When I was a teen-ager, reading liner notes like these, I was often swept away, imagining what the recording “scene” must have been like. Who were all those cute girls in that photo on the inside foldout of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Brothers and Sisters” album? Did they have Southern accents? Were some of them actually Brits? That would be hot. If I had showed up at the session, would the girls have been like: “Y’all, look at this cute Yankee preteen—let’s have him off for a quick towboat in the bloody lorry?” Here, there is no need to speculate. I was there. I saw it. I was there for the entire nine-day orgy of talent and spontaneous creativity, an orgy that was oddly unsexual, and in which I was sometimes the only participant, as everyone else had gone out for dinner and apparently forgotten to invite me. Sometimes—inspired, dazed, loaded, pulsing, reverberating, high on the music—we would wander out into the upstate night and just gaze up at the stars, realizing we were part of history. I remember Bruce Springsteen musing, “Folks, folks, we are part of history.” Come to think of it, that might be where we first got that idea about us being part of history, from Bruce saying that. And I remember Bono firing back, “Yes, Bruce, but isn’t it the case, technically, that everyone is part of history?” “You got me there, Bon,” Bruce said, and everyone roared with laughter, having just nearly witnessed, we realized, a real clash of the titans, there by the campfire. Unfortunately, the Bruce-Bono contribution—a speculative number in which Woody Guthrie and Tom Joad teleport back in time and tell a story to Pocahontas about a New Jersey state trooper accosting Gandhi outside a Paterson night club in 1955, with its rousing chorus (“Just because he looked / Like a person of color”) and then its somewhat less rousing subchorus (“That incident, concerning color / Had put us all in a sort of dolor”)—had to be cut, simply for reasons of time (it was more than eleven hours long). (...)
We recorded at “the farm,” an abandoned barn off the New York State Thruway littered with dead sheep and (before Prince took charge and paid to have him carted away) a dead farmer, and also some abandoned sheep and even, at one point, an abandoned farmer. It got pretty crowded in there, but, swept away by the Dionysian energy, no one minded, even when the abandoned farmer fell asleep across the mixing board and deleted the Ritchie Blackmore solo on Don Henley’s version of “The Wheels on the Bus.”
What can I say about those crazy days and nights? I was there. You weren’t. You only wish you were. And I wish you were. Or, as the English majors say, I wish you had been. That is called, they tell me, “past-perfect tense.” O.K., whatever, Shakespeare. Still, there’s something to that. Those nights were past, they were perfect—and they were tense. I remember once when all our gear went missing. What a crisis! All the harmonicas were in that bus! We’d parked outside a diner full of hostile locals and state troopers. After a rather scary meal, we came out to find the bus missing. We glanced back into the diner and all the hostile locals and state troopers were looking down at their plates, the beginnings of a smile flickering across their face. Across their faces. What I mean to say is, the beginnings of a smile, one per face, were flickering, there on the various— There must have been about, I’d say, forty faces in there. Plus, this one guy had no face. He must have been in an accident or something. Or, come to think of it, maybe he was a robber, wearing a pair of panty hose over his face? But, anyway, even that guy was smiling. They were all looking pretty smug in there, so happy that us long-haired creative types had been stymied by their cornpone antics. Because slowly it had begun to dawn on us: they’d stolen our bus! Until someone realized we’d gone out the wrong door. We raced around the rest stop to confirm this, some of us, including Billie Holiday and Mick Jagger, racing back through the diner, only to find our bus—sure enough—just where we’d left it! We had a good laugh about that. Inside, the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face were also having a good laugh about it. And I thought, Ain’t that America? For you and me? Ain’t that America, the land of the—
Which was when the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face all raced out and beat us up, for having wrongly accused them of stealing our bus. After the beating, though—indicating the complexity of America—all the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face invited us over for apple pie. And there were, like, as I said above, about forty of them. So we had to slog from house to house all night, eating pie after pie, when we should have been back at “the farm,” recording. Some of those pies were better than others. I guess that’s not surprising. It would have been pretty weird if every hostile local and state trooper and that guy with the panty hose over his face had all served us pie that was exactly equally good. Unless, I guess, they’d all bought their pie from the same place. Like Walmart. Or BJ’s Wholesale Club.
Anyway.
There were so many amazing moments during the making of this record. I suppose for many of us the high point was when Bob Dylan shuffled into the studio and sang his own composition, “As I Drive This Nation Sublime”:
As I drive this nation sublime / I drive my lady crazy / Get off my back woman / I’m free as that river flowing / Green as that grass you’re mowing / Don’t be so gender-inflexible / Where is it written that the dude must be the one who / Mows the lawn / Chick?But in the end that had to be left off, too.
by George Saunders, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Zohar Lazar
