Big names like Dylan, U2 dot producer Daniel Lanois' life story
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 12,
By Kevin Canfield
San Francisco Chronicle


Soul Mining: A
Soul Mining: A Musical Life
by Daniel Lanois
Faber and Faber, $26


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With radio-ready hits like Sledgehammer, Big Time and In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel's 1986 record, So, represented the biggest triumph in a long, successful career. But that doesn't mean it came together easily.

One day, it seems, the singer was writing a few verses in a barn in rural England, while next door the album's producer, Daniel Lanois, readied himself in Gabriel's recording studio. This usually worked well, Lanois explains in his new memoir, Soul Mining, but Gabriel would occasionally wander off, wasting precious time with pointless phone chat.

"Solution: the next time Peter went into the barn, I took these giant railway spikes and nailed him in," Lanois writes. "... I'm not sure that all the lyrics came out of that one session, but it was a good tone-setter for discipline, even if it almost got me deported from the West Country of England."

In the 25 years since this bit of makeshift carpentry, Lanois has positioned himself as one of the most successful producers in the business, the craftsman behind some of the era's finest albums: U2's The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind, Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball and Willie Nelson's Teatro (not to mention fellow Canadian Neil Young's recent Le Noise, an album that takes its title from Lanois' nickname). Accordingly, this book is bursting with memorable anecdotes about his collaborators, another of the debut author's many gifts to fans of rock and country music.

From Rick James to Brian Eno

Brief and episodic, Soul Mining begins on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, where Lanois, born in 1959, "spoke only French until the age of ten." A love of music ran in the family, which was populated by fiddlers and singers. As a boy he spent a week's allowance on a toy pennywhistle, and over time he devised his own musical language.

Reproduced in the book, his Morse-code-like symbols look like nothing much -- until they're compared with the notations Lanois kept many years later when working with U2 (also shown in the book). Juxtaposed, the pages offer a fascinating look at the development of a creative mind.

A young man with an ear for popular music, Lanois built a studio in his mother's basement. Word of mouth quickly led to pivotal early jobs -- one day, for example, he found himself recording Rick James. "I felt like I was in the presence of Bach or Beethoven," Lanois writes. "His understanding of the tapestry of funk in my experience remains unparalleled. ... I didn't even mind that Rick never paid me for the session."

He also found work alongside Brian Eno, the former Roxy Music keyboard player who, like Lanois, would later enjoy great success as one of U2's producers. In perhaps the book's most fascinating tale, Lanois describes how Eno conjured the dreamlike compositions found on his "ambient" records of the 1970s and '80s: "Years before, he had been hit by a taxicab in London. While lying in the hospital bed he noticed that the classical music playing over the speaker in his room was audible only at the crescendos of the arrangements. In the quieter passages there was seeming silence. ... This was the beginning of Eno's Ambient Music Theory."

No personal details

Elsewhere, Lanois offers vivid snapshots of his encounters with some of the era's musical geniuses. One chapter, for instance, finds him visiting Leonard Cohen's house to talk about a Cohen song he had just recorded: "Leonard greeted me with a platter and asked if I wanted any chopped liver. ... I accepted a glass of wine, as Leonard listened to my version of The Stranger on my Walkman headphones."

Another chapter captures the intimate feel of a Dylan recording session: "The Oh Mercy studio was essentially a kitchen. Bob and I sat like two guys on a porch. He played my nice 1952 butterscotch Telecaster that I plugged into an early sixties Fender Concert amp tucked around the corner, five feet from Bob, with moving blankets around the mic to avoid vocal spill."

For a man writing something like an autobiography, Lanois is notably circumspect about his personal life. The debauchery and damaged relationships found in many music memoirs have no place in this book. Maybe that's best. With a career this fascinating, there just isn't room for self-mythologizing filler. As Lanois writes at one point, "I don't want to give away all my secrets." He's referring to the experimentation that resulted in one of his best bits of studio work, but you get the sense that he has told all the stories he wants to tell.

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