That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders

Author:Daryl Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands

Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes

My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums

Should I leave them by your gate

Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?23

Mind you, this is not to suggest “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” has anything to do with the subject matter of Ezekiel. If passages from Ezekiel did inform the song, Dylan was only mining them for some Biblical flourishes to give it that “old-time religious” feeling.

When Dylan finally had a complete set of lyrics, he went into the control room to find Johnston. “I don’t know what time it was—2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning,” the producer recalled to the Austin Chronicle’s Louis Black. “Dylan finally came out, looked at me and said, ‘Hey Bob, you still awake?’

“I said, ‘Yeah.’

“‘Is there anyone else awake down there?’ he asked. ‘Who is around you can get? I think I got something here.’

“‘Yeah, man,’ I said, going off to wake them.”24

According to studio records, it was 4:00 AM when the Nashville musicians finally got their introduction to the “Sad Eyed Lady”—Kooper, of course, had heard the song back at Dylan’s hotel room. The lineup was Dylan, McCoy, and Moss on acoustic guitars, Robbins on piano, Kooper on organ, South on bass, and Buttrey on drums. Although they had already recorded the seven-and-a-half-minute “Visions of Johanna,” the Nashville players were not ready for “Sad Eyed Lady.”

Over the years, a number of the participants at that session have remembered recording “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in one take, and that has become part of the mythology surrounding the song, but there were actually four takes officially slated that morning, three of which were complete.

Although Dylan basically started with a finished set of lyrics, he did revise a few lines here and there over the course of the four takes, most notably the song’s first line. On the first two takes, he sang it as, “With your mercury eyes and the months that climb,” but prior to recording the third take he changed it to the now familiar, “With your mercury mouth in the missionary times.” He made the other significant tweak on the fly during the first take, deciding after three verses that the prophet in the chorus was also “sad-eyed,” after previously singing the second line as, “Where the prophet says that no man comes.”

Buttrey recalled Dylan running the song down for them to biographer Bob Spitz: “‘Okay,’ he said, ‘this going to be like a couple of verses and a chorus and an instrumental. Then I’ll come back in and we’ll do another couple of verses, another instrumental, and then we’ll see how it goes.’”25

The first take, which clocked out at 10:07, undoubtedly was the one Buttrey had in mind when he recounted the recording of “Sad Eyed Lady” to rock historian Clinton Heylin. “Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dynamically for a basic two- to three-minute record. Because records just didn’t go over three minutes,” Buttrey explained.

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