Notoriously slow workers Guns n' Roses, Don Henley and John Fogerty can't hold a candle to Jim Dickinson's long delay between studio albums. The veteran session musician and producer, who has worked with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Big Star, has finally finished work on his second solo album, Free Beer Tomorrow, the follow-up to his debut, 1972's Dixie Fried.

"As you're making one album, you're generally planning the next one," Dickinson says. "And I did that way back in the Seventies, but I got so involved with other projects . . ."

Those projects included everything from playing piano on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" to producing the Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me. During the past thirty years, Dickinson also has worked with the North Mississippi All Stars, led by his sons Luther and Cody. The younger Dickinsons are among the instrumentalists on Free Beer Tomorrow, due by the end of the year on Artemis Records.

"This is not a rock & roll record," the patriarch explains. "I'm referencing a lot of things at once, maybe too many things. I've always thought that I've played folk rock, and I guess this is folk rock."

Dickinson says he spent six years making Free Beer Tomorrow, which he calls "a collection of possibly obscure material that I've collected over the years, some songs that have never been recorded before and mostly by people no one's heard of before." He recorded the songs at Zebra Ranch in Mississippi and mixed them with John Hampton (Gin Blossoms, Robert Cray) at Ardent Studios in Memphis. Dickinson, the album's lone lead singer, plays some guitar in addition to his "normal array of keyboards."

"The hardest thing I had to do," he explains, "was for me, as a producer, to get from me, as a session player, what me, as an artist, wanted."

Dickinson's future plans include a series of solo shows. "There's really no way I could tour the record because there are so many instruments on it, and my boys are off playing their own music," he says. "So, I might go out by myself and do my folk act like I did in the Sixties. I could do most of the songs that way."

CHRIS JUNCIORE
(May 23, 2002)