Blood on My Tracks

I'm the only person alive who witnessed all of the New York sessions . . .

(With all the hoopla on Dylan these days and the 50th anniversary of Blood, here’s an excerpt from my book, Never Say No to a Rock Star: In the Studio with Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger and More . . .)

Ramone bellowed, “Come on you stupid fuckers! Bob Dylan is ready!”

One guy took a shot and kicked a metal box in the right place. The console shuddered, the lights came back on, and we were traveling through hyper-space again. We were on tenterhooks like that, always one transistor away from the damn thing failing.

We were ready just in time. I could feel the burn of creation from the other side of the glass. Dylan. Songs were bursting out of him like lava spewing from a volcano. He was mainlined to the source. What they call genius. I saw him write a song’s lyrics on a yellow legal pad like he was taking dictation, he couldn’t write fast enough. And the songs would rewrite themselves as he sang them. Take 1 would have a verse that sounded so good you could gasp with revelation, and then he’d do Take 2 and it would blow away the last one like so much ash after a fire.

We could feel it coming fast, and when that happened the pressure was on to capture it. Ramone’s foot would start tapping, his hands on the big round black knobs, controlling the levels, making sure that what went down on tape was clean. One chance, no going back. He whipped around to me,

“Roll tape, roll tape!”

The red lights were already lit. I had achieved the sweet spot, I knew what Ramone wanted before he did, I was Ramone, we were one. We locked eyes, no time for appreciation, was it going down on tape? I checked the lights, all tracks in record, I checked the meters, console, tape machine, the same. What was coming out of Dylan’s mouth and guitar was going to the console, coming out of the Altec 604 speakers that were as big as tanks and as heavy, loud to the verge of human tolerance, 101 decibels, going to the tape machine, to be etched into eternity. Or if I forgot one thing, oblivion. Can’t mess up, not now, not with Dylan. Meters moving in rhythm to the song. And Dylan, just a few feet away, behind the glass, throat tight, Tony Brown watching his fingers blast against the fret board, also trying to stay alive, Dylan, sweating, feeling it deep, the way he’d twist his vowels,

“You’re an eeeeeeeee-iihhhdiot, babe . . .”

Dylan! Holy shit! Me, 19-years-old watching rock-and-roll history being made right before my ears, seeing the spit flying out of his mouth against the U-87 microphone that I placed there.

Dylan. The whole studio throbbed, the big box with the copper roof about to blow off with all the pain, the anger, the truth. The tape machine flew in circles, the tape whirred, it seemed faster and faster than the thirty inches per second that I knew it travelled, the red lights seemed brighter, the needles pushed into the red zone, Ramone’s shoulders tensed, his total focus on what was in his hands, temperature rising, I started to hallucinate, the red lights turned to blood, the blood ran on to the tape machine, blood on the tracks . . .

“It’s a wo-o-u-under we can even feed ourselves!”

The plaintive moan of his harmonica, then the final, clangorous chord.

Then silence.

The song over. No one speaks when a take is done.

We sat and waited. Just the sound of the tape machine still whirring: flap, flap, flap. Now the needles still. The blood back to lights glowing, telling us it was all down on tape. We waited. Dylan turned to us in the control room, and said, in his sarcastic snarl, “Was that since-e-e-re enough?”

Vertigo. I was spinning like the fat tape on the machine. Ramone gave me the signal and I hit the stop button. Rewind.

I looked down at my feet, and watched the last floorboard give way. I fell. A lifetime of ideals washed away in one sentence.

What could this possibly mean? I had taken the oath, that’s what you did when you apprenticed to the master in the house of recorded art, you’d go to any length for the sake of rock and roll music, the highest state of truth yet created by human design. And now the high priest of it all was just a guy behind a curtain yanking the world’s chain? He’d murdered his musicians with the aplomb of a psychopath; he recorded his album sloppily in a day and then did it again two times more, and now this? Was it fucking sincere enough? I was ready to puke.

The egotistical pricks I’d indulged were all good fun compared to this. The icon of an age, the guy who punctured all pretense, who brought down the whole hypocritical building, the guy who sneered at sanctimony — totally full of shit?

I was lost. And I was to stay lost on a dark journey that was to last twenty years. Disillusionment can really mess with your head.