1975: Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan
BY ANNAKA SAARI
The facts of this year’s March were, for me, as follows: my partner of two and a half years and I agreed to end our relationship after more than a year of long distance. We spent five days together, mostly confined to my studio apartment in Boston, until he returned to England. When the car arrived to take him to the airport, he kissed me and told me he loved me and I watched him load his suitcases––full of books he had abandoned in a stack on my mantle when he flew away from me the first time––into the back of a blue Chevrolet Equinox driven by a man named Luis.
The evening he boarded his flight, I spent an amount of time that I cannot grasp or define pacing in and out of the doorframe of my kitchen, listening to Bob Dylan and trying to avert my eyes from the white spaces on my shelves.
***
“My parents talking,” is what Jakob Dylan called Blood on the Tracks, the album his father released in 1975. Many interpret Bob Dylan’s 15th album as work borne from the deterioration of his marriage to Jakob’s mom, then-wife Sara. The elder Dylan often insisted that the album is not autobiographical (in one case, by claiming that the album was entirely inspired by Chekhov stories) and conceded that personal details may have wormed their way in.
Blood on the Tracks has always fascinated me not only in its brilliance, but in its apparent refusal to decide how vulnerable it wishes to be. The history of the album’s production paints a picture of an artist unsure of how much to give; the final track list and Dylan’s vocal performances don’t provide much evidence to the contrary. Even the album cover seems to speak to such a conflict: Dylan’s face sits in profile, eyes completely obscured by sunglasses. It’s as if he cannot stand to make eye contact with the viewer, to be held responsible for what falls out of his half-open mouth.
***
My relationship with my ex, a poet 12 years my senior, is one that I characterize as largely positive, human in the way that writers use the word as a compliment. There were films and parties and broken glasses;evenings worn away indoors while snow swirled outside. There was also a wife, to whom he remained legally married until the final days of our time together. I share this not to shock you––their relationship had ended, and they moved out of their shared home and divided possessions over a year before I came into the picture––but to paint most clearly the desirous landscape in which I spent ages twenty-two to twenty-five, one in which I was never fully alone with the man I loved.
In the months before we separated, I wrote a poem about a nightmare that plagued him throughout our relationship: an image of his wife in his parents’ garden, dressed as she had been on their wedding day.
“This poem pulls imagery from things I’ve written,” he said, reading it for the first time. The corners of his mouth turned downward. His brow furrowed.
“I haven’t read your first book,” I responded, “but you’ve told me the stories.”
“You’ve managed to instill this piece with a sense of dread,” he finally admitted. We didn’t say much after that; I watched my reflection appear as he left my screen. I revised and redrafted the poem furiously in the hours that followed, always undoing my changes, always buttoning her back into the dress.
***
Perhaps the most famous detail of the lore surrounding Blood on the Tracks is Dylan’s decision, following his brother’s lukewarm review of the album, to suddenly re-record half of the track list in the weeks before the project’s release. Over the course of two December days in a Minnesota studio, with an unfamiliar group of backing musicians assembled at the last minute, Dylan cut new versions of “Tangled Up In Blue,” “You’re A Big Girl Now,” “Idiot Wind,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.”
The new, off-the-cuff recordings place, in a sense, another layer of manipulation between the listener and the original act of creation, another pane through which Dylan’s emotions are tempered. However, some of these barriers are thin, more transparent than the walls built in the initial sessions. An earlier arrangement of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” recorded in September of 1974, appears on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased), allowing for a glimpse at how the song sat before the recording of Blood on the Tracks. Dylan’s gentle vocals and the song’s upbeat guitar make even the snidest lyrics – such as the mostly-cut-from-the final “If you’re making love to her, / kiss her for the kid / who always has respected her / for doing what she did” – seem almost devoid of anger. Wistful yet sincere, the song wishes the best to the former lover; despite the awkwardness of separation, a honeyed warmth shines through.
The version that appears on the final cut of Blood on the Tracks is more somber: its guitar less jaunty, Dylan’s voice slower to chase his points. These changes are what allows the penultimate verse to hold such power: “And I’ve never gotten used to it, / I’ve just learned to turn it off. / Maybe I’m too sensitive / or else I’m gettin’ soft.” The regret and hurt that drip from Dylan’s mouth in the late December recording creates an emptiness in my core every time I listen. Whereas the early version is touching, the latter is harrowing, bitter. This version, this song, is what I most consistently returned to in the days and weeks following the break-up: I listened in subway stations and my beige-painted office, on trips to the market and walks along the Charles River.
***
As I continue to write poems about our relationship, I have struggled with how to present his now-ex-wife, a woman with no stakes in my time with her ex-husband. I have made her blonde and pulled at the hems of her skirts, thickened her thighs and stretched her tall. The artifice is always more revealing than what it was meant to obscure.
***
Dylan manages to inhabit both glib mockery and cruel earnestness on the album, twisting through allegory and biographically accurate material in the way that only he can. I cannot help but imagine whether the less realistic moments of the album come from a place of self-preservation, nor can I escape the sense that the more tender moments of anger and longing spring from places the armor cannot reach. The final track list is a strange push and pull between the light and the freighted, the vulnerable and completely opaque.
“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” track seven, is a lively, epic ballad, tracing a narrative that begins in a cabaret and watches an eccentric cast of characters reckon with romantic entanglement, crime, betrayal, and punishment. The song is a fun romp with insidious undertones; like a Greta Gerwig film or Cy Twombly exhibit, it leaves me smiling and slightly sore after each listen. None of the characters are anchored in a reality that reads as tangible. The song does not feel confessional in the least, and that’s the fun of it.
The album’s fourth song, “Idiot Wind,” on the other hand, feels so close-to-life, so specific in its cruelty, that I find it difficult to listen to: “I couldn't believe after all these years, / You didn't know me better than that,” sings our narrator, possessed by resentment and bitterness as he reflects on a failing relationship. Dylan himself has admitted that the song may be too revealing: “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind’... I didn't really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn't ... I didn't feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. Which might be the same thing, I don't know.” Knowing his feelings about the song amplifies the perverse sweetness of its final lines: “We're idiots, babe. / It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”
***
He did tell me, in the beginning, that he was not sure if he was ready for a relationship. I was persistent, emotionally and physically. I recognize that sharing this makes me less sympathetic as a narrator, that I could have led anyone reading this essay to think that I was still drunk on youthful naiveté, snatched up by an older man ignorant of the harm he would cause. I made my choices. He made his. It’s a wonder we could feed ourselves.
***
“Simple Twist of Fate,” the second track on the album, originally carried the subtitle “4th Street Affair,” a detail that seemingly harkens back to the address of Suze Rotolo, who Dylan had a relationship with in the years before his marriage to Sara Dylan. I often wonder who Dylan meant to protect, or what truth Dylan intended to serve, when he removed that geographic tag.
The narrator of the song laments a relationship between himself and a woman that ended due to circumstances outside of their control. In the lyrics’ present-day, he still searches for the connection he held with his ex-lover while engaging in trysts with other women. When performing the song in Japan while touring in 1978, Dylan introduced the song to the audience by saying "Here's a simple love story. Happened to me."
***
Once, after too many beers and small arguments, my partner called me by his wife’s name as he was falling asleep. There was no anger, no terse politeness, in his voice – just clear, hollow longing. I knew I was not who he wanted. I did my best to cry silently so I wouldn’t disturb his sleep.
He apologized in the morning. I feel an intense shame for having transcribed the details of those moments here.
***
“It’s hard for me to relate to that,” Dylan said of the album after its release in 1975. “I mean, people enjoying that kind of pain.” Some of the blood on the tracks is Dylan’s. Some must belong to the ex-wife, to the new lover.
***
I continue to draft and toil over poems about my relationship with my ex, which is to say I continue to struggle with what, and how much, is acceptable for me to share. I feel some genuine yet, I fear, pretentious dedication to authenticity, to getting it right; I want the poems to capture how the sun hit his hair and the brush of his fingers on my cheek, the quiet tears that crawled down our faces as we listened to the Springsteen song for what we knew would be the last time. Still, there is comfort in knowing that there is much I have not committed to text here, stories that belong only to me and my then-lover and the friends that served as witnesses to how we loved each other. You cannot brag about restraint by showing what you hold against your chest, but rest assured that there are beautiful, filthy, wonderful things that my poems will never hold.
I wish I could say that all this reflection, this consideration of ethics and aesthetics and the gray areas in between, has brought some sort of relief. I suppose the best I can do is tell the truth.
Annaka Saari is a writer from Michigan. She earned her BA from The University of Michigan and her MFA from Boston University, where she now works as the administrator for the Creative Writing Program. She also serves as managing editor for Solstice Literary Magazine and a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. The recipient of a Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, her work has been named a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize, longlisted for the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and appeared in or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Wales' "How to Write a Poem" series, and other publications. Her website is annakasaari.com.