Domestic Left #92: The blood left on the tracks
I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off
Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Blood on the Tracks, widely considered to be Bob Dylan’s best album.
Although Dylan himself has denied this, the songs are generally believed to be about the breakup of his marriage to Sara Lownds, with whom he had four children and whom he ultimately divorced in 1978.
Regardless of whether the songs are autobiographical or not, the album certainly includes some of the most harrowing “love songs” (or perhaps I should say “songs about relationships”) ever written. In an Instagram post from December, recalling hearing the album for the first time, the English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock writes that, “His marriage was shattering, by the sound of it, and the splinters from it cut like broken glass.”
I first heard Blood on the Tracks in its entirety when I taped it off the radio sometime in the late 80s. A couple of the classic rock and “album-oriented rock” stations that I listened to in those days would periodically play albums (or those newfangled “compact discs”) in their entirety at designated times during the week — 101 THE FOX, if I recall correctly, had a feature called “CD Sunday” every week at 8pm — and I would eagerly await the opportunity to expand my music collection by popping a blank cassette into my parents’ tape deck and pressing record. Suck it, Napster.
Until then, I think my only exposure to Dylan had been the album Greatest Hits, Volume One, which I had purchased at some point shortly after learning who he was. Originally released in 1967, that album is a collection of his most well-known songs from the mid-60s, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone” — which were also the only Dylan songs that got played regularly on stations like 101 THE FOX.
This album was in some ways similar — about half the songs stripped-down, with just Dylan’s voice and guitar and a bass guitar accompaniment, and about half recorded with a full band — but in other ways completely different. The songs had the same mythic grandeur, breaking pop music structures to extend to five, six, seven verses and more, but the flights of poetic license were drenched in darker hues. Though it would be years before I would actually see the cover of the album, I was not surprised at its dark burgundy color and somber, blurry image of Dylan, so different from the photo of him on Greatest Hits, with its light-blue background and backlighting making his hair glow like a halo.
The New York journalist Pete Hamill wrote the liner notes for the album, for which he won a Grammy. They begin, “In the end, the plague touched us all,” and continue for over 1,600 words (which Substack would inform us is a good seven- or eight-minute read). He notes Dylan’s references to Verlaine and Rimbaud and throws in a few of his own, to Yeats and Blake, Camus and Faulkner and Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti. But Hamill is less concerned with literature than with history.
To Hamill, Blood on the Tracks is about the aftermath of an inflection point in history, when a plague of “greed and uselessness and murder” killed “that old America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, ... the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world.” Vietnam is not named but clearly referenced (“The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God’s green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud”). One suspects that heavy on Hamill’s mind were also the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy — whom Hamill helped convince to run for president, and whose assassin Hamill helped disarm in the immediate aftermath of the bloodshed.
“We live in the smoky landscape now,” Hamill writes, “as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. ... And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home.” In Dylan’s emotional vulnerability on the album, whether it comes from his failing marriage1 or from some other source, Hamill finds a way forward of sorts after historic defeat: “The crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of the earth.”
Prior to recording the album, Dylan had spent several weeks in New York studying with the painter Norman Raeben; in interviews he has spoken about how the lessons with Raeben gave him a different understanding of time, which manifested in the lyrics on Blood on the Tracks.
This is clearest in the opening track, “Tangled up in Blue,” in which Dylan recounts the twists and turns of a relationship with a woman who, we learn in the second verse, “was married when we first met, soon to be divorced.”
But the seven verses of the song not only don’t tell the story in sequential order, the sequence of the events they describe is completely unclear — other than, I suppose, the single reference to when they “first met,” and the final verse, which begins “now I’m going back again, I got to get to her somehow.” The singer works as a cook in the great north woods and on a fishing boat right outside of Delacroix; he meets the woman working in a topless bar; she offers him a pipe and a book of Italian poetry from the fifteenth century; he lives in the basement down the stairs from her and another man, who may or may not be the man she was married to when they first met. The verses are sung one after another in a linear order, because that’s how songs work, but their order in the song gives few if any clues as to what order the incidents they describe occurred.
This scrambling of time allows Dylan to put two different “endings” in the song — a personal one, in the second verse (“We drove that car as far as we could / Abandoned it out west / Split up on the docks that night / Both agreeing it was best”), and a social-political one, in the sixth, where after describing a setting clearly reminiscent of the mid-60s (“There was music in the cafes at night / And revolution in the air”), he tells how the characters fell into moral corruption (“he started into dealing with slaves”) and descended into a numb solitude (“something inside of him died,” “she had to sell everything she owned and froze up inside,” “when finally the bottom fell out I became withdrawn”).
Most of us tend to think of the experience of heartbreak or defeat as anchored in a specific point in time, with a clearly defined before and after: a long-distance phone call or text message on a fall day; the announcement of the decisive votes late at night; the return to work after a lost strike. What Dylan gives us in “Tangled Up in Blue” is more true to life, and it is both easier and harder to accept: a general falling-apart of things, an account of the way we move back and forward in time, looking for clues, poking at scars, hoping against hope that we can somehow get back to the time before the plague.
Half of the album was recorded in New York City in September of 1974. Although Eric Weissberg and Deliverance were listed on the album credits, the only song on the final album which Weissberg’s whole band actually played on2 is the country blues “Meet Me in the Morning” (which I always loved for name-checking my home state of Kansas). “Simple Twist of Fate,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Shelter from the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain” were recorded with just Dylan and Weissberg’s bass player, Tony Brown.
The other half of the songs on the album were recorded three months later in Minneapolis with a full rock band of local musicians that Dylan had just met — they were recruited by his brother David Zimmerman — and who remained uncredited on the album. The quieter songs recorded in New York are still and reflective; these songs are full of motion, even if that motion is slow at times. If Dylan was “crawling from a wrecked dream into the bleak wasteland that was greeting many of us visitors from the 1960s as the 1970s unfolded,” as Hitchcock puts it, the Minneapolis songs are the soundtrack of him dragging himself from one rock to another, perhaps not sure where he is going but moving forward nonetheless.
Although he has always denied that the songs on Blood on the Tracks are autobiographical, in 1978, at a concert recorded for the live album At Budokan, Dylan introduced the song “Simple Twist of Fate” with the words, “Here’s a simple love story. Happened to me.”
An early version of “Simple Twist of Fate” was reportedly titled “4th Street Affair,” leading to widespread speculation that the song is about Dylan’s relationship with Suze Rotolo, the woman who appears with him on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. (Dylan and Rotolo lived in an apartment on West 4th Street in New York.)
Rotolo was a “red diaper baby,” the child of Communist Party activists, and her political commitments are often considered to be a major influence on Dylan’s songwriting in the 60s, when he composed the songs that, Hamill wrote, “gave many of us voice” before the plague. In the fifth and penultimate verse of the song Dylan sings:
He hears the ticking of the clocks
And walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks
Where the sailors all come in
Maybe she'll pick him out again
How long must he wait?
One more time for a simple twist of fate
Fifty years later, we have been through so many plagues, both metaphorical and literal, and so many inflection points in history, that Dylan’s weariness on this album is hardly surprising, barely even noticeable above the drab ennui of our irony-soaked culture. Few of us have ever believed in anything as purely as Hamill must have believed in the promise of the 60s. For Gen X, we navigated our adolescences in the midst of one plague only to have to shelter in place from another one with our teenage children. Subsequent generations grew up entirely online, greed and uselessness and murder only a click away. For half a century, the solitary human has stumbled through a wasteland of defeats and reversals, with apocalypse looming ever darker in the skies above.
The first side of the album closes with the shortest and most upbeat song in the collection, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” and it is indicative of the album’s overall mood that its most upbeat song is, in its very title, predicting — no, promising — the end of a relationship.
If one wanted to engage in biographical speculation, this song feels like it could easily be about Ellen Bernstein, a Columbia Records employee with whom Dylan was having an affair at the time he wrote the songs for the album. The song’s first four verses, and especially its first bridge, are full of the rush and excitement of new love, when even the natural world seems to confirm the rightness of a relationship (“Flowers on the hillside blooming crazy / Crickets talking back and forth in rhyme / Blue river running slow and lazy / I could stay with you forever and never realize the time”). But the refrain at the end of each verse, which gives the song its title, reminds us all — the listener, the singer, and the singer’s beloved — not only that all things have an ending, but that this relationship, in particular, is doomed to end sooner rather than later — as is the nature of most extramarital affairs.
Still, the mood is buoyant, even as, in the final bridge and chorus, the singer anticipates giving himself “a good talking to” about the end of the relationship and searching for his beloved in far-flung Hawaii, California, Ohio. And Hamill, in a stab at what optimism he can muster in the wake of the plague, chooses to end his notes with the final lines of this song:
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love.
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.
At some point in my life, I memorized all seven verses of “Tangled Up in Blue” — which I considered a not-insignificant achievement — and have in fact performed the song on occasion in a couple of different venues and contexts. When I need to push myself through the last five minutes of a run, I will often run through the song in my head, sometimes even loosely forming the guitar chords with the fingers of my left hand, in order to keep my mind occupied. The last mile of the Des Moines marathon, in October 2016, I ran through it twice.
However, I will always remain in awe of a banjo-playing former law student of my father’s who I once saw sing the entirety of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — a nearly nine-minute, sixteen-verse narrative ballad about jealousy, revenge, murder, dramaturgy and robbing banks — flawlessly, with no written notes.
The last recording session for Blood on the Tracks took place on December 30, when Dylan and his makeshift band recorded my three favorite songs on the album: “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.”
“If You See Her, Say Hello” is a lament for a lost love, one the narrator seems to acknowledge his own role in losing (“The bitter taste still lingers on / From the night I tried to make her stay”). Hamill describes it as “a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of poets, but is about love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so few people can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a life.”
The song’s musical structure is slightly unusual for Dylan — like many of his songs, it consists of a series of verses with no chorus, but unlike most Dylan songs it opens with an instrumental section using a completely different chord progression than the rest of the song, almost like an overture, which then repeats at the end, after the five verses.
It’s the eighth of ten songs on the album, and when I was recording it off the radio the first side of the 90-minute blank cassette I was recording it on snapped off during the song’s instrumental coda, allowing me to flip the tape over and capture the entirely of “Shelter From the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain” on the other side. Still, when I would listen to my taped version, thinking perhaps about someone who had become a parenthesis in my life, and the song would cut off during that final instrumental section, I would find myself thinking, hoping perhaps, that maybe the song doesn’t actually end, that maybe there is the possibility of more than just the solitary human, that maybe time’s seeming linearity is not absolute, that maybe there are more verses to come in this story.
Speaking of love songs, I found this recent article in the Guardian, about the science of how music shapes your love life, to be both fascinating and consistent with my own experience:
The romantic power of music does not just stop once you have found a partner. It can also help to form and maintain the relationship by creating more harmonious exchanges and a feeling of closeness.
I know I linked to Ted Gioia last week as well, and yes, he is full of himself and sometimes tiresome, but his recent “Manifesto in Defense of Courtship,” based in part on his ten years’ of research for a book on love songs, is worth a read (and also consistent with my own experience). And it includes this important advice:
Watch out for lute players!
Tomorrow, of course, is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. (We won’t speak of the other thing going on tomorrow.)3 A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for the UE NEWS about the history of the holiday and the struggles that went into both getting it recognized as a federal holiday and getting it recognized as a paid holiday in the shops.
Which Hamill, unsurprisingly, does not mention in the official liner notes.
There are dozens of alternate takes with various configurations of musicians, many of which have been released in recent years as part of Dylan’s official “Bootleg” series. In this post, I’m just discussing the recordings that actually made it onto the album.
Other than to note that, in “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” the character Big Jim, “with his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place,” gets his comeuppance in the end.
This is my favorite album, I think - "Tangled Up In Blue" is definitely my favorite song. Thanks for writing about it!