PART TWO
City
5-18 February 19756
Bob Dylan wasn’t kidding when he called his new album Blood on the Tracks—the songs are covered with it. “Warn all gentle and fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book,” Herman Melville wrote of Moby-Dick, full of delight at his work and full of worry at its reception; Dylan has a right to feel the same. Blood on the Tracks is an album of wounds: at once the tale of an adventurer’s war with a woman and with himself, and a shattering attempt to force memory, fantasy, and the terrors of love and death to serve an artist’s impulse to redeem disaster by making beauty out of it.
It is a great record: dark, pessimistic, and discomforting, roughly made, and filled with a deeper kind of pain than Dylan has ever revealed. And while there are echoes of Dylan’s earlier work on Blood on the Tracks (for its themes, Another Side of Bob Dylan; for its unity, John Wesley Harding; for its singing, Before the Flood), the only thing about Bob Dylan that could have prepared his audience for this music is his refusal ever to be pinned down.
Dylan is offering a fiction here, but he assumes the central role, kicking off his story with “Tangled Up in Blue,” a cracked narrative that introduces us to the hero of Blood on the Tracks and to the woman he will pursue, abandon, damn, lose and lose again, right through to the album’s end, nearly an hour later. Save for “You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go,” the album’s one certifiable stinker, the songs are as good as any Dylan has ever written—every one of them different, and all of a piece.
In a little hilltop village
They gambled for my clothes
Little red wagon, little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like
They say I shot a man named Gray
And 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
This is classic American songwriting, as plain and mysterious as twenties country music, thirties blues, or fifties rock ’n’ roll—stuff like the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” Buell Kazee’s “East Virginia,” Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodels, Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues,” Willie Brown’s “Future Blues,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight to the Blind,” Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love.” These songs are as obvious and unsettling as weather; no one can fail to understand them, and no one can get to the bottom of them, either. Blood on the Tracks is no different.
The backing on the album is merely functional, undistinguished save for Dylan’s harmonica, and his guitar on “Buckets of Rain” (he does nothing Ry Cooder couldn’t do, but Cooder couldn’t play with so much soul if he practiced for a hundred years). The music on the best Dylan records has always been special (think of Charlie McCoy’s bass on John Wesley Harding or Kenny Buttrey’s drumming on “Absolutely Sweet Marie”), and I miss that.
Because the music here doesn’t grab you from across the room, you may have to sit down and listen before you find your way into the songs. The album isn’t inaccessible, but it makes demands. You have to bring something to the music before you catch the way Dylan will lead with what might be his worst lines, and then put you away:
Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame, that all we shared can’t last
I, I can change, I swear!
Oh, see what you can do
I can make it through
You can make it, too
One mask of the adventurer fades into another: the perennial innocent of “Tangled Up in Blue” becomes the accuser of “Idiot Wind,” the boozy blues spirit of “Meet Me in the Morning” the fantasist of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” the loser of “Shelter from the Storm” the wasted survivor of “Buckets of Rain.” And if there is a story line running through these songs, and I think there is—the odyssey of a mythical lover possessed by an affair he can never resolve—then “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is at the center of the album. The Jack of Hearts is the secret hero the narrator would be if he could: the dark stranger who sweeps into town, turns it upside down, and makes off with the love of its women and its money to boot before anyone can get a clear look at his face, or his heart. Before and after come the songs of the man as he is: the one who sought shelter from the storm, found it, and lost it.
As he has done before, Dylan has dismissed the whole pop scene by releasing an album that cuts right through it. Blood on the Tracks reveals the emptiness and the failure of nerve of the records that these days pass for genius; it stakes a claim to its own voice, and for as long as the album lasts, that voice is a whole world. Blood on the Tracks proves that Dylan is a pathfinder because in the middle of the city he can discover forgotten streets and make them new.
Most of all, though, I like the way he says “Delacroix.”
Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks (Columbia, 1975).