Dylan’s Bloody-Best Album: 40 Facts About the 40-Year-Old ‘Blood on the Tracks’
Blood on the Tracks has left a 40-year blood trail back to the moment when rock’s most celebrated singer/songwriter released what stands as arguably the finest album of his career. Bob Dylan hardly faced an impossibly high bar when the album was released on January 20, 1975, since he’d been on an artistic downturn since the mid-‘60s, as far as his most demanding fans were concerned. But he blew expectations out of the water with the release — not with a barrage of electric guitars, as in his “How does it feel?” heyday, but with acoustic instrumentation that somehow made his snarl seem even more vital and indelicate.
For the landmark album’s 40th anniversary, here are 40 facts about Blood on the Tracks:
As the years go on, more and more fans and critics regard it as Dylan’s best album.
When Rolling Stone magazine’s editors made a list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time in the early 2000s, Blood on the Tracks came in at a mere No. 16, trailing top 10 choices Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. But in a 2012 reader poll, fans voted for Blood as his finest work.
Prior to Blood on the Tracks, Dylan hadn’t had a critical success since 1966.
His late ‘60s work was described as “pastoral,” which was not what most fans wanted from rock’s greatest fire-breathing poet. His first proper studio album after years of reclusion, Planet Waves, had reestablished him as a commercial force in 1974, debuting at No. 1, but “Forever Young” was the only classic that stuck.
Rolling Stone initially ran a mixed review of the album.
Then-critic Jon Landau, later to be Bruce Springsteen’s producer/manager, praised Dylan’s vocal work but not the instrumentation, saying it “would only sound like a great album for a while” and was “impermanent.”
Is the album really a secret tribute to a Russian playwright?
In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan was assumed to be referring to Blood on the Tracks when he wrote: “I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories. Critics thought it was autobiographical – that was fine.” No one was certain whether he was serious about the Chekhov.
Novelist Rick Moody is an evangelist for the album, frequently proclaiming it the greatest album ever recorded.
In a 2001 speech that was subsequently anthologized, Moody rhapsodized: “Of thee I sing, best album ever made, or that’s my hypothesis, best rock &roll record ever — more heroic than The Sun Sessions, more consistent than Exile on Main Street, more serious than Never Mind the Bollocks, better than Revolver because there’s no ‘Good Day Sunshine’ on it, more discerning in its rage than Nevermind, more accepting than What’s Going On, less desperate than Pet Sounds, and more adult than Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.”
Another huge fan: Miley Cyrus.
Cyrus released her version of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” in 2012 and subsequently made the song a staple of her touring. No longer was the focus on which lost love Dylan wrote the song about. Hollywood Life spotlighted Miley’s cover version with the headline: “Is She Singing About Liam Hemsworth?”
Miley may not be the strangest artist to have covered one of the songs from the album.
In 2002, Great White released their version of “Tangled Up in Blue.”
“Tangled Up in Blue” also has a special honor in the Rock Band 2 game.
It’s the Mount Everest of Rock Band 2 songs, being the last hurdle to overcome in the “Impossible Vocal Challenge” section.
Hootie and the Blowfish paid serious tribute to the album… and paid for it.
Their 1994-5 smash “Only Wanna Be With You” offers nearly nonstop homage to Blood on the Tracks: A reference to “a little Dylan” is followed by a quote from “You’re a Big Girl Now,” a much longer quote from “Idiot Wind” (“Said I shot a man named Gray / Took his wife to Italy / She inherited a million bucks / And when she died it came to me / I can’t help it if I’m lucky”), and finally a reference to a third song as Darius Rucker adds, “Ain’t Bobby so cool… Yeah, I’m tangled up in blue.” Surely they’d gotten permission? No, and flattery got them nowhere with Dylan’s legal team. In August 1995, the band and Dylan’s publishing company reached an out-of-court settlement that reportedly resulted in an immediate six-figure payout, ownership of half the publishing, and a co-writing credit. (Rucker didn’t hold the legal action against his hero, as he subsequently had a No. 1 country hit with the Dylan co-written “Wagon Wheel.”)
Plenty of other songs sound a little like “Tangled Up in Blue,” though no one’s wanted to go so explicitly down the Hootie path.
Just in case anyone missed that the acoustic strumming at the opening of Elvis Costello’s “King of America” has a resemblance to the beginning of “Tangled,” Costello would sometimes start off his concert versions of his tune with a snippet of the Dylan classic.
Jack White took part in the belated live premiere of the album’s least loved song.
“Meet Me in the Morning” has always been the least celebrated song on Blood on the Tracks. But its blues-based form was right up White’s alley. In 2007, Dylan and the White Stripes’ former leader did a duet of the song at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — astonishingly, the first time Dylan had ever sung it live, and still the last up to this point.
David Duchovny sang a snippet of “If You See Her, Say Hello” on Californication.
His character describes Blood on the Tracks as “a real heartbreak album.”
Jakob Dylan has acknowledged how the album brings up memories of his parents’ marital discord.
In a New York Times profile of the younger Dylan, former Wallflowers manager Andrew Slater recalled a revealing conversation. “I said, ‘Jakob, what goes through your mind when you listen to your father’s records?’ He said, ‘When I’m listening to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ I’m grooving along just like you. But when I’m listening to Blood on the Tracks, that’s about my parents.’ I never asked him again.”
Shortly after the album’s release, Dylan seemed to acknowledge that it was a personally painful work.
Dylan did not do many interviews to promote the album, per usual. But in an April 1975 radio discussion with Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul & Mary fame), he said, “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that—I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.”
Later, he repeatedly scoffed at the idea that the album is the slightest bit “confessional” or “autobiographical.”
In a 1985 interview with Cameron Crowe that accompanied the Biograph boxed set, Dylan expressed his displeasure with the wisespread belief that the Blood lyrics were rooted in his real life. “’You’re a Big Girl Now,’ well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks these interpreters sometimes are…I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It only seems so, like it seems that Lawrence Olivier is Hamlet… Well, actually I did write one once and it wasn’t very good—it was a mistake to record it and I regret it… back there somewhere on maybe my third or fourth album.” (He was referring to 1964’s “Ballad in Plain D,” an exploration of his breakup with Suze Rotolo, which he claimed was the one time he ever overtly mined his own emotional trauma for a song: “That one I look back and I say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’”)
But at one point he at least acknowledged being able to see how other people could see Blood on the Tracks as his personal breakup album.
“I’ve read that that album had to do with my divorce,” he told interviewer Bill Flanagan in 1985. “Well, I didn’t get divorced till four years after that.” (Actually, his wife filed papers just over two years after the album was released.) “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind’… I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn’t… I didn’t feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same thing, I don’t know.” Flanagan pressed and said the album “must at least be somewhat about that.” Dylan’s reply: “Yeah. Somewhat about that. But I’m not going to make an album and lean on a marriage relationship. There’s no way I would do that, any more than I would write an album about some lawyers’ battles that I had. There are certain subjects that don’t interest me to exploit. And I wouldn’t really exploit a relationship with somebody.”
A girlfriend who lived with Dylan on and off during a 1974 marital separation acknowledged that “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” was about their relationship.
Ellen Bernstein was an A&R executive for Columbia Records who embarked on a relationship with Dylan in 1974 while he was living on an 80-acre farm in Minnesota, separated from his wife. The geographical references in the lyrics all pertained to Bernstein, as did, apparently, a particular flower. In Clinton Heylin’s biography, Behind the Shades, Bernstein said, “I remember… when we were walking out in the fields somewhere and I found a Queen Anne’s lace, and he didn’t know that’s what it was called… This was in Minnesota. I would come up there for long weekends and then I would leave. I did say I was planning a trip to Hawaii. And I lived in San Francisco, Honolulu, [her birthplace of] Ashtabula—to put it in a song is so ridiculous. But it was very touching.” Of the relationship, she said, “It felt sorta like ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I was a very young 24… This was brand-new stuff to me, so I never thought to ask, ‘So, what’s going on with your wife?’… I didn’t want to get married, and I wasn’t being asked to leave.”
One outtake may have been cut from the album’s final track list because it really would have invited speculation about Dylan’s failing marriage.
The cut song “Call Letter Blues” (which was finally issued in 1991) included the lyrics: “Well, your friends come by for you/I don’t know what to say/I just can’t face up to tell ’em/Honey, you just went away… Well, children cry for mother/I tell them, ‘Mother took a trip.’”
Both the album and Dylan’s marital breakup were apparently influenced by an octogenarian art teacher.
Dylan fell under the artistic sway of a mercurial painter, Norman Raeben, who taught classes high above Carnegie Hall. He said that Raeben’s artistic methods were the impetus behind him writing time-jumping songs like “Tangled Up in Blue.” “It changed me,” he recalled in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1978. “I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. That’s when our marriage started breaking up. She never knew what I was talking about, what I was thinking about. And I couldn’t possibly explain it.”
At one point Dylan wanted the album to be less acoustic and more of a return to the Highway 61 Revisited sound.
He paid a visit to Michael Bloomfield, the electric guitar hero identified with Dylan’s most rousing mid-‘60s triumphs, and played the some of the new material he was eager to record. But Bloomfield felt confused and unable to follow Dylan’s lead, so the reunion and that sound were not to be.