Dylan and Blood on the Tracks [3]. Starting from a different point of view
January 22, 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, and Part 2 is here. Today: the songs.
Dylan’s art classes with Norman Raeben may not have improved his painting, but they do seem to have improved his writing. Jeff Slate, who wrote the sleevenotes to More Blood, More Tracks, describes the influence of Norman Raeben’s teaching on Dylan like this:
Raeben was a taskmaster, but he imparted in his students a sense both that life itself was the art, with their creations being merely the by-product of that experience, and, significantly for Dylan, that past, present, and future could all coexist in their work.
Of course, this takes us straight back to Tangled Up In Blue, one of the most annotated songs in music history, with its shifting perspectives of place, time, and point of view. It is a song that has continued to shift lyrically in performance ever since, and he has performed it a lot: by Jeff Slate’s calculation, writing in 2018, he had played it 1,546 times on the Never Ending Tour.
Dylan once said that Tangled Up In Blue took ten years to live, and two years to write. And maybe ten years to get right, since he’s also said that the live version on Real Live, recorded in 1984, is closer to what he wanted for the song.
Formally, it consists of seven verses, each of which is written as a sonnet. With a structure like that, it is not surprising that it attracted the attention of the poet Simon Armitage, now the British Poet Laureate, who subjected it to a lit crit reading, verse by verse, in his contribution to Do You Mr Jones—an anthology of pieces about Dylan by “poets and professors” edited by Neil Corcoran. The song didn’t fare that well in Armitage’s analysis. There are highlights, certainly:
But for every highlight there is a contrived rhyme, a cornball cliche, an embarrassing tautology, a redundant syllable, a tired simile, a lame comment and a lazy pun.
I’m not going head to head with the Poet Laureate on literary criticism, but it’s also possible to think that some of this is overdone. In the line ‘One day the axe just fell’, for example, Armitage takes exception to the word ‘just’ (he thinks it redundant) when it’s clearly not there just for scansion.
To be clear, Armitage regards Tangled Up in Blue as ”a great song”. Part of the point of his exercise is to separate out performance from poetry:
Dylan’s sabotaging of the linear progression of the story is intriguing, even exciting in performance, but on paper it doesn’t look so clever.
But then, as he also says, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.
Although the music writer Richard Williams wouldn’t want to mess around with Blood on the Tracks as it was released, he did eventually buy the single CD version of More Blood, More Tracks to listen to the earlier version of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
The version on the LP was recorded in Minnesota, and it rollicks along on the back of Bill Berg’s wire brushes almost too quickly for the listener to keep up with the gallery of characters and their entrances and their exits.
(Bill Berg on drums. Photo: Bill Berg/Discogs)
Williams says of it,
It’s a track I’ve always loved because it has so much of Bob in it: a wild story, full of characters and humour and unexplained ambiguities and bizarre incidents, a slapstick take on “Desolation Row” relocated in Tombstone, Arizona.
I’ve always admired one of the little lyric felicities in the song on the album version. Of Lily, in the New York version (and other versions of the song), Dylan sings,
She did whatever she had to do
She had that certain flash every time she smiled.
On the Minnesota recording, this has changed, subtly, to
She had to have something flash every time she smiled.
It’s the smallest of changes, and who knows if it was deliberate—Dylan was fiddling around with lyrics in the studio right up until recording the songs—but it manages to convey both a sense of glamour and an (anachronistic) sense of paparazzi.
The New York version of the song is quite a lot slower, and it’s just Dylan and his guitar, almost as if he’s back in Greenwich Village again; just him, a lyric, and a set of chord changes to mould the song around. Says Williams:
I don’t know many better examples of his command of phrasing, of his ability to manipulate asymmetry, making the bar-lines follow the melody, rather than the customary vice-versa... Once you start listening closely, it’s mesmerising.
In his long article on More Blood, More Tracks, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross spends time with the lyrics notebooks, finding that Dylan kept experimenting with the lines until he got to the one he wanted. On Idiot Wind for example, it took a while for the wind to be blowing from ‘the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capital’:
“The notebook shows constant, obsessive revision—a sort of perfectionism of disaster. “Idiot Wind,” the extended primal scream at the heart of the album, is seen in drafts so crowded with marginal additions that they are hardly legible. Often Dylan doesn’t cross things out, instead superimposing alternatives:...”
I BEG YOUR PARDON MADAM
(thru the circles round your eyes)
IDIOT WIND – BLOWIN EVERY TIME YOU MOVE YOUR JAW
FROM THE GRAND COOLIE DAM TO THE MARDI GRAS
(blowing thru the hot and dusty skies)”
The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who’d first met Dylan in New York in 1963, was particularly taken with Idiot Wind, writing these notes two daysafter Blood on the Tracks was released:
”He isn’t caged his heart’s enraged, everyone’s ideas of right + wrong loudmouth join the revolution Join the war are cancelled by the Wheel of Fate... – “In fact the wheels have stopped” – Ambitious control’s failed – Corrupt ambition, you, or America are finally blind….
“…and the final curse + analysis, a genius stroke of ecological vastness and tiny domestic paternal common sense – “It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves!”
Idiot Wind also changes markedly from New York to Minnesota, from resignation to anger, helped along by an increase in tempo, a key change, some lyrical tweaks, and the words coming in right from the start of the song.
(Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour later in 1975. SOURCE)
When Blood on the Tracks was released, the New York musicians were credited, while the Minnesotan musicians weren’t. The record sleeves had already been printed. But the mistake persisted: when the sleeves were reprinted, the names of the New York musicians were taken off as well. Dylan appears not to have cared. Kevin Odegard, who had recruited the band for the Minnesota sessions, spent decades trying to get this oversight corrected—as it was, finally, in the release of More Blood More Tracks.
Greg Inhofer, who played keyboards on the Minnesota sessions, approached Dylan when he saw him at a Stray Cats gig a couple of months afterwards and was more or less ignored. In a piece on the record in Uncut magazine, the assistant engineer for the New York sessions, Glenn Berger, who later retrained as a psychiatrist, reflected on this:
I’m a psychiatrist and have analysed what makes artists great, and part of it is shamelessness – not to care about how you treat people, to get what you’re looking for. Sometimes it works. Dylan’s walking on the tightrope, and we’re not.
Dylan had already moved on.
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