Bob Dylan

Getting lost and finding yourself again

New York, September 1974

When Dylan walks into New York's A&R Studios on September 16, 1974, he has with him a handful of new songs written the previous summer, during a vacation in Minnesota with his children. The return on the road for the tour with the Band had further strained his relationship with his wife, which had already seemed to be in crisis for some time. "She could never understand what I was talking about or what I was thinking, and I wasn't able to explain it to her either": Dylan feels Sara growing ever more distant, and the torment of that distance runs deep through the songs he wrote drawing on Raeben's lessons.

Having abandoned the idea of using a proper backing band, Dylan opts for the barest of accompaniments, and over four days of recording sessions — destined to go down in history simply as the "New York Sessions," faithfully documented on "More Blood, More Tracks", the volume of the "Bootleg Series" released in 2018 — he sketches out a spare, essential collection of songs built from acoustic brushstrokes and soft swirls of bass, over which the harmonica's lament, the caress of the pedal steel and a hazy backdrop of keyboards slowly find their way. Songs for which, as Greil Marcus wrote, the same warning Melville gave readers of "Moby Dick" applies: "All delicate and sensitive persons are warned off from any peeping whatsoever." Because they don't pull punches, they don't look for euphemisms: they go straight to the point, like a confession.

"Love is so simple, to quote a phrase": does Dylan really believe it, when in "You're A Big Girl Now" he echoes the sighed words of Arletty in "Les enfants du paradis"? It might seem like a natural act, something as innate as breathing or eating. But sometimes even getting the food to your mouth isn't a given: "We're idiots, babe/ It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves," he sings bitterly in "Idiot Wind".

No, there's nothing simple about love. Because loving means overcoming the estrangement that separates us from others, the idiot wind that blows every time we open our mouths. That wind that howls like a biblical warning through our skulls, that wind that sweeps away our anger and our resentment. And yet, the wistful melody of "Simple Twist Of Fate" suggests it can't all be put down to a mere twist of fate: "I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/ She was born in spring, but I was born too late/ Blame it on a simple twist of fate".

Going against the wind is the path of love, and there's no harder path than that. Between the western-style narrative of "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts" and the blues of "Meet In The Morning", what Dylan is trying to grasp is far more than a simple break-up album: love is transfigured into mysticism, following the Stilnovista archetype of that mysterious "Italian poet from the thirteenth century" who appears in "Tangled Up In Blue". And so the apparition evoked in "Shelter From The Storm" — silver bracelets on her wrists, flowers braided in her hair — is swept up into a perspective that predates the very creation of the world: "Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine/ If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born". The beauty that will save the world is also the beauty no one will ever possess.

It's no longer just a feeling, but the search for a vanishing point in which everything is reflected: "You're gonna have to leave me, now I know/ But I'll see you in the sky above/ In the tall grass in the ones I love", Dylan confesses amid the only seeming lightheartedness of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go". The most terrible torment is discovering that, in trying to reach that point, one has ended up destroying with one's own hands the very promise one had glimpsed.

"The artist doesn't want to reach the end," goes one of Raeben's fundamental teachings. "Even when everyone says the work is finished, he never thinks so. The work must always remain unfinished." And it's no coincidence that, when the album was practically ready for release, Dylan decided to start it all over again.

Having returned to his family in Minnesota for the Christmas holidays, at the end of December 1974 Dylan improvised new recording sessions at Sound 80 studios in Minneapolis, joined by a group of local musicians. This is how the definitive version of "Blood On The Tracks" came about, released on January 20, 1975, with half the tracklist replaced compared to the earlier versions.

The Minneapolis versions aren't simply new variations, but genuine rewrites, often lyrically as well. Just compare the mournful tread of "Idiot Wind": where affliction once dominated, a different emphasis now takes hold, a vehemence made of anger, resentment, sarcasm. Perhaps it's the need to gain some distance from a fragility too openly exposed, or simply the worry that something so bare might go misunderstood. Dylan's voice seems to want to rise into a howl of pain, the drums lend more energy to the way he attacks the verses, and the organ sound becomes urgent and enveloping.

The beating heart, however, remains the same. And it has everything to do with the great equation between life and travel: "But me, I'm still on the road/ Headin' for another joint," Dylan proclaims at the end of the circular trajectory of "Tangled Up In Blue," as the very line of time seems to dissolve into a shimmer of different points of view. Perhaps the secret lies in the almost wise simplicity of "Buckets Of Rain," the gentle folk nursery rhyme with which Dylan chooses to close the record: "Life is sad/ Life is a bust/ All you can do is do what you must/ You do what you must do and you do it well/ I'll do it for you, honey baby, can't you tell?"

There's a job to be done, and nothing left to do but get back on the road.

The Rolling Thunder is right around the corner.

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29/10/2006