Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (6 page)

Blood on the Tracks
is something more than the diary of a divorce, but if Dylan’s account was correct his songwriting was revived and transformed in the second half of the 1970s by a tangle of events, illuminations and misapprehensions. The strange part is that once you have read his explanation, it colours every subsequent experience of the marvellous entangling songs. In blue, mostly.

The teacher in question, an enigmatic, grouchy, Ukrainian-born multilingual septuagenarian named Norman Raeben, would contribute only a little to his pupil’s painterly skills but have a lasting effect on his perceptions. Dylan would characterise him as uncompromising and wholly unimpressed by fame. Supposedly, if you can believe such a thing of an encounter set in New York City in 1974, Raeben had no real idea that a famous singer was one of the less-gifted beginners in his studio on the 11th floor at Carnegie Hall. That part of the anecdote is questionable. For his part, Dylan was, let’s say, more familiar with the famous concert venue than most.
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For a couple of months, nevertheless, the pupil worked dutifully, from 8 a.m. or so until 4 p.m., five days a week, under the irascible Raeben’s guidance, and spent the rest of his time pondering the deeper meaning of the artist’s dictums. Striving to show a class full of off-duty cops, bus drivers, young acolytes and rich old ladies how to look and truly see, the tutor was raising questions about identity, intuition, perspective, illusive time and unmediated creativity. So Dylan believed, at any rate.
Blood on the Tracks
, on his accounting, was a direct result of Raeben’s urgings and of an erstwhile college dropout’s return to school.

In one sense, Raeben was repeating the offer made by Joseph Conrad in the preface to
The Nigger of the Narcissus
(1897). His task, wrote the novelist, was ‘to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you
see
… If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.’ Raeben added an insight of his own on the relationship between time and the visual image that was, for Dylan, more startling and infinitely more suggestive. Of itself, this was odd.

As the singer explained to several interviewers a few years later, time ceases to exist within a painting – the flower doesn’t wither, the clouds don’t move – but continues for the oblivious observer. Which is the illusion? Dylan would also sometimes stress the difference between seeing the parts of a picture and grasping the whole. His stroke of genius was to apply these ideas, trite enough in themselves, to his own art form in 1974.

Like Conrad’s fiction, a song is time-bound; it begins and ends. In music, time in its several senses is everything.
Blood on the Tracks
would dispute the fact. What made the triumph odd, however, was that Dylan treated the illumination as something new, and forgot – or was persuaded to forget – that he had mastered time before, most notably in ‘Visions of Johanna’ on the 1966 album
Blonde on Blonde
. In that song, too, he had played fast and loose with pronouns, permitted identity to become provisional, transposed or overlaid scenes, and allowed the perception of time to become fluid. But in 1974 he and everyone else seemed to forget all the things he had ever known of her, him, them, it, then and now.

Listen to ‘Visions’ and state who ‘he’ is. State the time, in any given verse, in relation to subjective time in any other verse. The
Blonde on Blonde
song, like several others on the album, exploits film grammar rather than paint to achieve the effect. But the fact of its existence acts as an overdue reminder that one of Dylan’s achievements in
Blood on the Tracks
was not without precedent, whatever the writer chose to believe. The important achievement, especially in the mutability cantos of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, was formal. It had to do with language, specifically diction, and emotion. Dylan in his high-’60s swagger, fascinated by dissociation and chaos, had not even paused to consider such a connection. Back then, words had poured from him in a near-spontaneous flood. Older, becoming wiser, he tried to canalise emotions by formal means, through tenses and verse structures, in order to find sense in the shapes he gave them. But life, not the rhetorical gambits of Norman Raeben, caused
Blood on the Tracks
.

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.

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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.
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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, Dylan 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’.
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Then, and only then, did brother David suggest a local solution.