May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...
Man In The Long Black Coat (1989)
The 1989 album ‘Oh Mercy’ was hailed as a return to form with some justification. For the first time in at least ten years he’d put out an LP where every song was an essential part of the puzzle. Perhaps not quite all-killer-no-filler but a set devoid of any of the throw away material he’d allowed to slip into most 1980s releases. Perhaps Dylan should have adopted the more measured work rate used by Leonard Cohen rather than striving for an album-a-year? Then his least celebrated decade could have looked very different. Still, it wasn’t just the regularity that caused problems; the synthetic sound of the era had ruined many a great artists’ audio quality during this time. It wasn’t just Bob who needed to pull back some analogue warmth by 1989; artists like Lou Reed, Neil Young and Eric Clapton all spotted the problem and atoned by putting out their best albums in years. Daniel Lanois was by no means an unknown quantity back then, he’d already seen success with U2 and The Neville Brothers, but still his production appointment was a masterstroke. The aural landscape he applied around Dylan’s increasingly ravaged voice proved to be exactly what the man required. The stand out of the album is undoubtedly the eerily thrilling ‘Man In The Long Black Coat’. Soaked in a shower of cricket sounds that Lanois had previously used on a Brian Eno record, this portrait of a dark sinister figure really gives ‘Oh Mercy’ a dramatic centrepiece. That the man in the long black coat is death seems likely, especially when you consider that live in 2004 Dylan changed the words “people don’t live or die, people just float” to “I went down to the river but I just missed the boat”. This may well be an acknowledgement of his own near death experience with the health scare suffered in 1997. You can enjoy the track here with a seriously well executed 2006 version by ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett. Daniel Lanois also worked with former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel and I wonder if it’s the Gabriel-esque atmospherics of the original that attracted Hackett to the piece?
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