BOB DYLAN

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

—Bob Dylan

I had always wanted to do a reggae CD of Bob Dylan songs. Dylan was a protest singer and reggae was protest music. It seemed like a marriage made in Zion. Dylan had been a big influence on me in my high school years and I knew his lyrics forward and backward. I still remember quoting this verse from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” for a school assignment: “A question in your nerves is lit / Yet you know there is no answer fit / To satisfy, insure you not to quit / To keep it in your mind and not forget / That it is not he or she or them or it / That you belong to / Although the masters make the rules / For the wise men and the fools / I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” These words helped define me—a rebel, and a free spirit to boot.

From my Reggae for Kids projects, I knew I was good at identifying the right singers to cover the songs that fit them best—and I was thrilled by the opportunity to present Dylan to reggae audiences. RAS had recently been bought by Sanctuary Records, which was in general a rock-oriented label, so I did not have much trouble convincing them to finance this idea. I had created the whole project in my head. It would be called Is It Rolling Bob? (the opening line from the Nashville Skyline album) and the cover would have Bob Dylan rolling a big spliff. I worked with the artist Eric White, and this was the only album I ever did where the cover was designed and painted and complete before a single note had been recorded.

Soon I began recording some of the tracks for the album. Of course I asked about having Bob Dylan do a Bob Marley song to include on the project. I knew it was a long shot but I figured it was worth a try. If you don’t ask, you will never get. I went to Jamaica to record the basic tracks and carefully selected my band. It was Sly Dunbar on drums (who had already played on two of Dylan’s albums from the early ’90s and had backed many rock artists), Glen Brownie on bass, Robbie Lyn on synthesizers, Steve Golding on rhythm guitar, Chinna Smith and Dwight Pinkney on lead guitar, and Sky Juice on percussion. I sang all the rough vocals so the musicians could lay down the tracks, and I gotta admit I did not do such a bad job.

We recorded fourteen tracks in two or three nights, and I then started to contact different artists about which songs I wanted them to perform. I made CDs of the rhythm track with and without my vocals and presented each artist with a copy of the lyrics so they could go home and study them. I even got the band to tune up so I could ask, “Is it rolling, Bob?” on tape to start the album and leave my mark as producer Bob Johnston had done before me.

That week we had the Mighty Diamonds come in and record “Lay Lady Lay.” Tabby loved the song and his sweet voice really fit the lyrics. Luciano was perfect for “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which he changed to “Knockin’ on Zion’s Door,” turning it into a Rasta-inspired gospel-type hymn. The song had already been covered by Glen Washington so Jamaicans were familiar with it, but Luciano really did it up right. And by the time Dean Fraser added his sax, the song was a full-blown hit.

One of my all-time favorite Dylan songs is “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which was covered by former Black Uhuru lead vocalist Michael Rose. It was the true story of a black maid living on a Maryland estate who was killed by a drunken aristocrat when his cane sailed through the air and struck her dead. And he was only sentenced to six months in jail. Michael did it so gracefully, and it was especially poignant to hear him—the descendent of a slave—singing Dylan’s heartrending lyrics. A new young singer, Abijah, showed up at the studio and cut “One Too Many Mornings.” Billy Mystic voiced “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and the great Yellowman struggled with “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” which never made it onto the release.

One of the major standouts and truly inspired performances was turned in by Sizzla, who was in high demand at the time. RAS had released his first album, and he was managed and produced by Fatis. But now that RAS was owned by Sanctuary, I had to draw up a contract for the deal rather than have a verbal agreement between brethren and brethren like in the good old days. Fatis helped with the negotiations, and this was Sizzla’s rare cover song. All his other material was original and radical, as he was a strict Bobo dread and a real hard-core militant. He was going to cover “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which could be considered one of the first rap songs ever released in popular music. I figured Sizzla could rip this song apart, and he did.

He and some of his crew worked the song over before we began the recording. He changed up the opening lyrics from, “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement thinking about the government,” to, “As for those in the basement, marijuana’s the medicine and those on the pavement burning down the false government.” He made other slight changes that gave the song a true Jamaican vibe. When Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen heard the rough mix, I could see in his eyes that he was astounded and knew this album was shaping up to be something beyond what he had expected.

I then had artist Dick Bangham make up cue cards with the lyrics on them so we could film a video similar to the one Dylan had made decades earlier in Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg in the background and Dylan flipping through the cards as the song played. The more Dylanesque I could make the project, the better I felt it would succeed with both Dylan and reggae fans. In order to shoot the video in the ghetto of Kingston (without police involved), I had to first meet with the ghetto dons from Maxfield Avenue. Fatis had made these arrangements, as he grew up there and still commanded a great deal of influence and respect. He had vouched for me and these ghetto thugs were sizing me up to see if this white man should be afforded the right to come into their zone and shoot a video. I met up with the dons at a cement-block community center without air-conditioning in the heart of the ghetto—it felt like it was 120 degrees in there. We burned some spliffs together and talked it through, and permission was fortunately granted for us to film the next day.

I had hired a Jamaican crew and bought up lots of food and drinks for all the people of the neighborhood, and we had the streets cleared so we could capture our shot down a lane that was pure Kingston. Pure Jamaica. From Dylan in New York to Sizzla in Kingston. I had Bunny Wailer (portraying Allen Ginsberg) and guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith in conversation off to the left, just as Dylan had done before. And like Dylan, Sizzla looked nonplussed as he dropped card after card to the ground. The entire video has a surreal quality to it, thanks to the compositional work of the great Dick Bangham, along with the natural talent of the “actors” themselves and the stark ghetto setting, replete with a mangy dog walking through the middle of the shoot.

Later, I grabbed vocal takes with Gregory Isaacs and J.C. Lodge (I wanted to have at least one female voice on the CD, and J.C. and I had worked together many times over the years) at Ariwa studios in London. I also had Don Carlos voice “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Apple Gabriel do “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at Lion and Fox in DC. All these sessions (except, of course, the Gregory one) were uneventful with the usual good vibes and the artists performing their best.

I was closing in on completing the recordings but still had a few more songs to knock out. I had selected Toots to sing “Maggie’s Farm,” which to me was a metaphor for slavery and subservience of not just the body but also the mind. As with the Michael Rose cut, it felt especially meaningful for Toots to be singing Dylan’s words; even though slavery was formally abolished on the island in the 1830s, the fact remains that other forms of inequity and mental slavery persist to this day in Jamaica. Like Bob Marley sang, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds.”

A few words about Toots: he is the Otis Redding of Jamaican music, and his numerous hits over the decades have earned him the status of superstardom worldwide. He’s toured with the Stones and has had the likes of Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, and Willie Nelson pay tribute to him on record. Also, Toots’s longtime manager Mike Cacia and I have been brothers from the early days, from back in the ’80s when we used to run around Kingston together, trying to stay out of trouble when trouble came looking for us. And once you are my brother, you’re a brother for life—unless, of course, you fuck with me. So don’t even try it. Seen? In any case, Toots, now in his late sixties, remains solid as a rock and continues to tour hard—even if he still can’t beat me at pool.

So after months of working on the song and memorizing the lyrics (Toots could not read or write), he gave me a call: “Doctor Dread, me ready now. Come make we voice the tune.” I flew to Jamaica and we recorded the song and he really put his heart and soul into it. I had my old friend and original Roots Radics guitar player Dwight Pinkney add some wicked bluesy lead guitar to the song and we were done. The result: a real masterpiece and a great accomplishment for Toots. Dylan and Toots later met on tour in Australia and talked about the song, which I find heartening. Their encounter also underscores why I made this album in the first place: I wanted to explore the intrinsic connection that exists between reggae fans and Dylan fans. Although the two groups are distinct and idiosyncratic, I believe they each have a latent level of understanding and mutual appreciation of the other that I was able to explore through this record.

Another track I knew had to be sung by a specific artist was “Just Like a Woman.” And just like Toots is the Otis Redding of Jamaica, Beres Hammond is clearly the Marvin Gaye—and he is beloved by Jamaicans at home and abroad. He had been signed by Electra and I think their idea was to have him cross over to the African American audience, but it never quite worked and he returned to his Jamaican roots. His raspy voice carries so much feeling that he easily gets to the ladies, and he also has the lyrics that can hold the male population, so he has it all covered. A brilliant songwriter, Beres has no problem landing on top of the Jamaican charts time after time. Fatis had produced many of his hits, but Beres was hard to get to even though he said he would record the track.

I decided to leave the twenty-four-track tape with Flabba Holt, the original bass player from the Roots Radics. Respect to Sly & Robbie, the most famous drum-and-bass duo, but in my humble opinion Flabba is the best bass player to ever tear up reggae music. When Flabba hits the bass the whole place is rocking. Since Flabba and Beres were tight, I left it up to Flabba and Jah to work it out and waited to see how things would turn out. It eventually did happen, thanks to Flabba and his persistence. Beres murdered the tune and I love it. Just like I imagined it.

I was friends with Drummie Zeb from Richmond, Virginia, who was playing with Family Man Barrett (the original bass player with Bob Marley and the Wailers, who ironically is reputed to have fathered thirty-eight children at last count). I had told Zeb about my album of Dylan songs and he got excited and said that he had just recorded a version of “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” At this point I had all the tunes I needed for the CD, but Zeb had a positive vibe and was excited about this song. He was also good friends with Dylan’s bass player, Tony Garnier. After hearing the tune, I thought the song had potential but I wanted the artist Nasio to revoice the track. We also asked Tony Garnier to come down from New York to add the bass line to the song, to bring some more authentic Dylan flavor to the recording. I immediately got a good vibe from Tony. His infectious laugh and good-hearted nature made him an easy person to be around. And with over fifteen years of playing bass with Dylan and his role as Bob’s bandleader, Tony certainly had the credentials to be a welcome contributor to this project. Then Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen mentioned that Dylan himself was willing to work on a Marley tune for the CD!

Nasio’s manager Steve Weltman agreed to have Nasio voice the tune, but there were a couple of conditions: he had to record in New Jersey, and no one from the label could be present. I had also asked Nasio to change the lyric “You might serve the devil or you might serve the Lord” to “You might serve Selassie I or you might serve the Lord.” I and I wanted to promote Selassie I as the Second Coming of Jesus, and in the Rasta world we want to rid the world of the devil. Nasio overstood the proposition and went into the studio and turned out a truly magnificent rendition of the song.

As a producer, I always try to capture the vibe of a track. It doesn’t have to perfect, but it has to have soul—my mission is to bring out the essence of what an artist is trying to convey. And I believe this is a major reason why people are so moved by music: an artist reveals his or her soul through a medium that enters the ears then goes into the mind and may even get all the way down to your feet and have you dancing!

In Jamaica the harmonica is known as the “mouth organ” and there are not many artists who play it proficiently and even fewer who can get the Dylan sound with it. And since many of the original versions of these songs featured Dylan on harmonica, it seemed necessary to have it in there on some of the tracks. Again Jah stepped in and brought me into contact with Lee Jaffe. Lee was a white American who had managed Peter Tosh, spent lots of time in Jamaica in the early ’80s, and played harmonica on Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock).” His harmonica work on this song had earned him a place in reggae music history—a real standout performance. Lee was also a huge Dylan fan and was really pumped up to do this. He tore the songs apart, adding an old-school bluesy/rock-and-roll vibe to them.

Now that all the tracks had been recorded, I went back to Dylan’s manager to ask if Dylan had been able to finish up his Bob Marley song for the album. Jeff Rosen’s response was that Bob had tried “Exodus” and two other songs but that he did not feel his renditions were substantial enough, and he would prefer to just let it rest. I was devastated. I who believed all things were possible. In Jamaica they say that “a promise is a comfort to a fool,” and I certainly felt the fool for allowing my expectations to get the best of me. So to make up for this, I suggested that perhaps I could do a remix of the Bob Dylan song “I and I,” which featured Sly & Robbie on drum and bass. I thought this could be a way to have Dylan on the album; like Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary.”

And as things turned out (praise Jah), I and I did come to an agreement that I and I could remix this song and include it on the CD. Sanctuary and Sony worked out the deal, and when I returned from an incredible trip with my family to South Africa, sitting on my desk was a twenty-four-track tape from Sony Music which contained the Dylan song “I and I.” I cannot express in words how great I felt, so I will not even attempt such a futile endeavor. Jeff Rosen told me to make sure I took good care of the tape and to get it back to him as soon as possible so he could return it to Sony, and I shared my plans to sell it on eBay and we laughed.

I immediately booked out a night at Lion and Fox and went in to start mixing. When we pulled out the track sheet from the tape, we could see that Sly & Robbie were on there, as well as Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits and Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones. But most important of all was the fact that HRH Bob Dylan was on there. We started to get a rough mix with the levels on each track to blend, and worked on things like the treble, reverb, and high-, medium-, and low-end sounds. Working and reworking the sonic levels. Rewinding the tape hundreds of times. Sometimes for just five seconds to get one phrase exactly how we wanted it.

Jim and I had learned from over twenty years of recording together how to communicate telepathically. As the mix started to come together and we were putting reverb effects on Knopfler’s guitar and had just the right amount of treble on Bob’s voice and were bringing out the drum and bass of Sly & Robbie to give the song more of a reggae flavor, I turned to Jim and said, “How fucking great is this? It’s three a.m. and we are in the studio mixing a fucking Bob Dylan song. I can’t even believe it.” It is one of the true highlights of my entire music career and I have to thank John Simson and Jeff Rosen for making it possible. You don’t get anywhere in life without the help of others, as no man is an island.

Next Jim and I shifted into another gear for mixing the dub version. Jamaicans had created dub in the late ’60s, where the engineer would drop out different tracks and add all kinds of effects like echo and reverb, and turn the song into a spacey, far-out version accentuating the instrumental tracks while sometimes leaving bits and pieces of the vocals in the mix to help bring the listener back into contact with the original song. The dub versions were almost always the B-sides of 7" singles released in Jamaica, and would be played at dancehalls where various rappers would get on the microphone and lay down their own set of lyrics. This is actually what American rap music was born from. And when you are really wasted on ganja, drifting away to the faraway dimensions where dub music can carry you is an auditory exploration that can be quite enjoyable. Of course I would not know this firsthand but have heard about it from some people I trust.

So Jim and I were prepared to totally murder this dub. I had decided to snag Bob’s vocal of the word “creation” from the song and echo it out to begin the dub version. And as Knopfler’s guitar reverberated in from the beginning and we laid down more of Bob’s voice, and when Sly’s drum was bouncing all over the room and Robbie’s bass would disappear and then reappear, the song started to morph into something that really was out of this world. There’s a waterfall in Jamaica that I mentioned earlier where you can swim through these intense falls and into a hidden cave; it is like being inside of a womb. Naturally, I had named the place “Creation.” Dub, of course, is a creation too—and hearing that word in Bob’s song brought me back there. “I and I Dub” became a true masterpiece and disc jockeys the world over could not believe this was even possible: Bob Dylan in dub. I also produced an equally far-out video for the song with the addition of a theremin track that’s also worth checking out.

As soon as the CD was completely recorded and mixed, it was time to put together the cover. I asked my good friend Roger Steffens to write the liner notes. Roger is the foremost authority on Bob Marley in the world—he knows reggae music inside out, and his home in LA is a literal shrine to Bob Marley. He’s also the original and longtime editor of The Beat magazine, and he had an influential reggae show on KCRW. A child of the ’60s who has always lived up to his ideals, Roger wrote an overview comparing Dylan to Marley, and explained how Dylan’s music was simpatico with reggae, and then contributed short pieces about each song. And Roger had also introduced me to Geoff Gans several years earlier.

Geoff had worked on many of Bob Dylan’s album covers over the last fifteen years, and was a big reggae fan. He completely got it right. He knew reggae and he knew Dylan, and he mixed all the ingredients together for a perfect recipe that tasted just right. Geoff and I became close for a while and even traveled to Jamaica together and hung out with Bunny Wailer and Fatis. Geoff is the one who managed to do the impossible by snapping a photo of me with the notoriously reclusive Fatis, which I’ve included in this volume—it’s one of my most treasured photographs.

After over a year of hard work, the CD was finally released on August 10, 2004. We got reviews in Billboard and Rolling Stone, and I was interviewed on NPR, which took the CD to number one on Amazon. Both reggae fans and Dylan fans were digging it. Mission accomplished. We also released a separate CD of all of the dub tracks, which I called Visions of Jamaica. And Dick Bangham once again helped me convey exactly what I wanted: the same portrait of Dylan from the Is It Rolling Bob? cover, but with some trippy floral tropical plants in the background.

Before long, my friends Seth Hurwitz and Rich Heinecke from IMP (It’s My Party) were promoting a Bob Dylan show at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. I had plenty of backstage passes lined up from both Tony Garnier, who was still playing bass with Dylan, and the promoters. Tony had come to see me at my fish job the previous day and picked up a nice whitefish that had just come from the smoker. He asked if he could get another one for Dylan. Later that night Tony dropped by my house to wash his clothes (it is really key to be able to wash your clothes on your day off while on tour), and we prepared a huge seafood feast.

My mom, as well as many of my friends who knew about my Dylan recording, would ask me if I had ever met the man. The answer was always, “No. And I seriously doubt I ever will.” But I felt that this night might be different. That the stars were aligning and maybe, just maybe, it would happen. I drove out to the show in my 1960 Dodge Polara station wagon and was escorted backstage and told to park right in front of Dylan’s tour bus. A bunch of the band members came out to see the car and I kept telling myself to not ask about meeting Dylan. If it was gonna happen, then just let it happen.

Sitting backstage, a little buzz came through the air as Dylan stepped out of his tour bus and hung with Tony beside the porch. I assumed they were discussing the set list for that night but I noticed Dylan doing a few double takes my way. Next thing I know they waved me over, and Dylan said to me, “You got the best fish. The best music. The coolest car. The coolest hat and shirt. How can all of this be possible?” I thought about it a few seconds and replied, “I guess I am just blessed.” We laughed. It felt like we had made a connection. We talked about Jamaica, and my trip there with Geoff Gans. Dylan asked if I could recommend any places for him to visit in Jamaica, which of course I did. He came across as just a normal guy, no pretenses, though he exudes a level of cool that mere mortals can’t hope to achieve.

That night I was allowed to watch the show from behind the monitor board on stage-left. The band got into a groove and played an excellent set, with Dylan reinterpreting his songs in new arrangements, as he tends to do in live settings. When he left the stage, instead of heading to his tour bus I was startled to see him making a beeline back toward me: he still had Jamaica on his mind, so we had the chance to talk a little bit more. We thumped fists, and as Dylan headed back to his bus I noticed people looking over at me and the shadow of Dylan that had just disappeared.

Shortly thereafter I got a call from his tour manager in Europe asking if I could line up some places for Dylan to stay at in Jamaica. I passed on the information, but I am not sure if he ever made it down there or not. I guess it is probably none of my business and none of yours either. Will Dylan and I ever meet up again? I seriously doubt it. But if the stars and planets properly align, who knows? Maybe Jah does not even know this one. Respect.