Customer Reviews

Blood on the Tracks [Vinyl]

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What is Bob Dylan's greatest album? Is it Highway 61 Revisited, an album that revolutionized rock and roll by combining the meaningful lyrics of folk with the rhythm of rock; or is it Blonde on Blonde, another mid sixties classic album with some of Dylan's best lyrics, epic songs, and vivid imagery; or is it Blood on the Tracks, a sweet unambitious album about a man's heart during his crumbling marriage? The answer is Blood on the Tracks, a simple but powerful masterpiece that captures the human emotions of love, anger, sadness, fear, regret, and hope. 'Tracks' doesn't take us into the mind of Bob Dylan, as 'Blonde on Blonde'and 'Highway 61' did, they take us inside Bob Dylan's heart, and inside our own. Dylan writes honest, emotional, beautiful lyrics. The album is the story of a man hanging on to his love, and at the same time letting it go. The album is a snapshot of Dylan's soul. The most beautiful song on the album that stands out is the least assuming. In 'Buckets of Rain,' Dylan's looking out into the rain, and reflects on life and love like no one else has ever done, and finally makes peace with his lonliness and longing for his love, moves on, but will always share a part of his heart for her. I could write for days about this album, but I'm sure you get this picture. Never before have I been moved by a piece of music like this album has, because we all know what Dylan is writing about is not only what's in his heart, but what's buried inside all of our hearts.

What to say about Dylan's masterpiece, arguably the finest album of my lifetime?

Yes, his mid-60s classics are 'hipper', but this is his creative pinnacle. The writing reaches unforseen hights of maturity, depth and soul-searching. Dylan never used to be this naked, this honest.

Highlights? Well, all of it really! "Tangled Up in Blue", "Idiot Wind" and the overlooked "Buckets of Rain" stand out for me, but everyone'll have their own favorites, usually for personal reasons - it's that kind of record.

Lennon gave us the raw PLASTIC ONO BAND, Townshend the bitter WHO BY NUMBERS, but Dylan's self-examination is more contemplative and more changeable - sometimes he sounds resigned, sometimes full of regret, sometimes angry.

Anybody who loves this album HAS to hear the unreleased original album takes too. Five of the ten tracks were re-recorded for BOTT at the last minute (the cover had already been printed up with liner notes making reference to lyrics that were no longer to be found on the album). Note: these are NOT the versions available on THE BOOTLEG SERIES 1-3, you'll have to seek out a REAL bootleg for all but "You're a Big Girl Now" which is on BIOGRAPH and is even more wonderful than the version you'll find here (BIOGRAPH also contains the excellent out-take "Up to Me"). These tracks, with their lyrical and mood variations give the listener an even greater insight into Dylan's finest hour.

Oh, and for the dissenters, he really sings well on this too!

Simply put, Blood On The Tracks is one of the greatest albums of the rock era and stands, arguably, as the greatest album in Dylan's long career.

It's an incredibly honest album, achingly so at times. Though Dylan has scoffed at the notion of Blood On The Tracks as a paean to his recently ended marriage to his wife Sara, it's hard to ignore the intensely personal nature of these songs - almost all of which deal with the loss of love.

The instrumentation is spare - guitar, drum, bass and, occasionally, harmonica. Somehow nothing else seems appropriate, as if anything more complicated would negate the power of these songs. Dylan has never sounded better, although arguments about his voice have always somehow missed the mark.

Which, of course, brings us to the songs. The record starts with one of Dylan's best and most loved story-songs, "Tangled Up In Blue," which manages somehow to be both joyous and tragic at the same time. For fans who were still listening by the mid `70s, this opening track must have signaled that the winds had changed.

Their hopes were borne out by the remaining nine tracks, all of which hit their mark. Both "Simple Twist Of Fate" and "You're a Big Girl Now" reveal Dylan to be a changed man from the youthful rebel of the mid `60s. Never an optimist, these songs show an even sadder, more resigned side of the songwriter.

"Idiot Wind" is perhaps the most bilious piece in Dylan's entire canon of work, but its power is impossible to deny.

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" and "Meet Me In The Morning" are simple expressions of loss, pending and present, respectively.

"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" is another classic Dylan story-song, psychically akin to "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" from John Wesley Harding.

"If You See Her, Say Hello," is quite possible the saddest song that Dylan ever wrote, and his vocal performance here is enough to draw tears from the attentive listener.

"Shelter From The Storm" offers a more positive theme, and it doesn't come a minute too soon. The album closes with the simple and sad "Buckets of Rain." By the time he sings "Life is sad/Life is a bust/All you can do is do what you must," you either believe him, or you weren't listening.

This album was made during a critical period of Dylan's life. People thought he was a has-been, that his times as a songwriter were gone; his marriage was falling apart. Like all great works of art, Blood On The Tracks is a product of hard times.

I've been listening to Blood On The Tracks for months now. Each new listen seems to bring something new to me, something I didn't notice the last time. That's because these are not ordinary love songs; they are filled with emotions such as love, anger, regret, sorrow, despair, loneliness. Even in the most bitter lines, you can feel Dylan's passion. His writing and singing have never been better; you can feel his heart pouring off of every song.

This album is to be listened from start to finish; the song cycle is maybe the best in rock history. The album starts with one of his best songs, Tangled Up In Blue, a great story of love found and lost (...I heard her say over her shoulder/ We'll meet again some day on the avenue...) (...The only thing I knew how to do/Was to keep on keeping on/Like a bird that flew/Tangled up in blue...).

Simple Twist Of Fate, You're A Big Girl Now and You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go are often unfairly overlooked; they are among Dylan's best love songs. Idiot Wind is perhaps Dylan's angriest song (...You're an idiot, babe./It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe...), Meet Me In The Morning is a great blues song, and Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts is one of his most off-the-wall compositions (...The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin' in the wall...).

Then comes the most emotionally affecting trilogy of songs in the history of rock.

If You See Her, Say Hello is one of his most beautiful songs; who can't identify himself with the narrator, trying to accept the loss of the one he loves? (...I always have respected her for doing what she did and gettin' free/Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in the way/Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay....) (...If she's passin' back this way, I'm not that hard to find/Tell her she can look me up, if she's got the time...).

Shelter From The Storm is perhaps Dylan's best song. The first five verses, with the narrator describing the time he met the girl who saved him, are the most beautiful ones in his, or anyone else's, career (I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form./"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm.") (...She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns...). Then comes the final five verses, dealing with the loss of that woman (...Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost/I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed...), going through anger (...I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn...), but eventually ending in the desire to get her back again (...If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born...).

The last song, Buckets Of Rain, with its haunting melody and painful lyrics (...Like your smile/And your fingertips/Like the way that you move your lips/ I like the cool way you look at me/Everything about you is bringing me misery...), ends the album on a perfect note (...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 well,/I'll do it for you, honey baby, can't you tell?...).

This album may not have the importance and impact of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, but Blood On The Tracks speaks to the heart and, for that reason, it will never get old and become dated; it will never be forgotten by those who are affected by it.

Blood On The Tracks is just what the title says: the heart of rock's greatest poet is in every song here.

When I was a kid, I only knew Bob Dylan from his top 40 stuff. "Blowin' in the Wind", "Everybody Must Get Stoned", "Serve Somebody", "Lay, Lady Lay", and I could never figure out what the big deal was. (You think I could at least have appreciated the wide variety). Flash forward to middle age. I rediscover my own love for the guitar, and enter the local open mic circuit. Time after time, when I ask a fellow bard "Whose wonderful, magical song is that?" the answer is, "Oh! That's Dylan." (Actually, the most frequent answer is, "Oh! That's Leadbelly," but that's another review.)

I can't remember what inspired me to make Blood on the Tracks on of my first Dylan choices; maybe because "Shelter from the Storm" was a song I knew I did like from his "popular" catalogue. But these lilting melodies, in many cases quite simple ("You're Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go"), but always beautifully crafted, and the witty lyricism keep this CD perennially on my changer.

"Blood on the Tracks" was written during a very difficult time, as his marriage was disintegrating (his divorce did not occur till 1977, while BOT was released in late 1974).. Much of the CD focuses on relationship and their endings. "Tangled Up in Blue" starts from the beginning. "Simple Twist of Fate" tells of the emptiness felt after a one-night-stand.

"You're a Big Girl Now" might be the first song to refer to an ended relationship.. The protagonist is saying goodbye to someone, reassuring himself more than her as she boards a plane that she can take care of herself on her own. He's accepted the separation, although there's one plaintive cry in the middle: "I can change, I swear", which resolves: " I can make it through, You can make it too."

Sure, there is anger. ("Idiot Wind"). Sure, there is pain. But the human spirit triumphs in these songs, as well.

My personal favorite is "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." Once again, the protagonist has accepted his love's decision to leave, and perhaps he also has pulled away some. But he still is able to sing her praises, and to know part of what they had will go with him: "But I'll see you in the sky above, In the tall grass, in the ones I love"

I've heard that Mozart was writing his tender, uplifting aria "Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben" (K 336b), after he had just been unceremoniously dumped by the love of his life, Aloysia Weber. Who knows if history will be as kind to Robert Zimmerman as to Wolfgang Mozart, but at least they have these things in common: people have gone around whistling their tunes in the streets during their lifetimes, and they were able to write hopefulness even during a time of pain.

(And trivia fans: the song over which Hootie and the Blowfish were sued after using its lyrics is on this cd.

Ain't Bobby so cool?)

I, from reading some of the reviews below, have some disagreements:

First: Many people are calling this the greatest "rock" album or "folk" album ever... I agree on the "greatest" part but this is not rock (one electric guitar on an entire 52 minute album?) nor folk (wierd rhythms, epic-sounding organ, syncopated but soothing bass, open D tuning..); this is BOB DYLAN MUSIC! -- It can't be categorized, so why try? ("Desire" is the same way, but with a vastly different sound).

Another point:Dylan's words only gain meaning when they're sung. The only exception I can think of is "Isis". All other songs by the D. need a voice, HIS voice, to be trully understood. It's the sound of his voice that makes "Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstacy" (from "Idiot Wind") sound like the end of the world. Someone mentioned "Nashville Skyline" as evidence that Dylan can sing; please don't burden the rest of the world with the depths of your ignorance. On "Nashville Skyline" Dylan sings the way you're "supposed to" which means technically good but leaves us with lifeless, characterless, emotionless, conventional performances that say nothing. Go listen to Mariah Carey if you want "perfect" listen to Dylan if you want spine-tingling. (Example: listen to the way he sings "cup" in "Twist of Fate" and how it communicates more emotion than most singers entire careers; one syllable).

Jbonepar wrote something to the effect that Dylan uses his voice to create different impressions with every phrase and I consider that to be a dead-on description of how Dylan works in these songs.

We all know that Dylan's marriage was on the rocks when "Blood" was released and that accounts for the vulnerability and sadness of these songs. Just so that guy who complained about "macho types" and "fake"ness know what he's hearing (or not).

Last but not least: this is Dylan's greatest album. "Desire" was musically great but on a few songs ("Mozambique", "Romance In Durango", and the overlong "Joey" and the musically perfect "Black Diamond Bay")Dylan just dosen't seem to care enough about the story hes telling to really sing from his heart. (contrast this with "Sara" where Dylan takes a cliched lyric and make it sound like gospel with the force of his singing). "New Morning" is almost worthless, through and through, with NO emotion (even less than "Nashville Skyline"), no real interesting lyrics, and bland arrangements (great song titles thought- "Father of Night" and "Day of the Locusts").

Anyway, "Blood On the Track" while it dosen't have a "Like a Rolling Stone" or a "Blind Willie McTell" is, as a collection of songs that work together perhaps the greatest album ever and is tied for my favorite album with that other great meditation on loss REM's "Automatic for the People"

My title says it all. If you haven't heard this, buy it now. Even if you aren't a Dylan fan, you will be hard pressed to not find something that you appreciate on this one.

Many people think that this is the greatest Bob Dylan album ever recorded and they have a lot of reasons to think so. I presonally prefer Blonde on Blonde and to some extent Desire and John Wesley Harding but this is a great Bob Dylan album as well (By the way if you like this album I recommend checking out the other three mentioned above). Anyway, this whole album is just filled with great tunes written in that story telling style that Dylan has become so famous for.

For those of you who read my Wonder Boys soundtrack review you'll notice several of the Dylan tracks selected for that project are from this album, and that makes perfect sense. This album is very emotionally charged and thus many of its tracks make good music for a movie. The reason for this sense of powerful sounds is that Dylan had just suffered a divorce and he immediately started work on this album. Thus all of the pain and anguish he had been feeling gets carried right over into these songs.

To name favorite tracks is hard on such a great album, but I'll do my best. "Tangled Up In Blue" is probably one of the most popular Dylan albums of all times and with perfect explanation, it's a great song. It has a great sound to it that meshes well with the sing song lyrics that go along with it. I was able to see Dylan in concert once and this song was really the height of the show. "Buckets of Rain" is an often overlooked song but one that I think is simply great nonetheless filled with emotionally naked Dylan's feelings. "Shelter from the Storm" is almost a prayer in its desire for security in an unsecure world. "You're a Big Girl Now" is a great song which if you're interested look for alternate versions of this song. Apparently it was changed just before the album was produced and the liner notes still refer to an older version of this song. And of course "Idiot Wind" is also on here a truly epic song.

All in all this is quite probably one of Bob Dylan's greatest albums, but a different one from many of his other albums. Where most of the time Dylan allows us to view his mind and see what he is thinking, this album is truly a look into his soul, and thus we see a very different side of this most wonderful songwriter. I highly recommend this album to everyone.

It has been thirty years since "Blood on the Tracks" was released and of all of the albums recorded by Bob Dylan it is the one that has most increased in stature simply because every album produced since then has failed to rise to this level. I think the reason for this is mainly because it was born in a creative burst of pointed lyricisim as his marriage to Sara Lowndes collapsed, with all the songs written in two months in the middle of 1974. I would no more expect any personal turmoil to provide similar inspiration any more than I would have expected any of the songs on this album to rise to the level of social rhetoric found in his greatest songs of the Sixties.

In "Blood on the Tracks" Dylan also turned his back on his greatest backing band, returning to his artistic routes on an album that is largely acoustic-based. The songs run the emotional gamut from sorrow and regret to bitterness and pain. At the same time, despite the obvious point of origin for most of these songs, this is not an openly confessional album (cf. Courtney Love's "America's Sweetheart"). After all, we are talking the lyrics of Bob Dylan, which means cryptic riddles and allegories abound all laid out in ten classic tracks:

"Tangled Up in Blue" is the best song on the album and the ambguity about the characters and relationships Dylan sings about has only increased over the years with the shifting lyrics in various performances. The cover version by the Indigo Girls remains my favorite Dylan cover.

"Simple Twist of Fate" is another great four-word phrase in a song that represents the most overtly personal song on the album. The stark instrumentation only serves to highlight the heartbreak of the existentialist lyrics and the mournful sound of the vocals.

"You're A Big Girl Now" is a ballad on the end of a relationship and a sort of benediction in that clearly the woman is right to move on, but Dylan is still haunted by their physical encounters. You would think that this would have been the logical final track for the album, but it is not.

"Idiot Wind" is song on the album that most reminds me of an earlier Dylan composition, namely "Like a Rolling Stone," the pair being a set of put-down songs. The difference is that while both song lash out in lots of directions, this one keeps coming back to a certain "babe." This is another song that has changed over the year for various reasons that could well inspire a doctoral dissertation.

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is a rather upbeat track, despite the descending chord progressions, and is usually considered a song hopeful of reconciliation rather than one eulogizing the breakup.

"Meet Me in the Morning" stands out musically as the most blues oriented track that always struck me as cleansing the palatte for what was coming next on the album.

"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" is a 8:50 story song that basically wears down the listener's insistence that this is a biographical album. It also has a line that Dylan seems to sing with nic epitch and without affection, to wit, "and Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair." Pay attention next time through to that one phrase.

"If You See Her, Say Hello" probably represents the emotional low point of the album, with lyrics reflecting a singer who is crushed and embittered by the end of the relationship, turning his anger in on himself.

"Shelter from the Storm" is a song of simple beauty, based on three chords and a simple melody, underscoring a profound sense of loss. The song provides an avalanche of symbols and metaphors, but actually seems to end on an optimstic note.

"Buckets of Rain" provides a fitting finale, suitably depressing lyrics against a rather upbeat melody as irony once again abounds. After this song there is no where left to go.

"Blood on the Tracks" is listed by "Rolling Stone" magazine as the #16 record on the list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, between #15 "Are You Experienced?" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and #17 "Nevermind" by Nirvana. It is one of ten Dylan albums on the list, behind #4 "Highway 61 Revisited" and #9 "Blonde on Blonde." This For pretty much the complete story on the making of this classic album, check out "A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks" by music journalist Andy Gill and guitarist Kevin Odegard, who played on the five tracks recorded in Minneapolis. You can also listen to "The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3" to hear the original version of "Tangled Up in Blue," "Idiot Wind," and "If You See Her, Say Hello" recorded in New York City in September to compare with the Twin Cities versions from December of 1974.

"Early one mornin' the sun was shinin'..." This album astounds me, turns my blood to ice and makes my heart ache. When he sings, "If you get close to her/Kiss her once for me...." you can hear, in his voice, every nerve in his body stripped raw. Actually, I'm wrong--this entire album is one man's heart, broken open. It is as immediate and timeless as any great work of literature or film--but you didn't need me to tell you that! I love "Idiot Wind" intensely. When he gets to the part:"The Priest wore black on the seventh day/And sat stone-faced while the building burned/I waited foryou on the running boards/Near the cypress tree while the springtime turned/Sloooowly into autumn," I stand awed and silent. It gives me a feeling that I've only known reading Dostoevski or something of that sort. It really is beyond my power to describe. "Shelter from the Storm"--he actually uses the phrase "creature void of form"! And the jangle in his voice when he sings "flowers in her hair"...whew. Or the cool reference to those notoriously ill-mannered French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." (Verlaine, in his 30s, shot his young lover Rimbaud, 16. Didn't kill him. They got back together afterwards.) This may be, song by song, Dylan's greatest album. It's a living thing--that's Dylan's blood in those grooves, man.