BLOOD, SIMPLE?

BOB DYLAN ★★★★ More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14 DELUXE EDITION (Columbia CD/DL)

“LOVE IS so simple, to quote a phrase,” sings Bob Dylan in every one of eight renditions of You’re A Big Girl Now across six discs of More Blood, More Tracks. Well, replies every other note and word of the 87 tracks herein, it is and it isn’t. These songs approach love and its loss from kaleidoscopic angles, and while some of them chime with what we think we know of Dylan’s biography – chiefly his divorce from Sara – the original Blood On The Tracks’ reputation for gloom and anguish was always misleading. Even Idiot Wind ends its startling first verse with a wink (“I can’t help it if I’m lucky”). And where there’s pain and maybe blame, there are mitigations and ameliorations, and ultimately a prevailing gentle stoicism. But, as More Blood, More Tracks reveals, that tone was the final stop on a fascinating journey on which Dylan tried a number of ways of voicing these songs. The solo New York recordings that so gripped contemporaries on bootleg but never reached the public via official channels – and are the jewel in this reissue’s crown – are stop one. It’s on these that Dylan sounds most bereft. In Take 1 of You’re A Big Girl Now you really feel that “corkscrew to my heart…” while his coat buttons clack against his guitar like rimshots. More blood, as advertised. But even by Take 3 you can hear him reaching for a more wistful place. Next to these revelatory performances – many key ones present on the 10 quid, single-CD version (for once, not too poor a relation) – the band takes from New York are less essential. In fact, Take 1a of Simple Twist Of Fate sounds pretty naff, with chorused electric guitar strums and cheesy stings. Dylan actually stops Take 2a to complain that the drums are “one second behind”. Then 3a starts and Richard Crooks, perhaps rattled, introduces a cymbal ‘ting’ that only adds to the lounge act ambience. Yet the missteps are also part of the fun. On Disc 3, Dylan tries Tangled Up In Blue with Tony Brown’s bass and Paul Griffin’s organ – but the organ clearly doesn’t work, and anyway Dylan’s going at it too fast, coat buttons clacking like crazy. At one point (Meet Me In The Morning, Disc 5) Mick Jagger shows up; we hear him suggesting Dylan plays bottleneck, like he’s suddenly the producer. Dylan makes a mess of it – his polite way of chiding Mick’s lèse majesté. Some of the songs change little; in the big box there are 12 takes of Buckets Of Rain, but Dylan seems fairly sure where he’s going from the off. On Tangled Up in Blue, he has various versions where “he” gets her out of her “jam” and “I” doesn’t turn up ’til verse four. But Idiot Wind is the most mutable. Dylan tries different ways of starting it, and ending it, and tinkers with the words – replacing Mardi Gras with The Capitol, throwing the I-Ching, then bumping into a fortune teller instead – as his tone changes from self-pity into something harder, until finally, in the right setting (Minneapolis) and with the right band, he screams it like he’s cleansing the temple. It’s always been tempting to imagine that Idiot Wind is what it feels like to be Bob Dylan, watching people’s minds race with “big ideas, images and distorted facts” as they approach you – no chance of normal interaction. But the song is broader, deeper than that. It’s all in that final, conciliatory “We’re idiots, babe…” – aiming not just at Sara and Bob, or even the media, but a vast human stupidity than encompasses everyone, everywhere. Blood On The Tracks: Bob biog or a piece of fiction; ‘just’ a performance? It doesn’t matter. As Pete Hammill wrote in his original linernote, “In the end, the plague touched us all.” Danny Eccleston

“MICK JAGGER SHOWS UP, SUGGESTING DYLAN PLAYS BOTTLENECK LIKE HE’S SUDDENLY THE PRODUCER.”