Dylan Did What Artists Always Do, He Took the Lemons That Life Hands Us All and Made a Delicious Batch of Musical Lemonade.
Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks (Columbia – PC 33235, 1975)
50 years ago found the release of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks which - for all intents and purposes - summarized the end of his first marriage in an outrageously poetic way. But, who can tell anything with Bob, really? There’s no denying, however, that the music contained herein is inspired by some hot (or frigidly cold) sear of emotion, pain, and even a pure freedom which is often a complicated mix of terror and ecstatic joy. If only we could all encapsulate our own living phases into 40 - 50 minute bursts of musical excellence; maybe we’d be more understood, quite possibly, however, it might lead to more confusion.
Sometimes, on BOTT, an item on Bob’s clothing clanks against his guitar (the buttons of our coats? his harmonica holder?) in an annoying way and occasionally his acoustic guitar is just a hair out of tune leading to a delicate yet subliminally jarring effect. But - well, you know how Bob is - he knew that the story he was writing needed some rough edges. It needed some honesty, more than even those cataclysmic lyrics could provide.
My library hosts a pressing of MFSL’s reissue from 2013 which - I’m embarrassed to say, because I hate doing this - I haven’t had the heart to break the seal on. Today would be the day to do it; 50th anniversary and all, but I think I’m just going to stick with an original pressing from Terre Haute with liner notes in black typeface for folks who love that sort of thing (I do). While I’ve foolishly never heard my Mofi pressing, this issue sounds excellent, especially considering the amount of music contained on the single disc release (51 minutes and 40 seconds) which is about the limit one would want to press onto a single disc before things get...messy.
But, messy is what Blood on the Tracks is all about, so that jives, doesn’t it? Sometimes we say more than we need to, too many words, too many emotions to get out in the open. In the hopes of saying it all, we contradict ourselves; our arguments become meaningless after we scurry through the rabbit hole time and time again, trying to remember where the whole thing went wrong to begin with: the closer that we inspect them - the more the origins of those anxieties only slip through our fingers.
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