Smashed guitars and a troubled quest for perfection: Bob Dylan’s feud fuelled recording sessions with Daniel Lanois
When working with an artist like Bob Dylan, there’s usually a different set of rules when entering the studio. Dylan may not have been the Pavarotti of folk singers, but as long as you can hear the honesty in his voice whenever he sang, that was usually more than enough to get someone paying attention. Daniel Lanois was more about getting the sonics right rather than the feeling, and the road to making Oh Mercy wouldn’t be the easiest to manage from one song to the next.
Then again, the Dylan of the 1980s is a far different animal than who we got back in his prime. After making the best albums of the 1960s and going on to create even bigger albums in the 1970s, hearing him go through a massive Christian conversion and turning towards gospel records felt like a sudden swerve from the artist telling you about the problems of the world.
Suddenly, the guy who gave a voice to the people about the problems with society had a lot more to say about how he found salvation, which didn’t sit well with audiences. Dylan needed a bounce back to secular music, and Lanois seemed to be a decent guy for the job. He had already worked with Peter Gabriel and U2 on their masterpieces, so why not try to bring the rock icon back from the brink?
As it turns out, that’s easier said than done. Lanois is the kind of producer who’s meant to cheer people on to get the best take, and putting him with Dylan’s no-bullshit character feels like mixing oil and water half the time.
Whereas Lanois might be trying his hardest to work up to get the right feeling, Dylan was always more concerned with playing the song and then moving on, not caring to go back and focus on the raw sonics of everything. It’s fine for people to disagree, but Lanois got a little too heated in one session that left a guitar in a million pieces.
According to mixing engineer Mark Howard, the tension between Lanois and Dylan exploded midway through a session, recalling, “Maybe Lanois and [Dylan] didn’t see eye to eye on certain things. It got heated for a minute, and Lanois lost his mind. He grabbed this dobro and smashed it over this floor wedge”.
While that kind of tension feels like something that should come out of a reality show on dysfunctional producers, this was just another day at the office for the producer. When working with Peter Gabriel on the album So, Lanois was equally cutthroat about what he wanted out of his artist, including smashing a telephone to bits on the recording console and locking Gabriel in the studio so he would finish the lyrics to some of the songs.
Although Dylan doesn’t work under that kind of pressure, the results do show a different side of what he can do, especially when working on songs like ‘Political World’ or ‘Disease of Conceit’. The songwriting icon may have still been able to work through the album bravely enough, but it’s no surprise why he went back to the laid-back atmosphere of the Traveling Wilburys for his next album.