The album Bob Dylan could never repeat: “An experiment”
If the folky political persona and the electric rebellion period never really did it for you, or if the Nashville Skyline sound just shut off the taps of interest entirely, there was usually just one last hurdle to leap before you could officially call yourself “not really a Bob Dylan fan”.
That was 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, the late-comer’s favourite Dylan record. Widely panned when it first came out, this ten-song collection has since been adopted by several generations of university-age romantics as the true unimpeachable gem of the Dylan discography.
Here, at age 34, he truly found his comfort zone as a grown-up singer-songwriter, worrying less about pretentious name-dropping poetry or impersonating his heroes, and leaning instead into more bare bones, vulnerable territory; you know, heartache and shit like that. His voice also never sounded better; an important selling point if you’re trying one last time to convince a friend that raspy nasality really could be beautiful.
Interestingly, even though it was mostly written in the summer of ’74 and released that winter, Blood on the Tracks has somehow become the go-to autumn album. It’s the sort of record you stick on your headphones for a crisp October wander, or maybe while pressing a few leaves into a scrapbook – people still do that, don’t they?
As no surprise, the lush but simplified sound of Blood on the Tracks did not signify a final stopping point on Bob Dylan’s winding journey toward whatever his authentic self might be (turns out it was unknowable). Within a few years, a painful divorce and a turn toward Christianity sent him on a polarising tangent. For a moment there, though, during the exciting period of Blood on the Tracks and the accompanying Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Dylan seemed as creatively energised as he’d been at any point since that fabled turn to electricity.
This same period did include the long-awaited release of The Basement Tapes and a very good follow-up record, Desire, but Dylan never quite returned to the tone or mindset that had made Blood on the Tracks so singular.
“I guess I never intended to keep that going,” Dylan explained to author Bill Flanagan in 1986, a discussion later printed in Flanagan’s book Written in My Soul: Rock’s Great Songwriters Talk about Creating Their Music. “It was an experiment that came off. I had a few weeks in the summer when I wrote the songs. I wrote all the songs for Blood on the Tracks in about a month and then I recorded them and stepped back out of that place where I was when I wrote them and went back to whatever I was doing before. Sometimes you’ll get what you can out of these things, but you can’t stay there.”
Some 40 years later, as pop culture continues to eat itself and reunions, tributes, and nostalgia trips consume more and more of our concert-going and streaming time, this idea of just leaving something in its moment feels quite refreshing. Fans might have longed for an extension of the Blood on the Tracks period to get them through a few extra weeks of the autumn, but sometimes the very thing that makes a record special is the lack of calculation that went into it. If it could easily be recreated, how much value would it really have?
Like looking back fondly on an old flame, we “know every scene by heart.” But do you really want a sequel to ‘If You See Her Say Hello’, where the girl comes back to Bob and they live happily ever after? What’s remotely autumnal about that?
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