In the summer of 1984, Bob Dylan returned to the studio. He had just completed his European tour, which began in the Verona Arena in Italy on May 28, 1984, and ended in Slane, Ireland, on July 8. Initially, he planned to practice and to provide the final touches to the songs he wrote earlier in Malibu, California. He wanted to wait to have a selection of reasonably uniform titles to be included on the same album, which explains the length of time for recording Empire Burlesque, from July 1984 to March 1985.
Dylan’s twenty-third studio album was the first released simultaneously on LP and CD, on June 10, 1985 (May 30, according to some sources). Empire Burlesque is an album of the digital age, characterized by a sound entirely different from any of Dylan’s previous albums. The songs, at least most of them, were remixed by Arthur Baker in a modern style. They were probably produced to attract radio listeners and MTV viewers, not the public of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In summary, Empire Burlesque is Dylan in the territory of Afrika Bambaataa and Hall & Oates, two artists also bearing Arthur Baker’s signature.
But as always with Dylan, the key is in the lyrics, in the poetic imagery and captivating rhythms of the words. If the songwriter is still obsessed with the Last Judgment, as evidenced by “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” biblical texts are no longer his primary reference. What Dylan offers the listener here is a return to the golden age of Hollywood, with John Huston, Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall as masters of ceremonies. Several of his songs, in fact, have references to classic American film noir, sometimes with almost literal quotations. Thus, “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)” and “Seeing the Real You at Last” refer to The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, “I’ll Remember You” to The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks, and “Never Gonna Be the Same Again” to Shane by George Stevens.
Dylan’s poetry is found in two songs with the accents of a protest song: “Clean Cut Kid,” the story of an average American “good kid” who goes to fight in Vietnam and whose dream turns into a nightmare, and “Dark Eyes,” the memory of a call girl.
Although Empire Burlesque is not a major Dylan album, it was well received, reaching number 33 on the US charts and number 11 in the United Kingdom. The effect of Live Aid on July 13, 1985, might have played a role. Dylan himself was very satisfied with this record, as he confided to Toby Creswell in 1986, “I thought it was really good.”20 By listening to the album, however, it is questionable that Dylan was well served by the sirens of digital technology.
Ken Regan shot the photo for the cover. Regan, the great photographer of the Camera 5 agency, had photographed Dylan’s tour, the Stones, the Band’s The Last Waltz (1978), the Concert for Bangladesh (1971), and Live Aid (1985). Regan shows Dylan bowed, wearing an improbable Miami Vice–style jacket, which some felt proclaimed the technopop tone of the album. On the back, the design is comparable: Dylan is wearing a hat and is accompanied by a young woman who looks like Sara, although her face is partly hidden. The design of the album was given to Nick Egan, who had also worked on albums by the Clash, Dexys Midnight Runners, and INXS, among others, as well as on Dylan’s box set Biograph. The title of the album could refer to America, which became an empire in a country of burlesque.
On July 24, 1984, a few days after his return from Europe, Dylan headed back to Intergalactic Studio in New York City, where he improvised a session with Al Green and his musicians from Memphis. The session turned into a fiasco, as reported by Ron Wood: “All these guys from Memphis couldn’t understand Bob’s chord sequences. Every time he started off a new song, he’d start in a new key, or if we were doing the same song over and over, every time would be in a different key. Now I can go along with that with Bob, but the band were totally confused.”89
From July 26, 1984, to March 23, 1985, Dylan booked no less than five studios to work on this album, totaling more than forty sessions of recordings and overdubs. After recording all the materials, he brought the tapes to Arthur Baker at Tommy Boy Records, a label oriented to dance, hip-hop, and R&B. Baker was an alchemist of sound, with the power to transform a rock composition into a disco or pop hit. His remixes included “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper, “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen, and “Thieves Like Us” by New Order, among others. In 1985, Baker helped produce Empire Burlesque, working as mixer and arranger. He gave Dylan’s songs a rather metallic and cold sound, popular at the time on rock radio stations. Only “Dark Eyes” escaped Baker’s transformation. In that song, Dylan revived the formula that created his musical identity, namely a voice, an acoustic guitar, and a harmonica. In 1986, Dylan explained his approach, “I just went out and recorded a bunch of stuff all over the place and then when it was time to put this record together I brought it all to [Arthur Baker] and he made it sound like a record. Usually I stay out of that side of the finished record… I’m not good at it. There are guys that don’t mind sitting in the control booth for days and days. I’m just not like that; I’m a one-mix man. I can’t tell the difference after that.”20
Dylan did not just increase the number of recording studios used. He also asked for twenty-eight musicians and two brass sections to participate in the album: five backup singers, eight guitarists, four bassists, four keyboards, a saxophonist, a percussionist, and five drummers—so far from his first recordings. The eclectic mix of musicians included the faithful Mick Taylor, Al Kooper, Ron Wood, Jim Keltner, Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Benmont Tench, Alan Clark, Carolyn Dennis, and Madelyn Quebec, but also new musicians like guitarist Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the keyboard player Richard Scher, who had played with Jeff Beck and Al Green.
Empire Burlesque was produced in five different studios. The exact number and dates of the sessions are unfortunately not definitive. Many documents are missing. However, various sources give a realistic idea of the recordings. After a first session at the Delta Recording Studio in New York City in June 1984, there were more than sixteen sessions at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood; a dozen at the Power Station in New York City, where the album Infidels had been recorded; about a dozen at Arthur Baker’s Shakedown Sound Studio in New York City; and some at Right Track Studios, also in New York but unfortunately not listed. Note that the Robb Brothers founded Cherokee Studios in the 1970s and produced an impressive number of artists. In 1975, David Bowie recorded his platinum album Station to Station there, and in 1978 and 1979 Michael Jackson made Off the Wall. In 1985, the recording equipment included a custom Trident A-Range console with eighty inputs. Arthur Baker’s Shakedown Sound Studio was equipped at the time with a forty-eight-channel Solid State Logic console. Three sound engineers worked on the album: Josh Abbey (Mark Knopfler, Brian Wilson), George Tutko (Duran Duran, Rod Stewart), and Judy Feltus.
In addition to his usual guitars, including his Fender Stratocaster, Dylan played an acoustic at Live Aid, presumably a Martin D-40, though it is not clear if he used it at the studio. Finally, he played harmonica on only one song, in G.