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'Twas in Another Lifetime • James Campion Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks at 50

You'll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry
                    “Idiot Wind”
 
     It took 33 years on the planet – a major portion of which was spent writing brilliantly devised and potently immersive songs – for Bob Dylan to finally confront the mythic jumble of contradictory conceits that was Bob Dylan. In the fall of 1974, balancing the thin line between cultural relic and luminary echo, the once reluctant “voice of a generation” entered a studio in New York City to record a collection of songs of genuine heartache, personal confusion, romantic conflict and elusive identity. By way of an ad hoc redo in Minneapolis two months later, the result was to become Blood on the Tracks, an aptly titled masterpiece that turns 50 this January, and is widely considered his finest work. I agree it is his best album, and I’m going to attempt to tell you why.
     Blood on the Tracks is Dylan stripped of artifice he so effectively fashioned since he emerged as a bizarre mid-western figure out of the clubs of Greenwich Village, the one acutely illustrated in James Mangold’s new film A Complete Unknown (also aptly titled), which stars a rather convincing Timothée Chalamet, who while doing a laudible job not devolving into parody was still given the difficult assignment to play what amounts to a phantom that enters and leaves scenes as nothing more than a mirror to how people perceive or confront him – lovers, accompanists, managers or those merely digesting his music. The Dylan in Blood on the Tracks is not the sellable hobo, finger-pointing seer, speed-addled hipster or Woodstock recluse. The album serves as a demystification of the former Robert Zimmerman’s non de plume.
     By the early 70s, Dylan’s changeling-as-challenge existence had waned considerably, but the catalyst to his most intimate portrayal on record was the slow and painful dissolution of his marriage to former actor/model, Sara Dylan, aka Sara Lownds (born Shirley Marlin Noznisky). Like Dylan, Lownds created a reflection of several myths, dabbling in magic and quoting folklore as a matter of blithe conversation. Her sad, piercing eyes and wispy elegance captured Dylan, as did his first significant female relationships with Suzie Rotolo, who spawned the socially conscious Dylan, and Joan Baez that formed the fame-conscious one. However, unlike those relationships, Dylan found solace in Lownds, moving from woman-as-muse posturing to actual familial connection. 
 
People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within
I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring
She was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate
                          “Simple Twist of Fate”
 
     The fissures to their bond clearly shook Dylan to his core – that core being music, his cathedral to expunge pain and express vitriol, which underscores the central theme of Blood on the Tracks, regret. These are songs penned by a man who felt far more comfortable aiming his considerable weaponry outward but would now be forced to recall a journey filled with so much promise but was now felled by two invincible psyches. Thus, he begins the album with the serpentine “Tangled Up in Blue,” a touchstone fable replete with timestamps, name-drops and locations that revisit the seminal moments of a relationship to find the missing threads that failed them.  
     Dylan came to realize that “Tangled Up in Blue,” like his emotions, was a fluid piece of art, as he would continue altering its lyrics throughout his life in live performances, as if he had more to say but could only get so much onto tape.
     Lownds and Dylan had three children, one adopted from her previous marriage, spending much of their time up in the Woodstock area of New York after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident – an event shrouded in as much mystery and myth as anything in Dylan’s life. There, the “escapist Dylan” emerged, shedding the skins of the former icon, a trick he had not tried since stumbling into folk-icon Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in the brutal winter of 1961. It was this opaque Dylan that would release confusing and uneven records, make occasional appearances, but avoid fully engaging in the music business until 1974 when he recorded and toured with the Band, whom he worked with on his controversial mid-60s “plugged in” tours with all the booing and gnashing of teeth before those months spent drinking, laughing, and recording some of the most important music in rock history in a basement garage in nearby Saugerties. 
     Throughout, Lownds and Dylan, both philosophical creations coming to grips with a dim sense of reality in a bubble of their own construct, drifted into their own avatars – conjuring parables that fit a comfy narrative. Bob Dylan crystalized this phenomenon on Blood on the Tracks – sweeping allegories of world-conquering love shattered by the cold light of day. The stinging rebukes and solemn misgivings add up to the most resonate writing of his career, because these were stirring personal explorations that did not distort or reimagine reality but face it head-on. 
     The tracks that follow “Tangled Up in Blue” offer glimpses of Dylan’s struggle that unnerve in its discourse, as if the listener is voyeur. "Simple Twist of Fate" is a desperate rummage through the carnage, as is "You're a Big Girl Now" pulling the punches saved for the following track, which unleashes the renowned Dylan fury.    
 
Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence
He's singin’ his song for me
At his own expense
And I'm just like that bird
Oh, singin’ just for you
I hope that you can hear
Hear me singin’ through these tears
                  “You’re a Big Girl Now”
 
     “Idiot Wind” is the album’s centerpiece, its centrifugal force that draws from the wistful beseeching of the previous tracks to an ugliness saved for the most beloved. It is not that Dylan ignored personal relationships in his songs prior to “Idiot Wind” but they were often soaked in allegory or adorned in metaphor – the childish whines of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" from Freewheelin’ when Rotolo left him for a few weeks or the withering spite of his damaged coupling with Warhol “It Girl” Edie Sedgwick, "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" and "Just Like a Woman" on Blonde on Blonde, and it is hard to imagine a more eviscerating personal attack than "Like a Rolling Stone" perhaps Dylan’s meanest statement. But none of those hit as close to the bone as “Idiot Wind,” which comes from the heart of Dylan’s fears about vulnerability and a revelation that the masks he fashioned cannot protect him from his grief.
     There is a ferocious live version of the song from the University of Colorado the following year in which Lownds attended wherein Dylan shouts his pent-up scorn directly at her. His pronouncing each line as if an exorcism is riveting stuff. The disdain that underscores his best 1960s commentary on racism, hypocrisy, and societal strife pales.        
     
I like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your hips
I like the cool way you look at me
Everything about you is bringing me misery
                       “Buckets of Rain”
 
     In the late 90s when he became famous with his Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan the couple’s youngest son described Blood on the Tracks as “my parents talking to each other.” What he specifically meant was the album’s last two tracks, "Shelter from the Storm" and "Buckets of Rain" – the former a celebratory remembrance of the immensity of their love and the latter a requiem to its demise. No two songs in Dylan’s canon laid back-to-back on an album are more striking (not even the dramatic density of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" into "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" from 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home – my second favorite Dylan album). Dylan’s vocals on these (as much of the album) are his sincerest confession to being laid low with zero smarm or erudite phrasing.   
     Dylan immediately understood the magnitude of these songs, as he initially recorded such a deeply melancholy versions of them with top studio professionals overseen by famed producer Phil Ramone that when he returned to Minnesota for the holidays, he considered them to too nakedly emotional and found local Minneapolis musicians – almost none of the professional – to re-record the entire album. Half of what you hear today is from the New York sessions, the other half from his home state – both places a geographical framing of one man trying to come to grips with his fate.
     And finally, Dylan was so spooked by baring his soul on Blood on the Tracks his next record features lyrics from someone else, Jacques Levy, a clinical psychologist, who painted soaring tales of chivalry and adventure, about as far from self-examination as it gets.
     In a career of lyrical and musical brilliance from one of the most important musical and cultural figures of our times, Blood on the Tracks remains Bob Dylan’s creative apex, wherein he releases defiant invincibility to embrace the most human of emotions, hurt, and delivered an epitaph like never before or since.     

Article as it appears in the Aquarian Weekly:
https://www.theaquarian.com/2025/01/29/profonde-musique-twas-in-another-lifetime-bob-dylans-blood-on-the-tracks-at-50/

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Follow at https://www.facebook.com/jamesbartolommeocampion/ X (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion).
 
James Campion is the the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, "Midnight For Cinderella" and “Y”. +, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon” + “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon” and “Take a Sad Song…The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude" and coming in *April 2025, “Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.”

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