Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan performing with Joan Baez and Santana in Hamburg, May 1984. Photo by Heinrich Klaffs. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
“There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better,” Bob Dylan admitted in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. He's sung about the city (“Bob Dylan’s New Orleans Rag”), performed there countless times, and even depicted it in his paintings (an exhibition of his work ran at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2016). It is a lesser-known fact that Dylan briefly called the Crescent City home.
In the late 1980s, Dylan met up with the famed Canadian producer Daniel Lanois at the Marie Antoinette Hotel in the French Quarter (now the Hotel Le Marais) to talk about working together in the future. The conversation went well, and in the early spring of 1989, Dylan moved down to New Orleans for a few months to record with Lanois. These sessions resulted in Dylan’s 1989 album Oh Mercy, which was written and recorded in a rambling old Victorian mansion on Soniat Street near Audubon Park. Even the most cynical, hard-nosed music journalists often consider Oh Mercy to be Dylan’s finest release of the decade. After a string of comparatively lackluster albums, it heralded a definite comeback, garnering a laudatory review from Rolling Stone, and reaching number thirty on the Billboard Charts in the United States. (It was largely as a result of her admiration of the producer’s work with Dylan on Oh Mercy that Emmylou Harris would later team up with Daniel Lanois to record her 1995 masterpiece, Wrecking Ball.)
Oh Mercy was recorded at night. Lanois installed a makeshift studio in the house on Soniat, specially fitting recording equipment for Dylan’s use. The kitchen radio was kept permanently tuned to WWOZ, which Dylan liked to listen to alone in the middle of the night on the occasions when not working on the record. The DJ that he liked best was Belle “Brown Sugar,” Moore, an iconic fixture at the station. Dylan praised the soothing qualities of her melodious, languorous voice and reveled in her impeccable rotation of early rock and roll hits and blues classics such as Wynonie Harris and Little Walter. He noted in his memoir that the radio stations in New Orleans reminded him of those he’d tuned into as a kid back in Minnesota.
The personnel list on Oh Mercy is rich with Louisiana talent. The album features contributions from Dumpstaphunk founding member Tony Hall, Rockin’ Dopsie, Daryl Johnson and Cyril Neville, among others. A handful of songs on the album occasionally pop back up in Dylan’s tour setlists today. During a recent show in Baton Rouge, Dylan performed one of the album’s standout tracks, “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” a song that drips with dark, Southern Gothic mystique. (Mark Lanegan famously covered the track for Todd Haynes’s experimental Dylan biopic, I’m Not There.) Even if you didn’t know, you could almost sense that Oh Mercy was recorded after hours, under the cover of night. You can feel the incandescence of a Southern twilight, crickets and cicadas chorusing from the shadowy lacework of the live oaks, darkness hovering, just beginning to close in. Much of the album resonates with that same sense of underlying, haunted melancholy.
When he wasn’t recording in the makeshift kitchen studio, Dylan explored the city extensively, from wandering around Magazine Street to eating turtle soup at Antoine’s. Sometimes he rode his motorcycle down Freret Street, or over to Jackson Square. He admired the extreme contrasts in architecture and style along the oak-lined streets, heavy with humidity and draped with veils of Spanish moss. He described the city’s “structures of wild grace,” and the visual feast that the profusion of lush, sub-tropical flowers provided. “There’s a thousand different angles at any moment,” he wrote in Chronicles. “The city is one very long poem.” Recording wrapped in late spring. Dylan left the oak-shaded Victorian house near Audubon Park and moved back home. Oh Mercy was released in September of the same year, to tremendous critical acclaim. The album was instantly recognized as one of the most masterful creations of Dylan’s career.
