Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (7 page)

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 marital 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.

*

Once again, the Dylans attempted to repair their marriage. Love and pride endured, it seems, despite the self-knowledge gained in the writing of the
Blood on the Tracks
songs, and despite the profound bitterness revealed in certain verses of ‘Idiot Wind’. It was one odd, ironic aspect of the album: Dylan had achieved a new ‘mature’ understanding of the human condition, but in his own life he continued to flounder.

He drifted from coast to coast, listening to music, attending parties, performing at a schools benefit in San Francisco organised in March by the promoter Bill Graham. Sara was with him at the show, but whatever hopes she or Dylan entertained for their union were soon confounded. As spring turned towards summer he was in the south of France, spending six weeks with his friend the painter David Oppenheim, and celebrating his 34th birthday with a bout of hedonism that Oppenheim would call ‘pathetic and superb’. Interviewed by the (now extinct) fanzine
Fourth Time Around
, the painter would also remember his friend as lost, confused and despairing, afraid even to sleep alone.

Dylan had expected his wife to join him in Europe, but he was disappointed, bitterly so. He called her frequently, to no avail. By now, the message was very clear. Her patience was at an end, her tolerance and support all but gone. The couple would not be divorced finally until the summer of 1977, amid horrific rancour, but by that time only the formalities remained. There would be other attempts to find ways to renew their vows before the lawyers intervened, but Sara’s refusal to drop everything and fly across the Atlantic was an unmistakable declaration. By the middle of 1975, to all intents and human purposes, the marriage was over.

In France, looking out over vineyards under a pink sky, Dylan once again pulled himself together. His marriage had failed, but his work remained. He decided to remind people of what, in essence, he was. At that moment, work was all that truly remained for an artist who could not be sustained by celebrity alone. In some strange way he was renewed by the fact. The old tenacity, the defiance of every circumstance, reasserted itself. When people ask how it is that this artist endures, decade after decade, one simple answer is stubborn pride.

The summer of 1975 found him in familiar New York haunts, particularly the old Bitter End club on Bleecker Street in the Village, close to the corner with LaGuardia Place and a short walk from his Houston Street loft. For reasons best known to its owners – who would soon acknowledge the mistake – the old joint had been renamed The Other End. Or rather, the club had been absorbed in February of 1974 by its newly acquired adjacent sibling. Crucially, the latter possessed a liquor licence. There Dylan was soon drinking his wine, listening to music, and meeting old friends such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bobby Neuwirth. For a few weeks he was granted the illusion of privacy in a public place. Those with whom he chose to socialise were allowed to approach the presence; the curious and importunate were kept at bay. It was as much as he could hope for.

Dylan was also beginning to wonder what he could do next in his perplexing career. Concert performances built around the
Blood on the Tracks
songs would have been a fascinating proposition, but the notion seems never to have crossed his mind. The writing and recording of that album had each been singular events, born in the moment, and born of the pressure of experience. The achievement was impossible to repeat and he had no desire to try. As usual, Dylan had begun to move on.

A work finished was not a work forgotten, exactly, but already his acclaimed new album was, for him, a thing of the past. As he began to join performers on stage at The Other End, nevertheless, an idea of performance was beginning to form in his mind. He was striking up new acquaintances and soaking up the old communal energy of the Village. Plenty of celebrities had begun to cluster around the club that summer, but the ambience was – or so they and Dylan chose to believe – a world away from the superstar nonsense, the stadiums, limousines, private jets and idolatry, that had marred the 1974 tour with The Band. Perhaps there was another way for him to take his music to the people, and to deal, finally, with the entities he had named Bob Dylan.

*

Just as
Blood on the Tracks
was being released in January of 1975, Dylan decided to allow portions of the celebrated basement tapes to see the light of day. Not once would he manage a convincing explanation for this remarkable change of heart. He had long dismissed the great songs recorded casually in the vicinity of Woodstock in upper New York State during the summer and autumn of 1967 as being of no account. In late 1969 he had told
Rolling Stone
that the tracks were merely demos, that he had been ‘pushed into coming up with songs’. Even when afflicted by writer’s block in the first years of the decade, when partial bootlegs of the tapes were becoming commonplace, he had declined, with a single near-pointless exception, to draw on a catalogue that included ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’.

Talking in April of ’75 to Mary Travers (she of Peter, Paul and Mary) on KNX-FM Los Angeles for his first radio interview since 1966, Dylan was less than illuminating. A couple of months before Columbia’s
The Basement Tapes
received its release, he said:

The records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.

Given that he had taken charge of the project, the ‘somebody’ was almost certainly Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitar player. Dylan had played no real part in the archaeological effort to collect and restore the old tapes. It seems likely, in fact, that he had no clear memory of exactly what the reels of disdained recordings contained. Hence the entirely misleading claim that record-buyers would hear the Woodstock work ‘in its entirety’.
Blood on the Tracks
, an international hit, had just spent a fortnight at the top of the
Billboard
album chart: Dylan had no need of product to satisfy the record company, no requirement for further acclaim. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the 1967 recordings was curious, as it would remain.