Inside Bob Dylan's Shadow Kingdom I: The Recording

Guitarist Ira Ingber remembers the secret recording sessions

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Bob Dylan’s performance film Shadow Kingdom premiered four years ago this week. To celebrate, I’m sharing two new interviews that go behind-the-scenes on this pandemic project. The first today looks at the recording side; the second will look at the filming side. Because, as I think is well-known by now, not only was Shadow Kingdom not performed live, the musicians who appeared on screen were not the same musicians who recorded the music. There are really two different Shadow Kingdoms—the album and the film—and each has its own supporting cast.

One of the musicians who recorded the music itself, before the filming, is Ira Ingber. We last heard from Ira discussing Empire Burlesque and his other ’80s sessions with Dylan. Shadow Kingdom came up a couple times in passing there (I want to hear Dylan’s aborted Chuck Berry cover!), but, as promised, there was a lot more. So, today, we kick off Shadow Kingdom Week at Flagging Down the Double E’s with the second half of my conversation with Ira, entirely focused on the secret recording sessions that created the music you hear in the film and on the soundtrack album.

If you haven’t read the first half, you might start there. We pick up right where we left off…

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So you finish your last round of sessions in ’86. Shadow Kingdom, we’re fast forwarding decades. Is there anything in between?

Nothing. I got a call from, a friend of mine who still works with Bob. She said, “Bob wants to ask you some questions about something.” I hadn’t talked to him in years.

We had a 45-minute phone conversation. It was as if no time had passed.

This is like mid-pandemic?

Pandemic time, exactly. Shadow Kingdom never would have happened if the pandemic hadn’t happened. He would have stayed on tour. Because he has to play, he has to work. And so this plan was hatched to record a live album. It became the event that you saw.

Is that the explicit purpose of this original 45-minute conversation, or it just starts with you catching up?

Both. Bob said, [Dylan voice] “Hey, I’ve got this Zoom thing I’m going to do.”

I can’t picture him saying the word “Zoom.”

As you can tell, I’ve been working on my Bob for years. “A Zoom concert, yeah.”

I had done a Zoom fundraiser for this little club I play in the night before we talked. I said, “Bob, it’s a very disembodied experience.” He said, “Disembodied…that’s a good word for it.” I said, “You of all people know how to read a room. Well, guess what? There’s no room to read. You’re playing into a pillow.” He said, “I was afraid of that.”

I said, “So what you have to do to bring this thing off, if it’s going to be a live-type show, is we have to play to each other.” And that’s what happened. We played in a circle. It was great, phenomenal, but he had no idea what he was getting himself into.

We stayed in touch after that first conversation. He’d call and we’d talk about this, that, and the other. I don’t know who came up with the plan to re-record the great songs—it may have been T Bone—and then I got enlisted.

When I finally showed up at the Shadow Kingdom sessions, I thought I was coming in for something else. Bob had sent me a sketch of something he’d recorded and wanted to know if I would put some guitars on it. I was honored and thrilled, and I did. So we started this back and forth, and I got called to come in from his office. I came in fully expecting the two of us to be working together on that song he’d started. But I got there, and there’s a whole mob of people. “What is going on here?”

Well, as it turned out, I was replacing Tim Pierce, who was the guitar player who started that Don Was brought in. Tim is a magnificent guitar player, he’s played on dozens and dozens of hits, but he didn’t work out. My understanding was he was being a little too literal. The job description was not to replay those songs, but reinterpret them. Make them new. I had a sense when I was called in and we start playing these songs—just hint at some of those parts. Like on “Queen Jane,” I know how that song goes. I know what the guitars are doing. Every once in a while, just put a little something in there as an homage, but not as a replication.

You don’t need to recreate the sound of Highway 61.

You can’t. That’s what Don Was tried on his album he did with Bob [Under the Red Sky], and it failed. Because Bob doesn’t do that. He’s not about then. He’s only about now.

I was very fortunate to know how to approach this thing, and it worked out really well. I think it’s a really beautiful record, and I was honored to be on it, and we got along great. At the very end, it was a big bunch of smiles, and he turned in a record that really exceeded, I think, what he thought it was going to be.

Given that you’re coming in a little ways into it, were the arrangements, the songs, everything sort of set by the time you joined?

Oh, not at all. It was very fluid. A lot of things got tried and didn’t work.

Like other ’60s songs?

Yeah. I mean, I’ll give away a little bit of the sausage factory. We tried “Watchtower” three or four different times, and it never worked. I mean, I thought it worked. He didn’t ultimately think it worked.

That instrumental that they ended up calling “Sierra’s Theme” kind of sounds like “Watchtower.”

That’s “Watchtower.” It is.

“Queen Jane” was a really hard-fought battle, because how do you beat that thing? Well, you don’t beat it. You just do something of equal intensity and determination. As I recall, that took the longest to do, because we kept getting stuck going down these dead ends. Then we found our way as a collective to bring this thing out.

Bob rose to the occasion. Probably, I’m speaking for him, but he had to let go of what it was also. Now I assume he’s been doing “Queen Jane” since forever, or not?

Compared to a lot of these songs, he’s played it much less.

I know from the playlists I’ve seen since Shadow Kingdom, he’s included a lot of the songs we did. I know he does “You Go Your Way.” He never played it that much, and now he does that all the time.

And “River Flow,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”…

“I’ll Be Your Baby” was, I think, the first one I came back for. It was early on. And “To Be Alone with You” and a couple of other ones, we tried different combinations of things.

I had asked him at one point during the recordings—I think we were alone, everybody had left, and we were just talking. I said, “So why are we here and not your band?” And he said, “Well they don’t know these songs.” I felt like saying, “Well we don’t know them either!”

But he said—this was really telling in a way, or just bullshit, I don’t even know—“You know, the songs I play with the band are stage songs, and these are recording songs.” I never understood the distinction.

They got angry, and they should have been, the longtime guys, why they were not part of Shadow Kingdom. They should have been there. I mean, I was grateful for the opportunity, but they’re a wonderful band, and they know him inside and out. Maybe he was just trying to get away from all of that, get a whole fresh perspective, which is what he was doing way back in the ’80s when he left our band and brought in the Heartbreakers. He’s constantly changing, you know? He needs a new splash of water in his face. Maybe that’s what the band that was put together for Shadow Kingdom was for him. We were a new way of doing things.

One of my favorites that you all did was “Forever Young.” That’s a song that’s so easy to make sort of trite. It’s honestly not a song when I listen to a bootleg I’m excited to hear most of the time, and then I remember seeing that being blown away.

Yeah, it’s fabulous. It’s chillingly beautiful. I don’t know why they cut the bridge out, but there is a bridge we played.

When you’re doing all these sessions in the studio, do you know from jump what the final product is going to be? That they’re gonna make a video and get these other musicians to act in it?

We didn’t. But he was very insistent that cameras and music don’t mix. So whatever he agreed to do for Shadow Kingdom being a “live event,” there was probably a miscommunication or a change in plans. He had never intended for it to be a live video event, because that’s not the way he works. He was very explicit—and I agree with him—that when musicians see cameras, they play differently. It’s not necessarily to your advantage as the artist to try to do two things at the same time.

So no, we didn’t know that we would be replaced by people lip-syncing to us. That was a disappointment. But I understood the reason for it.

As you say, leading up, it was all very mysterious. And I remember the realization where you’re watching it, it’s sort of presented as if it’s live, but you gradually are like, wait a second…

Anybody who was looking carefully could see pretty early on they weren’t playing. You know, it was a disappointment to see that, and not have credits.

I had communication with Don Was. Don worked really hard on that record. He really deserves the notices that he otherwise would have gotten. Don said, “Don’t worry, the word will get out. It always does with Bob’s stuff.” I said, “Yeah, but the lifeblood of artists are the credits.” And Bob knows that better than anybody. He always credited his musicians from the very beginning. But for whatever reason, he didn’t do it here.

But it did come out. Wikipedia and all these reviews cite everybody who’s on it. So despite whatever the intention was to not give credits, the credits all came out anyway.

I don’t have it in front of me. Did you all end up with an official credit on the album version they finally released?

No. There’s no credits. No producer, no engineer, no musicians. Why? I don’t know. Ask Bob. I don’t know what he had in mind, what the thinking was. Why the secrecy? But it was a wonderful opportunity, and I think it’ll stand the test of time.

Were you coming up with your own guitar parts?

Oh, yeah. He left us all pretty much to our own. We were given huge latitude. And not having drums gave us even more latitude, because the time was very open. It could move around in a beautiful way. I mean, we played very quietly. You could hear Bob singing very clearly without any PA. We were playing in this circle in a room, and it had this wonderful intimacy because the volume was so low and because we were listening so carefully.

To me, that sort of floating time connects to Rough and Rowdy Ways.

That’s a good point. I never thought of that, but yeah, I think he really got the picture making that record: This is another way to do it.

We were saying something about the drums. He said, “I don’t want to hear drums ever again.” I think the way that album worked out, the way really both those records worked out, it gave them a huge amount of freedom. Having drums inhibits you a little bit, because it locks things down.

How long, roughly, did this take?

My part was about three weeks long.

And you’re coming in partway through, too.

I came in about a quarter of the way in.

Is Bob playing anything? Is he on guitar or piano?

He’s playing a little guitar. We had to encourage him. And when he did, it was magic, because his acoustic playing is so good.

You so rarely hear it these days.

Yeah. We wanted him to play one thing. He said, “I played enough already.” I said, “You haven’t played enough. You need to play here.” And he said, “All right…” You know, he would get real cranky on us. “Come on, play!” So he kind of begrudgingly did.

It was always a treat when he played. He would indicate stuff on guitar or piano and then not play. We finally said, “Come on, when you play guitar, it helps.” So he did. But not a lot.

You mentioned “Watchtower,” and I think I saw “Masters of War” mentioned somewhere too. Were there any other songs you remember recording that didn’t make the cut?

“Masters of War” would have been Tim. I never played that one with him.

“The Times They Are a-Changin’” didn’t make it.

That would have been a good one.

I didn’t particularly think it was one of the more successful ones, but I’m glad we did it.

“Watchtower” just was so funny because it kept coming back again and again. And he contradicted himself like three times. He said, “You know, I never liked Jimi Hendrix’s version of it”—which is a patent lie, because he’s gone on record saying that is the definitive version. He loved Jimi Hendrix.

So we tried it this way, we tried it that way. I didn’t play a lot of acoustic guitar on that record, but I was playing my acoustic and Bob says, “Now how did Hendrix do that again?” So I started playing it and he’s like, “Oh let’s try that.” So the version you hear, which is “Sierra’s Theme,” is me and Greg [Leisz], I believe, doing essentially a Hendrix take of it. That’s what eventually made it.

But to Bob’s credit, he just was not satisfied with what “Watchtower” was doing in all those different versions. It just wasn’t working for him. And I don’t know what wasn’t working. It seemed like it was working really well, but he wasn’t getting it.

I think it’s a great record, not just because I’m on it. The fact that as an 80-year-old man singing songs that he wrote in his 20s, there’s such a poignancy to it. There’s an emotional current that runs through Shadow Kingdom. Some people would have said, “Don’t touch those things.” The fact that they are reinterpretations was a very daring move for him to make.

Did you stay in touch afterwards? Have you worked on anything since?

Yeah, we did. He called me in to do some stuff with him. Just the two of us, experimenting with things. We finished a song which I can’t talk about. He gave it to me. It was a gift, with a pseudonym. That’s all I can tell you about it. But it was wonderful.

I haven’t been in touch with him [more recently]. I expect someday, hopefully not long, he’ll give me a call and we’ll talk and we’ll get back together and do some stuff. You know, he must have thousands and thousands of people in his orbit that come and go. And I guess I’m one of them.

Again, we got along really well. We enjoyed each other’s company. A lot of time spent together was just talking about stuff. Stuff, not music. As I said earlier, the level of trust he had with me, he knew that I was going to take care of things for him musically. He could count on what I was providing him. I was very consistent with him.

As a matter of fact, my brother passed away in January. I got a nice note from Bob of condolence. I thought that was really generous of him.

You remind me of a few people I’ve talked to, like Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers and Alan Pasqua, the keyboard player, who toured with Bob for extended periods of time, don’t talk to him for decades, then get invited back in. It’s like no time has passed.

That’s right. Again, it’s because he’s in the moment. He thinks of me, or he thinks of Benmont, or whoever it is. “Hey, it would be great to have him.” And you come in, and it’s the greatest thing in the world, and then you’re gone. You don’t hear from him. It’s like it never happened.

Ultimately, he’s so many things. He’s confounding. He’s hard to figure out a lot of times. But then there’s the positive stuff. He’s just so inspiring. He really draws great performances out of people, because you want to be your best. He’s this catalyst who gives us reasons to excel.

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Thanks Ira! Again, if you missed it last month, the first half of our conversation is here. Keep up with Ira’s current work at iraingber.com.

Coming next: Inside Bob Dylan's Shadow Kingdom II: The Filming