Blood On The Tracks [Original recording remastered]

It has been thirty years since "Blood on the Tracks" was released and of all of the albums recorded by Bob Dylan it is the one that has most increased in stature simply because every album produced since then has failed to rise to this level. I think the reason for this is mainly because it was born in a creative burst of pointed lyricisim as his marriage to Sara Lowndes collapsed, with all the songs written in two months in the middle of 1974. I would no more expect any personal turmoil to provide similar inspiration any more than I would have expected any of the songs on this album to rise to the level of social rhetoric found in his greatest songs of the Sixties.

In "Blood on the Tracks" Dylan also turned his back on his greatest backing band, returning to his artistic routes on an album that is largely acoustic-based. The songs run the emotional gamut from sorrow and regret to bitterness and pain. At the same time, despite the obvious point of origin for most of these songs, this is not an openly confessional album (cf. Courtney Love's "America's Sweetheart"). After all, we are talking the lyrics of Bob Dylan, which means cryptic riddles and allegories abound all laid out in ten classic tracks:

"Tangled Up in Blue" is the best song on the album and the ambguity about the characters and relationships Dylan sings about has only increased over the years with the shifting lyrics in various performances. The cover version by the Indigo Girls remains my favorite Dylan cover.

"Simple Twist of Fate" is another great four-word phrase in a song that represents the most overtly personal song on the album. The stark instrumentation only serves to highlight the heartbreak of the existentialist lyrics and the mournful sound of the vocals.

"You're A Big Girl Now" is a ballad on the end of a relationship and a sort of benediction in that clearly the woman is right to move on, but Dylan is still haunted by their physical encounters. You would think that this would have been the logical final track for the album, but it is not.

"Idiot Wind" is song on the album that most reminds me of an earlier Dylan composition, namely "Like a Rolling Stone," the pair being a set of put-down songs. The difference is that while both song lash out in lots of directions, this one keeps coming back to a certain "babe." This is another song that has changed over the year for various reasons that could well inspire a doctoral dissertation.

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is a rather upbeat track, despite the descending chord progressions, and is usually considered a song hopeful of reconciliation rather than one eulogizing the breakup.

"Meet Me in the Morning" stands out musically as the most blues oriented track that always struck me as cleansing the palatte for what was coming next on the album.

"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" is a 8:50 story song that basically wears down the listener's insistence that this is a biographical album. It also has a line that Dylan seems to sing with nic epitch and without affection, to wit, "and Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair." Pay attention next time through to that one phrase.

"If You See Her, Say Hello" probably represents the emotional low point of the album, with lyrics reflecting a singer who is crushed and embittered by the end of the relationship, turning his anger in on himself.

"Shelter from the Storm" is a song of simple beauty, based on three chords and a simple melody, underscoring a profound sense of loss. The song provides an avalanche of symbols and metaphors, but actually seems to end on an optimstic note.

"Buckets of Rain" provides a fitting finale, suitably depressing lyrics against a rather upbeat melody as irony once again abounds. After this song there is no where left to go.

"Blood on the Tracks" is listed by "Rolling Stone" magazine as the #16 record on the list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, between #15 "Are You Experienced?" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and #17 "Nevermind" by Nirvana. It is one of ten Dylan albums on the list, behind #4 "Highway 61 Revisited" and #9 "Blonde on Blonde." This For pretty much the complete story on the making of this classic album, check out "A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks" by music journalist Andy Gill and guitarist Kevin Odegard, who played on the five tracks recorded in Minneapolis. You can also listen to "The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3" to hear the original version of "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "If You See Her, Say Hello" recorded in New York City in September to compare with the Twin Cities versions from December of 1974.

Perhaps the peak of a peak-strewn career from a craggy artist. The songs are thoughtful, poignant, witty and memorable. The music is not intrusive. The voice is crunchy, without the weak anemia that has haunted the recent releases.

This is Dylan's most talked-about LP from his post 1960s career, and while initially the critics were unsure about it, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS rapidly became perceived as one of the most impressive albums Dylan has cut. The song-writing is strong and assured, and Dylan is as cryptic as ever. Yet there also seems to be a central theme here: broken relationships. When asked about this album's reception, Dylan said he never truly understood why people enjoy that kind of pain.

Anyone familiar with art know that some of the best art in the world comes from pain. Bob Dylan's music from 1969 to 1974 was very much characterised by a sort of domesticity which was the central undercurrent to most of his music, being characterized by his familia lifestyle. While the music found on these albums (NASHVILLE, SELF-PORTRAIT to some extent, NEW MORNING, and PLANET WAVES) are sometimes exciting (especially NASHVILLE, the best of the lot), generally they never quite rise to the level of the artistically impeccable.

While the domesticity was heartfelt and sincere, it seems Dylan was too content with his life to put a lot into his art. There was no central drive like there was in the early days, when Dylan wanted to be the next Woody Guthrie, and then the more poetic direction of the mid 1960s, and then a more mellow country direction. Dylan was too interested in pursuing this path to make us care about the music found on NEW MORNING, etc. Now, however, he must channel that pain through into his art so he can deal with it. There's a real passion here that's lacking in the other albums of this period. This is the culmination of his mellow period, driving Dylan to an artistic catharsis because of a new ingredient in the mix of domestic bliss: pain.

This is the reason why BLOOD ON THE TRACKS stands as one of Dylan's most impressive LPs.

However, there is a common misconception about BLOOD. These very painful songs are oft attributed to Dylan's crumbling marriage. As other reviews have noted, Dylan has stated that this is not a tribute to his rapidly disintegrating marriage to Sara Lowndes. An artist can use something in their life as a springboard for their art, writing not really about the situation but using the situation as their inspiration to create art. This may be difficult to understand, and the only reason I believe this is because I also write and I have also experienced this phenomena, which is difficult to understand but I assure you it does exist. So, BLOOD is not about his crumbling marriage, yet paradoxically it is.

Many of Dylan's albums have a central song which all the others can relate too, or you can base your understanding of that album from that one song. This is most clearly evident on BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, as this track will not only help you understand BLOOD, but also the influence of the painters on Dylan. There is also a key song to which you base your understanding on: Tangled Up in Blue. This track approaches a situation from multiple points of view (povs) and chronologically is all over the map. The past, present, and future merge into one central mass of experience in which time does not have any distinction. The rest of the album takes its cue from this one song, playing almost like a concept album about pain in human relationships between the sexes.
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS becomes a cubist affair, and "Tangled" gives you the direction in which you need to direct your attention if you really want to understand BLOOD. BLOOD is about Dylan's relationships with the women in his life, and while all of them are about Sara, one is specifically about Elsie who he was seeing when he cut this album ("You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome"), and yet even that's about Sara, and yet, as I will discuss later, it is not about Sara at all. But this album records various elements of their relationships at various times, floating on the lake of time rather than swimming in it as most narratives do. This facet of BLOOD shows the influence the painters have had on Dylan, and also brings a great amount of complexity to BLOOD which would otherwise be lacking.

This understanding also helps better ease "Jack of Hearts" into its proper place on the album, telling a dense allegory in the old West which is just as relevant to Dylan's pain as the rest of this is. Although some have looked at this track with disdain, to me it's one of the best tracks on this album and if you get it, this song fits in perfectly.

A lot of BLOOD tracks were cut in 1974. About half the original cuts were deleted from this album and rerecorded. Dylan cops out here, with the single exception of "Idiot Wind," which benefits from being recut while the others do not. The original tracks betrayed to much of the pain he was going through. BLOOD ON THE TRACKS is remarkable in that it should feel very disjointed, with half of the album cut with Dylan being emotionally bare and honest, and with the other half Dylan purposefully distances himself from the previous version and yet somehow this album has a cohesion which I can't explain. The most dramatic difference in these versions is "Idiot Wind," which originally Dylan sang as an sad, resigned tirade, full of pain and sorrow, and yet the released version is marked with a very real and savage sense of anger. The anger is directed at the woman to begin with, but by the end of the song the anger is also directed against the narrator himself. Dylan's honesty is polluted and the pain is a little more well hidden, and yet paradoxically this doesn't really matter.

BLOOD is full of paradoxes. It is about his marriage and it isn't, there's a cohesion there which shouldn't be, it is a concept album and yet it isn't. Anyway you look at it, BLOOD is one of Dylan's must interesting albums, and also one of his best, if not the best .