Jim Dickinson's got a resumé that makes him sound an awful lot like the protagonist of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge". He was there, in 1969, when the Rolling Stones were recording "Wild Horses". He was there, in 1974, taping the drugged disintegration of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers. And he was there, stringing out Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. From 1969 to 1999, he was there, with Pet Clark, the Flamin' Groovies, Sam and Dave, Mudhoney, Primal Scream, Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan. He recorded and played with them all.
But Dickinson was there long before those more popular artists, going by his full Christian name and digging in the Memphis humus for some "self-buried dope by motorcycle moonlight," with his band, the Dixie Flyers (the house band for many late sixties Atlantic artists, second only to the Muscle Shoals crew). Thirty years later, his dope is again unearthed, and the vintage is quite potent, if not a bit ragged.
"Wine" cracks it all open, an ode to potables that leans heavily on "Wine Spodee-Odee" for support, but cuts loose with a drunken bottleneck slide flashing into white-lightning blindness at each break. The raucousness is palpable, barely controlled in the bellowed choruses and clouds of sawdust. The sluggish, morning-after regret "The Strength of Love" is soused with the kind of heavy molasses that coated Elvis' pill-popping gospel material, sung in the sort of preachy baritone Nick Cave's invoked in recent years. "Wild Bill Jones" is back on the bottle, with throat-scratched choruses from his cronies, strumming and slurring like it's a juke-joint's last call.
The centerpiece of the disc is "John Brown," an early Bob Dylan tune rendered unrecognizable-- much like the title character-- by heavy processing and some swamp gas bass. A churning, surly six-minute take, the synth simmers like bile midway through, and Dickinson's voice turns as foreboding as Jim Morrison's drawl. It's curiously psychedelic, in the sense that it unlocks a region of the mind seldom explored, and looses the darkness found there in a most horrific way.
The talent that led to Dickinson's status as highly-sought producer in later years is his inherent grasp of ancient American folk forms, and his ability to invoke them in present times, allowing the ghosts to swirl about in other people's songs, be they by Dylan, Carl Perkins, or even a little known piece archived by a New Orleans dentist and musicologist. "O How She Dances" staggers on by way of dobro, rattle, and talking drum, channeling sinister turn-of-the-century carny snarls and the freakish sneer of proto-rockabilly Harmonica Frank Floyd in its brief three minutes.
With a nod to Memphis blues legend Furry Lewis, Dickinson and what's left of the band fire up the train for "Casey Jones", taking it for a loopy, acoustic ride that brings this strange musical trip to a surprisingly mellow end, considering it's about a train wreck and all. Most of the individuals involved with this record wound up with some serious drug problems during and after the recording; it would take Dickinson himself until 2001 to get to his follow-up, Free Beer Tomorrow.
Part evening porch blues, part Saturday night rave-up, and part Sunday morning hangover prayer, Dixie Fried doesn't stand alongside wasted white-boy classics like sideman Dr. John's Gris-Gris or the Stones' Exile on Main Street. It doesn't approach Third/Sister Lovers either, but like Dickinson himself, it's close by. Without restraint or focus, his band fell apart around him as he tried to put his possessed vision to tape. Dickinson rooted for an essential drug outside of time on this record, a high to illuminate the exact moment when ether and molecules become definable sound, to capture the space between singing and song.
