Blood on the Tracks
Bob Dylan
“A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album,” said Dylan. “It’s hard for me to relate to that — I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.”
Columbia, 1975
bob dylan once introduced this album’s opening song, “Tangled Up in Blue,” onstage as taking him 10 years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis — the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes — that at least partly inspired Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s best work of the 1970s.
In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic folk-pop songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the LP, from start to finish, for pals and peers, including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, before cutting them in September — in just a week, with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance.
But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother, David, in Minneapolis, who suggested Dylan might get fuller versions of the songs if he recut some of them with local musicians. “The reality of having
Bob Dylan walk in the room was pretty shocking,” guitarist Kevin Odegard told Rolling Stone decades later. “There are two Bobs — Bob Dylan, the rock star, and Robert Zimmerman, the Minnesotan guy, who just hangs out. And that’s who we got.” The final Blood was a mix of New York and Minneapolis tapes; the New York versions are slower, more pensive, while the Minneapolis versions are faster and wilder. Together, they frame the gritty anguish in Dylan’s vocals, as he rages through some of his most passionate, confessional songs — from adult breakup ballads like “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” to the sharp-tongued opprobrium of “Idiot Wind,” his greatest put-down song since “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album,” Dylan said soon after it became a commercial and critical success. “It’s hard for me to relate to that — I mean people enjoying that type of pain.” Yet Dylan had never turned so much pain into so much musical splendor.