The album Bob Dylan said had no proper ending: “It doesn’t stop”
The last thing that any artist wants is a deadline on their work. As much as they might think they have the means of making a masterpiece, there’s always a certain pressure that comes with making a record within a certain time before the label runs out of money to give you or things start going over budget. Although Bob Dylan didn’t have to worry about such things with the kind of run-and-gun operation he had in the early 1960s, some songs needed to be lived through in order to be played properly.
Then again, there are hardly any problems with Dylan’s more accusatory songs in the early ’60s. Compared to every other political figure with a guitar in their hands, his songs demanded to be drawn out of him half the time, whether it was reminding everyone of what the big picture was on ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ or a cold condemnation of what would happen if we didn’t value each other on ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.
For all of the brilliance across Dylan’s first few records, though, never once does he reveal his true self. He was always more at home being enigmatic with his personal life, and even when he gave interviews, he was never one to give a straight answer that would look good in print. He lives life on his own terms, but that never stopped him from taking a few emotional hits during his time at the top.
There was already the motorcycle accident that left him sidelined for years, but even when he returned to the fray, he was far from the political figure he once was. His turn towards country may have been a nice change of pace, but it wasn’t until the ’70s with Blood on the Tracks that people got a look at what was going on in Dylan’s personal life.
While people like Joni Mitchell had been extremely candid about who their songs were about, this album showed the singer in a place no one had seen him before: vulnerable. He’d had his heart ripped in two after his divorce from his wife, and while she is never mentioned by name in any of the tunes, he has a lot to unpack when it comes to his broken heart, whether that’s lashing out in anger on ‘Idiot Wind’ or closing things off on a sombre note on ‘Buckets of Rain’.
Although Dylan did manage to craft some form of a resolution over the course of ten tracks, he admitted that it didn’t have the kind of ending he thought it deserved, saying, “It doesn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop. Where do you end? You could still be writing it, really. It’s something that could be a work continually in progress.” But that’s part of the beauty behind what Dylan created on that record.
Not all the questions he’s asking on this album have a straight answer, just like Dylan was wont to be in interviews, but he accepts that as a part of life, as should we. Plenty of people go through the biggest heartaches without ever getting proper closure. And while there might be days when the pain hurts a little bit less, there are always going to be subtle reminders about when it all went wrong or those situations that you wish you could take back.
So, really, the fact that Blood on the Tracks doesn’t have a proper ending is actually its greatest strength. Anyone in Dylan’s position would have loved to get some kind of reassurance that such a time in his life has passed, but, in the same way that his contemporaries like John Lennon were getting real on Plastic Ono Band, it’s much more intriguing when an artist shows their audience their ability to be truly human.
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