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Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks Audio CD

A fair review of the Bob Dylan "Blood on the Tracks" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Bob Dylan reviews here, or go back to the Bob Dylan tabs.

Band: Bob Dylan
Title: Blood on the Tracks
Rating:

Release Date: 2003-09-16
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Tangled Up in Blue 2: Simple Twist of Fate 3: You're a Big Girl Now 4: Idiot Wind 5: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go 6: Meet Me in the Morning 7: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts 8: If You See Her, Say Hello 9: Shelter from the Storm 10: Buckets of Rain

Easily Dylan's greatest album
I will say that I am a big Dylan fan, and I presently own thirteen Dylan albums. I could go on and on, ranting and raving about this fantastic album, but I won't. And "Blood On The Tracks" is easily his best! No wait. Maybe "Blonde on Blonde". Hell, buy them both! What are you waiting for?.

SACD sound quality
The stuff from the sixties just does not sound as good. Well done, and sounds much better on SACD then other earlier Dylan titles. Pity, because those are my favorites. When it comes to sound quality, You Can't Get "Blood" From A "Stone" seems to have a double meaning here. Pardon the pun.

It Makes You Want to Weep, it's so Damned Good
" "Tracks" represents both a return to Colombia Records and a dynamic new sound for Dylan. This record was released a year to the day (January 17, 1965) after Planet Waves and although that record was a tough act to follow, Bob Dylan did it dramatically with "Blood on the Tracks. Originally recorded in New York, when Dylan took a sample of the record to his brother in Minnesota, he was advised to do some of the songs over again as the album was mostly all recorded in the same key and the production of all of the songs was too similar. Reportedly his brother said many would find it boring.

Dylan took his brother's advice, hired some local musicians, re-recorded, "Tangled Up in Blue," "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," "You're a Big Girl Now," "If You See Her, Say Hello," and "Idiot Wind. " With the inclusion of the new version, the record was punched up enough to be one of Dylan's best all time sellers and probably the most critically acclaimed of his career. I know it's my favorite album of his. It's so real, so full of pain. It makes you want to weep, it's so damned good.

I've heard all of the original versions of the re-recorded songs, as they've been bootlegged again and again over the years and in my opinion the versions with the Minnesota band are much better. "Idiot Winds" turned into a screaming rocker that just rips into your heart. "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," turned into a gunfighter, bank robber, western ballad that has no equal. The other songs too, were dramatically improved. This is a moving, wonderful, ever changing, dynamic, powerful record that is most likely the best record ever recorded by anybody, ever.

Blood on the Tracks
It's the closest thing I will ever come to experiencing the "Oceanic feeling" Freud writes about in Civilization and its Discontents. My God it's great. I can't stop listening to it, and I probably never will. .

Dylan's most accessible album: cubism built on paradoxes
The song-writing is strong and assured, and Dylan is as cryptic as ever. This is Dylan's most talked-about LP from his post 1960s career, and while initially the critics were unsure about it, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS rapidly became perceived as one of the most impressive albums Dylan has cut. Yet there also seems to be a central theme here: broken relationships. When asked about this album's reception, Dylan said he never truly understood why people enjoy that kind of pain.

Anyone familiar with art know that some of the best art in the world comes from pain. Bob Dylan's music from 1969 to 1974 was very much characterised by a sort of domesticity which was the central undercurrent to most of his music, being characterized by his familia lifestyle. While the music found on these albums (NASHVILLE, SELF-PORTRAIT to some extent, NEW MORNING, and PLANET WAVES) are sometimes exciting (especially NASHVILLE, the best of the lot), generally they never quite rise to the level of the artistically impeccable.

While the domesticity was heartfelt and sincere, it seems Dylan was too content with his life to put a lot into his art. There was no central drive like there was in the early days, when Dylan wanted to be the next Woody Guthrie, and then the more poetic direction of the mid 1960s, and then a more mellow country direction. Dylan was too interested in pursuing this path to make us care about the music found on NEW MORNING, etc. Now, however, he must channel that pain through into his art so he can deal with it. There's a real passion here that's lacking in the other albums of this period. This is the culmination of his mellow period, driving Dylan to an artistic catharsis because of a new ingredient in the mix of domestic bliss: pain.

This is the reason why BLOOD ON THE TRACKS stands as one of Dylan's most impressive LPs.

However, there is a common misconception about BLOOD. These very painful songs are oft attributed to Dylan's crumbling marriage. As other reviews have noted, Dylan has stated that this is not a tribute to his rapidly disintegrating marriage to Sara Lowndes. An artist can use something in their life as a springboard for their art, writing not really about the situation but using the situation as their inspiration to create art. This may be difficult to understand, and the only reason I believe this is because I also write and I have also experienced this phenomena, which is difficult to understand but I assure you it does exist. So, BLOOD is not about his crumbling marriage, yet paradoxically it is.

Many of Dylan's albums have a central song which all the others can relate too, or you can base your understanding of that album from that one song. This is most clearly evident on BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, as this track will not only help you understand BLOOD, but also the influence of the painters on Dylan. There is also a key song to which you base your understanding on: Tangled Up in Blue. This track approaches a situation from multiple points of view (povs) and chronologically is all over the map. The past, present, and future merge into one central mass of experience in which time does not have any distinction. The rest of the album takes its cue from this one song, playing almost like a concept album about pain in human relationships between the sexes.
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS becomes a cubist affair, and "Tangled" gives you the direction in which you need to direct your attention if you really want to understand BLOOD. BLOOD is about Dylan's relationships with the women in his life, and while all of them are about Sara, one is specifically about Elsie who he was seeing when he cut this album ("You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome"), and yet even that's about Sara, and yet, as I will discuss later, it is not about Sara at all. But this album records various elements of their relationships at various times, floating on the lake of time rather than swimming in it as most narratives do. This facet of BLOOD shows the influence the painters have had on Dylan, and also brings a great amount of complexity to BLOOD which would otherwise be lacking.

This understanding also helps better ease "Jack of Hearts" into its proper place on the album, telling a dense allegory in the old West which is just as relevant to Dylan's pain as the rest of this is. Although some have looked at this track with disdain, to me it's one of the best tracks on this album and if you get it, this song fits in perfectly.

A lot of BLOOD tracks were cut in 1974. About half the original cuts were deleted from this album and rerecorded. Dylan cops out here, with the single exception of "Idiot Wind," which benefits from being recut while the others do not. The original tracks betrayed to much of the pain he was going through. BLOOD ON THE TRACKS is remarkable in that it should feel very disjointed, with half of the album cut with Dylan being emotionally bare and honest, and with the other half Dylan purposefully distances himself from the previous version and yet somehow this album has a cohesion which I can't explain. The most dramatic difference in these versions is "Idiot Wind," which originally Dylan sang as an sad, resigned tirade, full of pain and sorrow, and yet the released version is marked with a very real and savage sense of anger. The anger is directed at the woman to begin with, but by the end of the song the anger is also directed against the narrator himself. Dylan's honesty is polluted and the pain is a little more well hidden, and yet paradoxically this doesn't really matter.

BLOOD is full of paradoxes. It is about his marriage and it isn't, there's a cohesion there which shouldn't be, it is a concept album and yet it isn't. Anyway you look at it, BLOOD is one of Dylan's must interesting albums, and also one of his best, if not the best .

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You can see a complete list of all Bob Dylan discography, or go back to the Bob Dylan tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.