Dylan and Blood on the Tracks [1]. From Studio A to Minnesota
January 20, 2025
Andrew Curry writes: It is 50 years since Blood on the Tracks was released—perhaps Dylan’s most complete record. On Salut! Live this week, we’re running a long article in three parts to mark the anniversary.
Now that Blood on the Tracks is universally recognised as one of Bob Dylan’s finest records, it is easy to forget how much was riding on it in 1975, in terms of Dylan’s reputation. His historic trio of records in the mid-60s—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde—seemed a long time ago. The records he’d released since his motorcycle crash were widely regarded as lightweight or dull.
(Photo: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The move to Asylum Records from CBS had helped a bit. The 1974 tour with The Band, captured on Before the Flood, was commercially successful, as was Planet Waves, but both left an aftertaste of an artist whose best days were maybe now behind him. Dylan, opportunistically released by CBS in late 1973, didn’t help, since it was a collection of outtakes from earlier records.
Some of this helps to explain the production history of Blood in the Tracks. He’d returned to CBS from Asylum, and was recording in the same New York studio—Studio A—where he’d recorded Highway 61 Revisited. Phil Ramone, the producer/engineer who now owned that studio, was regarded as one of the best in the business. He’d produced There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, had been the sound engineer on the 1974 tour, and had supervised the release of Before the Flood.
After four days of sessions in September 1974—some watched, by chance, by Mick Jagger, who was doing some work in the same studios—there was a record in the can, even if after the sessions, according to the assistant engineer Glenn Berger, Phil Ramone had to reassure Dylan repeatedly about its quality.
The story told about the original New York sessions is that Dylan started out with a band in the studio—Eric Weissberg and Deliverance, hired in by Phil Ramone—and discarded them one by one as they struggled to follow him (he didn’t bother to run through the songs with them first). Jeff Slate, who wrote the liner notes for the More Blood, More Tracks release in the Bootleg series, explains that this is more or less completely untrue. Dylan never wasted time in the studio, and by the time the band arrived he’d already recorded eleven songs on his own:
“Contrary to most accounts, Dylan was supremely prepared, and immediately went about delivering aching versions of some of the best—and most intimate—songs that he had ever written...
“[After the band arrived] Dylan would record another fifteen that day—including five takes of Idiot Wind, alone again, save for the bassist Tony Brown... But it’s clear as you listen that instead of things getting better as the sessions progressed, with the musicians finding their groove with Dylan, the atmosphere in the room degenerated.”
Of the released tracks, the full New York band played only on Meet Me In The Morning: Weissberg and Charles Brown on acoustic guitars, Buddy Cage on pedal steel, Thomas McFaul on keyboards, Tony Brown on bass, and Richard Crooks on drums.
(David Zimmerman, left, and Kevin Odeberg. Photo: Kevin Odeberg)
Despite Phil Ramone’s assurances, Dylan, anyway, wasn’t happy with what he had got. Over Christmas he visited family in Minnesota. His brother David Zimmerman, by some accounts, heard the test pressing and said it was too stark to sell. Zimmerman and a local musician, Kevin Odegard, put together a band for him to re-record some of the songs. Dylan wanted a rare 1937 Martin guitar for the recordings, which Kevin was able to borrow from a local music shop. And Dylan also wanted complete secrecy about what any of this was for.
David Zimmermann also sat in on the sessions in the control room. Kevin Odegard says that Zimmerman is the unsung, uncredited hero of Blood on The Tracks:
[His] contribution made it a completely different record. It would have been another quiet, sleepy little wonderful Bob Dylan album had it not been re-worked;... David Zimmerman is the man responsible for making it a masterpiece.
The best single account of the making of Blood on the Tracks is probably the book by the music writer Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard. Gill warmed up for the book by writing an extended piece for Mojo magazine in 2001 that marked Dylan’s 60th, and some of the detail here comes from that piece.
Dylan now reworked with the Minnesota musicians half of the songs that were to be released on the record. Tangled Up In Blue, You’re A Big Girl Now, Idiot Wind, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, and If You See Her Say Hello all come from this second set of sessions. By all accounts, much was much more relaxed than he had been in the New York sessions. Unlike in New York, he ran through the songs before they played them, and Dylan listened to suggestions from the musicians about improvements. Unlike in New York, they also did a little bit of over-dubbing.
It seems clear, from the different accounts of the sessions, that when he went in he knew exactly which songs he wanted new versions of.
We know from the test pressing that the New York record was sequenced in the same order as the released LP—Andy Gill writes that “Dylan appears to have had a track sequence in mind from the start”—so it seems likely that this was about changing the emotional effect of the record. The Minnesota tracks, with their bigger sound, are tracks 1, 3, and 4 of the five tracks on Side 1 of the LP, and then tracks 2 and 3 on Side 2.
And listening to Meet Me In The Morning, recorded in New York, alongside the Minnesota recordings, it’s possible to imagine that Dylan just wanted more of that fuller sound on the record, to rebalance it.
Since the Minnesota musicians remained uncredited for decades, let me credit them here: Bill Berg played drums on all five Minnesota tracks; Greg Inhofer contributed keyboards, piano or organ, again on all the tracks; Chris Weber, who had only turned up to babysit his valuable Martin guitar, played acoustic or 12-string. Billy Petersen played bass on three tracks, Kevin Odegard played guitar on Tangled Up in Blue, and Peter Ostroushko played mandolin on If You See Her, Say Hello. Paul Martinson was the recording engineer.
It was the rhythm section, Bill Berg and Billy Petersen, who made the real difference to the sound. By Andy Gill’s account, “they were the best in town,” even if Berg had to be persuaded to play on the sessions.
He was just about to leave for Hollywood with (successful) plans to become an animator. Dylan asked Berg during the sessions if he would join his touring band, and Berg turned him down.
One of the myths about the Minnesota band is that they were just a bunch of pickup musicians that Dylan threw together for the sessions. This might be because a couple of the contrarian and perhaps self interested reviews that complained about the sound (looking at you, Nick Kent and Jon Landau). But these musicians were seasoned pros, among the best in Minneapolis-St Pauls.
The record’s release date was pushed back a few weeks, although it’s remarkable that the second Minnesota session was on 30 December and the record was released on 20 January. For his part, Phil Ramone was “quite shocked” when he heard about the new sessions. As he told Andy Gill, maybe a bit defensively:
[Dylan] had time to sit around with the tapes for three or four months, and once you do that you reflect, and then you worry... But you could tell from the feelings in the room [in New York] that this guy was touching you and himself and everyone else that would hear this music—and the simpler the better, for me."
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