

moment. He offered his hand, flashed a slightly bashful smile, then walked over to my stereo, kneeled down, and started to flip through a stack of some records on the floor—mostly music by older jazz, pop, and country singers. He commented on most of what he came across. “The Delmore Brothers—God, I really love them. I think they’ve influenced every harmony I’ve ever tried to sing. . . . This Hank Williams thing with just him and guitar—man, that’s something, isn’t it? I used to sing those songs way back, a long time ago, even before I played rock & roll as a teenager. . . . Sinatra, Peggy Lee, yeah, I love all these people, but I tell you who I’ve really been listening to a lot lately—in fact, I’m thinking about recording one of his earlier songs—is Bing Crosby. I don’t think you can find better phrasing anywhere.”
    That’s pretty much how Dylan was that afternoon: good-humored and gracious, but also thoughtful in his remarks. And sometimes—when talking about his Minnesota youth, or his early days in the folk scene under the enthrallment of Woody Guthrie—his voice grew softer and more deliberate, as if he were striving to pick just the right words to convey the exact detail of his memory. During these moments he lapsed sometimes into silence, but behind the sunglasses (which he never removed), his eyes stayed active with thought, flickering back and forth, as if reading a distant memory.
    For the most part, though, sipping a Corona beer and smoking cigarettes, he seemed surprisingly relaxed as we talked that afternoon. He grew most animated when he talked about a video shoot that he had done a short time before to promote his most recent album at that time,
Empire Burlesque.
At Dylan’s request, the shoot had been done under the direction of Dave Stewart, who was then a member of Eurythmics. “His stuff had a spontaneous look to it,” said Dylan, “and somehow I just figured he would understand what I was doing. And he did: He put together a great band for this lip-sync video and sets us up with equipment on this little stage in a church somewhere in West L.A. So between all the time they took setting up camera shots and lights and all that stuff, we could just play live for this little crowd that we had gathered there.
    “I can’t even express how good that felt—in fact, I was trying to remember the last time I’d felt that kind of direct connection, and finally I realized it must have been back in the 1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, playing with four-piece rock & roll bands back in Minnesota. Back in those days there weren’t any sound systems or anything that you had to bother with. You’d set up your amplifiers and turn them up to where you wanted to turn them. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Now there are just so many things that get in the way of that kind of feeling, that simple directness. For some reason, making this video just made me realize how far everything has come these last several years—and how far I’d come.”

    SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, in late spring 1986, my conversations with Dylan continue.
    It is just past midnight, and Dylan is standing in the middle of a crowded, smoke-laden recording studio tucked deep into the remote reaches of Topanga Canyon, outside Los Angeles. He is wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, a sleeveless white T-shirt, black vest, black jeans, frayed black motorcycle gloves, and he puffs hard at a Kool while bobbing his head rhythmically to the colossal blues shuffle that is thundering from the speakers above his head.
    “Subterranean,” he mutters, smiling delightedly.
    Sitting on a sofa a few feet away, also nodding their heads in rapt pleasure, are T-Bone Burnett and Al Kooper—old friends and occasional sidemen of Dylan. Several other musicians—including Los Lobos guitarist Cesar Rosas, R & B saxophonist Steve Douglas, and bassist James Jamerson, Jr., the son of the legendary Motown bass player—fill out the