The photo shows a young Charlie McCoy, top Nashville session musician, during the recording of John Wesley Harding. It comes from an excellent article in The Independent, 24/06/15, by Adam Sherwin who interviewed the multi-talented muso in relation to, ‘Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: a New Music City exhibition running at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee until 31 December 2016 – also an accompanying 2CD album released by Legacy Recordings/Sony.
Charlie has played on hundreds of recordings including numerous chart toppers. “I’ve played on some 13,000 sessions,” reflects the genial 74-year-old, a multi-instrumentalist, who is the most recorded harmonica player in history. “I’ve been on some great sessions. And some stuff that’s downright horrible.” It’s a typically modest assessment from a Nashville, Tennessee session musician whose name may not be widely known but whose vital contribution to a wealth of classic recordings certainly is. That’s McCoy playing the sax on the unforgettable, propulsive opening riff to Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”. The mallet percussion on Bobby Vinton’s desolate “Blue Velvet” is his work, as is the distinctive bass harmonica backing on Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”.
From Perry Como to Leonard Cohen, Cliff Richard to Dolly Parton and Jerry Lee Lewis to Johnny Cash, the production line never stopped, with McCoy improving countless recordings while sticking to a maxim of never stepping on the toes of the star who is paying your daily wage. Oh, and the wheezing harmonica theme to The Old Grey Whistle Test, “Stone Fox Chase”, that’s McCoy, too. “I got a good royalties rate for that,” he jokes.
In 1966, McCoy helped lure the East Coast bard-turned-electric rocker away from the hip New York scene to record in Nashville, then a culturally Conservative, Bible Belt city, out of step with popular music trends.
The resulting double album, Blonde on Blonde, recorded with McCoy and the Nashville Cats, the city’s supremely skilled A-list players, is still regarded as one of the greatest LPs ever made.
Dylan said the album was “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind”. He returned to McCoy for the spartan follow-up John Wesley Harding and the country-informed Nashville Skyline album. But Columbia, Dylan’s record label, had ordered him not to step foot in “backwards” Tennessee.
McCoy said: “The bible of that movement was Rolling Stone magazine and it was not kind to Nashville. Quotes like ‘cookie-cutter music, all business and no art, assembly line music’. But we were A-list musicians who knew how to get a lot of music, at high quality, in a very short space of time, on a small budget. These guys were incredible.”
In 1965, Bob Johnston, a Nashville songwriting hustler, found himself producing Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album in New York and invited McCoy to town, promising him Broadway tickets. His real motivation was to get him to play guitar with Dylan.
“He said, ‘I’m getting ready to record another song, why don’t you grab a guitar and play along?’ It was ‘Desolation Row’.” Dylan was knocked out by McCoy’s licks on the epic track and sensed a new musical journey.
“Bob Johnston said, ‘You know, I was using you as bait. I wanted Dylan to come to Nashville and he didn’t want to.’ So I was bait and it worked.”
When Dylan arrived at Columbia’s Music Row studio in Nashville, it was a shock to the system for McCoy, used to highly regimented sessions. The muse refused to strike. “We sat there from 2pm till 4am the next morning and we never played a note. This was unheard of, everybody was on the clock. We couldn’t believe it. You’re figuring out ways to stay awake because he might decide at any minute that he wanted to record and we wanted to be ready for him.”
“I don’t know how many games of ping pong we must have played. Then at 4am he came up with “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, an 11-minute ballad. And everybody’s sitting there saying, ‘Please don’t let me make a mistake.’ He just started playing it and kind of left it up to us to decide what to do. Every recording, there was no conversation.”
McCoy, who played guitar, bass, trumpet and harmonica on Blonde on Blonde, established a limited form of communication with Dylan. “I’d say, ‘Bob, what would you think if we did this or that?’ And his answer would always be, ‘I don’t know, man, what do you think?’
“So I finally went over to the producer and I said, ‘You know what, I’ve got to quit asking because he’s not answering. If we do something he don’t like, maybe he’ll say something.’ And the producer said ‘That works for me, so go ahead.’ So that’s the way that it went.”
The cross-fertilisation of the Dylan sessions opened up Nashville to a wave of rock and pop artists including the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, who came to the city to record, with many invited to perform with Johnny Cash on his popular television series.