BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
Recorded September 16 to 25 and 30, 1974
Released January 17, 1975
Playing Time 51:55
Produced by Bob Dylan and David Zimmerman
Engineered by Phil Ramone
|
Bob Dylan
Bill
Berg |
Vocals, Guitar, Harmonica, Keyboards
Drums |
Liner Notes
Musicians:
Tony Brown -- Bass
Buddy Cage -- Steel Guitar
Paul Griffin -- Organ
Eric Weissberg & Deliverance
In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus.
No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and
uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the
bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin
suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected
young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death
through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent
streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were
churned to mud.
And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among us, slaying that old
America where the immigrants lit a million dreams in the shadows of the bridges,
killing the great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and home-run
hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl Furillo and heavyweight champions of
the world. And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism.
Painters lift the easel to scrawl their innocence on walls and manifestos.
Symphonies died on crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for ideology.
And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back to reveal the worms,
many retreated into that past that never was, the place of balcony dreams in
Loew's Met, fair women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves in the
Creamsicle summers, only faintly hearing the young men march to the troopships,
while Jo Stafford gladly promised her fidelity. Poor America. Tossed on a
pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died.
Except for Dylan.
He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and remained
true. He was not the only one, of course; he is not the only one now. But of all
the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it
in a glass.
Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain
that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968
Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected
drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are
gone now. Dylan remains.
So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust. Remember
that he gave us voice, When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that
moment into art. The wonder is that he survived.
That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted
troops seek the roads home. The signposts have been smashed; the maps are
blurred. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the plague
recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant as the
tarnished statues in the public parks. We live with a callous on the heart. Only
the artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the poor land again to
feel.
And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album, he is as personal
and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous
opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the music, the tones of
voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with
sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. They are the poems of a
survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no longer here, because Dylan
has chosen not to remain a boy. It is not his voice that has grown richer,
stronger, more certain; it is Dylan himself. And his poetry, his troubadour's
traveling art, seems to me to be more meaningful than ever. I thought, listening
to these songs, of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland: "We make
out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves,
poetry."
Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The crowds have moved back off
the stage of history; we are left with the solitary human, a single hair on the
skin of the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.
If you see her,
Say hello.
She might be in Tangiers...*
So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice, and as dangerous.
Dylan doesn't fall in. Instead, he tells us the essentials; a woman once lived,
gone off, vanished into the wild places of the earth, still loved.
If you're makin' love to her,
Kiss her for the kid.
Who always has respected her,
for doin' what she did...*
It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper territory of poets, but
is about love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so
few people can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a life. That
song, and some of the other love poems in this collection, seem to me absolutely
right, in this moment at the end of wars, as all of us, old, young, middle-aged,
men and women, are searching for some simple things to believe in. Dylan here
tips his hat to Rimbaud and Verlaine, knowing all about the seasons in hell, but
he insists on his right to speak of love, that human emotion that still exists,
in Faulkner's phrase, in spite of, not because.
And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over the hurt, delivered
almost casually, as if the poet could control the chaos of feeling with a few
simply chosen words:
Life is sad
Life is a bust.
All ya can do.
Is do what you must.
You do what you must do,
And ya do it will.
I'll do it for you,
Ah, honey baby, can't ya tell?**
A simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which
conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars,
the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of Ginsberg and
Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing Deam Mariarty across
the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the
riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac
dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music drove them; they always knew
they were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the radio. In San
Francisco they declared a Renaissance and read poetry to jazz, trying to make
Mallarme's dream flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artist
generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their promise.
Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self. Listen to "Idiot Wind." It
is a hard, cold-blooded poem about the survivor's anger, as personal as anything
ever committed to a record. And yet is can also stand as the anthem for all who
feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat
with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred.
The idiot wind trivialized lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion,
glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of
magazines, in all of television, if the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But
most of all, it blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a wind is
the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists die, we all die with them.
Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack of
Hearts." It should not be reduced to notes, or taken out of context; it should
be experienced in full. The compression of story is masterful, but its real
wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist left out of his painting. To me,
that has always been the key to Dylan's art. To state things plainly is the
function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive,
symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us
the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song
because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the
mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form
of creation.
Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan's art feels, and invites us to
join him.
That quality is in all the work in this collection, the long, major works, the
casual drawings and etchings. There are some who attack Dylan because he will
not rewrite "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gates of Eden." They are fools because
they are cheating themselves of a shot at wonder. Every artist owns a vision of
the world, and he shouts his protest when he sees evil mangling that vision. But
he must also tell us the vision. Now we are getting Dylan's vision, rich and
loamy, against which the world moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned world,
is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where the rocks are clear and smooth
at the bottom.
So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind.
Don't mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies.
He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has
survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into the courtyard, padding across
the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about "flowers on the hillside
bloomin' crazy/Crickets talkin' back and forth in rhyme..." A girl, red-haired
and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the poet sings to all of us:
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love.
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.***
-- Pete Hamill, New York, 1974
Cover Photo -- Paul Till
Back Cover Illustration -- David Oppenheim
Art Direction -- Ron Coro
*from "If You See Her, Say Hello," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission.
All rights reserved.
**from "Buckets of Rain," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights
reserved.
***from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You Go," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music.
Used by Permission. All rights reserved.