ON THE THIRD FRIDAY IN JANUARY 1975, BOB DYLAN RELEASED HIS 15th studio-made album in a dozen or so years. Blood on the Tracks was neither expected nor suspected. Its author had been back in business as a public performer, by his lights, for just over a year, but nothing had prepared his audience for this new work. Of all the things of which he was thought capable – as always, an improbably long list – unburdening himself, purging himself publicly, was not his style. Dylan didn’t do that.
Planet Waves, issued in the previous January, had been his first attempt in 40 long months at a fully rounded set of self-composed songs. The effects of a willed absence had been evident: rust had penetrated the artistic mechanism. Critical hyperbole, the special blend reserved for Dylan, had helped to give him his first number-one album in America, but sales had waned quickly. The set had soon enough felt thin, underweight, oddly mannered and hesitant. For no immediately explicable reason, it failed to repay much attention. Public demand for the latest Bob Dylan was limited.
Somehow there was a stiffness in the musical joints, an unpersuasive, metronomic rigour to The Band’s best efforts, and a vagueness to Dylan’s memory where an ineffable vocal line was concerned. If ‘Tough Mama’ or ‘On a Night Like This’ were what remained of ‘66, and of the Woodstock basement, the performers who reassembled in the early 1970s had forgotten the meaning, verb and adjective, of ‘rock’. Two acute and forbidding pieces, ‘Going, Going, Gone’ and ‘Dirge’, were lost in the shuffle on Planet Waves. Those who had grown up with Dylan, desperate to hear again the old, unalloyed genius after some testing times, had tried and failed to kid themselves. The album’s ecstatic and ribald handwritten sleeve notes, later removed, had been more fascinating than most of the songs. ‘Back to the Starting Point!’ Dylan had scrawled. ‘Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aint [sic] far behind . . .’ But the promise of the ‘cast-iron songs & torch ballads’ of Planet Waves soon faded into another of those fascinating false dawns.
Reviewers had taken a keen interest in the writer’s apparent willingness to appease the confessional urge, but with a couple of exceptions – the transparently autobiographical ‘Wedding Song’, the ‘anthemic’ (in pop’s crude coinage) ‘Forever Young’ – the tracks could not bear the weight. Unlike the singer-songwriters he had licensed, Dylan allowed only hints of intimacy. He mentioned places familiar from the standard bio and set scenes, glittering like little recovered jewels, that might have sprung from memory. But such songs – ‘Something There Is About You’ and ‘Never Say Goodbye’ – had merely invited Dylan’s audience to treat allusion as fact. Had Planet Waves been produced by any other artist, reviews would have ranged from ‘not bad’ to ‘pretty fair’. The competition Dylan had provided for himself, the unrelenting competition with which he would have to contend for decades to come, rendered the album a middling affair. Irrespective of anything supportive critics wanted to believe, he was still falling a long way short of his best. Whatever the problem, Planet Waves was not the answer.
The 1974 ‘comeback’ tour, launched in Chicago in that same January amid an all-outlets media pandemonium, had meanwhile amounted to misdirection, to a sleight of hand. The tour had embraced 21 cities in Canada and the United States, but musically it had gone nowhere at all. Audiences had been delighted, predictably, and critics had swooned to see the artist back on tour – ‘live’, as they say – for the first time since 1966. For most, striking matches or waving their twinkling cigarette lighters in comical obeisance, it had been enough just to celebrate and bear witness. But as the accompanying album, Before the Flood, had made plain, there was nothing subtle about this returning hero.
He and The Band, performing together and apart – in theory, billing was shared – had gone at the rearranged Dylan songs with a metaphorical wrecking ball. There had been plenty of sound and fury, but the significance of the performances had been slight. On the recordings approved for release – certain bootlegs, to be fair, are more intriguing – Dylan sounds as if he wants to get through the ordeal with all possible speed. With the exception of the double-edged ‘Forever Young’ and intermittent performances of ‘Wedding Song’, the Planet Waves compositions disappeared from the set as the tour progressed. They were not granted space amid the famous hits on Before the Flood. Such choices told their own story.
Dylan, though on guard against an epidemic of nostalgia, instead gave lucky customers the old stuff in new guises. He took their money, a lot of money, but soon enough disdained the praise. Talking to Cameron Crowe for the 1985 Biograph box set, he spotted his own mistake. On the tour he had played ‘Bob Dylan’ to his utmost, nothing more, and gained plaudits for mere ‘energy’. Looking back, he called that absurd and ‘sort of mindless’.
No doubt Dylan also remembered that while sales of Planet Waves had struggled to reach 600,000 copies by the close of 1974, at least 5 million applications for concert tickets – some estimates run to double that number – had been received. A Dylan still singing those ’60s songs was preferred to his best recent efforts in the studio. Close to 700,000 people across America had been desperate just to see him and lucky enough to have their wishes granted; what they heard was of less importance. The biggest cheers, night after night, had been for ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. By its end, the sole useful function of Tour ’74 had been to show Dylan how not to stage public performances. It was a lesson he would digest in 1975 with fascinating consequences.
*
Some questions had seemed to hang in the air, for all that, as he reappeared on stage for top dollar and the undivided attention of those still transfixed by a shared past. They were not artistic questions, as such, but they had to do with this artist’s place in an altered world. A lot had happened in the eight years of his seeming absence. The consoling Aquarian mythology of the 1960s had disappeared like so much fairy dust – he had been prescient about that – and no one was yet hailing glad conservative morning in America. If anything, the opposite was true. As the American political system was shaken to its roots, the very survival of the Republican Party seemed to be at stake. The common mood was sour; faith in the nation was in short supply. Vietnam had lurched towards a kind of peace – for American enlisted men, at least – but the conflict’s apparent conclusion in 1973’s Paris Peace Accords bore no resemblance to a US victory. It tasted very like defeat for the nation that had never before lost a war.
When Dylan and The Band took to the road at the start of ’74, America’s last moon mission in the twentieth century was over and done. The Arab oil embargo was rattling the economy and corroding business confidence. Many of those who had found their identities in the impulses of the counter-culture were heading for the hills and retreating to communes. Meanwhile, the affair of the Pentagon Papers, the vast Department of Defense study copied by the analyst Daniel Ellsberg and part-published by the New York Times in the summer of 1971, had demonstrated an astounding, dispiriting truth. Four American administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – had lied systematically to the people about their activities and intentions in Vietnam. In October of 1973, thanks to charges relating to bribery and the evasion of taxes, the vice-president himself, Spiro T. Agnew, had been obliged to resign.
Then, capping all, there was the aftermath of a strange episode in a Washington office and apartment complex named the Watergate. A vast unravelling at the heart of the state was set in motion by an affair that had seemed, for long enough, like a footnote to the list of America’s worries. At first, no one – no one who was anyone, at least – had given a damn. Afterwards, the folk myth of heroic journalists righteous for truth against the odds would fill the void where a body politic once had stood.
So a 24-year-old watchman, Frank Wills by name, had come across five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices on the night of 17 June 1972. So the cops had been called and made their collars in the wee small hours. And so what? At first it hadn’t sounded like the biggest crime on record. True, a quintet resplendent in business suits and surgical gloves with sophisticated bugging equipment to hand did not qualify as run of the mill, but these were early days for the great American conspiracy theory. Even journalists suspicious of President Nixon took a while to join the dots.
Then, amid wave upon wave of revelations, chiefly from the Washington Post, hell broke loose. By the first week of 1974, most Americans knew something – and some knew many things – about Watergate, the presidency, and the state of America’s democracy. These were headlines read around the world.
First, belief in the nation had been tainted by a war whose conduct and point, if any, had seemed to tear the country apart. Loyalty to the idea of America right-or-wrong had been tested beyond the breaking point. All the draft dodgers taking refuge in Canada and elsewhere in no sense represented a majority, but there was a nagging symbolism in their defiance. To conservatives they represented betrayal, but that in itself was troubling. The other side of the political coin said that too many of America’s claims had proved counterfeit. Certain veterans of the fighting in Indochina, authentic heroes among them, had become prominent in anti-war protests.
Then there was the Watergate thing. To all the doubts over probity in foreign policy were added devastating allegations: that the president re-elected in a landslide as recently as 1972 was out of control, that he had engaged in a conspiracy against the constitution, that his deeds had been criminal. Whatever Americans thought of the man in charge, the office of president, and all it represented, remained near-sacred. In one sense, Richard Milhous Nixon stood accused of sullying faith itself. The crisis was without precedent.
*
Each night on his tour Dylan would win blistering cheers for a certain famous line among several famous lines in his song ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. This was not mere lazy, reflexive counter-culture approval. In city after city, not a soul was in any doubt that, sooner rather than later, even the President of the United States would have to stand naked before the people. In early 1974, those enemies against whom he had raged and cursed for so long were closing in on Nixon. This time, they had the law on their side.
Dylan had performed his song as usual at the Coliseum in Denver, Colorado, on the evening of 6 February. As usual, those once-prophetic lines had caused whoops and cheers. That very day the House of Representatives in the 93rd Congress had approved a resolution ‘providing appropriate power to the Committee on the Judiciary to conduct an investigation of whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States’. A little less than a fortnight later, just after Dylan’s tour had ended, the Senate committee investigating the labyrinthine Watergate affair would end its public hearings. The 39th president had nowhere left to hide. Impeachment was inevitable if he failed to resign.
When the articles of impeachment appeared at the end of July, they could not have been more damning. But then, how else could a president fall if not thanks to ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’? In the matter of Watergate, Nixon had obstructed justice, violated his oath and his constitutional duty, then conspired ‘to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities’. There was more.
This president had commissioned lies, condoned lies and been party to the withholding of evidence. He had bought silence and attempted to influence witnesses, tried to misuse the power of the CIA and, not least, ‘made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States’ into believing that White House misconduct had been investigated.
Nixon had abused his power shamelessly and repeatedly by attempting to tamper with both the tax service and the FBI in an effort to confound ‘enemies’. Finally, thanks to his disdain for subpoenas, he had been flagrantly in contempt of Congress. It would take decades of careful, assiduous PR work to bring this sepulchre back to any semblance of whiteness. Candour, poetically enough, would have nothing to do with it.
Nixon would go nowhere near a jail, of course. Few at the time were surprised by that. Awash with self-pity, apparently still sustained by his most famous lie – ‘I’m not a crook’ – he would resign in August and receive a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford. Some 70 minions, bagmen, burglars, dirty-tricks artists and bit players would be less fortunate.
The shock to American belief in America was profound. Some of that was echoed – anticipated and echoed – in ‘It’s Alright, Ma’. That he had sensed the impending disillusionment fully a decade before the Watergate crisis was taken as confirmation of Dylan’s genius. According to a Newsweek report in January of 74, his performance of the song on the tour’s opening night in Chicago ‘even inspired one man to rip off his clothes and declare his presidential candidacy on the spot’. But Dylan had written ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ in 1964, and detected the rot, and foreseen contempt for authority figures, when his own understanding of political engagement had begun to alter. Those existentialist lines – ‘But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked’ – had not been intended as a comment on judicial process.
A decade later, the arena crowds could cheer his intuitions all they liked. He would not, could not, resume the cursed role of spokesman. There was nothing in his recent repertoire that resembled ‘It’s Alright, Ma’. If audiences applauded what sounded like a judgement on Nixon, they were indulging in nostalgia for the brave old world of protest. And nostalgia, as Dylan would tell the Los Angeles Times in 1992, ‘is death’. Even amid the tumult of a constitutional crisis, he would not be lured into making political pronouncements. Those days were gone.
Vietnam and Watergate were reason enough for protest and what America, quaintly, would sometimes term ‘social comment’. But when had Dylan last risked a simple statement of honest opinion? His songwriting no longer allowed such a thing. Even before the great exhaustion of 1966, even before the flirtations with Nashville and the desperate, nomadic search for privacy, he had denounced that conceit (and by implication denounced his younger self). In his now unshakeable opinion no one who claimed to know the truth, least of all a mere singer, deserved serious attention: the act of making the claim was proof of bad faith, of ignorance and illusion. Equally, pronouncements on issues of the day were antithetical, somehow, to creativity. Passing controversies, slogans and ideologies and positions, had nothing important to do with the permanent truths of art.
Such, at least, had been Dylan’s reasoning. Fundamentally, he didn’t want the job. He had tasted ‘leadership’ and the experience had horrified him. To be expected to think in a certain way, to speak and perform in a certain pre-approved manner, was more than he could bear. A clumsy couplet in ‘Wedding Song’ on Planet Waves was blunt enough: ‘It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large / Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge.’ He would not have that kind of greatness thrust upon him. By the early 1970s, only a deity could have dented his indifference.
It remains a mistake, nevertheless, to imagine that Dylan somehow relinquished his intelligence, or that politics, politics in the broadest and deepest sense, would disappear entirely from his music simply because he cancelled his subscription to this cause or that movement. His objections were specific: he was no one’s glove puppet. He would not be taken for granted. This didn’t mean he ceased to think or, however subtly, to voice his thoughts.
That summer Dylan was on his farm in Minnesota, drafting and redrafting a song about deceit, general and particular. ‘Idiot Wind’ would range across the bleak territory of a broken marriage and tear through the storm of dishonesty sweeping the republic. Blood on the Tracks, the album he would record later in the year, would be categorised as ‘personal’, confessional, autobiographical. Dylan was too acute, too artistically slippery, to fall headlong into that trap. ‘Idiot Wind’ would descend sometimes into vicious petulance, but the old knack for finding a universal allegory in a personal circumstance survived. While justice kept its appointment with Nixon, Dylan was shaping an image of democracy’s decay that would stagger Allen Ginsberg. In a 1976 interview with Peter Barry Chowka for New Age Journal, the poet argued that the song was ‘one of Dylan’s great, great prophetic national songs, with one rhyme that took in the whole nation’.
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
*
A few weeks after his tour’s end in Inglewood, California, on 14 February 1974, Dylan was back in New York, studying painting and pondering the state of his marriage. If half the rumours reaching the press and TV were true – by August, even Rolling Stone would see fit to make note of the gossip – he had done himself no favours and hurt Sara Dylan deeply with his failure to resist the sexual temptations available to a superstar on the road. The album he would write and record later in the year would persuade many listeners, meanwhile, that the couple’s problems ran deeper than a few casual betrayals.
Who really knows, or has the right to know? There is the unanswered question of cause and effect. Unhappiness caused by infidelity, or vice versa? There is the fact that Sara Dylan has kept her memories and thoughts to herself, held fast in absolute privacy. There is the fact that those who read Blood on the Tracks like an open letter harbour a naive idea of what pronouns might (or might not) signify in a song. Finally, there is the fact that Dylan has said only a few enigmatic things down the years to explain – to appear to explain – what happened to his first marriage.
In 1978, notably, he would tell the Dallas Morning News that the study of painting was the true beginning of his estrangement from Sara. It was during his lessons, Dylan said, that ‘our marriage started breaking up’. She ceased to understand him, he would recall. For whatever reason – that part would remain obscure – she no longer grasped what he was saying or thinking. Dylan, meanwhile, ‘couldn’t possibly explain it’.
You could call it a strange tale. In this anecdote, the most famous ‘break-up album’ of them all arose from insights gleaned during the studies that helped to cause the break-up. Further, the meaning of separation and loss is explored – in several of the songs, at least –through methods acquired in the classes that hastened separation and loss. There is no such word as meta-irony, but there ought to be.
Blood on the Tracks is something more than the diary of a divorce, but if Dylan’s account was correct his songwriting was revived and transformed in the second half of the 1970s by a tangle of events, illuminations and misapprehensions. The strange part is that once you have read his explanation, it colours every subsequent experience of the marvellous entangling songs. In blue, mostly.
The teacher in question, an enigmatic, grouchy, Ukrainian-born multilingual septuagenarian named Norman Raeben, would contribute only a little to his pupil’s painterly skills but have a lasting effect on his perceptions. Dylan would characterise him as uncompromising and wholly unimpressed by fame. Supposedly, if you can believe such a thing of an encounter set in New York City in 1974, Raeben had no real idea that a famous singer was one of the less-gifted beginners in his studio on the 11th floor at Carnegie Hall. That part of the anecdote is questionable. For his part, Dylan was, let’s say, more familiar with the famous concert venue than most.1
For a couple of months, nevertheless, the pupil worked dutifully, from 8 a.m. or so until 4 p.m., five days a week, under the irascible Raeben’s guidance, and spent the rest of his time pondering the deeper meaning of the artist’s dictums. Striving to show a class full of off-duty cops, bus drivers, young acolytes and rich old ladies how to look and truly see, the tutor was raising questions about identity, intuition, perspective, illusive time and unmediated creativity. So Dylan believed, at any rate. Blood on the Tracks, on his accounting, was a direct result of Raeben’s urgings and of an erstwhile college dropout’s return to school.
In one sense, Raeben was repeating the offer made by Joseph Conrad in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). His task, wrote the novelist, was ‘to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see . . . If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.’ Raeben added an insight of his own on the relationship between time and the visual image that was, for Dylan, more startling and infinitely more suggestive. Of itself, this was odd.
As the singer explained to several interviewers a few years later, time ceases to exist within a painting – the flower doesn’t wither, the clouds don’t move – but continues for the oblivious observer. Which is the illusion? Dylan would also sometimes stress the difference between seeing the parts of a picture and grasping the whole. His stroke of genius was to apply these ideas, trite enough in themselves, to his own art form in 1974.
Like Conrad’s fiction, a song is time-bound; it begins and ends. In music, time in its several senses is everything. Blood on the Tracks would dispute the fact. What made the triumph odd, however, was that Dylan treated the illumination as something new, and forgot – or was persuaded to forget – that he had mastered time before, most notably in ‘Visions of Johanna’ on the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. In that song, too, he had played fast and loose with pronouns, permitted identity to become provisional, transposed or overlaid scenes, and allowed the perception of time to become fluid. But in 1974 he and everyone else seemed to forget all the things he had ever known of her, him, them, it, then and now.
Listen to ‘Visions’ and state who ‘he’ is. State the time, in any given verse, in relation to subjective time in any other verse. The Blonde on Blonde song, like several others on the album, exploits film grammar rather than paint to achieve the effect. But the fact of its existence acts as an overdue reminder that one of Dylan’s achievements in Blood on the Tracks was not without precedent, whatever the writer chose to believe. The important achievement, especially in the mutability cantos of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, was formal. It had to do with language, specifically diction, and emotion. Dylan in his high-’60s swagger, fascinated by dissociation and chaos, had not even paused to consider such a connection. Back then, words had poured from him in a near-spontaneous flood. Older, becoming wiser, he tried to canalise emotions by formal means, through tenses and verse structures, in order to find sense in the shapes he gave them. But life, not the rhetorical gambits of Norman Raeben, caused Blood on the Tracks.
The insights of Dylan’s mentor have not brought the late painter – who died of a heart attack in December 1978 – much in the way of a posthumous reputation. Art was not revolutionised, it seems, by his interest in synchronicity, or by his insistence on an intense way of seeing. The attention paid to Raeben these days is, rightly or wrongly, most often due to his brief association with Dylan. The singer would nevertheless assert that Blood on the Tracks possessed no sense of time thanks to Raeben. Instead, the record contained a ‘code’ – always a word to feed to certain fans – in its lyrics. You might wonder whether ‘code’ is itself a kind of code, of course, in Dylan’s involuted language. The single known fact is that the album was conceived, written and recorded while his relationship with Sara was cracking and crumbling. To deny that the songs are entirely autobiographical is not to deny that they are drawn, some of them, from life.
One claim is beyond dispute: the verses of any song are parts, inescapably, of the whole. Blood on the Tracks does not stoop to anything as banal as a ‘concept’ – its maker, unlike certain of his contemporaries, didn’t fall for that one – but it possesses a coherence that is formal, emotional and tonal. Art is united in the person, or at least in the persona created. Dylan had begun to ask how the constituent elements of an album might function together.
*
Early in 1974 he had purchased a 100-acre farm on the Crow River, in north-western Hennepin County, Minnesota. The spread, close to the small town of Hanover and perhaps 40 minutes from Minneapolis, had also become home to his brother, David, and to David’s family. After his experiences with Raeben had caused Sara to cease to ‘understand’ him, Dylan took refuge in his home state, amid the landscape he knew best. Hopes of a pastoral idyll were fading with his marriage, but at the farm there was a studio for painting, a slow tributary of the Mississippi flowing by, and freedom from all the freaks and grasping obsessives bewitched by ‘Bob Dylan’ who were liable to render Greenwich Village uninhabitable. In the summer he came to Minnesota, without his wife but not entirely alone. For part of the time, at least, a young woman named Ellen Bernstein, an employee of Columbia Records, was with him.
Dylan was 33 years old, a revolutionary who had outlived his revolution, a family man whose family’s core was disintegrating, a formerly instinctive artist struggling to reawaken his instincts, and a performer who seemed, on the evidence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to have exhausted most creative possibilities. Any one of those facts might have served as a good place to begin to start again.
That summer he began to fill a small, cheap notebook – red, as you are always reminded – with verses enough for seventeen songs, though only ten were placed on the album and only a dozen have seen the light of day. The notebook contained more than he would need. As his subsequent editorial decisions would demonstrate, one mark of the concentrated, distilled quality of Blood on the Tracks is that Dylan never intended to allow it to sprawl, in that pre-digital age, into another of those tricky double albums.
As it was he would push his luck, technically, with a piece of vinyl running to almost 52 minutes of playing time when the experts in these matters decreed, as they still decree, that 22 minutes a side represents the outer limit of acceptable audio quality. A longer single album was close to an impossibility. By the time he was satisfied with his verses, and had begun to play the songs for friends and acquaintances, the hour’s worth of material at his disposal was insufficient for a two-record set, but too much for one disc. Choices were required.2
Many critics and fans would later contend that the marvellous ‘Up to Me’, at over six minutes, was dropped because it was ‘too similar’ to ‘Shelter from the Storm’. Discussing the former in his 1985 notes to the Biograph compendium, Cameron Crowe would certainly label it a ‘companion piece’ to the song used on Blood on the Tracks. It is hard, however, to connect the apocalyptic imagery of ‘Shelter from the Storm’ with the strange remembered road movie that is ‘Up to Me’. Besides, the recordings made by Dylan in New York in September 1974, the ones he fully intended to release before second thoughts intervened, are hardly a musically diverse bunch. The same three or four chords are favoured; open tunings are everywhere in evidence; lyrics with a religious flavour – the only real connection between the two songs –are scarcely rare. The evidence suggests that Dylan dropped a great piece for entirely pragmatic reasons.
It is even possible that the sequencing of the songs on the finished record, a source of much speculation and analysis, was a hard-headed concession to the engineers who would have to master the disc. ‘High-frequency content’ survives best on the outer edges of such an artefact. You finish sides with lighter, shorter tracks if you want to maintain sound quality. ‘Up to Me’ did not fit that bill. To suggest such a thing of any Dylan work is blasphemy, of course.
The first sessions for Blood on the Tracks were held at A&R Studios at 799 7th Avenue in New York. Previously known as Columbia’s Studio A, it was the successor to the hit factory where Dylan had once upon a time recorded six of his finest albums. The first session was held on 16 September, with the artist taking on the duties of producer and the vastly experienced Phil Ramone – the R in A&R – in charge of the engineering.
On that first morning Ramone encountered and promptly hired the multi-instrumentalist Eric Weissberg and his band Deliverance for the evening’s session. They had all the necessary skills. Weissberg could read music and play any instrument liable to be required for recordings in the folk(ish) style. Much good it did him. Dylan arrived and almost immediately began to play, allowing Deliverance little time to notate the music. His tunings were meanwhile strange and unfamiliar, but he made no allowances. Mistakes didn’t seem to trouble him. If his shirt buttons rattled audibly on his guitar’s body, or if the sound of scraping fingernails could be heard, Dylan ignored the distraction. Spontaneity, aided by a good deal of wine, was once again his guiding principle. He had worked hard on his songs, rewriting or discarding verses, determined to stay true to Raeben’s principles. Deliverance, like so many musicians before, would have to shift for themselves.
Ten songs were recorded during the first session. Half a dozen of those, it seems, were somehow put on tape with the aid of Deliverance. Takes of ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ and ‘Meet Me in the Morning’ passed muster. The remainder were set aside. On the next day, Dylan decided that henceforth he needed only the help of the band’s bassist, Tony Brown, and an organist who had worked on Highway 61 Revisited named Paul Griffin. Most of the members of Deliverance had been fired, in other words. ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, ‘Shelter from the Storm’ and ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ were then added to the list of takes meeting the artist’s specifications.
Not for the first time, Dylan was working at lightning speed. He was working, in fact, much as he had done in his very first sessions under the guidance of John Hammond, back in the winter of 1961, in those selfsame studios. He knew no other way, and didn’t care to learn.
The Blood on the Tracks songs were now clear in his head. He expected trained musicians to be able to keep up, no matter what. Nevertheless, his approach to the making of an acknowledged masterwork was a reminder of a curious fact. Dylan had made his name and found fame as a recording artist and yet in reality he was no such thing, at least not as the term is commonly understood. He disliked the entire process and compromised with it grudgingly. In this, he was as much of a purist as the old folk crowd.
In Dylan’s mind, the studio destroyed the essence of music. He consented to overdubs, for example, only with extreme reluctance. As Deliverance were quick to realise, the technical deficiencies in a recording counted for nothing alongside the vitality, the substance, the living heart of a performance. Dylan took a lot of risks, in short, to preserve his idea of real music-making. It would take him decades to come to terms with the consequences of his convictions.
On the afternoon and early evening of the 18th, Dylan made a couple of attempts at ‘Buckets of Rain’, the half-hopeful track destined to close the finished album, with only the steel guitar player Buddy Cage for company. During the next session, running from Thursday night on the 19th into the early hours of Friday morning, with Tony Brown serving as lone accompanist, Dylan attempted almost three dozen takes of various songs and achieved five he thought good enough to count as finished articles. It seemed he had done it again, just as in the old days: an entire album in something less than a working week. And not just any album.
It was then that he realised that he had made more music than a single vinyl disc could accommodate. ‘Up to Me’, a song most people would have saved at all costs, was removed from the running order. It would remain hidden until the release of the Biograph box set a decade later. As is too often forgotten, however, an album based only on the sessions recorded in New York was even longer, by a good couple of minutes at least, than the album that would eventually see the light of day. Test pressings of Blood on the Tracks were made regardless; artwork was commissioned. A new Dylan album would be ready for the Christmas holiday market.
Then the artist had second thoughts. The standard account holds that while on a December visit to the farm in Minnesota he was convinced by his brother that the album as planned, the album that was set and ready to go, lacked a necessary commercial edge. What was said, if it was said, has been elaborated by a lot of people who were not present. David Zimmerman supposedly argued that the record was too stark, too bare, too daunting. Given that Dylan had set out to make a plain, unadorned and low-key album, this should not have counted as a problem. When, for that matter, had he ever abandoned work on the advice of his beloved brother? The precise origins of the anecdote are elusive. In his 2001 biography of Dylan, Howard Sounes identified the artist himself as being ‘still unhappy about approximately half the tracks he had recorded in New York’.3 Then, and only then, did brother David suggest a local solution.
But who cares? The masterpiece called Blood on the Tracks is the commercially available version you can buy readily. The test pressing, the so-called New York Sessions bootleg, is lovely, startling and arguably superior, especially where ‘Idiot Wind’ is concerned. But Dylan’s decision to re-record, and to do so with a group of local unknowns, speaks of a creeping indecision, an early symptom of the self-doubt that would afflict him in the years to come. Blood on the Tracks in either incarnation would have stood as a remarkable achievement, yet he doubted himself, or was talked into doubting himself.
As it was, he demonstrated yet again that the juvenile medium of pop was capable of an unsuspected maturity. In the 1960s he had shown that popular songs could aspire to the status of literature, that – at worst – a song could be crammed full of metaphors, images and ideas more usually associated with poetry than with teen romance. In that decade, Dylan had shown what could be done with the slippery notion of sensibility. With Blood on the Tracks he turned his ‘break-up’ into a meditation on time, impermanence and loss. One of his subjects – he had a few – was the essential isolation of the human individual, the ache that love couldn’t cure. As in all the best poetry, this was shown, not stated. Those stories by Anton Chekhov, the ones he would mention as inspiration almost 30 years later in his book Chronicles: Volume One, remain entirely plausible candidates for Dylan’s model.
At a place called Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis, close to his Dinkytown stamping-grounds from his very earliest days as a student dropout and apprentice folkie, Dylan repaired the perceived flaws in Blood on the Tracks with a little borrowed 1934 0042G Martin guitar and the help of a pick-up band of local musicians (who never did receive credit). Five tracks were replaced, though whether the substitutes count as an improvement is a matter of opinion. Some such as Clinton Heylin have quibbled, persuasively enough, over a few rewritten lines; others over a ‘loss of focus’. This writer contends that the final version of ‘Idiot Wind’, alone among the released recordings, edges a little too close to melodrama. It is, as Heylin has also observed, ‘overwrought’. The control shown by Dylan elsewhere on the record, the delicacy of emotional interplay, is lost. He lets rip; he allows what sounds in places like self-pity and spite to get the better of him.
When the album appeared, several of the better-known rock critics expressed disappointment, if not disdain, picking out allegedly sloppy musicianship. In Britain, the New Musical Express even called the accompaniments ‘trashy’. Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Jon Landau, wrote of ‘typical shoddiness’. On occasion, the bizarre hybrid form styling itself ‘rock journalism’ was shown to be just as empty-headed as Dylan had always alleged. Wisdom prevailed in the end, shortly followed by unquestioning reverence. The record-buying public in America and Britain had meanwhile voted for Blood on the Tracks en masse, turning it into a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
*
Blood on the Tracks is the musical and literary equivalent of the painter’s penetrating gaze. An album of popular songs – a suite would be the fancier description – was ideal for Dylan’s concentrated purpose. It counts as an obvious fact, but one often overlooked, strangely enough, when the arguments over poetry resume. The artist would discover the truth for himself when he tried to become a film-maker. He had encountered it in the mid-’60s, to his immense frustration, when embarking on the novel that wound up in disarray as the ‘prose experiment’ Tarantula. Song was the only medium in which he truly functioned artistically. Only in songs could verbal compression be combined with narrative, the internal logic of imagery – his imagery above all – and the emotional colouring of melody. That much is, or ought to be, self-evident. But in Dylan’s hands, on Blood on the Tracks, song became something more expansive than poetry. The usual charge against his art should have been turned on its head. The problem, if it ever was a problem, was not that his ‘poems’ failed to ‘work on the page’. The printed page was an utterly inadequate expression, a hollow echo, of the performed songs. Write about what Dylan wrote and you have not begun to say even the half of it. Everything said about this artist’s work is paraphrase.
Between September and December of 1974 five Blood on the Tracks songs were remade. The effect, in several cases, was to depersonalise the works slightly, as though Dylan was putting a safe distance between himself and the belief that he was engaged in naked autobiography. Any judgement remains a matter of opinion. Perhaps he wanted to prevent his audience from getting the wrong idea about private truths and public art, or perhaps he realised that he had gone too far, revealed too much, and invaded his own privacy.
Equally, a song such as the long ballad-fable ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, recorded first in New York with just Dylan’s guitar, is not easily explained, even as metaphor, as the story of a marriage. Those who care to take the alleged esoteric wisdom of Tarot cards seriously might find a nuptial allegory in the verse-movie. There is also an obvious sense in this tale’s plot that life is a performance and a game, that fate is the luck of the draw. Dylan is happy enough, meanwhile, to find symbolism in a frontier story: you don’t call your elusive man of mystery the Jack of Hearts for nothing. But you could equally argue that the writer is as interested in extending his beloved ballad tradition as he is in supplying puzzles for critical analysis.
He had dabbled often enough before in gambling songs. The fourth poem from his ‘Some Other Kinds of Songs’ on the sleeve of 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan had taken its inspiration, and a line or several, from the old blues piece ‘Jack o’ Diamonds (Is a Hard Card to Play)’. Whether Dylan knew it from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tex Ritter, Odetta or Mance Lipscomb is neither here nor there. Playing card imagery had long been his stock-in-trade, as it would remain. ‘Lily, Rosemary’ does not fit easily, for all that, with the supposed ‘break-up’ theme of Blood on the Tracks.4
‘Shelter from the Storm’ is another of the album’s songs that could be represented as an allegory on mystical bonds, but in no possible sense is it a literal account of marital relationships. Dylan might now and again mythologise his existence and its travails, but if autobiography lies in these verses it is buried so deep as to be invisible. At best, you could say that he has given the most profound aspects of marriage a fictional setting, slap in the middle of a landscape that is part biblical, part western and part apocalyptic. The song contains one of his very finest couplets: ‘Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line / Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.’ But the writer who wants to ‘turn back the clock to when God and her were born’ is not talking about a long-married couple drifting apart.
Such truths did Dylan no good, in any event. Blood on the Tracks was filed instantly under ‘autobiography’, where it has remained. It was deemed a record about a break-up, ‘lost love’, pain, loneliness and redemptive hope. It is all those things, of course, but it is more than that. Dylan, you suspect, couldn’t help himself. His songs had always enlarged the meaning of personal experience. He had never believed, like so many of the singer-songwriters who followed in his wake, that an event was of consuming importance simply because it had happened to him. Blood on the Tracks had to do with what it meant to be human, with the struggle of those born alone to communicate with one another. In his otherwise-hyperbolic original sleeve notes for the album, the journalist Pete Hamill had rightly called this ‘the quarrel of the self’2kia.
Interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1978, Dylan said of the song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’: ‘What’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics, and there’s also no sense of time. There’s no respect for it. You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.’ Such was the art and craft underpinning the work. It made the confessional aspects of the song and the album almost incidental.
*
Once again, the Dylans attempted to repair their marriage. Love and pride endured, it seems, despite the self-knowledge gained in the writing of the Blood on the Tracks songs, and despite the profound bitterness revealed in certain verses of ‘Idiot Wind’. It was one odd, ironic aspect of the album: Dylan had achieved a new ‘mature’ understanding of the human condition, but in his own life he continued to flounder.
He drifted from coast to coast, listening to music, attending parties, performing at a schools benefit in San Francisco organised in March by the promoter Bill Graham. Sara was with him at the show, but whatever hopes she or Dylan entertained for their union were soon confounded. As spring turned towards summer he was in the south of France, spending six weeks with his friend the painter David Oppenheim, and celebrating his 34th birthday with a bout of hedonism that Oppenheim would call ‘pathetic and superb’. Interviewed by the (now extinct) fanzine Fourth Time Around, the painter would also remember his friend as lost, confused and despairing, afraid even to sleep alone.
Dylan had expected his wife to join him in Europe, but he was disappointed, bitterly so. He called her frequently, to no avail. By now, the message was very clear. Her patience was at an end, her tolerance and support all but gone. The couple would not be divorced finally until the summer of 1977, amid horrific rancour, but by that time only the formalities remained. There would be other attempts to find ways to renew their vows before the lawyers intervened, but Sara’s refusal to drop everything and fly across the Atlantic was an unmistakable declaration. By the middle of 1975, to all intents and human purposes, the marriage was over.
In France, looking out over vineyards under a pink sky, Dylan once again pulled himself together. His marriage had failed, but his work remained. He decided to remind people of what, in essence, he was. At that moment, work was all that truly remained for an artist who could not be sustained by celebrity alone. In some strange way he was renewed by the fact. The old tenacity, the defiance of every circumstance, reasserted itself. When people ask how it is that this artist endures, decade after decade, one simple answer is stubborn pride.
The summer of 1975 found him in familiar New York haunts, particularly the old Bitter End club on Bleecker Street in the Village, close to the corner with LaGuardia Place and a short walk from his Houston Street loft. For reasons best known to its owners – who would soon acknowledge the mistake – the old joint had been renamed The Other End. Or rather, the club had been absorbed in February of 1974 by its newly acquired adjacent sibling. Crucially, the latter possessed a liquor licence. There Dylan was soon drinking his wine, listening to music, and meeting old friends such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bobby Neuwirth. For a few weeks he was granted the illusion of privacy in a public place. Those with whom he chose to socialise were allowed to approach the presence; the curious and importunate were kept at bay. It was as much as he could hope for.
Dylan was also beginning to wonder what he could do next in his perplexing career. Concert performances built around the Blood on the Tracks songs would have been a fascinating proposition, but the notion seems never to have crossed his mind. The writing and recording of that album had each been singular events, born in the moment, and born of the pressure of experience. The achievement was impossible to repeat and he had no desire to try. As usual, Dylan had begun to move on.
A work finished was not a work forgotten, exactly, but already his acclaimed new album was, for him, a thing of the past. As he began to join performers on stage at The Other End, nevertheless, an idea of performance was beginning to form in his mind. He was striking up new acquaintances and soaking up the old communal energy of the Village. Plenty of celebrities had begun to cluster around the club that summer, but the ambience was – or so they and Dylan chose to believe – a world away from the superstar nonsense, the stadiums, limousines, private jets and idolatry, that had marred the 1974 tour with The Band. Perhaps there was another way for him to take his music to the people, and to deal, finally, with the entities he had named Bob Dylan.
*
Just as Blood on the Tracks was being released in January of 1975, Dylan decided to allow portions of the celebrated basement tapes to see the light of day. Not once would he manage a convincing explanation for this remarkable change of heart. He had long dismissed the great songs recorded casually in the vicinity of Woodstock in upper New York State during the summer and autumn of 1967 as being of no account. In late 1969 he had told Rolling Stone that the tracks were merely demos, that he had been ‘pushed into coming up with songs’. Even when afflicted by writer’s block in the first years of the decade, when partial bootlegs of the tapes were becoming commonplace, he had declined, with a single near-pointless exception, to draw on a catalogue that included ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’.
Talking in April of ‘75 to Mary Travers (she of Peter, Paul and Mary) on KNX-FM Los Angeles for his first radio interview since 1966, Dylan was less than illuminating. A couple of months before Columbia’s The Basement Tapes received its release, he said:
The records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.
Given that he had taken charge of the project, the ‘somebody’ was almost certainly Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitar player. Dylan had played no real part in the archaeological effort to collect and restore the old tapes. It seems likely, in fact, that he had no clear memory of exactly what the reels of disdained recordings contained. Hence the entirely misleading claim that record-buyers would hear the Woodstock work ‘in its entirety’. Blood on the Tracks, an international hit, had just spent a fortnight at the top of the Billboard album chart: Dylan had no need of product to satisfy the record company, no requirement for further acclaim. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the 1967 recordings was curious, as it would remain.
Robertson, for his part, sounded disingenuous when he got around to attempting to explain how The Basement Tapes came to be released. He failed even to offer a convincing explanation for his own motives. Interviewed by Crawdaddy magazine for its March 1976 edition, the guitarist was certain only that the legal version of the basement recordings had not been produced to ‘combat’ the tenacious bootleggers. Robertson said:
All of a sudden it seemed like a good idea. I can’t tell you why or anything. It just popped up one day. We thought we’d see what we had. I started going through the stuff and sorting it out, trying to make it stand up for a record that wasn’t recorded professionally. I also tried to include some things that people haven’t heard before, if possible . . . I just wanted to document a period rather than let them rot away on the shelves somewhere. It was an unusual time which caused all those songs to be written and it was better it be put on disc some way than be lost in an attic.
It was one thing to refuse to look back, but Dylan had a large blind spot where this part of his work was concerned. Several of the songs had provided hits for other artists. A good number had been praised to the skies by the usual critics. Who writes ‘I Shall Be Released’ and acts as though it’s a bagatelle to be rearranged and added, almost as an afterthought, to a makeshift greatest-hits package? In April of 1975, nevertheless, Dylan was still telling Travers that the basement songs were ‘written like in five, ten minutes, you know’ while he and his musicians were ‘drying out’ in their rural retreat. No big deal, then.
If he had been paying more attention, Dylan might have thought twice about some of the choices made by Robertson. After a wave of approbation for The Basement Tapes from critics primed for genuflection – the New York Times burst a corset and called the set ‘one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music’ – questions were asked. Why had tracks recorded primarily in basic stereo been collapsed into mono if not to give a fake ‘primitive’ patina to the sound? Who thought it clever to add overdubs of drums, keyboards and guitar to several performances on this ‘historic document’? How come one-third of the twenty-four tracks offered were by The Band – who would receive commensurate royalties - when most buyers were interested, first and foremost, in the songwriter of the age? By 14 August, Rolling Stone’s gossip column, ‘Random Notes’, was reporting ‘a Columbia insider’ to the effect that Dylan had demanded $1 million for consenting to the album ‘because he wanted to help out The Band, who he reportedly said was [sic] having financial problems (denied by a Band spokesman)’. It was soon discovered, in any case, that half of the recordings selected by Robertson to represent his group’s contribution had either not been made in 1967, or had not originated in the improvised studios of Woodstock.
The original basement tapes ran to between 120 and 130 recordings, depending on how false starts, stoned jokes and a handful of allegedly ‘missing’ titles are calculated. These days, after sterling remastering work by the bootleggers, a compendium with 124 takes is easy enough to obtain. Yet, for the sake of The Band, Dylan’s fans were obliged in 1975 to do without ‘I Shall Be Released’, The Mighty Quinn’, ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Sign on the Cross’, ‘Silent Weekend’, ‘All You Have to Do Is Dream’ and even the glorious fun, interruptions and all, of ‘I’m a Fool for You’. That was before anyone mentioned the numerous traditional songs and cover versions attempted in 1967. Dylan’s performances could have filled a couple of fine vinyl double albums easily.
Despite it all, and in defiance of the approbation granted to the work, he gave no sign that he cared. Subsequently he would fail to disguise his contempt when attempts were made to identify those covert, subterranean recordings as the founding artefacts for an ill-defined musical movement known as Americana. He would have no taste whatever for the grand cultural theories piled around the monuments raised to this phase of his career. Something about the circumstances surrounding the Woodstock recordings, or perhaps just the recordings themselves, had left him dissatisfied and defensive.
You can easily believe, of course, that the success of Blood on the Tracks could have been enough to persuade Dylan finally to countenance an album based on the tapes. The former gave plenty of cover, commercially and creatively, for the latter. Nevertheless, a simple fact is worth repeating: even in the worst of times, paralysed by writer’s block and self-doubt at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, he had refused to exploit the great songs of 1967 seriously.
His only concession had come in the autumn of 1971, in the depths of his creative drought, when Columbia had proposed the mistitled double-album stopgap More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits. Dylan had suggested that one side should contain previously unreleased material, but on this occasion the company had been oblivious to the appeal of ‘the legendary basement tapes’. He had therefore re-recorded three of the 1967 songs in an afternoon and put them on an album that did not contain too many certifiable hits. That had been the limit of his interest.
Few others would have hesitated in lean times to fortify flimsy albums with ‘Too Much of Nothing’ or ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’. Nevertheless, eight years after the fact, with Blood fast becoming established as one of his finest achievements, no one was liable to accuse Dylan of desperate measures, or of recycling his own legend. In any case, the bootleg industry and a host of cover versions had already settled the matter. The reviews for The Basement Tapes were preordained, if not already written. The only person who seemed to dissent was Bob Dylan.
According to Rob Fraboni, the studio engineer given the job of restoring the original basement recordings, the artist spent next to no time overseeing the work. It was all one to him, it seems, whether the original, spooky stereo sound captured by The Band’s Garth Hudson was rendered into that spurious ‘authentic’ mono at the behest of Robbie Robertson. Above all, Dylan appeared not to care about the songs involved. If ‘copyright issues’ between himself and his estranged manager, Albert Grossman, had ever been at stake, they were no longer relevant by the summer of 1975. Dylan simply refused to take seriously all the praise that had been showered on his compositions. Omit ‘I’m Not There’? Sanction an album that misrepresented the work done at Woodstock and the legends born of that work? As he seemed to say, ‘What of it?’ In a way, he had a point. The legal double album entitled The Basement Tapes, since greatly improved by a 2009 remastering exercise, would stand in its own right as a significant event in pop’s small universe.
There is, in any case, rubbish aplenty in the remainder of the mythologised bootleg corpus; enough of it, certainly, to rebut some of the extravagant acclaim and the socio-historical theorising. The Woodstock recordings embrace a fair number of duds and worse. There are numerous tracks to which no serious (or sober) artist would lend his name. Nevertheless, Dylan’s disdain even towards the official release and what it was supposed to represent stands as an early example of the wilful artistic self-harm that would become commonplace in the succeeding decades. But nothing in his world is forever.
After touring South America, Central America and Europe in 2012, Dylan returned to the US in the autumn of the year. At first his concert set seemed to follow the structure that had become familiar to audiences across the world throughout the year. Then, at a casino’s 10,000-seat arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, as though out of nowhere (appropriately enough), Dylan opened with one of his less-favoured songs. Why choose ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, a 45-year-old tune from a body of work he had often disparaged? Only he could say. Before long, however, the song had become one of Dylan’s regular opening numbers. As the tour drew to a close in Brooklyn, New York, at November’s end, there it was again, a piece of the past redeemed.