by Bell, Ian
The insights of Dylan’s mentor have not brought the late painter – who died of a heart attack in December 1978 – much in the way of a posthumous reputation. Art was not revolutionised, it seems, by his interest in synchronicity, or by his insistence on an intense way of seeing. The attention paid to Raeben these days is, rightly or wrongly, most often due to his brief association with Dylan. The singer would nevertheless assert that Blood on the Tracks possessed no sense of time thanks to Raeben. Instead, the record contained a ‘code’ – always a word to feed to certain fans – in its lyrics. You might wonder whether ‘code’ is itself a kind of code, of course, in Dylan’s involuted language. The single known fact is that the album was conceived, written and recorded while his relationship with Sara was cracking and crumbling. To deny that the songs are entirely autobiographical is not to deny that they are drawn, some of them, from life.
One claim is beyond dispute: the verses of any song are parts, inescapably, of the whole. Blood on the Tracks does not stoop to anything as banal as a ‘concept’ – its maker, unlike certain of his contemporaries, didn’t fall for that one – but it possesses a coherence that is formal, emotional and tonal. Art is united in the person, or at least in the persona created. Dylan had begun to ask how the constituent elements of an album might function together.
*
Early in 1974 he had purchased a 100-acre farm on the Crow River, in north-western Hennepin County, Minnesota. The spread, close to the small town of Hanover and perhaps 40 minutes from Minneapolis, had also become home to his brother, David, and to David’s family. After his experiences with Raeben had caused Sara to cease to ‘understand’ him, Dylan took refuge in his home state, amid the landscape he knew best. Hopes of a pastoral idyll were fading with his marriage, but at the farm there was a studio for painting, a slow tributary of the Mississippi flowing by, and freedom from all the freaks and grasping obsessives bewitched by ‘Bob Dylan’ who were liable to render Greenwich Village uninhabitable. In the summer he came to Minnesota, without his wife but not entirely alone. For part of the time, at least, a young woman named Ellen Bernstein, an employee of Columbia Records, was with him.
Dylan was 33 years old, a revolutionary who had outlived his revolution, a family man whose family’s core was disintegrating, a formerly instinctive artist struggling to reawaken his instincts, and a performer who seemed, on the evidence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to have exhausted most creative possibilities. Any one of those facts might have served as a good place to begin to start again.
That summer he began to fill a small, cheap notebook – red, as you are always reminded – with verses enough for seventeen songs, though only ten were placed on the album and only a dozen have seen the light of day. The notebook contained more than he would need. As his subsequent editorial decisions would demonstrate, one mark of the concentrated, distilled quality of Blood on the Tracks is that Dylan never intended to allow it to sprawl, in that pre-digital age, into another of those tricky double albums.
As it was he would push his luck, technically, with a piece of vinyl running to almost 52 minutes of playing time when the experts in these matters decreed, as they still decree, that 22 minutes a side represents the outer limit of acceptable audio quality. A longer single album was close to an impossibility. By the time he was satisfied with his verses, and had begun to play the songs for friends and acquaintances, the hour’s worth of material at his disposal was insufficient for a two-record set, but too much for one disc. Choices were required.2
Many critics and fans would later contend that the marvellous ‘Up to Me’, at over six minutes, was dropped because it was ‘too similar’ to ‘Shelter from the Storm’. Discussing the former in his 1985 notes to the Biograph compendium, Cameron Crowe would certainly label it a ‘companion piece’ to the song used on Blood on the Tracks. It is hard, however, to connect the apocalyptic imagery of ‘Shelter from the Storm’ with the strange remembered road movie that is ‘Up to Me’. Besides, the recordings made by Dylan in New York in September 1974, the ones he fully intended to release before second thoughts intervened, are hardly a musically diverse bunch. The same three or four chords are favoured; open tunings are everywhere in evidence; lyrics with a religious flavour – the only real connection between the two songs – are scarcely rare. The evidence suggests that Dylan dropped a great piece for entirely pragmatic reasons.
It is even possible that the sequencing of the songs on the finished record, a source of much speculation and analysis, was a hard-headed concession to the engineers who would have to master the disc. ‘High-frequency content’ survives best on the outer edges of such an artefact. You finish sides with lighter, shorter tracks if you want to maintain sound quality. ‘Up to Me’ did not fit that bill. To suggest such a thing of any Dylan work is blasphemy, of course.
The first sessions for Blood on the Tracks were held at A&R Studios at 799 7th Avenue in New York. Previously known as Columbia’s Studio A, it was the successor to the hit factory where Dylan had once upon a time recorded six of his finest albums. The first session was held on 16 September, with the artist taking on the duties of producer and the vastly experienced Phil Ramone – the R in A&R – in charge of the engineering.
On that first morning Ramone encountered and promptly hired the multi-instrumentalist Eric Weissberg and his band Deliverance for the evening’s session. They had all the necessary skills. Weissberg could read music and play any instrument liable to be required for recordings in the folk(ish) style. Much good it did him. Dylan arrived and almost immediately began to play, allowing Deliverance little time to notate the music. His tunings were meanwhile strange and unfamiliar, but he made no allowances. Mistakes didn’t seem to trouble him. If his shirt buttons rattled audibly on his guitar’s body, or if the sound of scraping fingernails could be heard, Dylan ignored the distraction. Spontaneity, aided by a good deal of wine, was once again his guiding principle. He had worked hard on his songs, rewriting or discarding verses, determined to stay true to Raeben’s principles. Deliverance, like so many musicians before, would have to shift for themselves.
Ten songs were recorded during the first session. Half a dozen of those, it seems, were somehow put on tape with the aid of Deliverance. Takes of ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ and ‘Meet Me in the Morning’ passed muster. The remainder were set aside. On the next day, Dylan decided that henceforth he needed only the help of the band’s bassist, Tony Brown, and an organist who had worked on Highway 61 Revisited named Paul Griffin. Most of the members of Deliverance had been fired, in other words. ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, ‘Shelter from the Storm’ and ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ were then added to the list of takes meeting the artist’s specifications.
Not for the first time, Dylan was working at lightning speed. He was working, in fact, much as he had done in his very first sessions under the guidance of John Hammond, back in the winter of 1961, in those selfsame studios. He knew no other way, and didn’t care to learn.
The Blood on the Tracks songs were now clear in his head. He expected trained musicians to be able to keep up, no matter what. Nevertheless, his approach to the making of an acknowledged masterwork was a reminder of a curious fact. Dylan had made his name and found fame as a recording artist and yet in reality he was no such thing, at least not as the term is commonly understood. He disliked the entire process and compromised with it grudgingly. In this, he was as much of a purist as the old folk crowd.
In Dylan’s mind, the studio destroyed the essence of music. He consented to overdubs, for example, only with extreme reluctance. As Deliverance were quick to realise, the technical deficiencies in a recording counted for nothing alongside the vitality, the substance, the living heart of a performance. Dylan took a lot of risks, in short, to preserve his idea of real music-making. It would take him decades to come to terms with the consequences of his convictions.
On the afternoon and early evening of the 18th, D
ylan made a couple of attempts at ‘Buckets of Rain’, the half-hopeful track destined to close the finished album, with only the steel guitar player Buddy Cage for company. During the next session, running from Thursday night on the 19th into the early hours of Friday morning, with Tony Brown serving as lone accompanist, Dylan attempted almost three dozen takes of various songs and achieved five he thought good enough to count as finished articles. It seemed he had done it again, just as in the old days: an entire album in something less than a working week. And not just any album.
It was then that he realised that he had made more music than a single vinyl disc could accommodate. ‘Up to Me’, a song most people would have saved at all costs, was removed from the running order. It would remain hidden until the release of the Biograph box set a decade later. As is too often forgotten, however, an album based only on the sessions recorded in New York was even longer, by a good couple of minutes at least, than the album that would eventually see the light of day. Test pressings of Blood on the Tracks were made regardless; artwork was commissioned. A new Dylan album would be ready for the Christmas holiday market.
Then the artist had second thoughts. The standard account holds that while on a December visit to the farm in Minnesota he was convinced by his brother that the album as planned, the album that was set and ready to go, lacked a necessary commercial edge. What was said, if it was said, has been elaborated by a lot of people who were not present. David Zimmerman supposedly argued that the record was too stark, too bare, too daunting. Given that Dylan had set out to make a plain, unadorned and low-key album, this should not have counted as a problem. When, for that matter, had he ever abandoned work on the advice of his beloved brother? The precise origins of the anecdote are elusive. In his 2001 biography of Dylan, Howard Sounes identified the artist himself as being ‘still unhappy about approximately half the tracks he had recorded in New York’.3 Then, and only then, did brother David suggest a local solution.
But who cares? The masterpiece called Blood on the Tracks is the commercially available version you can buy readily. The test pressing, the so-called New York Sessions bootleg, is lovely, startling and arguably superior, especially where ‘Idiot Wind’ is concerned. But Dylan’s decision to re-record, and to do so with a group of local unknowns, speaks of a creeping indecision, an early symptom of the self-doubt that would afflict him in the years to come. Blood on the Tracks in either incarnation would have stood as a remarkable achievement, yet he doubted himself, or was talked into doubting himself.
As it was, he demonstrated yet again that the juvenile medium of pop was capable of an unsuspected maturity. In the 1960s he had shown that popular songs could aspire to the status of literature, that – at worst – a song could be crammed full of metaphors, images and ideas more usually associated with poetry than with teen romance. In that decade, Dylan had shown what could be done with the slippery notion of sensibility. With Blood on the Tracks he turned his ‘break-up’ into a meditation on time, impermanence and loss. One of his subjects – he had a few – was the essential isolation of the human individual, the ache that love couldn’t cure. As in all the best poetry, this was shown, not stated. Those stories by Anton Chekhov, the ones he would mention as inspiration almost 30 years later in his book Chronicles: Volume One, remain entirely plausible candidates for Dylan’s model.
At a place called Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis, close to his Dinkytown stamping-grounds from his very earliest days as a student dropout and apprentice folkie, Dylan repaired the perceived flaws in Blood on the Tracks with a little borrowed 1934 0042G Martin guitar and the help of a pick-up band of local musicians (who never did receive credit). Five tracks were replaced, though whether the substitutes count as an improvement is a matter of opinion. Some such as Clinton Heylin have quibbled, persuasively enough, over a few rewritten lines; others over a ‘loss of focus’. This writer contends that the final version of ‘Idiot Wind’, alone among the released recordings, edges a little too close to melodrama. It is, as Heylin has also observed, ‘overwrought’. The control shown by Dylan elsewhere on the record, the delicacy of emotional interplay, is lost. He lets rip; he allows what sounds in places like self-pity and spite to get the better of him.
When the album appeared, several of the better-known rock critics expressed disappointment, if not disdain, picking out allegedly sloppy musicianship. In Britain, the New Musical Express even called the accompaniments ‘trashy’. Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Jon Landau, wrote of ‘typical shoddiness’. On occasion, the bizarre hybrid form styling itself ‘rock journalism’ was shown to be just as empty-headed as Dylan had always alleged. Wisdom prevailed in the end, shortly followed by unquestioning reverence. The record-buying public in America and Britain had meanwhile voted for Blood on the Tracks en masse, turning it into a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
*
Blood on the Tracks is the musical and literary equivalent of the painter’s penetrating gaze. An album of popular songs – a suite would be the fancier description – was ideal for Dylan’s concentrated purpose. It counts as an obvious fact, but one often overlooked, strangely enough, when the arguments over poetry resume. The artist would discover the truth for himself when he tried to become a film-maker. He had encountered it in the mid-’60s, to his immense frustration, when embarking on the novel that wound up in disarray as the ‘prose experiment’ Tarantula. Song was the only medium in which he truly functioned artistically. Only in songs could verbal compression be combined with narrative, the internal logic of imagery – his imagery above all – and the emotional colouring of melody. That much is, or ought to be, self-evident. But in Dylan’s hands, on Blood on the Tracks, song became something more expansive than poetry. The usual charge against his art should have been turned on its head. The problem, if it ever was a problem, was not that his ‘poems’ failed to ‘work on the page’. The printed page was an utterly inadequate expression, a hollow echo, of the performed songs. Write about what Dylan wrote and you have not begun to say even the half of it. Everything said about this artist’s work is paraphrase.
Between September and December of 1974 five Blood on the Tracks songs were remade. The effect, in several cases, was to depersonalise the works slightly, as though Dylan was putting a safe distance between himself and the belief that he was engaged in naked autobiography. Any judgement remains a matter of opinion. Perhaps he wanted to prevent his audience from getting the wrong idea about private truths and public art, or perhaps he realised that he had gone too far, revealed too much, and invaded his own privacy.
Equally, a song such as the long ballad-fable ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, recorded first in New York with just Dylan’s guitar, is not easily explained, even as metaphor, as the story of a marriage. Those who care to take the alleged esoteric wisdom of Tarot cards seriously might find a nuptial allegory in the verse-movie. There is also an obvious sense in this tale’s plot that life is a performance and a game, that fate is the luck of the draw. Dylan is happy enough, meanwhile, to find symbolism in a frontier story: you don’t call your elusive man of mystery the Jack of Hearts for nothing. But you could equally argue that the writer is as interested in extending his beloved ballad tradition as he is in supplying puzzles for critical analysis.
He had dabbled often enough before in gambling songs. The fourth poem from his ‘Some Other Kinds of Songs’ on the sleeve of 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan had taken its inspiration, and a line or several, from the old blues piece ‘Jack o’ Diamonds (Is a Hard Card to Play)’. Whether Dylan knew it from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tex Ritter, Odetta or Mance Lipscomb is neither here nor there. Playing card imagery had long been his stock-in-trade, as it would remain. ‘Lily, Rosemary’ does not fit easily, for all that, with the supposed ‘break-up’ theme of Blood on the Tracks.4
‘Shelter from the Storm’ is another of the album’s songs that could be represented as an allegory on mystical bonds, but in no possible sense is it a literal account of mar
ital relationships. Dylan might now and again mythologise his existence and its travails, but if autobiography lies in these verses it is buried so deep as to be invisible. At best, you could say that he has given the most profound aspects of marriage a fictional setting, slap in the middle of a landscape that is part biblical, part western and part apocalyptic. The song contains one of his very finest couplets: ‘Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line / Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.’ But the writer who wants to ‘turn back the clock to when God and her were born’ is not talking about a long-married couple drifting apart.
Such truths did Dylan no good, in any event. Blood on the Tracks was filed instantly under ‘autobiography’, where it has remained. It was deemed a record about a break-up, ‘lost love’, pain, loneliness and redemptive hope. It is all those things, of course, but it is more than that. Dylan, you suspect, couldn’t help himself. His songs had always enlarged the meaning of personal experience. He had never believed, like so many of the singer-songwriters who followed in his wake, that an event was of consuming importance simply because it had happened to him. Blood on the Tracks had to do with what it meant to be human, with the struggle of those born alone to communicate with one another. In his otherwise-hyperbolic original sleeve notes for the album, the journalist Pete Hamill had rightly called this ‘the quarrel of the self’.
Interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1978, Dylan said of the song ‘Tangled Up in Blue’: ‘What’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics, and there’s also no sense of time. There’s no respect for it. You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.’ Such was the art and craft underpinning the work. It made the confessional aspects of the song and the album almost incidental.