In the previous post on those interviews from Uncut with people who’ve worked with Bob Dylan, I completely forgot to reference what is probably my favorite segment, from the especially fascinating interview with Malcolm Burn, who was a recording engineer on Oh Mercy.

At this juncture, Burn is talking about how Daniel Lanois and those he’d assembled to prepare for the recording sessions with Dylan were wondering what kind of material Bob was going to be bringing down to New Orleans for them.

So, other than that, we were just trying to get ready in the normal way, and then, a week before we were due to start recording, we received a cassette from Bob. And I thought, Oh, great, we’re going hear some songs. We got this cassette, and it had this little note from Bob: “Listen to this, this’ll give you a good idea of what’s going on.” And so Dan and I and Mark Howard, the other engineer, we sat down to listen to this cassette, and we put it in the machine – and this Al Jolson music started playing.
And we were like, “What the Fuck? Al Jolson?” So, we fast-forwarded it, and it was just a whole tape of Al Jolson. And we looked back at the note, and it said. “Listen to this. You can learn a lot.” So Dan and I sort of looked at each other and – you know, Al Jolson’s great –but we sort of thought it was a bit odd.

But, y’know, anyway, when Bob arrived and we started making the record, I’d sort of forgotten about this. And then, one evening in the middle of recording, we were taking a little break, and somehow, something came up about favourite singers, and who were great influences, especially when it comes to phrasing. Bob had said a number of times that phrasing was sort of everything. You can have really great lyrics, but if you don’t deliver them properly, they’re not gonna mean a thing. And it’s quite true. And in this conversation, Bob said, “My two favourite singers are Frank Sinatra and Al Jolson.” And I thought, wow, now I get it. And it’s interesting, because when you have that in your head and you go back and listen to Al Jolson, you can sort of make the correlation with Bob Dylan, that concatenation, that kind of rapid-fire thing. That was kind of an interesting learning experience. Al Jolson. Bob Dylan. We had a couple of nice conversations.

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Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• The Uncut interviews: pure gold
• David Kemper on Bob Dylan in Uncut magazine
• More on dynamic range compression