By ROBERT GORDON

Can you photograph a ghost? Can you hold a scent in your hand? Can you be respected, feared, known and unknown at the same time? Can you explain Mud Boy and the Neutrons?

"We’re the random element," says James Luther Dickinson, longtime Memphis session man, songwriter, and producer, about the group that began 14 years ago on a Halloween night and released its first album, Known Felons In Drag, on New Rose (France). "We originally put the group together so we couldn’t possibly make a deal. When we started the band, we rehearsed for three months, and it took us seriously three years to get over the three months of rehearsal. The music is just not abut being rehearsed."

What Mud Boy is about becomes clearer after learning about Dickinson. He has production credits dating back more than 20 years, and has worked with groups as varied as the Flaming Groovies, Black Oak Arkansas, and Alex Chilton; he has performed on songs as disparate as "Tumbling Dice" and "City of New Orleans." In recent years, he has worked in conjunction with Ry Cooder, performing n and producing the soundtracks to Paris, Texas and Southern Comfort, among other films. "To accompany a visual image," he says, "is the ultimate form of accompaniment. I used to sit at the TV with the sound off and play."

When sitting at the bigger screen, Dickinson enlarged his accompaniment techniques. "I played an electric Kawai on all the scores. On Paris, Texas I detuned it into quarter steps from middle C as far up as it would hold. I figured out in order to get the real quarter tone lick out of it, I had to be able to mash four notes at once, so I used reels of duct tape, rolling them across the keys, and as they would cross—the random element of it—some of the harmonics were really nice. It is the sound on Paris, Texas that sounds like bicycle spokes.

"We had a bowed piano on Blue City. Cooder and I figured out a way of running horse hairs, detached from a violin bow, highly resined, under the (piano)strings. If you go back and forth, you get the principal and the major harmonics, but if you move it (up and down the string), the harmonics shift, and it makes a real nice sound. In fact, we had a bowed piano quarter in Blue City, four people around the piano doing that, and we made one note that, when they went over it with synthesizers, they couldn’t create it. Couldn’t even get below it."

When not playing, Dickinson works as a producer. In the last year, he has produced five albums, not including his own (produced by Mud Boy), which he denies credit for. He recently worked with the Replacements, and his records with Green On Red and Joe "King" Carrasco are in the can, while his work with the True Believers and Tav Falco is already out.

"In terms of Southern production," he says, "there’s not anybody doing it any better. Southern production is a different approach, a little less confrontational. When I was a session player, I would work with Southern producers, I thought they were idiots. It took me years to figure out what they were doing. There is a story in [Peter] Guralnick’s book [Sweet Soul Music] about Quenton Claunch rattling the change in his pocket (rather than correcting a musician), I saw that work ever time.

"I’m a big foe of self-production. And almost everybody that I work with ends up thinking that they can produce themselves, because they can’t see what I’m doing. What I do is real small. Almost never observed. It does instill in people the idea, that fallacious idea, that they can produce themselves. As far as the sound and the overall recording experience, it’s an unnatural process Everybody who goes through it responds in a different way. But it is all tricks, and the more tricks you know, the more tricks you can apply and the better record you can make. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I know a lot of tricks."

The following trick is from Dickinson’s 1973 sessions for Dan Penn’s unreleased album Emmett the Singing Ranger Lost in the Woods. "the best thing I did on that session was a song called ‘Tiny Hinies and Hogs’ about Harley riders. I had two big Harleys in the studio. One of them was playing just rhythm, it was open, the other one was playing on the beat. Campbell Kensinger was retarding the spark to get it on the beat and then giving it gas to keep it from dying. It was shooting four feet of blue flame. The whole studio filled with carbon monoxide. The motorcycle even takes a solo at one point, it sounds like a saxophone." Dickinson laughs, "Everybody is saying, ‘Yeah, listen it’s right on the beat.’ Of course everybody was playing with the motorcycle, that’s what was really happening."

Dickinson also recalls Alex Chilton sessions for Big Star 3rd and Like Flies on Sherbert with relish. "We recorded Flies at Sun, a primitive situation. There were open mikes all over the room, and during songs people would wander around and play randomly on these instruments. The one song, when (Alex) came up with ‘It’s so fine,’ if I could have mixed that with Joe Hardy at Ardent, we’d have been on the radio with it. And Alex knew it, so we flushed it instead."

Though 3rd has "never been released anywhere near in sequence, " and "Dream Lover"—"the whole point of the record" has never been included on it, Dickinson is still proud of it. "People have come to me and said, ‘It changed my life.’ The first time, I thought, yeah, sure. But it’s happened over and over. Obviously there was a generation of 12 year-old boys that were devastated by Big Star 3. They used to say about the Velvet Underground’s first record, everybody that bought it formed a band. It certainly must be true of Alex (3rd) now.

"Three people at Warner Brothers who recommended me for this project with the Replacements turned down Big Star 3. Now they speak of it in hushed tones, as if it were the be-all and end-all of rock music. They always critically say that my stuff as a producer is too futuristic, which is just bullshit."

"Futuristic" may not apply, but "surreal" would not be far off. "One of my partners in Mud Boy, Jim Lancaster, used to produce records on inmates at the Whitfield Sanitarium. As he maintains, and I heartily agree with him, those people have a right to make records too. I don’t see any difference between those sessions and the Replacements sessions. It’s the same process, and you have to honor it. If you honor the process, they you have something that stands a chance in the overall moral struggle of the world."

It took 14 years for Mud Boy and the Neutrons to finally honor the recording process and Dickinson is worried that it may be overexposure. He says, shaking his head, "Maybe I should have waited two more years."

To describe Mud Boy is to talk about more than just the music. Dickinson makes references to the Jajuka pipes of Pan, theories of synergism, and more. He drops his voice and averts his whole head, as if to talk about the group is to look too long at the sun. The pygmies perform their ritual hoping that the voice from the rain forest will answer them. And of course the voice is the shaman, a fraud—as all important things are, I think. But that’s what Mud Boy is, he’s something that we try to summon so that there will be an additional entity there. Astrophysics? Spiritualism? R. Buckminster Fuller? "The most successful we can get is that sometimes Johnny Woods (bluesman Robert Johnson’s disciple) will appear."

The other three core members of Mud Boy are Delta bluesmen Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker and Jimmy Crosswaith. Selvidge has released several albums, many on his own Peabody label, which was responsible for his critically acclaimed 1982 release Waiting For A Train, as well as Chilton’s seminal Like Flies on Sherbert in 1976, both of which feature members of Mud Boy. Crosswaith, a scrubboard player and percussionist, backed bluesmen like Bukka White in Memphis, and spread 60’s gospel to little children with his wildly imaginative Electric circus Marionette show. He makes his singing debut on this record, which warns Dickinson , "The world may not yet be ready for."

Baker, the man behind the white Stax act Moloch, an "ugly, pre-Southern rock, boogie band" (according to Dickinson) has such a peculiar tense, terse vibrato guitar style that Dickinson has remarked of Mud boy, "All we really are is a backup band for Lee Baker. Furry (Lewis) made a real big difference in how Lee plays. To me, it was a difference for the good, but whatever little commercial value (Lee) might have had, it took it away from him.

"There are things that happen between me and Baker, that if we stopped doing it nobody would do it. I mean like nobody on earth would be doing the one little thing that we do because we both played with old blues players. He knows to do certain things when I do certain things, only because of the peculiarity of the environment.

"Clint Davis, the guy who puts on the New Orleans Jazz Festival, said once about us that his interest in music was about when the shit comes together, and he said he thought Mud Boy tried to extend those moments. We play rock and roll music as if it were jazz in the early ‘50s. we play tunes, rather than doing covers. I’ve been playing some of the same songs for almost 30 years. In some cases, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. How are you gonna write a better song that ‘Ubangi Stomp?’ You’re not gonna do it. I feel I can lend an interpretation of ‘Ubangi Stomp’ so I just do it that way. That’s what I mean by jazz. I think of it as an interpretive, what we do."

In the spirit of the band, hearing Mud Boy is hard to do. Often retiring, they play only a couple of gigs a year. Felons is available only as an import from France, though Dickinson talks of releasing it stateside as a cassette. New Rose is already talking about a second album and a possible reissue of Dickinson’s only solo effort, Dixie Fried (1972), and you can try writing Peabody (c/o 2000 Madison Ave., Memphis, TN 38104) for their pertinent selections. Lastly, you can sit at home and pray to the pygmies that Dickinson will test this final statement:

"I firmly believe that anywhere on earth we took Mud Boy and played, the same thing would happen. I think there are people who want that, everywhere, who basically want to get a little weird. Everywhere on earth. And I think Mud Boy strikes a responsive note."

Hey, gentle reader I'd like to point out that the above article came from a magazine -- exactly which mag I haven't a clue -- a BOAC reader sent it my way. I certainly believe in giving credit where credit is due, so if this seems familiar let me know.