Cigar Box Banjo (17 page)

Danny only ever did one thing at the time that indicated he might be headed someplace farther away than Hamtown, Ontario. I think it occurred when we were working on Tony’s novelty album. And I might preface the story with a little anecdote about overdubs. In a multi-track recording studio, as you may know, bed tracks are laid down, maybe some ghost vocals,
¹
and then layers and layers are added through successive recordings. At any rate, I’m remembering a moment when, having successfully captured a basic version of some song, we all gleefully rubbed our hands and said, “Time for overdubs!”

“Okay!” said my brother Tony. “What are we going to over-do?”

There is more than a grain of truth in that gibe. In this particular case, the song lyric mentioned rain, and someone had the idea to portray rain sonically—specifically, via a gong that would sound “like a five-pound raindrop.” I don’t know exactly who I’m quoting there—some young buck in love with music who had too much catnip in his system. It could have been any one of us. Danny Lanois smiled, shook his head. “Not such a good idea,” he said. But we quickly became adamant. “Yes, yes! Let’s have the five-pound raindrop!” Danny’s smile vanished. “Guys . . .,” he said, gesturing with his hands in an imploring manner, trying to get us to see sense. But it was late, we were giddy, we wanted a five-pound raindrop. After all, no one else we knew of had a five-pound raindrop. Creative differences soon gave way to bristling hostility. Finally, Dan pointed at the relevant track on the mixing board. “Look,” he said, “I can’t do it. I’m leaving for a while. I’ll start the tape, you hit the ‘record’ button. See you later.” And then Dan Lanois—our paid employee, I might add—left the recording studio.

We exchanged a number of sheepish glances. “Maybe,” someone suggested, “it’s not such a good idea.”

WHAT, EXACTLY, does a producer do, you may still be wondering.

I would say, to begin with, the producer helps in the selection of material. Sometimes the producer selects the material by him- or herself, and I suspect there are instances when the artist, pumped up with pharmaceuticals and egotism, decrees the songs. But usually this is an area where the producer has influence. And having selected the songs, the producer is usually the one who gives them a distinctive nature. This may be as drastic as reimagining them, taking something up-tempo and making it into a ballad, and so on.

The producer usually determines the “sound,” that vague but oh-so-important quality that distinguishes one album from another. There are many factors at play here.
Where
the music is recorded is hugely significant. Studios have distinctive aural qualities and are imbued with the spirit of the local geography; a facility in Akron, Ohio, can have the same equipment as one in New Orleans, but they probably wouldn’t sound at all alike. The locality can also affect the quality of the sidemen who might be engaged. There would be a huge disparity between, say, the go-to guy in Akron and the go-to guy in Nashville. (Not that I’m slagging Akron, but there would likely be a big disparity between the go-to Ohioan and the sixth-call Nashvillian.)

These decisions all have repercussions. Let us imagine that a producer is charged with producing ten songs written and sung by an artist named, oh, Jude the Obscure. Well, Jude the Obscure could be featured with only his own gnar-bly guitar for accompaniment. He could be backed up by a string quartet, a small jazz combo, nineteen guys beating on koto drums, or the Berlin Philharmonic. The possibilities are endless. The producer has to make the right aesthetic call, and budgetary concerns also come into play, as he thence has to contract the musicians. (Or hire someone else to contract the musicians, especially if he wants any kind of horn or string section. This is how it happens that Porkbelly’s bassman, Chasbo, has been on so many recordings by so many famous people.) The producer might also think about special guests—maybe Prince can play the guitar solo on this track, that kind of thing. The producer has to determine methodology. Is everything going to come live from the floor, or will there be a reliance on the technology of the over-do? Is the entire thing going to be recorded in a single weekend, or are there vast empty pockets of time, so much so that songs can be composed in the studio, so much so that the musicians, their heads made vapid by intoxicants, can doze on the sofas in the control room until inspiration stands them up on their spindly legs?
²

Perhaps above all, the producer—like a theatrical or movie director—must deal with the talent. He must try to draw out the best performances, and use whatever means he has at his disposal to do that.

Let me be clear about one thing. While it is true that a producer can create a hit—save a song—or just as easily destroy it, I believe that the great songs are producer-proof. There are versions of Townes Van Zandt’s song “Pancho and Lefty” that are not as successful as others. Townes made a few of ’em his ownself, but that does not diminish the quality of the song. Some productorial decisions are foolish and ill conceived. I have a recording of “Pancho and Lefty,” featuring Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, that begins with a jaunty instrumental section I suspect is supposed to sound like a mariachi band, but really sounds like a bunch of L.A. cats being silly. Better to listen to Emmylou Harris sing the song (it’s on her album
Luxury Liner
), with her beautifully plaintive voice complemented by a tear-inducing pedal steel. But none of these variations alter the fact that it is a great, great song.

My friend Jake MacDonald is very fond of this song, and he cites it often. I remember barrelling down a dirt road somewhere in Manitoba, heading toward Jake’s f loating house in Minaki, Ontario. (Just in case I hung you up there, left you wondering what I meant by “floating house,” let me assure you that I meant the house was waterborne. It was octagonal and had a wooden walkway constructed around its perimeter. I suppose that beneath the house proper were some buoyancy devices; at any rate, it floated.) Jake’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles blanched. He was grim-faced and teetering on the brink of insobriety, a chasm into which he rarely falls. “I thought,” he said lowly, “that we were like Pancho and Lefty. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t, exactly. It’s possible that even Jake was a little unclear. I hope he was applying at least a modicum of his concentration to the task of driving, which he had undertaken at a velocity not countenanced by the law. So it’s possible he meant he and I were like “Pancho and Emiliano,” as in “Villa and Zapata,” the great Mexican revolutionaries. I think he meant to introduce the concept of steadfastness, of a committed dyad that could withstand all manner of destructive outside forces, because we were discussing his recent bride’s more recent decision to live otherwise than with Jake. But in citing “Pancho and Lefty,” he had in fact raised the spectre of betrayal. Perhaps this was intentional. As I say, he was teetering on the brink of insobriety. I should not talk; I am the one who, later that night, strolled nonchalantly off the aforementioned wooden walkway and into the nearly gelid Lake of the Woods.

I think it entirely possible that even Townes Van Zandt was a little iffy about what precisely was going on in the world of “Pancho and Lefty.” He allowed himself to mix up mythologies, to conflate folklore. It’s almost as though, inside Townes’s fertile and febrile mind, there were all these characters running around. There was the historical Pancho Villa, whose assassination gave rise to these famous last words: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Somewhere in there, perhaps, was Lefty Costello, the fictive union organizer from Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty
, who, like Godot, never shows up—in Lefty’s case, because he’s been murdered. These two disparate characters bump into each other, deep within the Van Zandt cranium, and Townes imagines a tale of intrigue, of betrayal, of death. Being Townes Van Zandt, he allots no time to reflection, to ratiocination. Instead, the strange hybrid world spills out, fully formed, and the listener is battered emotionally without ever truly understanding what is going on.

Maybe that is what my friend Jake meant when he cited “Pancho and Lefty” in reference to his own marital disaster: that he had been battered emotionally without ever truly understanding what was going on.

TOWNES VAN ZANDT, who died around the turn of the last century, at fifty-two years of age, is a golden and fabled presence in the pantheon of songwriters, and my mention of him leads me to other things. Townes came from a fine family, Texan aristocracy, and proved himself a brilliant scholar and athlete as a young man. Some problems—apparently no more severe than those suffered by many teenagers—led to doctors administering insulin shock therapy. The wiring in his mind was thereafter faulty, a condition he exacerbated with drugs and liquor. As the man himself put it, “I started doing crazy things.” He lived in an isolated cabin in Tennessee and emerged only rarely to play gigs. Onstage, Townes would grapple with his fretboard, bellow rather tunelessly, and quite often forget the words to his own songs. Audiences, always small, would be battered emotionally. He could be very funny—especially between songs, when he would describe the vagaries of his existence—but Townes carried with him an impenetrable darkness. Once, asked why he wrote sad songs, he quibbled: “Well, many of the songs, they aren’t sad, they’re hopeless.” It was as though he had suffered on our behalf. I have been to these horrible places, Van Zandt seemed to say, “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Orpheus—the father of songs, according to the Greek lyric poet Pindar—went to great lengths himself in his quest for subject matter. He is the only man to have visited the underworld. (Let me re-speak myself: the only man to have
returned
from there.) Orpheus, legend has it, could work wonders with his lyre, perfecting the instrument invented by the messenger Hermes. Orpheus could tame wild beasts when he played and sang. He could inveigle the stones and the trees to dance. He could alter the course of mighty rivers. And according to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
Orpheus was “inflam’d by love.” When his wife, Eurydice, stumbled over a nest of snakes, only to be bitten on the heel and die, Orpheus sat down with his lyre and produced songs of such manifest mournfulness that the nymphs and the demigods were moved to pity. “Well,” they suggested, digging the tears out of their eyes, dragging gossamer sleeves across their noses, “why don’t you go down there and get her back?” Orpheus descended. He played his music, the saddest of sad songs. Even the Lord of the Night was moved, and he told Orpheus, “Okay, okay, you can take her back. But”—there’s always a
but
—“make sure she walks behind you, and don’t look back at her until you’re both topside.” Once Orpheus popped up into the sunlight, however, he spun around, and Eurydice vanished forever.

It’s a romantic story, and some might say I have too romantic a notion concerning descendants of Orpheus such as Townes Van Zandt. Many of these same people (i.e., women with whom I have had relationships) also accuse me of not being romantic enough. It’s funny. It seems to be only in this one regard (where are you willing to go for your “material”? What sacrifices with regard to your physical and emotional well-being are you willing to make?) that romanticism is seen as a negative thing. I admit to being vulnerable here. When I was twenty, my role models were Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, and William Faulkner, men who swam in an ocean of poison, diving to the bottom and surfacing with a handful of pearls. And let’s face it, it isn’t easy to leave your role models behind.

This book is about my life in music, I realize, but hey, it’s my story, and having called to mind the Welsh Bard, I believe I will end this chapter by speaking about my relationship with him. I have made, over my lifetime, a series of pilgrimages to places of significance to Dylan Thomas. I have been many times to the White Horse Tavern, the bar in Greenwich Village where Thomas drank himself to death—or, perhaps more accurately, finished the job of drinking himself to death, a task he’d committed himself to as a young boy. “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies,” he announced to his tavern companions (after what observers agree was more like eight). “I think that’s the record.” Thomas also had, at that moment, a severe bronchial infection and an agent who was determined that Thomas remain upright and functioning through the rehearsals for the New York production of
Under Milk Wood
. This agent—John Brinnin, a frustrated poet, himself a pill-popping whisky addict—had located a doctor who made a series of misdiagnoses (he guessed “delirium tremens” as the infection in Thomas’s chest worsened) and administered a series of wrong-headed injections. The famous autopsy report of “alcoholic injury to the brain” was a cover-up, because these guys were guilty of what was, basically, manslaughter. It was Brinnin himself who propagated the “eighteen straight whiskies” myth in his book
Dylan Thomas in America.

Given the White Horse Tavern’s association in the public imagination with the premature death of a great poet, it’s surprising how proud the establishment seems to be. There is a shrine set up to Thomas, a glass case holding old copies of his books and such, and his portrait hangs prominently on the wall. I half-expected to see a poster announcing the monthly “Double-Whisky Drinking Contest! Try to Beat Dylan Thomas’s Record!” Still, it’s a fitting destination for a pilgrimage. Jack Kerouac was thrown out of the White Horse many times, and Bob Zimmerman/Dylan liked to drink there.

My Dylan Thomas pilgrimages have not been confined to the North American continent. I also—in confederation with Martin Worthy—once expedited into Wales from his wife Jill’s hometown of Cambridge. (Actually, Great Shelford, which is near Cambridge.) Marty and I went to Swansea, the “ugly, lovely town” of Thomas’s birth. We visited a commemorative fountain, where a small sign displayed the first few words of “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” When you think about a city, any city, having those words displayed for public consumption, it makes you feel better about the world and its relationship to poetry. Marty and I also went to a small workingman’s pub in Swansea, the kind of place where Dylan might have hoisted a pint as an apprentice drinker. When we opened the door, we were assailed by the sounds of boisterous laughter. Ale dribbled audibly over stubbled chins, darts whistled on their merry trajectories. As soon as we crossed the threshold, there came an unearthly silence. Faces, paled and pounded by a workingman’s existence, turned toward us; the eyes, stonelike, burned with an unspoken question: “What the fuck are
you
doing here?”