The raw, painful birth of Blood on the Tracks

[corbe]

The raw, painful birth of Blood on the Tracks

Sean O'Hagan
 
8 hrs ago
 

Bob Dylan on stage in a surprise performance at a benefit gig in San Francisco on 23 March 1975, two months after the release of Blood on the Tracks.© Michael Ochs Archive/Getty 

On 16 September, 1974, Bob Dylan entered A&R recording studios in New York to begin work on his 15th studio album. He was 33 years old, his marriage was on the rocks and, despite a successful comeback tour that same year, his reputation rested solely on the epochal songs he had produced a decade previously. Having so defined the 1960s, Dylan had become an increasingly marginalised figure following his retreat to rural Woodstock at the close of the decade. The domestic normality he found there had precipitated a run of low-key, creatively unfocused albums that stretched from 1969’s Nashville Skyline to 1974’s Planet Waves. All that was about to change.

The making of the masterpiece that is Blood on the Tracks is as tangled a tale as any in Dylan’s long recording career. A version of the album was completed over four days in the studio in New York, the pace of Dylan’s impatient creativity confounding the hastily assembled band that had been recruited to flesh out his darkly reflective songs. Guitarist Eric Weissberg later recalled: “I got the distinct feeling Bob wasn’t concentrating, that he wasn’t interested in perfect takes. He’d been drinking a lot of wine, he was a little sloppy, but he insisted on moving forward, getting on to the next song without correcting obvious mistakes.” For the second day’s session, only one of the six musicians was retained, while two others were drafted in.

The finished album was scheduled for late December release. A record cover was printed, an advertising campaign finalised and test pressings dispatched to selected radio stations. A dissatisfied Dylan spent Christmas with his brother, David Zimmerman, his closest confidant. On hearing the finished record, David told him that it would fail commercially because the songs were too stark and stripped back to appeal to a mass audience. Rattled, Dylan derailed his triumphant return by insisting at the last minute that the album be withdrawn from the schedules.

<..snip..>

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/the-raw-painful-birth-of-blood-on-the-tracks/ar-BBOZZqb?ocid=ientp

[andy58-in-nh]

Many of Dylan's songs continue to resonate and endure, even as the work of so many others of his time have faded. My appreciation of his lyrics has grown as I have aged. 

They sat together in the park
 As the evening sky grew dark
 She looked at him and he felt a spark
 Tingle to his bones
 'Twas then he felt alone
 And wished that he'd gone straight
 And watched out for a simple twist of fate

* * *

'Twas in another lifetime
 One of toil and blood
 When blackness was a virtue
 The road was full of mud
 I came in from the wilderness
 A creature void of form
 "Come in," she said, "I'll give you
 Shelter from the storm"

* * *

She was working in a topless place
 And I stopped in for a beer
 I just kept looking at the side of her face
 In the spotlight, so clear
 And later on, when the crowd thinned out
 I was just about to do the same
 She was standing there, in back of my chair
 Said to me "Don't I know your name?"
 I muttered something underneath my breath
 She studied the lines on my face
 I must admit, I felt a little uneasy
 When she bent down to tie the laces
 Of my shoe
 Tangled up in blue

[Sanguine]

My favorite Dylan album. 

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early Spring, is livin' there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so

We had a falling-out, like lovers often will
And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we've never been apart

If you get close to her, kiss her once for me
I always have respected her for busting out and gettin' free
Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in the way
Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay

I see a lot of people as I make the rounds
And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town
And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off
Either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she’s passin’ back this way, I'm not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she's got the time

[berdie]

I can't argue...he was a superior lyricist.

[corbe]

   I like this one off of Hwy 35 Revisited.


Mama’s nowhere to be found, perhaps, she’s finally skipped town

My phone continues to ring, not answering brings less misery
I know it’s just a Sheriff or a Hospital Geek that wants me to share their pain
Cause Mama’s little baby has just been incarcerated, again.
Parole blown to shit at 28, looking at a hard 10,
It’s still a much better life than where she’s ever been.
Truck stops and dope robbed her of her soul
Shiny new shovels, she kept digging her hole.
I’ve checked both the local homeless camps
Talked to the drunks on the crumbling boat ramps

Mama’s nowhere to be found, perhaps, she’s finally skipped town

She has clean clothes, big boobs and no phone
Accessorizing her tortured soul that claims no home.
Her mind as shattered as her loving heart
She just can’t find a clue on where to start
The putting back together what was once whole
Stopping the spiral in her world gone cold
You may ask me why I just won’t let her go
And you’d be right to question this row that I hoe
But she took my wallet so I wrote this

Mama’s nowhere to be found, perhaps, she’s finally skipped town

[TomSea]

There is no "was" as far as Dylan is concerned, he's still writing great stuff and last I knew, toured....

I think I even posted an article in the past 2 years, where,  maybe he even follows the Christian faith some....maybe later, I will go find that article.

[TomSea]

We have that thread on Saudi Arabia....

From one of Dylan's early albums, he had "Masters of War", we are defniitely selling weapons, so are the UK and Canada for that matter. But I'll keep the conversation light... good song though, on either Free Wheelin' or Another side of BD.

[TomSea]

I don't want to get too off track but it has always seemed "Desire" is sort of like a sister album to "Blood on the Tracks", "Blood on the tracks" yes, probably much more of a landmark album but "Desire" has moments.

So, I always liked the song on "Desire" "Joey" and figured, it's about Joey Gallo. Anyone can search the web for themselves.... but the overall impression of this Joey Gallo from what I read is very, very negative, he seems like he was a bad dude. I think they say the same thing for the Hurricane, Ruben Carter... they say he was actually guilty. I don't know myself. I'll just enjoy the songs.

[corbe]

   I wore out that cassette Tom along with Blond on Blond. He got mixed up with Billy Graham in the 80's I believe, but quickly became disillusioned with it after a couple of Lp's (which were shitty).

[corbe]

listened to Desire today, many good cuts on that CD.

[TomSea]

In a pig's eye,  it's bad music @corbe

Dylan's Christian period is very good. I don't know if it was Billy Graham, I really thought it was Johnny Cash.

I mean, to actually write these kinds of lyrics from "Man Gave Names To All The Animals":

! No longer available

He saw an animal that liked to growl,
Big furry paws and he liked to howl,
Great big furry back and furry hair.
"Ah, think I'll call it a bear."

Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, in the beginning.
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, long time ago.

He saw an animal up on a hill
Chewing up so much grass until she was filled.
He saw milk comin' out but he didn't know how.
"Ah, think I'll call it a cow."

Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, in the beginning.
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, long time ago.

He saw an animal that liked to snort,
Horns on his head and they weren't too short.
It looked like there wasn't nothin' that he couldn't pull.
"Ah, think I'll call it a bull."

Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, in the beginning.
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, long time ago.

He saw an animal leavin' a muddy trail,
Real dirty face and a curly tail.
He wasn't too small and he wasn't too big.
"Ah, think I'll call it a pig."

More fine Dylan:

! No longer available

[corbe]

   @TomSea I was being too unkind in my sweeping generalizations of his 'Christian' period.  I really like Slow Train Coming (1979) but his next 2, Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) are not even in my catalogue. 

   Here's an interesting article about this particular period in his life.  (Caution: SALON)


A simple twist of faith: Reconsidering Bob Dylan’s “Christian period”

For a brief and now mostly forgotten moment, he was an evangelist — a new collection of songs demands we look back
 
Aaron Carnes

November 4, 2017 6:00pm (UTC)
 

“There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore,” Bob Dylan told a crowd of 1,400 folks at the Emergency Civil Liberty Committee’s annual Bill of Rights dinner in 1963 during his acceptance speech for the Tom Paine Award.

“There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics” he added. Odd words for a person being honored for their work promoting civil rights, let alone someone who had quite recently become a protest-music icon.

 That wasn’t even the strangest part of the speech. He also said of Lee Harvey Oswald days after he assassinated President John F. Kennedy “I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him.” He continued in another vein, “My friends don’t have to wear any kind of thing to prove that they’re respectable Negroes.”

<..snip..>

https://www.salon.com/2017/11/04/bob-dylan-christian-period/

[TomSea]

There's that one website (there might be another that does that) that deal with song meanings.

Scroll to the comments area, some pretty interesting analysis on 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts', an amazing narrative. What is the song meaning?

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/lily-rosemary-and-the-jack-of-hearts

[corbe]

   Thanks for the LINK @TomSea BKMK'd it, very interesting