11/18/2023 0 Comments Time out of mind![]() ![]() He wanted to put together a band and go to Miami. In a phone call Lanois has described as “crushing,” Dylan explained he didn’t want to record so close to home. But before the sessions began in January, Dylan threw Lanois one of the change-ups he was famous for. The eeriness of the empty theater added to the timeless feel he was after. “I wanted to make the record at the Teatro because the place had the very best vibe,” Lanois says. Eventually, demos were cut for six of the 11 songs that would appear on Time Out of Mind, as well as others. Dylan came and went, sometimes working with his road band, sometimes with Lanois, Howard and Mangurian, playing over the loops Lanois had made in New York. Dylan’s Point Dume house in Malibu was about 45 minutes south, and throughout September and October he’d drive up whenever he wanted to work out the songs. That idea was explored during demo sessions at Lanois’ studio in Oxnard, California, called the Teatro and built in a former theater. “The original idea was … we’d do all this collaging and cut-and-paste.” “Dylan was very interested in Beck,” Lanois’ engineer Mark Howard told Uncut magazine. These loops may have been a response to Beck’s mix of the blues with hip-hop’s aesthetic. The two played percussion over Patton’s delta blues, then stripped the original recordings out and looped eight-bar sections into 15 or so grooves to help set the mood and direction of what was to come. Looking for the spark of the old records Dylan had recommended, Lanois began by working with producer Tony Mangurian in Mangurian’s small New York studio. This time, I didn’t want blueprints – I wanted the real thing.” ![]() “Many of my records are more or less blueprints for the songs. “I wanted something that goes through the technology and comes out the other end before the technology knows what it’s doing,” he’d tell New York Times writer Jon Pareles. It had the simplicity, presence and power – a sense of music unfolding in real time and space – that Dylan was out to capture. “Great early American recording prior to experimentation,” Lanois says. But if the music wasn’t set, the intention was: Dylan asked Lanois to listen to old rock & roll and blues records – Little Willie John, Arthur Alexander, Little Walter, Charley Patton. “Bob said, ‘Well, this could go any way we want,'” says Lanois. “They had regret and hope, beauty and optimism. What Lanois heard that day were songs that focused on what Dylan called “the dread realities of life.” “They had a lot in them,” Lanois says today. The two were about to make an album that, Dylan would later tell Rolling Stone, “was me getting back in and fighting my way out of a corner.” And he picked a sparring partner who’d helped him do it once before. That contention – and the results it produced – may have been part of what Dylan was looking for. Dylan and Lanois had not much kept in touch since the contentious New Orleans sessions for Oh Mercy in 1989. ![]() He wanted Lanois to listen to some lyrics that he’d put together and tell him if there was enough there for his first collection of original songs in more than half a decade. In 1996, Bob Dylan met Daniel Lanois in a hotel room in New York.
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