It wasn’t as if Bob Dylan hadn’t reshaped popular music before 1975. He was the most important figure of the folk revival growing out of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. He was the most important figure in the subsequent shift to folk-based rock & roll a few years later.
For a guy who couldn’t really sing and who drifted in and out of key like a drunk on a tightrope, Bob Dylan had an outsized influence on the way the Western world listened to music.
But in the mid-‘70s, that influence was in decline. A new Bob Dylan album was still major news, but it had seemed for almost a decade that his revolutionary take on modern folk and rock had never recovered from the serious motorcycle accident that removed him from the public in the summer of 1966.
Looking back on Bob Dylan's iconic Blood on the Tracks, fifty years later
After the titanic double disc Blonde on Blonde, Dylan released a handful of beloved albums, but they seemed somewhat softer and tamer, especially for an artist who had stirred up so much ardor and was still several years shy of his 30th birthday.
Then came Blood on the Tracks, released fifty years ago. A brand new chapter opened on one of the most important popular musicians of the 20th century. Dylan, who had elevated folk protest with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They are a-Changin’ in ‘63/’64, and then launched rock & roll into its earliest maturity with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, was at it again.
Blood on the Tracks was the most mature collection of personal songs any pop artist had ever released to that point. It still rates at or near the top of any such list. And since so many of his albums seem to exist in pairs, he did it again a year later with Desire, a more ambitious but somewhat more uneven effort than Blood on the Tracks.
Though it is impossible to recapture the excitement that attached itself to the release of Blood on the Tracks, you can still listen to the album fifty years on and recognize its craftsmanship and intensity. Since his accident, Dylan had released two somewhat gentle, country-tinged albums, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. Then he had the first serious miss of his career, 1970’s Self Portrait.
Though some retrospective reviews recognize the value in Dylan’s tenth studio album, the entire concept does not play to the singer’s strengths. First and foremost, he does a lot of covers. Dylan could interpret works from the great American songbook folk chapter, but he was clearly at his best singing his own words.
New Morning was somewhat better received, but the music world was moving on and many in it were beginning to wonder if Bob Dylan had a significant place in the new decade. He left Columbia, the label that had released all of his work in the 1960s, and disappeared for a few years. When he came back in 1973 with Dylan for Asylum, most of his fans kind of wished he had stayed on the sidelines.
But 1974’s Planet Waves showed that the singer, now in his 30s, still had something to say. He had been moving away from political protest for a long time. Planet Waves, recorded with support from The Band, dove deeper into personal matters than he had done since Blonde on Blonde.
Still, who could have predicted Blood on the Tracks? It emerges fully formed from the singer’s heart and soul like Athena sprouting from the head of Zeus. It is often considered the greatest break-up album of all time.
Dylan had been married to Sara Lownds since 1965 but a decade later, their marriage was clearly on the rocks. Hence the double meaning of the title. Blood on the tracks is a metaphor for the aftermath of an accident, and it is also a comment on how Dylan will be spilling his emotional blood onto the “tracks” of this album.
And what tracks they are! Dylan opens his fifteenth studio album with the epic, nearly six-minute tale of a passionate and ultimately failed relationship, “Tangled Up in Blue.” It employs his typical literary, narrative. He paints pictures of his romantic pair, sending them all over the world. The epic story gets the full band treatment with a couple of additional acoustic guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards, joining Dylan’s guitar and ubiquitous harmonica, which shows up in the coda.
From that long romantic journey, we move to a much smaller love story, the almost impossibly poignant “Simple Twist of Fate.” Thematically, it is a similar territory. A brief passionate affair. Heartbreak in the end.
Unlike “Tangled Up in Blue,” which ends with the protagonist vowing to rekindle the relationship, “A Simple Twist of Fate” ends with acceptance of the reality that sometimes things don’t work out. Blame it on a simple twist of fate. The musical approach is also simpler – Dylan’s guitar and harmonica supported by Tony Brown’s melodic bass.
The remaining eight tracks flip between those two musical approaches – some played with a full band and others with Dylan largely on his own. The album was recorded in two distinct sessions. The first, September in New York, was Dylan with minimal support. Three months later, between Christmas and New Year's, he went to Minneapolis to record five more tracks with a more complete backing band.
The full band is used to great effect on the “bigger” songs, like the supremely bitter “Idiot Wind,” which uses a double keyboard attack, with Gregg Inhofer’s piano joining forces with Dylan’s Hammond organ. Or on the classic old west narrative “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” in which Inhofer takes over on organ.
At almost nine minutes, “Lily…” is the longest song on the album and it is something of a lark, with its superhero good-guy thief navigating his way in and out of trouble. But at its core, it has the same view of romance that most of the rest of the tracks have. Romance – true, long-lasting romance – is doomed.
The Minneapolis songs are topflight, but the songs recorded in New York – mostly with just Dylan and Tony Brown – are sublime. In addition to “Simple Twist of Fate,” Dylan offers the simple beauty of “Buckets of Rain” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” both of which face the fleeting nature of love head-on.
Then there is “Shelter From the Storm,” a companion piece to “Tangled Up in Blue,” another wide-ranging tale about a love once potent and now lost. But the singer hasn’t lost his memories or his hopes of finding it again. He concludes with the fervent wish, “If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.”
There is one song from the New York sessions that sounds more like Minneapolis. “Meet Me in the Morning” adds drums, keys, and even an electric guitar to its bluesy vibe. And there is one song from Minneapolis that sounds like New York – quite possibly the saddest song about lost love Dylan ever sang. “If You See Her, Say Hello” uses two mandolins – played by Dylan and Minneapolis institution Peter Ostroushko – to create the most delicate of backdrops for this story of a man who simply can’t put the past behind him.
The casual desperation of his closing lines – “If she’s passing back this way – I’m not that hard to find – Tell her she can look me up – If she’s got the time” – contains some of the most incisive lyrics ever written about a wounded, desperate heart.
It’s as if you can taste the blood on the tracks. Once again, Bob Dylan had raised the bar. Mature love songs would thereafter be held to a higher standard.