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<\/a><\/p>\nIn\u00a0September, 1974, Bob Dylan spent four days in the old Studio A, his favorite recording haunt in Manhattan, and emerged with the greatest, darkest album of his career. It is a ten-song study in romantic devastation, as beautiful as it is bleak, worthy of comparison with Schubert\u2019s \u201cWinterreise.\u201d Yet the record in question\u2014\u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d\u2014has never officially seen the light of day. The Columbia label released an album with that title in January, 1975, but Dylan had reworked five of the songs in last-minute sessions in Minnesota, resulting in a substantial change of tone. Mournfulness and wistfulness gave way to a feisty, festive air. According to Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, the authors of the book \u201cA Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of \u2018Blood on the Tracks,\u2019\u00a0\u201d from 2004, Dylan feared a commercial failure. The revised \u201cBlood\u201d sold extremely well, reaching the top of the Billboard album chart, and it ended talk of Dylan\u2019s creative decline. It was not, however, the masterwork of melancholy that he created in Studio A.<\/p>\n
For decades, the first \u201cBlood\u201d circulated on a bootleg called the New York Sessions. The compact disc that I picked up in a basement Greenwich Village store had a pleasant overlay of vinyl noise\u2014the result of a transfer from a test pressing. Although several of the tracks have shown up in Columbia\u2019s long-running Bootleg Series, the perennial absence of the full album has made fans wonder whether Dylan is wary of revisiting a turbulent time of his life, when his first marriage, to Sara Lownds, was dissolving. Dylan has denied that \u201cBlood\u201d is autobiographical; in his memoir, \u201cChronicles: Volume One,\u201d he suggests that the songs were based on Chekhov. Artists tend to dislike personal readings of their most personal work.<\/p>\n
Last month, Columbia issued \u201cMore Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 14<\/a>.\u201d Available both as a single-disk compilation and as a six-CD \u201cdeluxe edition,\u201d it is both more and less than what Dylan obsessives have been tiresomely clamoring for. The logical move would have been to include the entire album in its initial guise. Yet the single disk gives you only two of the test-pressing tracks, alongside some admittedly riveting outtakes. The box set has all of the discarded tracks, but they are scattered through a complete chronological survey of the four days of sessions\u2014five and a half hours of Dylan at the height of his powers. You will have to study the track listings to assemble the original record. The elusiveness of \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d has been integral to its allure, and so it remains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Morgan Library, which owns the\u00a0autograph manuscript<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cWinterreise,\u201d also possesses a five-inch-by-three-inch red spiral notebook in which Dylan wrote down lyrics for \u201cBlood on the Tracks.\u201d A hardback book included with Columbia\u2019s \u201cdeluxe edition\u201d reproduces forty pages of sketches. Some of them are sung more or less as written on both incarnations of the album:<\/p>\n He woke up, the room was bare Other lyrics never saw the light of day, and are brutally confessional: \u201cDoomed (led) by a heart that wanders astray \/ Trapped by a brain that I can\u2019t throw away\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Was it really 12 years ago, well, it seems like just the other day\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And it\u2019s Breaking me up with only myself to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n Clich\u00e9s about heartbreak feeding genius fail to explain the singular potency of \u201cBlood on the Tracks.\u201d The rawness of feeling is certainly there, but it is joined to meticulous craftsmanship in the working-out of words and music. The notebook shows constant, obsessive revision\u2014a sort of perfectionism of disaster. \u201cIdiot Wind,\u201d the extended primal scream at the heart of the album, is seen in drafts so crowded with marginal additions that they are hardly legible. Often Dylan doesn\u2019t cross things out, instead superimposing alternatives:<\/p>\n The priest wore black on the seventh day and waltzed around on a tilted floor Such collisions of hallucinatory images and dour realism\u2014the waltzing priest, the marital argument\u2014are common in Dylan\u2019s work, yet here the literary touches seem less an artful device than a form of extreme emphasis. What\u2019s more, the writing process is open-ended: images are shuffled around through successive drafts and, later, through successive takes in the studio. That priest waltzes on a tilted floor; then he waltzes while a building burns; then he sits stone-faced. The wind blows from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras, then to the Capitol.<\/p>\n The music that Dylan wrote for these lyrics has a chilly, clammy air. His guitar is in open-E tuning, meaning that all six strings of the guitar are tuned to notes of the E-major triad:\u00a0E, B, E, G#, B, E. As a result, the tonic chord rings rich and bright. But each verse begins with a jarring A-minor chord, which tends to land awkwardly. The middle note easily strays off center, souring the sound. Occasionally, a stray F-sharp bleeds through, adding a\u00a0Romantic tinge<\/a>. The unwieldiness of the progression is at one with the fraught atmosphere of the text.<\/p>\n The emotional violence is troubling. The word \u201cidiot\u201d is flung down twelve times. Some lines are openly assaultive: \u201cOne day you\u2019ll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes, \/ Blood on your saddle.\u201d Here, Dylan\u2019s original approach makes a substantial difference. He made four complete takes in New York, plus several rehearsals and false starts. Each time, he has only a quiet bass guitar backing him. (A ghostly organ was later overdubbed.) The tempo is slow, the delivery subdued. All this is at odds with the song\u2019s smoldering rage, and the contradiction gets resolved in the final chorus, where Dylan shifts from the second person to the first-person plural: \u201cIdiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats \/ Blowing through the letters that we wrote\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. We\u2019re idiots, babe, it\u2019s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Many Dylanists will disagree with me\u2014the second \u201cBlood\u201d\u00a0has eloquent defenders<\/a>\u2014but to my ears the later version, recorded with six pick-up musicians in Minnesota, cuts out much of the complexity. Mannerisms overtake the singer\u2019s delivery. \u201cIdiot\u201d becomes \u201cyidiot,\u201d and a goofy pirate yowl periodically intrudes: \u201cI woke up on the roadside, daydreaming about the way things sometimes\u00a0aaahhhhhrrrre<\/em>.\u201d (When he does this on one of the New York takes, Tony Brown, the bass player, laughs out loud.) The admission of shared responsibility at the end doesn\u2019t register: you\u2019re carried away by the momentum of the band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n All through the New York sessions, you hear a persistent downward tug in the voice, a grimace of regret. Even the album\u2019s livelier numbers, such as \u201cYou\u2019re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,\u201d can be wrenched into the abyss; on one take, the tempo drastically slows, giving an almost tragic tinge to a line like \u201cI\u2019ve only known careless love.\u201d The potential downside is a tendency toward relentlessness: one piece after another in the key of E, spiralling through love and loss. The final album offers more variety. The Minnesota band gives a rollicking energy to the cinematic yarn of \u201cLily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.\u201d Arguably, that song suffers under the austere New York style, though I love it anyway.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the long-running debate over the competing incarnations of \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d misses the point of what makes this artist so infinitely interesting, at least for some of us. Jeff Slate, who wrote liner notes for \u201cMore Blood, More Tracks,\u201d\u00a0observes<\/a>\u00a0that Dylan\u2019s work is always in flux. The process that is documented on these eighty-seven tracks is not one of looking for the \u201cright\u201d take; it\u2019s the beginning of an endless sequence of variations, which are still unfolding on his Never-Ending Tour. In an\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0from 1999, I notated some of Dylan\u2019s live revisions of \u201cSimple Twist of Fate.\u201d The \u201cMore Blood\u201d book reproduces alternate lyrics that were written on stationery from the Hotel Drei K\u00f6nige am Rhein, in Basel. Dylan is still at it. The other night, in Durham, North Carolina, he sang:<\/p>\n He woke up and she was gone To assemble the original \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d from the eighty-seven takes on \u201cMore Blood, More Tracks,\u201d select tracks 69 (CD 5, No. 3), 71 (CD 5, No. 5), 34 (CD 3, No. 3), 76 (CD 5, No. 10), 48 (CD 4, No. 2), 16 (CD 2, No. 5), 11 (CD 1, No. 11), 59 (CD 4, No. 13), 46 (CD 3, No. 15), and 58 (CD 4, No. 12).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nHe\u00a0could<\/del>\u00a0didn\u2019t see her anywhere
\nHe told himself he didn\u2019t care,
\npushed the window open wide
\nThen felt an emptiness inside
\nto which he just could not relate
\nBrought on by a Simple Twist of Fate<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nstepped all over me<\/em>
\nAfter you (came down on me) you said you never saw my face before
\ndid me in<\/em>
\ndone<\/em>
\n(After you stepped all over my head, you said ya never wanted to see my face no more)
\nI BEG YOUR PARDON MADAM
\n(thru the circles round your eyes)<\/em>
\nIDIOT WIND \u2013 BLOWIN EVERY TIME YOU MOVE YOUR JAW
\nFROM THE GRAND COOLIE DAM TO THE MARDI GRAS
\n(blowing thru the hot and dusty skies)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nHe didn\u2019t see nothing but the dawn
\nGot out of bed and put his shoes back on
\nThen he pushed back the blinds
\nFound a note she left behind
\nWhat\u2019d it say? It said you should have met me back in \u201858
\nWe could have avoided this, ah, little simple twist of fate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n