‘BLOOD’ RUNS DEEPER
A new box set gives us a fresh take on Dylan’s Seventies classic
Released on January 20th, 1975, Blood on the Tracks was many records — in conception, execution and rapid change of mind — on its way to canonization: Bob Dylan’s greatest album of the Seventies and, as much as the singer has denied it since, the most emotionally direct body of songs he has ever committed to a single LP. It was an album born amid a crisis of family, largely composed in retreat — on Dylan’s farm in Minnesota — and initially recorded in New York as his then-nineyear marriage to the former Sara Lowndes broke down.
All but five of the 87 tracks on the six-CD super-forensic edition of More Blood,
More Tracks comprise the entirety of Dylan’s sessions in mid-September 1974 at A&R Studios, as he wrestles with the bones and language of his new songs, across a range of acute reflections and romantic turmoil. Over two CDs from September 16th alone, Dylan runs through eight of the eventual album’s 10 songs in a variety of tests. They include the barbed farewell in “You’re a Big Girl Now” and the crime-andrevenge allegory “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” both solo and acoustic, as if it were 1963; the warm resignation of “Simple Twist of Fate” with banjo player Eric Weissberg’s progressive-country band Deliverance; and “Idiot Wind,” Dylan’s jeremiad at its most stark and seething over just his guitar and a bass.
But a single shot that day at the yearning blues “Meet Me in the Morning” is the only keeper. Instead, over the next three days, Dylan — supposedly the king of one-and-done in the studio — keeps pushing through the guilt and rescue in “Shelter From the Storm,” the fond memory and regret in “Tangled Up in Blue” and the slippery wordplay of the drifter’s escape “Up to Me.” What emerges from those repeated takes and Dylan’s decision to sideline most of that work (including “Up to Me,” left unreleased until the 1985 box set Biograph) is a record that, at the time, would have felt like a rearview triumph, a step back to the dusky simplicity of 1967’s John Wesley Harding in songs that crackled with the tensions of Dylan’s middle age.
Heard now, these alternate performances — some of which appeared on an early, rejected test pressing — are a revelation of process, showing Dylan at his most certain and searching at the same time: always going for a master take even as he edits and shades his telling along the way, changing tempos, settings and vocal approaches. He was still rewriting lyrics at the Minneapolis sessions, a month before Blood on the Tracks’ release, included at the end of this deluxe box.
This set doesn’t contradict the choices Dylan made on the way to the final Blood on the Tracks album. It fills in his road to wisdom.