The one classic album Bob Dylan wanted to scrap: “Neighbour convinced him to go back”
Bob Dylan has never been known to be the most faithful guy when it comes to his projects.
It’s not out of the question for him to move on to something completely different if it feels like it on any particular day, but it’s insane to think that any one of his masterpieces could have easily been trashed had he not been given the right motivation.
Because as much as Dylan loves the process of songwriting, writing and recording are two very different things. By the time the red light comes on, most people have to have their music set in stone and be absolutely committed to what they’re doing, which probably explains why some of his first projects were recorded within the span of days. Back then, he was trying to capture the moment he was in, but that got a bit more complicated when recording technology started to change.
He now had to revolve around what the new school was doing, and while he did adapt to rock and roll quite nicely, he was never going to be predictable even as a teenybopper star. Throughout the rest of his career, it was always going to be different seeing what he would work on, and whether it meant getting help from Mark Knopfler during his born-again years or getting production genius Daniel Lanois behind the board, it was still about capturing a moment as he performed.
While a lot of the seriousness went out the window when working with The Traveling Wilburys, the 1990s wouldn’t be the kindest to Dylan’s style of music. No one’s raising their hand to defend songs like ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ or anything, but by the end of the decade, albums like Time Out of Mind were the exact kind of record many people hoped for. Dylan was much older and wiser, but there were also songs that seemed to flirt with mortality and what it meant to be in one’s twilight years.
Before the album even saw the light of day, though, engineer Mark Howard remembered that Dylan had the feeling that there was nothing usable until the 11th hour, saying, “I didn’t think the record was gonna come out. And then months later, I get a phone call from Bob in the middle of the night, he goes, ‘Hey Mark, what do you think? Do we got a record here?’”. But when Dylan got the right motivation from a stranger, he knew that he was onto something good.
Howard knew that there was more work to be done, but he remembered Dylan reassuring him that things were going to work out when he talked about one of his friend’s neighbours loving the tunes, saying, “He calls me back up and he goes, ‘Mark, you know, I was playing the record for my friend in his apartment building and the guy from downstairs knocked on the door. My friend answers the door, and he goes, ‘What are you guys listening to? I gotta have this, this is amazing.’ So essentially this guy’s neighbour convinced him to go back there and finish the record.”
While motivation comes from all sorts of places, the idea of Dylan getting that final push from someone he didn’t even know actually makes a lot of sense, given the nature of the record. This was the kind of vulnerable album that most legends of Dylan’s stature were far too scared to release by this point, but by keeping everything punchy and leaving in the right amount of details, he wrote the perfect soundtrack for what happens when rock and rollers face the second half of their time in the spotlight.
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