the case for bringing war to Iraq. I myself heard the song in those months reflecting on how relevant its message seemed, forty years on. After the bombs started falling on Baghdad on March 18, and in concerts for the rest of 2003, Dylan stopped playing the song. We’ll never know why, but perhaps Dylan felt that would make it too overtly a “protest song,” the old label. It returned the following year, however, and stayed on setlists until November 23, 2010, when it disappeared, so far for good, except for one performance on October 7, 2016, at the Desert Trip music festival in Indio, California, a weekend extravaganza where some of those particular fans would have expected to hear the song, along with hits by Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, and the Who.
Throughout December 1974, as my first semester as a Ph.D. student was drawing to a close, I regularly stopped in at the local record store on campus to pick up Dylan’s new album, Blood on the Tracks, unaware that Columbia Records had held up its release. My pilgrimages to the record store became part of the rhythm of life, and I made some friends in the process, leading to late nights throughout my Ann Arbor years with music and revolution in the air at a blues club called the Blind Pig, or the Del Rio, which offered free jazz on Sunday evenings. The Ann Arbor Blues Festival had debuted a few years before I got to campus, in the fall of 1969, and featured artists like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. There were funding issues and by 1974 the festival had finished its run, but there was still good music from local bands and musicians attracted to that town’s entertainment market of more than thirty thousand students.
As fans would later discover, Blood on the Tracks was delayed because Dylan had gone back to Minnesota, where he rerecorded some of the songs. But in due course Blood on the Tracks turned up in January 1975 and soon took its place right up there with Blonde on Blonde, a new classic for a new decade. The characters of that earlier album had been mysterious and lovely: Louise and Johanna in “Visions of Johanna,” the sad-eyed lady in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The first girlfriend of my imagination had bits of each even before she materialized. After those eight years, things had changed with the romantic visions of Blood on the Tracks: “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad,” Dylan sang on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” He later denied that the album was about getting divorced from Sara Dylan. Sara Lownds had married Dylan on November 22, 1965, and their divorce would come almost three years after the songs were written. But there is no denying that with Blood on the Tracks, the art and the beauty seem to come more from a sense of hurt and loss, and seldom is experience not an ingredient of art, as Dylan himself has said. All these years later, the emotion in those songs is as palpable as ever, in the studio versions and thousands of versions recorded in concert. That is what literature, song, and the way they work on memory and experience conspire to give us. Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along. That’s what Virgil’s words on the Nobel medal mean, honoring those “who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged.”
The music that Dylan produced in the eight years between these two great albums indicates anything other than decline. But it’s hard to articulate the disappointment back through those years that the particular sound of Blonde on Blonde had gone away, never to return. The music he made between that album and Blood on the Tracks was all part of Dylan’s continuing evolution, particularly in mid-1967 as he worked with members of the Band, in seclusion in upstate New York. Some of this material was released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, and much of the rest was long available on unofficial bootleg versions, eventually to be released in 2014 in a six-CD set. Then came the relative simplicity of language on the 1967 album John Wesley Harding, with its biblical engagement and old-school feel. Here Dylan sang with a more spare accompaniment, turning away from the hip, mod sixties to a sound that seemed rooted in nineteenth-century Americana, a return to a new, creative version of the folk traditions that had always been in his blood. Eighteen months later, with the 1969 release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan seemed to be creating a new genre, now inventing country rock, as he had invented folk rock a few years earlier. The next year saw release of his album Self Portrait, and then New Morning. Self Portrait was hit particularly hard by critics, including by music historian Greil Marcus, who famously opened his Rolling Stone review with the words “What is this shit?” It wasn’t until 2013, when Dylan put out The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait, with alternate, live, and overdub-free versions, that the brilliance of this period truly came to light, as Marcus himself would eventually acknowledge.
But the fact is that in 1975, when Dylan put out Blood on the Tracks, the world changed for those who cared about his music, maybe in part because of the sublimation of life experience into art, which is the essence of the album. Gone for now was the “old, weird America,” as Marcus had so well described it, of the songs Dylan was laying down with the Band. Gone were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds of bootlegging, hoboing, and minstrel boys on Self Portrait, gone too the country pie of Nashville Skyline. And gone was the white picket fence that New Morning had tried to build around Bob and Sara Dylan and their four children, against the odds.
Many of the songs on Blood on the Tracks were constructed through the principles and practice of painting, a skill and insight he picked up from Norman Raeben, a painting teacher in New York City, in early 1974. To be sure, Dylan attributed to Raeben the very comeback that the album represented.
I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else, and I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt … when I started doing it the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.
Dylan is characteristically vague on the actual methods or techniques, and one could claim that a song like “Visions of Johanna” from 1966 already seemed to reveal painterly qualities, but it is true that the vivid narrative technique in a song like “Simple Twist of Fate” from the new album gave it new effects that catch what he is talking about:
A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walkin’ by the arcade
As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up
She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate
In a radio interview with folksinger Mary Travers in April 1975, Dylan said of Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?” That’s the point, as Dylan, here deliberately disingenuous, well knew. His artistic genius—in his words, music, and voice—create pain, but precisely because of the brilliance of his art on this album, these songs produce recompense for the loss of love and the memory of what had once been. This is the quite intentional goal of songs like “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” or “If You See Her, Say Hello.” These songs also hold the trace of a hope that all might not be lost: in “Simple Twist of Fate” the man “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in / Maybe she’ll pick him out again,” this also giving the point of view of the character in the song; or the switch at the end of “Idiot Wind” from “You’re an idiot, babe” to “We’re idiots, babe.” Sharing the blame; or at the end of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time”—though in other versions, any hope is pretty remote, as we’ll see. To have lived through more than forty years with all of the music and poetry of these songs, from the album and in performance, is a source of good fortune and of genuine pleasure and deep contentment, even—or especially—with the pain the album so exquisitely expresses.
Much of the album focuses on nighttime, the time of day when the relationships in its songs seem to fall apart, perhaps also the case with Dylan’s real-life relationships. The first line of the first
