T-Bone / Dylan project: Lost On The River

[cwr]

I really hope we get to hear the rest of what The New Basement Tapes recorded that didn't make it onto Volume One.

It would also be great if EC could release all of his New Basement Tapes demos -- maybe that's unlikely since maybe that would be perceived as violating the team spirit of the project, but a limited edition release of all the Costello/Dylan co-compositions feels like it would be a worthy thing to put out into the world.

[And No Coffee Table]

Taylor Goldsmith reflects.

Part 2

https://dawestheband.substack.com/p/los ... river-pt-2

So there we were at the beginning of our two weeks. Some of us old friends, some of us meeting for the first time. Some of us way over-prepared (*raising my hand* - the reasoning behind it explained in the last post and not a quality of mine I am proud of in this instance), some way under-prepared. But all of us thrilled to be there.

I don’t remember who kicked it off. Probably Elvis, if I had to guess. He had a lot of ideas at the ready and easily had the most experience under his belt (which is saying a lot in a group like that). The perfect person to set the creative pace. That pace happened to be an all out sprint, as it turned out. Two weeks in a studio (and I can’t remember if we played Sundays or not…probably not) and we were able to cut FIFTY SONGS! To put that into perspective - a lot of albums these days take somewhere between 3 and 6 months. And that’s just 10-12 songs. Our first record was cut in 2 weeks, but it’s only 11 songs and we worked as fast as we possibly could (for mostly financial considerations). So fifty in two weeks is unthinkable. A lot of the lyrics ended up with several renditions. Lost On The River, which was my demo shared in last week’s post, was cut by everyone by the end, I think. It made sense for it to become the album title. But even though the same lyrics were sometimes re-imagined musically, 50 completely different full band arrangements is an extremely tall order for any amount of time, let alone 14 days.

T. Bone Burnett was our producer. I obviously knew him from so many favorite records of mine - King Of America, August and Everything After, Bringing Down The Horse, Gillian Welch’s first 2 albums, Braver Newer World and so many others - but I didn’t know him personally and I definitely had never worked with him. He had all of the pre-requisites for a great producer - offering small arrangement adjustments, making suggestions regarding keys or tempo…that sort of usual thing - but he had a certain quality that took him from great to brilliant in my estimation. I feel like this quality is best explained by a particular anecdote from our time together.

There was a certain Rhiannon song, I wish I remembered which one exactly…but I was on bass, Elvis on keyboards, Jim on guitar and Marcus on drums (along side Jay Bellerose who played drums on every tune on the album) being led by Rhiannon and her fretless banjo. We did an early take of the song and it felt sort of flat. Definitely not the song, just the performance. We all noticed it so no one needed to mention it directly. Then T. Bone walked in and asked how everyone felt. Elvis mentioned not knowing his way around the chords quite yet. Marcus wanted the drums to feel a bit more pocketed. Despite my awe and reverence for both of these guys, these self-diagnoses felt reasonable. That’s when T. Bone surprised me. He denied them both. He said they were wrong and what they had just played was amazing and they needed to do the exact same thing. My initial reaction was that he must have not been listening. I thought that this response couldn’t have been helpful and now we were doomed to have a few more subpar takes before we started righting the ship. But I was dead wrong. Right after T. Bone said what he said and went back in the control booth, our next take was perfect and ended up being the master. He refused to let the unavoidable artistic self-doubt start to fester and spiral within our ranks. It was the exact thing we needed from him in that moment. That’s when I realized he was something of a wizard. He knew what every situation called for and that 6th sense of his went way beyond the merely musical. It was a deep level of perception that kept hearts open, spirits high, and confidence abounding.

There’s no good way to tell this whole story of this album without forcing it or getting too much of it wrong. So I’m gonna let this remembrance end here for now. I’m certain there will be one reason or another for The New Basement Tapes to come up again here on Substack, so I’m sure we’ll circle back at some point.

Below I’m gonna give you another demo of mine from this period that was never re-recorded but before I do, I wanted to share the only run in The New Basement Tapes had with Bob Dylan The Man, not just a pile of his lyrics…

We were doing overdubs for a song that didn’t need Elvis or I to be recording so the two of us were standing in the hallway right outside the control room. We were actually talking about his TV show ‘Spectacle’ and how he had tried to get Dylan to come on as a guest when, right then, Bob Dylan himself turned the corner walking down the hall towards us along with a small entourage of 5 or 6 people. I was understandably shocked but my brain started trying to make some kind of sense out of it. Was he here to visit Elvis? T. Bone? Was it something cooked up for the sake of the documentary we were filming? I had no idea. I also didn’t know him at all so I wasn’t about to ask. But I was standing next to someone that DID know him. So Elvis actually started walking in his direction and I thought my head was going to explode. I vividly remember Elvis slightly lowering his glasses and asking Bob Dylan, “what are you doing here?” Bob didn’t even slow down. As he kept walking he turned his head to Elvis and said, “what are YOU doing here?”

That was it. He turned another corner and was gone and we didn’t see him again. We learned a little bit later that he was in Capitol Studio C, which is a mastering studio, and he was in the process of mastering what would eventually be Shadows In The Night. So it had nothing to do with us! Pure coincidence. Or so I was told.

There you have it. Here is my demo of Spanish Mary. The album version by Rhiannon is arguably my favorite tune on the whole album. We were really burning on that performance and her vocal is insane. My version never had that kind of potential so I’m glad it wasn’t cut. But it’s nice to hear now. It sounds like I was in my phase of listening to a lot of Nina Simone, especially her covers of Bob Dylan.