Remember where you were the first time you heard Blood on the Tracks? Me either. What could have been a stuffy introduction to one of the best albums of all is this, instead. Frankly, Blood on the Tracks is on the turntable upstairs so often, it would be impossible to remember the first time the needle dropped on those grooves. What can be considered, and remembered far fonder than a first-time experience, is longevity. Its impact. Blood on the Tracks turns fifty this year. Autobiographical or not, Blood on the Tracks serves as a sharp turn for Dylan. A moment of no return. He has never sounded the same again. Those religiously guided albums to follow are, for better or worse, a fundamental change in the songwriting style and influences Dylan worked with for Blood on the Tracks.
We like to think, as dedicated fans, that we have a read on Dylan, and that we are capable of picking at the finer details of his great works. But all it amounts to is speculation until the man himself lays down the real meaning. He never will, and so we are free to consider the possibilities of Blood on the Tracks. Not his most influential album, but certainly the most important to come from the 1970s. It rivals some of his best works, up there with Highway 61 Revisited and Time Out of Mind. Superior to Bringing it All Back Home and Another Side of Bob Dylan. Listeners wanted another side, and that is what they got with Blood on the Tracks. A bashful, brutal piece of work which, to this day, profiles a point of no return for the great wordsmith.
Look to the paintings of the late Norman Raeben. That is the catalyst for Blood on the Tracks, not some influential read of Anton Chekov or a tumultuous relationship with a Colombia Records employee. There is a fatigue present in the people Raeben painted, a candid expression of guilt resting on their faces. What he planted in Dylan, who began writing Blood on the Tracks soon after a few weeks of painting with Raeben, is a patronising tone. Idiot Wind stands firm with that feeling but to get there, to the clarity which Dylan held for the B-Side, is to unpick a decade of work. He does so in less than an hour, redeveloping his taste and view of the world around him. Gone is the blistering fear of the Cold War and in comes a general distrust and fury of those closest to him.
Opener Tangled Up in Blue feels for this blunt appraisal not just of the past but of an unwritten future. Blood on the Tracks may hold some links to Chekov after all, but where Dylan has rejected the autobiographical approach in Chronicles, he plays right into our hands with pieces like this. Are we right to say an artist is wrong? That the reading of their work, truthful or not, is simply untrue? Yes. Blood on the Tracks is too clearly a moment of rage defined by the relationships of the time, but it is not, in hindsight or with the context with Chronicles now available, a series of Chekov stories with Dylan’s emotional turn absent. Poison-tipped tracks like You’re a Big Girl Now or the brutal specifics of Idiot Wind are far too poised to be anything but influenced by the personal turmoil of the times.
Those flickers of rage are not the only emotional complexity Blood on the Tracks offers. The likes of You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go and Meet Me in the Morning, the two B-Side openers, offer a complete overhaul of how Dylan feels. Gone is the rage and in comes the regret. Blood on the Tracks is very much an album of two halves. Those passions stay the same but what is key for this is a desire to push on past the coddled and idealised public and private image. Those moments on an album where joy abounds, songs of real quality but without a tinge of fear or, even worse, indifference, as expressed here. Shades of regret appear in If You See Her, Say Hello, but these feel like afterthoughts, moments of half-hearted care to a wronged individual after the breach of the peace on the first side. That is the noise of a man who believes he is liberated, the early morning sunrise of Tangled Up in Blue giving way to the rough way of living.
Pieces like Simple Twist of Fate remain elusive. It is how Dylan has always been and that will not change, even when he states one point, countered by another later down the line. Confessional songs and love songs are admitted to on the At Budokan live album. A criminally underrated piece of work which adds new detail and layers to these songs. Dylan is wrong, to be frank. An artist may intend one thing and end up with another entirely, subconsciously or consciously adapting their lives to their work. Dylan is a slippery beast of a writer and to pin any song of his down to a particular is not just tricky but an ill-fated idea. These are whispers of incredible detail which transcend the usual route to the heart of a songwriter. But he is only human, and with Blood on the Tracks, the same rules apply.
Heartbreak dominates, anger remains and the spite bleeds on through. Unavoidable this may be, it is not as though Dylan feels contempt alone for whoever these songs, barbed they may be, are for. That is where we can trust his interpretation found on the pages of Chronicles. His self-proclaimed “novelistic writing” should be taken with a grain of salt and the understanding of hindsight. Reflection gives way to the romanticism of the past, to opportunities for forgiveness where temper was once passionate and unwieldy. Blood on the Tracks has not lost its jagged edge in the decades to follow. It remains a tender best for Dylan. Simple Twist of Fate and album closer Buckets of Rain hint at a hopeful future. There is light at the end of the tonal, the brutally broken heart still searching despite what it has learned. Blood on the Tracks is as human a profile of Dylan as you can get, that is, until the reflections of Rough and Rowdy Ways.
