“It was a strange, fucking surreal day.” This was former Sex Pistols guitarist ' verdict on his one-time-only studio session with folk legend and 's Paul Simonon in the spring of 1987. For reasons he never elected to explain, the folk legend had decided that his 25th studio album, , would benefit from some outside input, and so, over the course of six years and numerous studio sessions, an extraordinary range of guest musicians - , Ronnie Wood, Jerry Garcia, Mick Taylor, Mark Knopfler, and, er, among them - were invited to add light, shade and texture to the scattershot ten-song collection Dylan was assembling as the follow-up to 1986's critically savaged album.
Exactly what motivated Dylan to place a call to Steve Jones and ask him to put together a band of his choosing for a March '87 session at Sunset Sound studios - “maybe he was a secret Professionals fan,” the guitarist mused, with tongue firmly in cheek, in his highly readable 2016 memoir - we shall likely never know, but to his credit, Jones took the assignment seriously, roping in the services of ex-Clash bassist Simonon, Pat Benatar's drummer Myron Grombacher and longtime Rod Stewart collaborator Kevin Savigar, none of whom had the slightest idea what exactly Dylan expected of them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ensuing session in Studio 3 was a stilted, awkward affair, not least because Dylan himself seemed unprepared, and unsure of what the common goal was, beyond directionless jamming. “There was a bit of.