Dylan and Blood on the Tracks [2]: New York states of mind
January 21, 2025
Andrew Curry writes: To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Blood on the Tracks this week, we’re running a three part series about the record. Part 1 is here. Today is about ‘managing the melancholy’.
There’s a clear difference in tone between the initial Blood on the Tracks sessions in New York, and the later sessions in Minnesota, and it makes a real difference to the record that was released. The music writer Richard Williams, who considers Blood on the Tracks to be a “perfect record”, summarised the difference like this when he reflected on the 2018 release of More Blood, More Tracks:
[T]he real value of the new release is in its implicit suggestion of why Dylan rejected the first (mostly) solo version of the album, recorded in New York. What he didn’t like was its “down” mood. When he re-recorded half the songs in Minneapolis with a band, he dialled the mood up a notch, letting a bit more sunlight in. And he got it right.
(Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
A bootleg that included some of the New York outtakes, Joaquin Antique, showed up soon enough. And since More Blood, More Tracks was released, in 2018, we know what the New York version of the record would have sounded like. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross pieces together this ‘lost version’ of Blood on the Tracks from the 87 tracks on the 6-CD set of out-takes that is the full Bootleg Vol 14 release. (Two of the New York recordings originally intended for release, but then removed, are on the single More Blood, More Tracks CD).
Ross, better known for his classical criticism, compares this original recording to Schubert’s Winterreise.” This is high praise, but Winterreise is one dark series of songs. (One of the songs in the cycle is included at the end of this post). Similarly, says Ross, the New York version of Blood on the Tracks is “as beautiful as it is bleak”:
All through the New York sessions, you hear a persistent downward tug in the voice, a grimace of regret. Even the album’s livelier numbers, such as “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” can be wrenched into the abyss... The potential downside is a tendency toward relentlessness: one piece after another in the key of E, spiralling through love and loss. The final album offers more variety.
It seems that while he was listening to the test pressing Dylan had misgivings. He feared a commercial failure, and wanted to add some lightness to the dark. The revised version of Blood on the Tracks was no longer—in Ross’s phrase—“a masterpiece of melancholy.” And Dylan’s commercial judgment seems to have been right: Blood on the Tracks topped the US album charts and sold two million copies in the US alone over the next twenty years.
At the time he was writing these songs, Dylan was distanced from his wife Sara, who had stayed in California with their children while he came to the East Coast. He was having an affair in New York with Ellen Bernstein, who worked for CBS. When you read the lyrics of the songs on the album, it is possible to read a lot into all of this. Dylan, inevitably, has denied that the songs are autobiographical, while accepting that they could be read in this way. In his book Chronicles, he says they were inspired by Chekhov’s short stories.
(Blood on the Tracks: “my parents talking”. Photo of Jakob Dylan by Greg2600, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Other interpretations are available, of course. Jakob Dylan described the record as “my parents talking”, and the music writer Andy Gill says that You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go was written of Ellen Bernstein. It also seems likely that Tangled Up In Blue is about his earlier relationship with Suze Rotolo. In the notebooks, it is initially titled 4th Street Affair—the New York street where he and Rotolo had an apartment.
One unexpected influence on the record, though, was the painter Norman Raeben. While in New York, Dylan had taken art classes with Raeben, and while Dylan was not much taken with his own painting and drawing at the time—his gallery shows come much later—the experience seems to have unblocked him lyrically. As he later told the Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Cott:
"He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt."
In his effusive liner notes—more essay than note—the New York City writer and journalist Pete Hammill tries to capture a sense of this, and of the transition of this, more personal Dylan from the more public Dylan of the 1960s.
To get the full effect, you really need to read them in full, but let me give you a flavour.
“I thought, listening to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
“Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.”
Like much else associated with the record, the liner notes had a chequered history. They were there when the record was first released, but then removed. The image of the painting by Dylan’s friend David Oppenheimer was blown up to fill the space. But then Hammill won a Grammy for his liner notes (who knew?) and CBS put them back onto the record sleeve for the next pressing.
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