Happy 45th Anniversary to Bob Dylan’s fifteenth studio album Blood On The Tracks, originally released January 20, 1975.
Maybe I’m dense, but I’ve never thought of Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks as a break-up album. It may be because it took me a while to hear the album in its entirety. I’d finally begun immersion into Dylan just before I went off to my sophomore year in college. For months, the only songs I’d had in rotation were the ones that my father had told me were the best, and that I’d dubbed onto a blank cassette from his original records. I’d been so used to seeing only the trees that I truly was disregarding the forest.
I admit I was in the wrong here, because people who have been studying and writing about music much longer than me consider Blood On The Tracks the definitive break-up album. In this case, many interpret it as Dylan chronicling the dissolution of his marriage with his first wife, Sara Noznisky. Their son Jakob famously said that it’s “My parents talking.”
The vast majority of the album is consumed by pain from love lost. Dylan and Noznisky were separated while he recorded the album, and it would stand to reason that since the two divorced in 1977, Blood On The Tracks was inspired by the difficulties that the two were going through at the time.
For what it’s worth, Dylan has vehemently denied that Blood On The Tracks is autobiographical, going as far as to say it was inspired by the short stories of Anton Chekhov. He’s even bristled at the idea that people relate to the pain that he expressed on the album. During a radio interview with Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary) a few months of after the album’s release, he famously told her that “a lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that—I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.”
Like many of Bob Dylan’s albums, Blood On The Tracks has a complicated and involved history that greater musicologists than I have documented. A book, Simple Twist of Fate, was written about it, but the broad strokes of Dylan’s fifteenth studio album are reasonably well known.
Blood On The Tracks was Dylan’s first album back on his long-time home Columbia Records after releasing a pair of albums through Asylum. It was seen as his first and greatest comeback album that cemented him as an artist that could prosper in any era. At the time of its release, most believed it was his best album in close to a decade. And now, 45 years later, many say that it’s the best project that he ever recorded.
The relatively obscure details about the album have also been documented. How Dylan initially recorded the entire album over four chaotic days in New York City. How on the eve of the album’s release, with test copies of the vinyl pressed and artwork printed up, he decided to recall it and rerecord at least half of it (possibly at the suggestion of his brother). How he recorded the album in Minnesota using mostly unknown session musicians; the only credited musician for Blood On The Tracks is Eric Weissberg of “Dueling Banjos” fame. How he retooled the album’s sound and changed the lyrics on some of the songs in order to “soften” them. How he helped make the album lighter by changing the key everything would be played in.
Out of that mess, Blood On The Tracks in its “official” form was born, a timeless masterpiece of folk rock Americana. This makes it a difficult album to pay tribute to, because so much has been said and written about it in the past 45 years. Few other Dylan albums have gone through such extensive analysis. The angles and superlatives have all but run dry.
So I’ll just state my opinion, which is just that Blood On The Tracks is unquestionably great, high within the ranks of the best albums of all time. I’m not of the opinion that it’s Dylan’s best album, but I have it comfortably within the top five. That does indeed put it amongst the best albums ever released.
The album opens with “Tangled Up In Blue,” one of Dylan’s most beloved songs. It’s famous for the non-linearity of its narrative, which wasn’t a frequently used songwriting tool in the mid ’70s. Dylan’s approach to this unorthodox narrative structure was apparently influenced by artist Norman Raeben, who gave Dylan painting classes during 1974. The ’70s were a time when a folk rock god could say that his music was influenced by Anton Chekhov and Ukrainian painters and not sound pretentious.
“Tangled Up In Blue” remains one of Dylan’s surrealistic tours-de-force, filled with wistful memories of a woman with red hair and the time they spent together, including a still elusive tale of how they first met. Dylan has continued to change the lyrics to the song, performing many different versions of it over the years.
Blood On The Tracks is replete with strong narrative fare, creating vivid and fully realized characters through his lyrics. “Simple Twist Of Fate” documents what appears to be a one-night stand in a waterfall hotel. Dylan explores the thoughts of the man and woman, as she leaves to wander the docks soon after the night of passion has ended. He also makes inventive use of shifting the perspective of the song from first to third person, sometimes within the same verse.
Of course, the guts of Blood On The Tracks cover Dylan’s lamentations of love lost. On songs like “You’re A Big Girl,” “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” and “If You See Her Say Hello,” he struggles to balance being the mature adult and learning to let go, all while being haunted by what could have been. “Meet Me In The Morning” is another largely underappreciated composition, a traditional Blues record that’s the only song on the album where the aforementioned Eric Weissberg appears.
Melancholy gives way to bile on “Idiot Wind,” the centerpiece of the album’s first side and Blood On The Tracks as a whole. At nearly eight minutes in length, it features Dylan railing against all manner of slights and perceptions, while leavening it with brief humorous asides. It’s a mash of over-the-top imagery and fury at his critics, musical or otherwise. It’s a subject matter that has been popular with Dylan since the days of “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
His anger is crystallized perfectly in the song’s second verse, as he rails, “People see me all the time / And they just can’t remember how to act / Their minds are filled with big ideas / Images and distorted facts.” He then segues into rage towards those who believe the criticisms that they read, sneering, “I couldn’t believe after all these years you didn’t know me any better than that.”
These words and other verses throughout the song only encouraged the idea that he was using the album to communicate bitterness towards his soon to be ex-wife. “Idiot Wind” is allegedly one of the songs that received the most extensive lyrical makeover, as some sections cut too close to the bone. Still, lyrics like “You hurt the ones that I love best / And cover up the truth with lies / One day you’ll be in the ditch / Flies buzzing around your eyes” are still pretty damn harsh.
“Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” is Dylan at his most cinematic, an upbeat country ballad depicting the night in the life of bandits, a diamond baron, and cabaret performers in a town in the Old West. Structurally, the nearly nine-minute epic unfolds like a Larry McMurtry story, perfectly setting the scene and exploring the motivations of nearly everyone, except the enigmatic Jack of Hearts himself. Reportedly, there have been multiple attempts to turn the song into a film, but nothing has ever been made.
“Shelter From The Storm” features some of the album’s most arresting and beautiful imagery, as Dylan recounts his visions of the former love of his life providing him solace from the constant turmoil that life presents you. But like many of the songs on the album, unconditional love gives way to regret, as they lose sight of each other. Dylan sums up his feelings in the song’s second-to-last verse, singing, “Now there’s a wall between us / Something there’s been lost / I took too much for granted / I got my signals crossed.”
The album-ending “Buckets of Rain” is the only straight-ahead love song on Blood On The Tracks that doesn’t center on heartbreak. Playing his guitar and backed only by a bass, Dylan describes love in uncomplicated terms. He describes the effort it takes to find it amongst the misery of everyday life and the reality that comes from friends drifting apart. His lyrics are simple, yet pack a lot of depth and meaning, as he sings, “Friends will arrive, friends will disappear / If you want me honey baby, I’ll be here.”
Blood On The Tracks continues to be a source of fascination for Dylan fans and musical scholars. Columbia released More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 (2018) as part of their continuing series of releasing outtakes and alternate takes of Dylan’s music. It was released as a single CD and six-CD boxset. The obsessives out there can use the six-CD set to piece together the “original” unreleased version of the album.
Blood On The Tracks could all be ruminations on the short stories of Chekhov or coded messages to the mother of his first child. Or it could be something else entirely. But whether or not it’s based on reality is immaterial. The album still has a power that hasn’t waned in the past four-and-a-half decades. Whether or not I personally ever thought of it like that, Blood On The Tracks stands as an unyielding monument to the permanent timelessness of heartache and pain.
LISTEN: