{"id":5606,"date":"2018-11-01T13:29:30","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T13:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennywilson.org\/?p=4741"},"modified":"2018-11-01T13:29:30","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T13:29:30","slug":"bob-dylans-first-day-with-tangled-up-in-blue-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2018\/11\/01\/bob-dylans-first-day-with-tangled-up-in-blue-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan\u2019s First Day with \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By\u00a0Jeff Slate<\/a><\/p>\n

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With \u201cBlood on the Tracks,\u201d Bob Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet, showing himself once again to be a master singer-songwriter. Photograph by Rick Diamond \/ WireImage \/ Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
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The\u00a0 New York sessions for Bob Dylan\u2019s 1975 album, \u201cBlood on the Tracks,\u201d have always been ground zero for Dylan\u2019s reputation as a cipher and a curmudgeon in the recording studio, intent on speeding through the proceedings and capturing lightning in a bottle, quality control be damned. As the story has been told\u2014mostly by musicians who no doubt felt that they didn\u2019t get a fair shake during the biggest moment of their careers\u2014Dylan started sessions for \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d on September 16, 1974, on Rosh Hashanah, with a band of New York session \u201ccats\u201d who couldn\u2019t hear what Dylan was doing on songs that he hadn\u2019t bothered to teach them. He waved them off, one by one, as the day wore on, essentially firing them before they had a chance to prove themselves. The problem is, it simply isn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

As the author of the liner notes for \u201cMore Blood, More Tracks<\/a>,\u201d the latest entry in Dylan\u2019s \u201cBootleg Series,\u201d I was one of the first people to hear the raw session tapes in chronological order. I listened while perusing Dylan\u2019s fabled \u201cred notebook,\u201d in which he\u2019d written the lyrics to the ten songs on \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d in his tiny, precise scrawl. What I quickly realized turned the legend upside down: Dylan entered the studio early on the sixteenth, long before any of the session musicians had arrived, intent on cutting an acoustic album\u2014a sort of \u201cFreewheelin\u2019 Bob Dylan\u201d for the mid-seventies. Contrary to most accounts, Dylan was supremely prepared, and immediately went about delivering aching versions of some of the best\u2014and most intimate\u2014songs that he had ever written. In the era of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and so many others unjustly or unfortunately dubbed \u201cthe New Dylan,\u201d and after a clutch of albums that fans had found less than satisfying, Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet, showing himself once again to be the master singer-songwriter and performer.<\/p>\n

By the time the musicians who\u2019d been hired to back Dylan arrived that afternoon, he had already cut eleven songs. Dylan would record another fifteen that day\u2014including five takes of \u201cIdiot Wind,\u201d alone again, save for the bassist Tony Brown\u2014for a total of thirty-six, an epic amount by any standard. But it\u2019s clear as you listen that instead of things getting better as the sessions progressed, with the musicians finding their groove with Dylan, the atmosphere in the room degenerated. Most interesting, while Dylan gamely puts the band through their paces on the seemingly easy blues of \u201cCall Letter Blues\u201d and \u201cMeet Me in the Morning\u201d (after attempts at \u201cSimple Twist of Fate\u201d failed miserably), he never lets them near what he surely senses must be his latest masterpiece: \u201cTangled Up in Blue.\u201d And so, on the afternoon of September 17th, Dylan steps up to the microphone and delivers a hushed, intense, and powerfully intimate version of that song, accompanied only by Brown on bass.<\/p>\n

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https:\/\/www.wnyc.org\/widgets\/ondemand_player\/thenewyorker\/#file=https:\/\/downloads.newyorker.com\/mp3\/181030-Dylan-Tangled-Up-in-Blue.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n

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Audio:\u00a0Take one of \u201cTangled Up in Blue.\u201d<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s a plaintiveness in that very first version of \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d that\u2019s unusual. It\u2019s the earliest version we have of the now-familiar tale\u2014of the star-crossed couple and their travels and travails, that jumps from the first to third person and back again\u2014and while Dylan doesn\u2019t necessarily sound tentative, the way he often did on \u201cThe Cutting Edge: 1965-1966<\/a>,\u201d the \u201cBootleg Series\u201d entry that chronicled his \u201cthin wild mercury music\u201d years, he does seem more vulnerable than he ever had before, or ever would be again. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of honesty there,\u201d Jeff Burger, the author of \u201cDylan on Dylan<\/a>,\u201d said. \u201cIt\u2019s raw and heartfelt, with less posing than he\u2019d done on some of his earlier songs. Of course, many great songs had come before, like \u2018Desolation Row\u2019 and so many others, but he was showing off his way with words and painting a picture of another world, not necessarily telling a whole lot about himself. But here he really gets down to the personal, even if it isn\u2019t completely direct.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was writing the songs for \u201cBlood on the Tracks,\u201d Dylan had taken up painting classes with the New York artist Norman Raeben. By all accounts, Raeben was a taskmaster, but he imparted in his students a sense both that life itself was the art, with their creations being merely the by-product of that experience, and, significantly for Dylan, that past, present, and future could all coexist in their work. \u201cHe put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt,\u201d Dylan told\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0in 1978, of Raeben\u2019s influence on his songwriting approach.<\/p>\n

While Dylan is known to endlessly and brutally edit his lyrics until the very last minute in the studio, and the epic \u201cIdiot Wind\u201d transformed in the course of the \u201cBlood on the Tracks\u201d sessions, \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d is the one song in Dylan\u2019s vast catalogue that he has never seemed to be finished with. There are eight takes from the New York sessions, and the slightest lyrical change, shift in tempo, or variation in delivery causes the song to reveal itself in unexpected ways. When Dylan launches into take two of the song, it\u2019s bouncy, with punchy vocals and organ flourishes, making it, already, a different tale altogether. Further takes seem to split the difference between dark and light. By\u00a0the time Dylan and Brown attempt the song for the last time in New York, in a remarkable version recorded at the eleventh hour of those sessions, Dylan has seemingly wrung all he can out of \u201cTangled Up in Blue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Dylan would revisit the song just three months later\u2014this time in Minneapolis\u2014in the version that we would all come to love and obsess over. His voice was already transformed, more akin to the carnival-barker delivery that he\u2019d employ on 1975\u2019s \u201cDesire\u201d and the Rolling Thunder Review tour. The version Dylan performed less than a year later on that tour was yet again vastly reworked, and he would continue tinkering with it over the years. A decade later, in 1984, on the album \u201cReal Live,\u201d Dylan felt he\u2019d finally found the song he\u2019d been looking for. \u201cOn \u2018Real Live\u2019 it is more like it should have been,\u201d Dylan told\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0in 1985. \u201cI was never really happy with it. I guess I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts, but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that\u2019s what I was trying to do\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you\u2019re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn\u2019t matter. On \u2018Real Live,\u2019 the imagery is better and more the way I would have liked it than on the original recording.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dylan has performed \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d 1,546 times during his\u00a0Never Ending Tour<\/a>, which began in 1988 and is still going. Like any good Dylan obsessive, I\u2019ve seen many of those performances. It\u2019s a guilty pleasure of Dylanologists to trainspot the tweaks\u2014both large and small\u2014that Dylan makes to the lyrics from year to year, or sometimes from night to night. Still, when I was presented with Dylan\u2019s latest revision, written in his own hand\u2014which is part of the \u201cMondo Scripto\u201d exhibition of his art currently on display at the Halcyon Gallery in London\u2014 it was like seeing an old, dear friend, whom you know intimately, but who\u2019s no doubt changed and grown over the years, adapting with the times.<\/p>\n

\"Tangled\"Tangled<\/p>\n

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Fans who have seen Dylan in concert recently will recognize some of the changes, of how \u201che let the law take its course\u201d has taken the place of using \u201ca little too much force,\u201d or how instead of \u201cfishing outside Delacroix,\u201d \u201ceverybody\u2019d gone somewhere.\u201d Of course, the past is still close behind, \u201cfollowing me like a shadow that couldn\u2019t get out of my mind \/ sticking like glue \/ Tangled up in blue,\u201d but she isn\u2019t working in a topless bar anymore but at the Moonlight Lounge, \u201cwhere men put money in her hand.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s always been a certain truth about money that I never did understand,\u201d this new version of Dylan\u2019s classic tells us. \u201cYou put things to bed and you\u2019ll call it a day \/ Sometimes you go along for the ride \/ You pick your brains and you bury the hatchet \/ Then you walk on the wild side \/ Towns are ruined and cities burns and images disappear \/ Weep with all of your heart if you would \/ I too cried a tear \/ Nothing you can do \/ If you\u2019re tangled up in blue.\u201d It recasts the song in the spirit of our times, in the same way the original was so much a product of the Vietnam and Watergate era.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

While researching the sessions for \u201cBlood on the Tracks,\u201d I spoke to the writer Larry (Ratso) Sloman, who got to know Dylan around the time and has remained friends with him ever since. He told me a fascinating story of an artist who is perhaps oblivious to how seriously we all take him, but also at peace with his creative process. \u201cI was around during the sessions for \u2018Infidels,\u2019 and I fell in love with the song \u2018Blind Willie McTell,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Sloman said, referring to a song that\u2019s considered one of Dylan\u2019s best but didn\u2019t find a home on a release until the first volume of his \u201cBootleg Series,\u201d in 1991. \u201cWhen the album was finished, Bob called me up and asked me if I wanted to come over to hear it. He played it for me, but no \u2018Blind Willie McTell.\u2019 I asked him, \u2018What gives, Bob? Where\u2019s \u2018Blind Willie McTell?\u2019 And, without missing a beat, he goes, \u2018It\u2019s no big deal, Ratso. It\u2019s just an album. I\u2019ve made twenty-two. And I\u2019ll make more.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike, say, Paul Simon, a presenter who toils over his records, perfecting every nuance until everything is just so, Dylan is restless, visceral, mercurial, always seemingly on the way to his next creation. \u201cMore Blood, More Tracks,\u201d and especially its centerpiece, the constantly evolving, shifting, changing \u201cTangled Up in Blue,\u201d is pure Dylan, a portrait of an artist who never seems to tire of the chase.<\/p>\n

\u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d copyright \u00a9 1974 by Ram\u2019s Horn Music, renewed in 2002 by Ram\u2019s Horn Music. Additional lyrics copyright \u00a9 2018 Ram\u2019s Horn Music. Courtesy of the MondoScripto exhibit at the Halcyon Gallery, London.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n