Legendary producer Jim Dickinson On Working On The Time Out Of Mind Album

In 2008, Brian Wise visited Jim Dickinson at his Zebra Ranch studio and talked to him about working with Bob Dylan.

im Dickinson was a founding member of The Dixie Flyers, who went on to be the house band at Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama in the early ‘70s, backing artists including Aretha Franklin. He played piano on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’ and even appeared in the film Gimme Shelter. He was Ry Cooder’s musical collaborator on many film soundtracks. He even formed the Memphis all-star supergroup, Mud Boy and the Neutrons. As a producer he worked with Big Star, The Replacements, Jason & the Scorchers, Green on Red, The Radiators, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, our own Weddings Parties Anything and numerous others. Dickinson’s first solo album in 1972 was Dixie Fried, which has become a cult classic. Dickinson's sons, Luther and Cody, formed the North Mississippi All-Stars. As a session musician, Dickinson worked with Primal Scream, The Flamin’ Groovies, Delaney and Bonnie and, in 1997 he got a call to go to Miami and join the sessions for Time Out Of Mind.

“That was one of the last things on my list, you know,” said Jim Dickinson (1941 – 2009) when I asked him about working with Dylan on the Time Out Of Mind sessions. “I’ll tell you this about Bob Dylan. Many things in life are disappointing. Bob Dylan is not one of those things. It was amazing.” Dickinson continues the story.

Well, if you read the book [Chronicles] and the timeline that he lays down in the book is correct and factual, then he was thinking about me 10 years before he come. He obviously does a lot of thinking. But it took, took five or six phone calls before it actually took place. I don’t think I was Daniel Lanois’ first call. I may be wrong about that one. But when I got there the session had been going on for a couple of days and apparently not very much had been happening. But everything we did stuck to the tape. There’s, one outtake, which to me - and typical of Dylan, as I understand it from other people - was the best thing we recorded. It’s called ‘The Girl from the Red River Shore’. [The song did not emerge until the Tell Tale Signs box set and is included in the new Fragments box].

The other thing, ‘The State of Mississippi (A Day Too Long)’, we cut a version of that which appeared by Sheryl Crow. So, maybe someday we’ll hear it by somebody else. But as we walked in, we worked on it. [‘Mississippi’ was included on Love & Theft and is also on Fragments]. A lot of that album is the first or the second take. We worked on this song a lot. And as we walked into the control room to hear the playback, Dylan said, ‘We did everything but bring in the Symphony Orchestra. Had I been producing at that point I would’ve started calling the Symphony Orchestra (laughs) but Lanois just sat there. I mean, they got one in Miami and I think they would’ve been more than happy to come play for Bob. But for whatever reason, they didn’t use the cut. And it really was like a true folk song where each verse ended with the same line. I know that he left the song off of Shot of Love. I was there the night they sequenced that just with Keltner [Jim, drummer] hanging around. He left the best song off that record, which I’ve heard is just something he does.

There were 12 musicians on the floor, 23 people in all in that and he [Lanois] was in unspoken control of every human being. I mean, I was there to play my little part, but I was a stick for him to hit Lanois with. It was like payback somehow for Dylan. It was a really complicated thing that went on……….which I can’t really discuss, but it showed me that I was right in thinking that. Even in the book [Chronicles], the way he presents me in the book, I was like a safeguard for him. And of the first night, there are two moments.

Now, this is me as a producer, and of course I wasn’t there to do that. But as a producer there are two moments in the session - the way things where the producer has ultimate control to me. That’s in the moment before you record on the talk back and the last thing that anyone says. [That] should be the producer, even if it just something like stupid, like ‘roll it’, or ‘take It again’ or whatever. In that moment, everyone is listening to you. Lanois never said a word in that moment. The other time is after the first playback is over when there’s silence in the room and everybody knows not to talk until the producer says something. Lanois never spoke.

The first night - I guess about the second, maybe the third song - at that moment after we’ve listened to the first playback, Dylan says, ‘What do you think, Jim?’ And Keltner immediately responded and Dylan says, no, I mean him and pointed to me. So, I told him what I thought, what you’re not supposed to do, and this kept happening. So, after a couple of nights - and I had to get reasonably drunk to do this, and I don’t drink anymore…….and I got reasonably drunk and went over. It was so jive ass. I had a little meeting with Daniel.

I said, ‘Look, man, I know I’m not supposed to be saying this stuff and I want to apologise but it’s Bob Dylan’. He said, ‘Oh, no, man, that’s what you’re here for, don’t feel that way about it.’ He kind of complained. He says, ‘He talks to you. He doesn’t talk to me. He thinks I’m a whipper snapper.’ And I, I thought to myself, ‘No, he thinks you’re a Canadian whipper snapper.’ (Laughs). But for whatever reason, Dylan did use me as a stick to hit Lanois with and it got a little uncomfortable a couple of times, but that was the gig.

Man! He had it written down on notebook paper, like a teenage kid. And one of the things that impressed me the most was in between cuts he would get the notebook out and work on the lyrics. He was still working on them. He told me that some of the songs were like six years old, and he had ‘em for a long time. He had called his manager and said, ‘Yeah, well, I’m writing songs, but I’m not gonna record ‘em.’ Now wouldn’t you love to hear that if you were the manager? (Laughs).

The reason that we were making that record and the reason that the record is very serious and kind of heavy with mortality [is that] he said he realised he’s going touring – and he thought he’d got in his band where it was pretty good - and that all of a sudden he had a younger audience that was a new audience and he decided that a new audience needed new songs. Dylan, as you might guess, is a very interesting man and his rationale may not be apparent but it’s there. The people who say he’s not in control, they just don’t get it. He was in utter control of that whole environment, not just the recording. He stood four feet from the microphone, wearing no earphones, and performed all of those vocals live. He went back and patched a couple of spots where he cracked up over the lyrics, and that was it.

Well, the most interesting thing he said here though, was I guess [because of] being in Mississippi. He says, ‘You know Larry Brown, the writer?’ ‘Matter of fact, I do,’ I said, ‘Yeah, he hangs around down in Oxford in this bar where my kids play. I see him down there, drinking.’ He looked at me real serious and he said, ‘I have read every word he ever wrote’. So, it kind of caused me to reassess my thinking about Larry, who was my friend. Think about Dylan sitting there on the bus reading Joe or something. I mean, pretty heavy!