"Blood On The Tracks" released on Jan. 1975 is 50 years old - proficiat!
50 MILLION YEARS AGO
… during the days of the epic and (im)mature Dylan
What a sweet and impossible mission is to get to know Bob Dylan! Eventually, it’s Bobby who gets to know you.
Writing about him is an aural Rorschach, a psychoanalytic auto-confession sold as expert rambling around “what Dylan meant to say.” A lost cause from its start, since— as author Sheila O’Malley summarised— “Dylan is someone who started his career by changing his name and saying he came from New Mexico” (or Illinois, if you read “Chronicles I.”)
I have never changed my initial attitude towards Dylan. I magically let myself go: I let my mind to be carried away by his voice (ugly for some people, genial for me.) I let my Broca’s area wander through his vocal accents, and flow, reminiscent of his favorite phrasing geniuses: Al Jolson and Frank Sinatra. And I get lost falling senseless into his guitar strumming and those harmonica notes, sometimes drawn as thin as a hair, almost inaudible.
I mean the term ‘Magic’ in the most serious, Giordano Bruno sense: his music transforms those intercepting it. To the point that once, during the Terrible ‘10s, at Malpensa Airport in Milan, I was in a business meeting— in the quietness of an empty, plastic Hilton lounge - when, after a couple of hours spent in this enormous silent room… here starts the background music. It was our Bard. It was Knocking On Heaven’s Door. And upon hearing it, I knew it, in an instant. I understood that my father, thirty miles away, just back from the U.S. was not just unwell: he was dying. And so the story went. Should we talk about synchronicity?
Instead, some folks love to talk about… charts. The once-hip music mag “Rolling Stone” (LOL) is the best at it. They placed BOtT at number 7 on their list of “Greatest LPs ever.” And threw Like A Rolling Stone (re-LOL!) to lead the “Best Songs of all times” list. On which topic Dylan said dismissively something like “well you know, a new chart comes out every week.”
There is one chart, though, that I must assume rings dear to “Zimmy” ‘cause it appears on his official website. It’s a list which requires a very well-updated archive: the list of “The Songs Most Played Live” by our Bard - from day one! Could it be a bluff chart? another sign of his raconteur’s nature? I’d like to (and I) think not.
Bobby's “most played live song” turns out to be All Along The Watchtower, followed by Like A Rolling Stone and Highway 61 Revisited. Then at number four, played live almost 2000 times, stands Tangled Up In Blue, the first “bloody track” of this particular chart. I would assume this chart appears on his website for either one of two reasons: these are the songs he loves the most, or these are the ones his audience loves the most.
The reason of the success of Tangled Up In Blue leads to its multi-faceted uniqueness, but should we razionalise that fresh, clean feeling between sonic aggression and tender caress of its first seconds, this seem to rely mainly with recording three acoustic guitars playing the same chords each one from different fret positions, one of them using the a-capo on the 7th fret, providing rich high notes, while all of them are perfectly on time, and tied together by an assertive, precise bass and a clinical, non-invasive drum.
Then the lyrics open the record on a radiant morning:
Early one morning/The sun was shining/I was laying in bed.
Each beginning of a song is of extreme relevance to Dylanologists. Often they sieve the first lines as goldminers would, and search for the omens that the ancients found in the entrails of animals. The line above was also the start of an album welcomed (like several others, after the infamous bike accident) as Dylan's rebirth. Did these fifteen initial syllables justify such attentions?
Certainly Bobby is suggesting from BOtT’s very start to pay attention to its words, if not to his lies, considering it's early morning... but the sun is already shining (?) and the narrator is stately idle or thoughtful, possibly even ‘late’ (as some would misinterpret the last verse.)
Maybe not. Because Dylan's songs (even more so the best ones) well… they just flow. As a virtuoso specialised in rhymes, as an intellectual proto-rapper, Bobby uses grammar as a drummer uses his kit or a percussionist the congas. His best lyrics are like waves, with their own irregular rhythm in which meanings and signifiers are woven into the ultimate, perfect fabric.
Continuous refinements of the original text seamlessly try to improve the flow providing at times extended meanings, as the outtakes from the recent “More Blood, More Tracks” release have confirmed. Zimmy can sacrifice a lot, even the plot, at the altar of the ‘wise beat’ temple.
No surprise then if Tangled Up In Blue got changed even after its release. It happened right after, during that delirious tour named “The Rolling Thunder Review.” A tour showing, on the musical side, Dylan’s extraordinary acumen for innovation. Including his paradoxical choice of musicians. Like… Mick Ronson? The guitarist vomited out by Bowie but then re-born with Dylan as a very fine creator of rock riffs re-inventing folk anthems?! As for our song, during the RTR Dylan spun those 15 initial syllables like a peacock with its tail, distorting their meaning…
“Early one morning/The sun was shinin’/She was lying in bed.”
… changing subject and a common phrase (like ‘laying in bed’) with a less usual trisyllable (due to the apocope of “ing” with “in”) or perhaps with a more usual trisyllable - since you’re dealing with a break-up. In the outtakes’ release “More Blood More Tracks” it was later discovered that he had given a shot - in the studio - even to a more self-critical “I was lying in bed.”
All this just to wrestle a bit with the first fifteen syllables of the album. No wonder. Even Zimmy once admitted (para-phrasing his art teacher - see under) that this song contains “yesterday, today, and tomorrow, all in the same room.” To add aural curiosity to its intricate plot, Dylan came up - using an expression from the Untold Dylan blog - with the idea of its “collapsing glissando” (“Tangled up in bluuuueeee.”) Another driver of the song is the hidden crescendo subtly played by the Minnesota musicians, which is surprising in dynamic power but only perceivable when you try skipping from the start to the end of the song.
But coming back to the “Most played live" song list, among the top one-hundred it includes three other songs from BOtT (albeit attributed to “The Complete Budokan 1978”, possibly because preferred versions.) These are: Simple Twist of Fate (17th), Shelter From The Storm (48th), and You’re A Big Girl Now (98th.) Two more follow in the ‘lower’ ranks of the list, and these are correctly attributed to BOtT: If You See Her, Say Hello (150th) and Idiot Wind (196th - played only 55 times in 50 years.)
In essence, there are reasons to believe that people (let alone music critics, except Nick Kent -LOL) really loved this LP, even if Tangled (as a single) did not fetch much in the charts. The album, nonetheless, went no.1 in the U.S., no. 4 in the U.K. and sold one hundred thousand copies even in Italy.
Bill Flanagan: When you see a video of yourself in concert 40 or 50 years ago, does it seem like it’s another person? What do you see?
Bob Dylan: I see Nat King Cole, Nature Boy - a very strange boy under a spell, a terribly sophisticated performer, with a cross-section of [the history of] music, already post-modern. A different person than the one I am today.
Interview on bobdylan.com (2017)
A popular line of thought says you should listen to BOtT only “if you had your heart broken at least once” and considers BOtT the greatest “breakup record” ever. Certainly ‘to know the meaning of the blues’ helps, actually that helps any experience, but let me disagree on the “breakup record” tag itself.
BOtT could be seen, instead, as a showcase of possible romantic situations (strictly heterosexual - it’s the Seventies after all) which is exactly what I would do should I feel like composing an LP during my break-up and yet would not want anybody to know about my inner feelings. If I abhorred the idea of letting the world know that I am sleeping with a number of women and with my wife too, well… I would tend to mix things up. I'd tangle them up in my blue.
This may be the solid reason why every narrative of this album seems to float in a vacuum of space and time, with no certain references to the subjects of the action. A sure way to raise doubts on how close these stories are to the naked truth.
Creating a spaced-out notion of time was not a new technique to Dylan: for instance Talking WWIII Blues, a dozen years before, used to live in a similar dream-like concept of time,. But it is certainly from BOtT that Bobby feels like extending the idea, as a distinct modus creandi, to a whole album.
Focusing on verb tenses, there has been an analytical research based on Dylan’s entire corpus. It found that the present tense is the one Bobby uses the most. Yet, in BOtT, the space is the memory, and past is the tense. We live in a mnemonic world crowded by (presumed) wives and lovers who could be near as they are far, perhaps real or imagined, often tender but sometimes malevolent, to fertilise an ever-changing emotional state of the author: at times shaken, rabid or passionate, capable of pure love, tender feelings or lukewarm remembrance.
The “Showcasing” idea makes even more sense - we gather from bits and pieces of interviews - as Zimmy felt genuine regret for the immaturity with which he handled a fundamental romantic experience such as the one with Shirley Marlin Noznisky, aka Sara Dylan: wife, mother of four of his children and of the one daughter Bobby adopted, as well as muse in the style of Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura (but also an American and thus a former Playboy club bunny.)
About the subsequent tour with the “Rolling Thunder Review,” Bobby will honestly admit that “I don’t remember anything. I wasn’t even born” and at 78 years old he confessed he identifies with Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy: lonely and wandering, “a bit shy/with a sad eye/but very wise,” a guy professing that “the greatest lesson/is to love/and be loved in return.”
“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.”
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)
The micro-metric observation of Dylan's work by “Dylanites” has gone well beyond the interpretation of the entrails by the ancients, transforming the Bard into a living work of art; a persona (amongst his many multitudes) to whom he seems to have adapted, albeit reluctantly.
Examples of this micro-metric fashion are the lessons Dylan attended in ’74 at the studio of the bizarre (and exclusive) Norman "Numa" Raeben, a detail unknown at the time of the album's release. Numa’s lessons were aimed “to create connections between art, literature, philosophy, psychology, science, and Judaism,” as I quote from Fabio Fantuzzi's 367-page doctoral thesis, and attracted writers, photographers, goldsmiths, directors, actors, mostly of Jewish culture (translated into the song as “some are mathematicians/some are carpenters' wives.”)
From these lessons, amongst several other things, the fluid conception of time in BOtT was born. And the psycho-labile Numa is now firmly attributed with that “tangled up in blue” (originally a comment he made on Dylan's paintings) which has become BOtT’s most famous song.
Thirty-year-old Sam Sussman (in a 2021 article for “Harper’s”) revealed less academic memories as gathered from his mother Fran, publicised only after her premature death. The relationship between thirty-five-year-old Bobby and twenty-year-old Fran would explain other phrases in Tangled Up In Blue. Like the book that Fran shows to Zimmy, by Petrarch (described as “an Italian poet of the Thirteenth Century.”)
She also explained to Sam what meant ‘to date Zimmy’ in those days: “sure, he was brilliant but a terrible date. You’d be talking and he’d suddenly jump up, grab his guitar, and say, 'Oh, this reminds me...', and he’d be off for the whole evening.”
Fran met Bobby at Numa's workshop and left him when she felt she would not be able to share him with “a twenty-four-year-old employee of Columbia Records” (Ellen Bernstein) and actress Ruth Tyrangiel or others. Then Bobby called Fran back in... 1990 and it remains uncertain whether Sam is the Bard's son or not.
Regardless to the answer, Sam writes pretty well. And he knows how to touch someone’s heart while describing that one concert during which mother and son - trying not to be noticed by the Bard - cry, holding in each other’s arms.
So if BOtT expresses some “maturity” (as many say), this should be understood in a different, dual sense. More concretely, BOtT had the privilege of being the album released after the interesting but not stellar “Planet Waves” and the mediocre trio of “Dylan,” “New Morning,” and (God save me!) “Self-Portrait.”
More importantly, it appears to represent the moment when the Bard (and his fans) made peace with the fact that it was no longer time to compose the dazzling series of lyrics Dylan had so effortlessly strung together in the years ’64/’66, needing just “the time it took to write them on a piece of paper.”
BOtT has indeed become, with time, his proud exit out of the “Gates of Eden” - away from compositional Elysium, away from a poetic quality in direct contact with the noumenon, beyond human reach. The awareness of which Zimmy only later (when truly reaching maturity) would admit. On the other hand, BOtT begins to play with words differently: it would no longer be a matter of repeating the pre-’67 period; Dylan now could cross - and succeeded in crossing - new paths.
The epic Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts is an example of this. The flow remains, but without the "jingle jangle" of the lysergic-rational assonances (“with one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands”) typical of the "golden trilogy" (’64-’65-’66).
Now something has quieted down, but the levels of interpretation have multiplied (Zimmy will mention that a “code” hovers in the album’s lyrics), suggesting a more reasoned, well-studied composition rather than crisp instant creation.
Lily... is the most striking example of disorientation in an album that - to quote Dylanist Tony Attwood - from beginning to end "reeks of confusion masked by simplicity.” An unsuccessful song? I might find a slight evidence of this in the fact that it was played live only once, such as it would be for a song that promises more than it delivers. But then, Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was never played live… Certainly Lily’s melody - as recorded - is slightly monotonous, a fact perfectly demonstrated by Joan Baez's version: long, didactic, soporific and unbearable. But Bobby had other arrows in his quiver.
The acoustic arrangement (from the outtakes of the New York recording sessions) amplifies the feeling that Lily... might have tended towards becoming a new Visions of Johanna, as both songs features three characters with uncertain outlines. It simultaneously demonstrates that there is no way back. Looking back turned Sarah into a statue of salt, after all.
Dylan solves the problems by opting - with the Minnesota session: a end-of-the-year, last minute hesitation over Phil Ramone’s NY session, turned into a coup de genie - for a very fast arrangement, almost slapstick music, driven by a drumbeat some critics defined as ‘silly,’ certainly binary, march-like. Indeed an essential idea, a master move to shake off that monotone feel of the acoustic version, as it also accentuates the disorientation already implied by the text.
That march feel distracts us like a con artist would. An artist focused on denying you the time to realise that you are enchanted but you’re being deceived. In Bobby’s case, not giving the listener time to observe the wide gap between body and engine, signifier and meaning, between aural surface (comic) and a deeply sad story (about: a “drilling gang,” indeed con-artists; betrayals; psychological abuse; attempted suicide; murder; death by hanging.)
The setting carries a ‘saloon and Wild West’ flavour, but then if you ask yourself: where is it taking place? you may find that - at the time - there was only one diamond mine in all of the U.S. (the text talks of “the only one in town.”) Then you’re left wondering: perhaps the action takes place… in the Canadian Wild West? And searching you discover that “Rosemarie” (a Broadway play from 1924, featuring Big Jim and “Rose-Marie the Flame") was set in Canada. But Rimbaud also ‘sang’ of a Lily and a Rose-Marie. And the word “lily” alone opens up a flood of references and connections leaving you lost in the high seas of life, and of power and human nature.
Is the song an allegory set ‘somewhere else’? If so, what is the allegory about? Isn’t the song, after all, centered on a phantasmic, Lacanian ‘Other,’ namely the “Jack of Hearts”? A Jack that, in the Minor Arcana of the tarot, is the card of the lover, relevant yet immature?
The disorienting lyrics leave plenty of room for stuffing them with substance, as evidenced by the many interpretations - from the biblical references (the ‘Song of Songs’) to a far-out metaphor involving the Watergate ‘case’ (which - shortly after the release of BOtT - would anyway explode, leading to Nixon’s resignation). Certainly, uncertainty remains. Even the climax of the plot (the murder of Jim by Lily, for which Rosemary takes blame) has been called into question by a “Colt revolver” since it could sound as a “cold revolver,” a revolver without bullets in the chamber, and that would really be a change of plot…
Rock 'n' roll was a dangerous, chrome-plated weapon, exploding at the speed of light, reflecting (...) the presence of the atomic bomb.
Interview on bobdylan.com (2017)
There’s just one song of the album dealing with a proto-typical, angry break-up. It talks about the Idiot Wind whiffing out of the mouth of… the (hated) Other. I sang it, deeply sinking in the depths of my room, when passion, ignorance, and goodness (according to the Bhagavad Gita) made me gulp down the hemlock of a non-consensual separation.
In that case, I did not yet know myself - ignorant, good, or passionate - but I could find myself in those words: “You’re an idiot, baby/It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.” The “real” story of Sara was unknown to me at the time, but I was all in sharing his blind rage. Then, time passed, wounds heal. The same for Bobby and his song - he had sung “you’re at the bottom” but then Sara ended up with half of Bobby’s royalties (an alleged 36 Million - of Seventies’ dollars.) And Zimmy made peace with her, as it’s quite a reasonable to do amongst grown-ups.
My crazy Lester Bangs (1948-1982) wrote about the ‘maturity’ of Idiot Wind - right away, in 1975. He figured you come to appreciate this song when - just out of a quarrel with your special lady friend, or wife; and drunk - you feel like basking in your confusion. He soon concluded that… no way: “any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself, or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be. Which was simply not enough.”
Enough said about ‘maturity,’ Idiot Wind still shines on, especially in the subsequent version, from the crazy days of “The Rolling Thunder Review.” Just don’t get drunk while listening to it.
Time is a jet plane/It goes too fast.
You’re A Big Girl Now (1974)
In 2019, writer Bret Easton Ellis (“BEE”) revisited the question of Dylan's ‘maturity’ in a section of his essay “White” where he suggests a historical division all of his own: “Empire is the USA around the time of WWII and September 11th” (…) “with the empirical attitude of believing themselves better than anyone else.”
Empire “revolved around the figure of the American hero: solid, rooted in tradition, tactile and analogical” in contrast to a “post-Empire (…) made up of people seen as ephemeral from the start,” rooted in social media, driven only by “exhibition and surface.” So “Empire was The Eagles, Veuve Clicquot, Reagan, ‘The Godfather,’ and Robert Redford,” while “post-Empire is ‘American Idol,’ coconut milk, the Tea Party, ‘The Human Centipede,’ and Shia La Beouf.”
BEE loves to take all the risks inherent in simplifying the complexity of the Real, yet he does not fail to glimpse the existence of hybrids, which he defines as “the ‘I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ celebrities of the Empire,” a sub-set of celebrities including “Muhammad Ali or Gore Vidal or Bob Dylan or John Lennon.”
Still to him BOtT remains “one of the proudest and most stylish successes of the Empire” while Dylan's narcissism - so typical of the ‘Empire’ era - does not possess the post-imperial fury of Eminem, a singer and song-writer capable of admitting “the idiocy of his own flaws and the failure of his marriage,” while singing about the (imagined) assassination of his wife.
As much as innovative BEE’s vision can be, I tend to see Dylan as the unparalleled bridge between past and future of the US ‘Empire.’ Even in BOtT, a quarter of a Century before 9/11, he oscillates between 14th-century lovers and fantasies of marital death (“One day you’ll be in the ditch/flies buzzing around your eyes.”)
Accordingly to BEE, post-Empire artists excel in their “radical attitude that asserts that the lie of the Empire is not real - being true, transparency, and the tactility of your flesh are the only qualities that matter,” yet Zimmy - from Masters of War or Maggie’s Farm to the New Twenties of Murder Most Foul (and that significant image on the tickets of his Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour, yet to be deciphered) - has given me ample proof that he may like to believe in his own lies, certainly not in those of others.
To my own regret, I tend to follow Ellis when he says that BOtT has “a good Empire taste and a Boomer elegance that no longer makes sense in the post-Empire world.” True: half of the Gen Z people I ask tell me that Dylan is important, but can’t say why. I guess some Gen Z may even know why, but the vast majority of them... they rest in silence.
Bobby is the true survivor of 2024. The survivor that every POTUS would wish to have on his side, even if Bobby wrote It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). What a crazy wish.