Blood on the Tracks
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| Blood on the Tracks | ||
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| Studio album by Bob Dylan | ||
| Released | January 17, 1975 | |
| Recorded | September and December 1974 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Length | 51:41 | |
| Label | Columbia Records | |
| Producer(s) | Bob Dylan | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan chronology | ||
| Before the Flood (1974) |
Blood on the Tracks (1975) |
The Basement Tapes (1975) |
Blood on the Tracks is a 1975 album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In September 1974, Dylan entered the studio with a clutch of newly written songs, many inspired by his recent estrangement from his wife of ten years, Sara Lownds Dylan.
All ten songs on the album were originally recorded at New York City sessions produced by Phil Ramone. With Columbia set to release the LP, Dylan pulled back at the last minute, and at year's end re-recorded five of the ten songs in Minneapolis with a crew of area session musicians assembled by his brother, David Zimmerman. Dylan's fans theorize endlessly about his reasons for revamping the album, but the most likely reason (and the simplest) is that the musical feel of the album was monotonous, with too many songs in the same key and the same languid rhythm.
Told of the album's lasting popularity, Dylan was later to say: "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?"
Blood on the Tracks was a #1 Pop Album on the Billboard Music Charts and reached #4 in the UK. The single "Tangled up in Blue" peaked at #31 on the Pop singles chart. The album remains one of Dylan's all-time best-selling studio releases, with a double-platinum US certification to date. It is also one of his most critically-lauded.
In Dylan's 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Vol. 1, he claims that although one album of his songs was entirely inspired by short stories by Anton Chekhov, many of his fans and critics treat it as autobiographical. This passage is often cited as a reference to Blood on the Tracks.
Contents |
[edit] Writing and recording Blood on the Tracks
More than two months after finishing the Bob Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour, Dylan travelled back to New York City, where he looked up an art teacher, Norman Raeben. Dylan was working on his skills as a painter, and Raeben was recommended to him by his friends in California. In 1978, Dylan recalled that his friends "were talking about truth and love and beauty, and all these words I had heard for years, and they had 'em all defined...I asked them, 'Where do you come up with all those definitions?' and they told me about [Raeben]. I made a point to look him up the next time I was in New York, which was the spring of 1974. I just dropped [in] to see him one day and I wound up staying there for two months...Five days a week I used to go up there, and I'd just think about it the other two days of the week. I used to be up there from eight o'clock to four. That's all I did for two months."
As biographer Clinton Heylin writes, Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara (shot in the fall of 1975) "share a fascination with identities that stems as much from Raeben as Dylan." In 1978, Dylan recalled that his time with Raeben "locked me into the present time more than anything else I ever did...I was constantly being intermingled with myself, and all the different selves that were in there, until this one left, then that one left, and I finally got down to the one that I was familiar with...[Raeben] taught me how to see...in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt. And I didn't know how to pull it off. I wasn't sure it could be done in songs because I'd never written a song like that. But when I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks. Everybody agrees that that was pretty different, and what's different about it is there's a code in the lyrics, and also there's no sense of time."
After spending two and a half months in New York, Dylan flew to Minnesota. Ellen Bernstein recalls, "He was at his best there, at his most comfortable, with his brother's house down the road. He had a painting studio out in the field, and the house was far from fancy, out in the middle of nowhere. He was very relaxed, and that's where and when he was writing Blood on the Tracks."
Heylin writes that "only when [Dylan] had a fully formed prototype for the song would he show it to Ellen, and invariably, by then, it had been copied into [his] little red notebook from the scraps of paper on which his initial thoughts had been sketched." Ellen Bernstein recalls "Dylan would do his writing early in the morning and then kinda materialize around midday, come downstairs and eventually, during the day, share what he had written. It was in the notebook, but he would play it, and ask me what I thought, and it was always different, every time, he would just change it and change it and change it. You definitely had this sense of a mind that never stopped." Dylan would eventually fill his little red notebook with a total of seventeen complete songs.
On July 22nd, Dylan played Stephen Stills and Tim Drummond at least half a dozen of the new songs composed that spring and summer. Stills and Drummond heard these songs in a room at the St. Paul Hilton Hotel, after a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert, and soon after hearing them Drummond would praise them, describing them as "gutsy, bluesy, so authentic...it's the first time I've sat in a room and liked everything I heard."
Dylan began planning his next album, and at one point, he considered hiring guitarist Michael Bloomfield for the recording sessions. (Bloomfield was a key element on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.) However, Bloomfield recalls, "[Dylan] came over and there was a whole lot of secrecy involved, there couldn't be anybody in the house. I wanted to tape the songs so I could learn them so I wouldn't [mess] 'em up at the sessions...and he had this look on his face like I was trying to put out a bootleg album or something...He started playing the [expletive-deleted] songs from Blood on the Tracks and I couldn't play, I couldn't follow them...There was this frozen guy there. It was very disconcerting...He took out his guitar, he tuned to [open E] tuning, and he started playing the songs nonstop! And he just played them all and I just sort of picked along with it...I was saying, 'No, man, don't sing the whole thing, just sing one chorus and if it's not gonna change, let me write it down so I can play with you.' And he didn't. He just kept on playing...They all began to sound the same to me, they were all in the same key, they were all long. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life."
Though his meeting with Bloomfield was not a success, Dylan continued to audition his songs to a select number of people, including bluegrass picker Pete Rowan and songwriter/poet Shel Silverstein, who was introduced to Dylan by Bernstein. "He was very interested in people's reaction," recalls Bernstein. "When Bob and I went to New York to do Blood on the Tracks he wanted to go and visit this friend of his in some Hasidic neighborhood...we went out in the backyard and he played the songs for these friends of his..."
On August 2nd, Dylan also renewed his relationship with Columbia Records, Bernstein's employer and Dylan's original label. Dylan had a falling out with Columbia that led Dylan to record briefly with David Geffen's Asylum Records, but Columbia mended its relationship with Dylan, going as far as reverting the rights to Dylan's previous album masters on the delivery of a new product. (Bernstein insists that she had no part in Dylan's decision to re-sign with Columbia.)
With a new contract secured, Dylan took his little red notebook to New York and began recording his next album. The sessions were held at A&R Studios on 799 Seventh Avenue in New York, formerly known as Columbia's Studio A, back when Dylan was recording six of his albums within its confines. The first session was to be held on September 16th, with Dylan himself producing and Phil Ramone engineering.
On the morning of the 16th, guitarist and banjo player Eric Weissberg was up at A&R Studios working on an advertising jingle when he ran into Phil Ramone in the hallway. A successful session musician who, according to Weissberg, "was just about the only guy who could play all the folk instruments - mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, etc. - and read music and follow a chart," he had recently scored a major hit with "Dueling Banjos," a banjo instrumental he had written and recorded for the 1973 film Deliverance. The success of that single led him to form a group called Deliverance, consisting of drummer Richard Crooks, keyboardist Thomas McFaul, guitarist Charlie Brown III, and bassist Tony Brown. According to Weissberg, Ramone asked him if he had a band. Weissberg told him about Deliverance, and Ramone reportedly told him that he needed a band for Dylan's recording session, set to take place that evening.
About half an hour before the first session was to begin, Weissberg and Deliverance arrived at A&R Studios to unpack and tune their instruments. Weissberg brought his prized guitar, a 1939 Martin Herringbone D-28, while Charles Brown brought a Fender Telecaster.
When Dylan arrived, he began to play and sing his new songs, giving Deliverance little time to notate the music for themselves. Charles Brown recalls that Dylan "didn't use any charts. I finally wound up getting a yellow legal pad and scribbling down a couple of things, which were gone, instantly, right out the window. It wasn't worth bothering to write them down, he changed things so much...He would run something down once, and maybe halfway again, and that was it: Take it! Because he wanted the immediacy of the moment, he didn't care whether there were mistakes in there or not."
Weissberg echoed Charles Brown's sentiments, recalling that Dylan had made things difficult for Deliverance, just as he had done with Bloomfield. "It was weird. You couldn't really watch his fingers 'cause he was playing in a tuning arrangement I had never seen before. If it was anybody else I would have walked out. He put us at a real disadvantage." Weissberg also recalls Dylan drinking a lot of wine, and that he seemed uninterested in "correcting obvious mistakes." As some critics would later note, Dylan didn't even seem fazed when his jacket's buttons rattled against his guitar. "There were certain ones where you can hear the sound of his fingernails on the guitar," recalls Bernstein. "That didn't matter to him. None of that stuff was important to him. What was important was the overall weight of the song."
Sometime during this session, John Hammond, Sr. dropped by to welcome Dylan back to Columbia. Dylan reportedly told Hammond that he wanted his next album to be "easy and natural" with little, if any, overdubbing. According to Ramone, he accommodated Dylan's wishes by recording him with two guitar microphones "for reasons of sound and to give him freedom of movement, because he's not prone to stand in one place without moving around...One was a Sony C37, a tube microphone; the other was a Neumann KM56. I think I tried something different on the vocals, because I went to a dynamic [microphone], a Sennheiser 421, rather than a condenser [microphone], mainly because I felt I could get around his movement better..." The natural reverb in A&R Studios also contributed to the sound. "The room was big, but downstairs we had some incredibly good chambers. There's just a touch of the room..."
Dylan recorded at least nine songs during that first session, and at least six of them were recorded with Deliverance. Master takes of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", "Meet Me in the Morning" and "Idiot Wind" were successfully recorded at this session and set aside for the album, but the rest of the recordings were deemed unsatisfactory. ("Call Letter Blues," an outtake recorded on the 16th, would eventually be released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.
Another session was held the following day, but this time, at Dylan's request, only bassist Tony Brown would return as Dylan's sole accompaniment. "I got a call from someone in Dylan's office," Tony Brown recalls, "who said 'come on back.' I asked, was Eric going to be there, and the guys? The person said, 'No, just you.' That was a shock. I had no idea why that was. I was more nervous then." At this session, master takes of "You're a Big Girl Now," "Shelter from the Storm," and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" were successfully recorded and set aside for the album. "I remember being struck by the songs," recalled Tony Brown. "It was obvious to me what they were about, how deeply personal they were. I had a whole day with him, and the next [session] Paul Griffin was there."
That next session came on the 19th. Dylan was once again accompanied by Tony Brown, but this time, he had also recruited organist Paul Griffin to join the sessions. (Griffin had also previously recorded with Dylan.) At this session, Dylan successfully recorded master takes of "Buckets of Rain," "If You See Her, Say Hello," "Simple Twist of Fate," "Up to Me," and "Tangled Up in Blue," which were set aside for the album. On this day, Dylan also overdubbed a new lyric for "Meet Me in the Morning" onto a "Call Letter Blues" backing track recorded with Deliverance on the 16th.
Tony Brown would later say that he "made a conscious decision to emulate" the bass playing style on Dylan's 1967 album, John Wesley Harding. "I used a lot of eighth notes, just like Charlie McCoy played on John Wesley Harding."
Recording was deemed complete, but during the preliminary mixing and sequencing of the album, Dylan realized he had to remove one, possibly two of his chosen songs as the final product would have been 58 minutes in length, too much for a single LP but too short to give a double LP release serious consideration. As a result, "Up to Me" was excised, eventually seeing release on 1985's boxed-set retrospective, Biograph.
Dylan had completed his album in less than a week, and Columbia was now preparing to release it by Christmas. Test pressings were eventually made and Columbia was soon printing sleeve artwork as well. On his return to Malibu, Dylan played his own test pressing to a number of friends, including Robbie Robertson. However, when Dylan went to see his younger brother, David, in Minneapolis, David apparently convinced Dylan that the album would never "sell." Put off by the album's stark sound, David convinced Dylan to re-record half of the album in Minneapolis with local musicians that he would assemble at a studio he knew well. The decision would force Columbia to push back the release date for Blood on the Tracks.
David first contacted an associate of his, guitarist Kevin Odegard, asking him for a 1937 0042 Martin, a compact, small-bodied acoustic guitar sometimes referred to as the "Joan Baez." (Baez was the first major performer of the folk scene to use it as her main instrument in performing live and in the studio.) Apparently, David was searching for the guitar on Dylan's behalf. Odegard was not able to find that exact model, as it was considered very rare, but he came close. He called his friend, guitarist and music store owner Chris Weber, asking about the guitar, and as it turned out, Weber had a 1934 0042G. "The G means gut-string model setup...the neck was a little bit wider, and it wasn't really designed for steel strings," says Weber, "although it was strong enough to support them." When Odegard told David about Weber's guitar, David then asked if Odegard could assemble a group of musicians for a recording session; David also told Odegard of Dylan's intentions to re-record some material for his next album. Odegard quickly assembled a band with guitarist Kevin Odegard, bassist Billy Peterson, keyboardist Gregg Inhofer, and drummer Bill Berg, and in the end, he was able to convince David to grant him permission to bring Weber to the session. (Reportedly, David relented in order to ease the sale of Weber's guitar; Dylan would ultimately buy Weber's guitar.)
The musicians reported to Studio 80 in Minneapolis on Friday, December 27th, where Weber showed Dylan his guitar. Weber and Dylan sat in the studio's glass vocal recording booth, where Dylan was able to hear the instrument better, and as they talked, Dylan asked if Weber wrote anything. Weber played him a piece called "'A' Rag," a performance that convinced Dylan of Weber's instrumental abilities. Dylan then played "Idiot Wind" to Weber and asked him if he could learn it and teach it to the other musicians. "Because he wanted to keep it fresh and didn't want to have to keep going over it," recalls Weber. "So he laid down a C minor chord...[and] he proceeded to teach me the progression of the song 'Idiot Wind'...In a few minutes we worked out the song. I suggested an A minor seventh chord instead of the A seventh chord that he had been playing, and he said, 'Leave that in there; that sounds nice.' I learned the song, we left the booth, and I went out and taught it to the band."
Dylan proceeded to re-record "Idiot Wind" backed by these local musicians, and after Dylan punched in a few vocals, Peterson had to leave for his regular, pre-arranged performance at a local jazz club. There would be no time for a replacement, but sometime after Peterson's departure, rather than end the session, Dylan informed engineer Paul Martinson that he wanted to record "You're a Big Girl Now."
"I remember 'You're a Big Girl Now' in particular," recalls Inhofer. "I couldn't play the organ part the way [Dylan] wanted it because I wasn't very well versed in Hammond B-3 at the time...he said, 'No, man - here, you go play the piano, I'll play the organ.' And so I was learning the song on the piano and he was standing next to me when I played a third in the bass, an F sharp over the D chord, and he said, 'Hey, what's that? That's cool, I like that, keep that in."
Two complete takes of "You're a Big Girl Now" were recorded when Weber suggested a twelve-string guitar to "give it a lot more fullness." Dylan almost sent Weber on an errand to retrieve a twelve-string guitar, but by then it was getting late, and they decided to call it a night. Master takes of "Idiot Wind" and "You're a Big Girl Now" were later selected from this session would ultimately replace the 'New York' master take on the final album.
Dylan was pleased with the results from the 27th, and the same musicians were asked to return to Studio 80 for a second session. This time, Weber brought mandolin player Peter Ostroushko and banjo player Jim Tardoff "because Bob had mentioned on Friday that he really wanted this to be an acoustic album, a return to his roots...So he was open to other traditional acoustic instruments."
On December 30th, the local musicians, with Ostroushko and Tardoff, re-convened at Studio 80, where Dylan proceeded to re-record "Tangled Up in Blue," "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," and "If You See Her, Say Hello."
During the New York sessions, Dylan recorded "Tangled Up in Blue" in the key of E with an open-tuning configuration. When he began sessions in Minneapolis, Dylan raised the pitch, performing the song in the key of G. Dylan was pleased with this new key, but when he asked Odegard what he thought of the new arrangement, he was taken aback when Odegard called it "passable." Odegard would later claim that he was so relaxed, he did not realize the impact of his casual response until seconds later. Fearing his termination was imminent, Odegard quickly added that "it would be better, livelier, if we moved it up to A with capos. It would kick ass up a notch." Dylan thought it over and said, "All right, let's try it." Odegard and Weber then moved their capos up two frets while Dylan simply adjusted his fingered bar-chord positions. The new key also prompted Dylan to sing with more force in order to hit the higher notes. After a successful run-through with this new key, Odegard then suggested a new guitar lick.
Odegard had been experimenting with a new guitar lick similar to one he had heard on a Joy of Cooking song called "Midnight Blues." "It was a 'ring-a-ding-ding' figure that seemed to work well as an intro and a repeating figure on the front of each verse, so I stuck with it," recalls Odegard. With Dylan's approval, Odegard applied this lick to "Tangled Up in Blue," where it ultimately remained.
"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" was arranged in the key of D, and when Dylan realized that the harmonicas he brought were not in the same key, Weber called his wife and asked her to go to their music store and retrieve the appropriate harmonica. Meanwhile, Dylan worked with Berg and Peterson on the song's rhythmic structure. Before Weber's wife arrived with a number of different harmonicas, the arrangement was essentially finished, and after a quick rehearsal, Dylan launched the band into a recorded take using one of his incorrect harmonicas. "Not the wrong harmonica necessarily," recalls Weber, "but it was certainly the wrong key for the song...Dylan used an A harmonica on the song and can be heard throughout the introduction scrambling to find notes that worked on the mismatched instrument, which harmonized neither in the tonic position nor in a blues configuration, or 'cross-harp' styling." (Actually, Dylan clearly uses a G harmonica, which produces the D mixolydian mode.) By the time Weber's wife arrived, the recording was completed, and it would be the first and only take recorded; despite the wrong harmonica, it was eventually set aside as the new 'master take.'
"If You See Her, Say Hello" was the last song recorded at the December 30th session; once again, Peterson had to leave in mid-session due to a pre-arranged performance at a local jazz club, and therefore was unable to participate in the song's recording.
Master takes selected from the December 30th session would replace the 'New York' master takes on the final album, but not before some major overdubbing. "He overdubbed on every single song [recorded at the Minneapolis sessions]," recalls Odegard. "He even overdubbed a mandolin on 'If You See Her, Say Hello,' borrowed it from Peter Ostroushko to play what's called a 'butterfly' part, in a higher register; Peter played his part, but Dylan played it as well. And Dylan overdubbed the flamenco guitar parts on 'You're a Big Girl Now' and 'If You See Her, Say Hello,' too."
The revised edition of Blood on the Tracks was eventually released on January 17th, 1975, but test pressings of the original version were eventually replicated and heavily bootlegged.
When Blood on the Tracks was released, the original album credits were not changed, omitting the Minneapolis musicians from the sleeve notes. Columbia allegedly wanted to exhaust their supply of album sleeves (printed before Dylan's decision to hold additional sessions at Studio 80), after which new sleeves would be printed with the correct album credits. However, this was never done, and subsequent re-issues of Blood on the Tracks still incorrectly list Deliverance as the only musicians involved.
In the early 1980s a CX encoded version was released making it the only CX encoded Dylan album.
[edit] The songs
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The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. |
Salon.com critic Bill Wyman writes that "the apogee of [Dylan's] career is perhaps Blood on the Tracks. In his infrequent interviews, Dylan snaps when people ask if the record is the account of his breakup with Sara. In any case, with 15 years of fame behind him and the failure of a decade-long marriage in front of him, it is true that Dylan on this album looks at the world through blood-spattered glasses. The losses he is singing about seem fatal; his anger on songs like 'Idiot Wind' is Lear-like...
"Early one morning the sun was shining," the album begins. Dylan's voice is quieter and silkier than it ever sounded, or ever would again; each line, each word, on the record is articulated and, seemingly, meant. More than 25 years after its release it provides unexpected and moving moments. A title like 'You're a Big Girl Now' seems as if the track will be of a piece with his most condescending love songs; yet it turns out to be arranged, performed and sung in the gentlest of ways. Two lines in, Dylan sings, 'I'm back in the rain,' and a minute later, at some last emotional end, he whispers, 'I can change I swear' - an ineffable moment in his most vulnerable song.
"'Idiot Wind' is about truth, love, hatred and the Grand Coulee Dam; 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' is a meticulously constructed abstract western. The last track, 'Buckets of Rain,' is a throwaway -- rain imagery permeates the album. It seems innocent, until you listen closely and hear the easygoing guitar line that anchors the song echo and break, the strings buzzing against the guitar neck, the guitarist's hands snapping off the frets. And then you notice the album's over."
"In the first verse of 'Tangled Up in Blue,' the singer stands hitchhiking on the side of a road in the rain, thinking about his dues," writes National Public Radio's Tim Riley. "By the end of the second verse, he's driven with his lover to the West Coast and abandoned the relationship along with the car. From there, the song is a tableau of encounters that conveys an atmosphere of detachment from both his lover and the people they knew together."
In an interview taken in 1985, Dylan said that "'Tangled Up in Blue'...was another one of those things where I was trying to do something that I didn't think had ever been done before. In terms of trying to tell a story and be a present character in it without it being some kind of fake, sappy attempted tearjerker. I was trying to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images...I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting."
In "Simple Twist of Fate" the narrator experiences what he feels is a passionate one-night stand, but when he wakes up the next morning, he sits in an empty room, wondering if the woman he had the night before is thinking about him at all.
As described by Riley, "'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' is an intricately evasive allegory about romantic facades that hide criminal motives, and the way one character's business triggers a series of recriminations from people he doesn't even know."
Riley writes that "'Shelter from the Storm'...accepts bitterness and solitude as a necessary price for buying into love's illusions, the inward scorn that repays innocence."
[edit] Outtakes and alternate versions
Tim Riley describes "Up to Me" as "another buried treasure that becomes a sublime cover on Roger McGuinn's Cardiff Rose (1976)...its armload of self-referencing touches operate as blueprints for Blood on the Tracks' major themes of obsession, denial, and melancholy humor. 'Up to Me' works as both the engine of feeling underlying the album and one of the sliest self-references Dylan ever gets up the nerve to sing: 'How my lone guitar played sweet for you that old-time melody / And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for you, free... / You know it was up to me.'" A serious contender for the album, it was omitted due to an overabundance of material. It was later issued on 1985's Biograph.
Blood on the Tracks also produced one of Dylan's most popular bootlegs, a replicated version of the acetate test pressings created for the album's original configuration. With both the original 'New York' master takes and the Minneapolis re-recordings made available for comparison, there's been much debate among critics and fans alike over Dylan's decision to replace five songs on Blood on the Tracks with the Studio 80 re-recordings.
Riley argues that Dylan "was probably right to chuck the New York tracks for the Minneapolis band, not only because with new players the songs get a refreshingly naive surface that rubs up against their world-weary outlook, but because Dylan's singing in New York is so soft it sounds swallowed - a whole record of that couldn't have carried the same load."
Critic Robert Christgau wrote, "The first version of this album struck me as a sellout to the memory of Dylan's pre-electric period; this [revised edition], utilizing unknown Minneapolis studio musicians who impose nothing beyond a certain anonymous brightness on the proceedings, recapitulates the strengths of that period."
Critic Paul Nelson would later describe the Minneapolis band in Rolling Stone Magazine as "that wonderful pseudonymous band from Minnesota, who clearly have an affinity for Dylan and his music."
However, Clinton Heylin argues that the Studio 80 version of "You're a Big Girl Now" was "a mere reflection of the ghost of a pale shadow of its New York self" while the Studio 80 version of "If You See Her, Say Hello" was "subjected to a number of minor changes and one line - 'If you're making love to her' became 'If you get close to her' - that stepped back from the intimacy and real hurt in the original." Though he concedes that Studio 80 versions of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" and "Tangled Up in Blue" "may have the edge on the New York takes," he also criticizes the Studio 80 version of "Idiot Wind," arguing that although "the rewrites made for a more poetic lyric, they worked at the expense of the song's sense, which, when aligned to its Minneapolis performance, is overwrought, and belies all the underlying sorrow rippling through the original vocal."
"I really thought that what Paul Griffin and I did [at the September 19th session] was far superior to what was used on the final version of the album," Tony Brown later said. "Nothing can touch our version of 'Idiot Wind.' And I remember getting out of the sessions and telling people how great these new songs were."
[edit] Aftermath
When Blood on the Tracks was first released, critical reception was somewhat mixed. Crawdaddy reviewer Jim Cusimano disparaged the album for its "instrumental incompetence" while NME's Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise takes." Rolling Stone reviewer Jon Landau, arguably Dylan's most vocal critic throughout his early career, wrote that "the record itself has been made with typical shoddiness. The accompanying musicians have never sounded more indifferent...To compare the new album to Blonde on Blonde at all is to imply that people will treasure it as deeply and for as long. They won't...Blood on the Tracks will only sound like a great album for a while. Like most of Dylan, it is impermanent."
Despite harsh reviews by critics like Landau and Kent, Blood on the Tracks still received its fair share of positive reviews upon its release. Rolling Stone published a four page debate between supporters and detractors of the album, while critic Paul Williams called it "the best album of the last five years by anybody."
"Dylan's new stance is as disconcerting as all the previous ones," wrote Robert Christgau, "but the quickest and deepest surprise is in the music itself. By second hearing its loveliness is almost literally haunting, an aural déjà vu. There are moments of anger that seem callow, and the prevailing theme of interrupted love recalls adolescent woes, but on the whole this is the man's most mature and assured record." Christgau then gave the album an A rating.
When The Village Voice conducted its prestigious Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1975, Blood on the Tracks managed to place at #4; Dylan and The Band's The Basement Tapes reached #1, having been issued later that year.
The general public was also receptive to Blood on the Tracks; the album became his second consecutive American chart-topper.
Decades later, any negative assessments of the album were very much in the minority. One of the most celebrated albums in rock history, in 1997 Blood on the Tracks was named the 11th greatest album of all time in a 'Music of the Millennium' poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 1998 Q magazine readers placed it at number 45, while in 2003 the TV network VH1 placed it at number 29. In 1987 it was ranked number 12 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best albums of the period 1967-1987 and number 16 on their later list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". An FM radio station in Philadelphia, WXPN 88.5, compiled a list of the top 885 albums of all time, where it placed at number 5. It most recently was number 4 on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of The 1970s.
Critic Bill Wyman would later call 'Blood on the Tracks "[Dylan's] only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion, written and rewritten, formed in a way his songs almost never are. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."
Clinton Heylin would also write that Dylan had reinvented "his whole approach to language. Gone were the surrealistic turns of phrase on Blonde on Blonde, gone was the 'wild mercury sound' surrounding those mystical words. In their place was a uniformity of mood, a coherence of sound, and an unmistakable maturity to the voice...He had never sung better.
"Blood on the Tracks was not only markedly superior to the juvenile angst of Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan's last 'confessional' album, but the album of a man in his mid-thirties, coming to terms with all the water that has passed under the old bridge. For the first time he was confronting the previous decade as a survivor, willing to reminisce about a time when 'revolution was in the air,' while insisting that his primary concerns lay elsewhere."
As Heylin writes, Dylan would continue to mine the "rich vein of language struck on Blood on the Tracks" when he composed "Abandoned Love" soon after. Around the same time, Dylan wrote another new song titled "One More Cup of Coffee." Both songs would set the stage for his next album, one that marked another dramatic change in his musical direction.
[edit] Track listing
[edit] Side one
- "Tangled Up in Blue" – 5:40
- "Simple Twist of Fate" – 4:18
- "You're a Big Girl Now" – 4:36
- "Idiot Wind" – 7:45
- "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" – 2:58
[edit] Side two
- "Meet Me in the Morning" – 4:19
- "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" – 8:50
- "If You See Her, Say Hello" – 4:46
- "Shelter from the Storm" – 4:59
- "Buckets of Rain" – 3:29
[edit] Credits
- Bob Dylan – Guitar, Harmonica, Keyboards, Vocals
- Bill Peterson – Bass
- Eric Weissberg – Banjo, Guitar
- Tony Brown – Bass
- Charlie Brown – Guitar
- Bill Berg – Drums
- Buddy Cage – Guitar (Steel)
- Barry Kornfeld – Guitar
- Richard Crooks – Drums
- Paul Griffin – Organ, Keyboards
- Gregg Inhofer – Keyboards
- Tom McFaul – Keyboards
- Chris Weber – Guitar, Guitar (12 String)
- Kevin Odegard – Guitar
- Phil Ramone – Engineer
- Pete Hamill – Liner Notes
- Ron Coro – Art Direction
