Buckets of Rain: Blood on the Tracks at 50
Honoring Bob Dylan’s brilliant 1975 LP
Sometimes you never forget the first time you hear a song.
In the case of “Tangled Up in Blue” — the opening song from Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks — I was a teenager in my suburban Connecticut bedroom.
I couldn’t tell you the exact date but it would have been some time around the tail end of the ‘70s. I was casually listening to a radio station out of Hartford one afternoon when suddenly “Tangled Up in Blue” hit the airwaves and blew my mind. The length of the song (almost six minutes), the imagery (which started out in first person but switched to third), even the harmonica solo at the end — it was like nothing I’d ever heard before and yet it all made sense. The track’s final verse remains as powerful today as when I first heard it as a teenager:
“So now I’m going back again/I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know/They’re an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians/Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started/I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road/Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue…”
This was popular music as poetry and it opened my young mind up to non-linear narratives, to time spent on the road, to loving and losing… All in less than six minutes!
Not long after that, I went to a local record store and bought a copy of Blood on the Tracks. If no other song on the disc topped that one, several came close. And unlike so many albums, every song on Blood on the Tracks was worthy of inclusion. Most of them are great and the album flows from start to finish, as a complete statement. Blood turns 50 this month — on January 20th, according to most sources. And it still holds up.
Dylan’s previous studio disc, Planet Waves — which was recorded mostly with The Band — had by no means been a disaster. It produced the evergreen hit “Forever Young” and actually topped the Billboard charts. But like all of Dylan’s albums from the 1970s up to then — the disastrous Self Portrait, New Morning and the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack — it didn’t feel like a classic either. With Blood on the Tracks, he made his first bona fide classic of the 1970s.
Dylan tapped Phil Ramone — who would later work with Billy Joel among others — to produce the set in 1974. Ramone, in turn, tapped Eric Weissberg — the guitarist who had scored a number two smash with “Dueling Banjos” from the Deliverance soundtrack — to play on it. No doubt Weissberg was a talented musician — but he wasn’t the first talented musician who didn’t click with Dylan. After spending a long night working on a bunch of songs to little avail, Dylan dismissed Weissberg and most of the Deliverance band. The only member he called back was bassist Tony Brown. In the end, at least a dozen musicians played on Blood on the Tracks — many of whom weren’t credited on the album cover! Besides Brown, the musicians who appeared on the most songs were guitarist Chris Weber, keyboardist Gregg Inhofer and drummer Bill Berg. Interestingly, five of the 10 tracks were recorded in New York City while the other five were recorded in Dylan’s native Minnesota.
Blood leads off with “Tangled Up in Blue,” the album’s best song and, to these ears, one of the best songs ever written. From there, we get two gorgeous but heartbroken ballads back to back. “Simple Twist of Fate” is told from both first and third person whereas “You’re A Big Girl Now” is strictly first person. Both carry a palpable sense of loss. Rarely has Dylan made himself as vulnerable as when he sings, “I can change, I swear” on the latter song.
From there, the record takes a hard left turn. “Idiot Wind” is a masterpiece of rage that, initially at least, seems out of place on this record. But there’s no denying that it’s a great song. For nearly eight minutes, Dylan spews his venom against an enemy (a former lover? a politician? the media? all of the above?). It’s so intense that it makes “Positively 4th Street” look like a love song. But the most powerful thing about “Idiot Wind” may be that Dylan doesn’t let himself off the hook either. Witness the final verse:
“You’ll never know the hurt I’ve suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I”ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry…”
Not for the faint of heart.
Side one ends with “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” At 2:55, it’s the shortest tune on the album — but it’s a keeper. The upbeat melody belies another heartbroken lyric. “I could stay with you forever and never realize the time,” sings Dylan to a lover who is about to depart. All told, side one of Blood on the Tracks is one of the finest sides of music ever recorded.
Side two opens with “Meet Me in the Morning.” It’s a bluesy song, more low-key than most of the tunes on Blood, but still effective — especially when Dylan references certain Midwestern locales. And again, there’s a sense of lost love here.
That brings us to the longest track on the album. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is a nine-minute narrative about a love triangle — or possibly even a quadrangle! This is another one with abstract lyrics, so it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on. But, as Pete Hamill wrote upon the album’s release, “Its real wonder is in the spaces, in what the artist left out of his painting… To state things plainly is the function of journalism. But Dylan sings a more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of images and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him.” Musically, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is upbeat — but it’s not really rock and roll. It could almost qualify as carnival music, which seems fitting for the narrative.
From there, we return to back to back ballads. “If You See Her, Say Hello” and “Shelter from the Storm” are two of the most beautiful songs on Blood (if not in Dylan’s entire catalog). Both reek of heartache. In the former, Dylan is addressing someone who seems to know his ex. “She might think that I’ve forgotten her/Don’t tell her it isn’t so,” he sings. But to these ears, the song’s best line is “And I’ve never gotten used to it/I’ve just learned to turn it off.” Similarly, “Shelter from the Storm” is poetic and heartbroken as Dylan recounts a relationship that has ended.
The disc ends with “Buckets of Rain,” one of its shorter songs and possibly its most understated. Lyrically, it may not be on the level of most of Blood on the Tracks, but it serves to tie things up nicely — and gently. After the previous nine songs, it’s almost a relief not to have something so emotional.
VIDEO: Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue”
Understandably, many interpreted Blood on the Tracks to be an autobiographical album. Dylan was estranged from his longtime wife Sara Lowndes — for whom he’d written “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and other songs — at the time he recorded it. But in interviews (not to mention his book Chronicles Vol. 1), Dylan has denied this. In 1985, he told Bill Flanagan, “A lot of people thought that album pertained to me. It didn’t pertain to me.” Having said that, Dylan is famous for contradicting (or even recreating) himself. And it’s worth noting that Jakob Dylan — his and Sara’s son and the frontman of The Wallflowers — has said, “When I’m listening to Blood on the Tracks, that’s about my parents.” The truth is probably somewhere in between. There’s no question that Dylan took poetic license — especially on songs like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — but it’s hard not to believe this album wasn’t inspired by real life events.
Blood on the Tracks received mostly good reviews when it was released — but it also had its share of detractors and of mediocre reviews. Commercially, it was a success; it became Dylan’s second studio effort in a row to top the Billboard chart while “Tangled Up in Blue” was a Top 40 hit. Over the past five decades — indeed by the 1980s — the album’s reputation had only improved. It is now uniformly considered Dylan’s best album of the 1970s and one of his best period. And it was generally hailed as Dylan’s “comeback record” — which is not to say it was his only comeback. He would make another comeback in the late ‘80s (after a disastrous string of albums) with Oh Mercy, another one in the late ‘90s with the brilliant Time Out of Mind and, arguably, yet another in 2020 with his most recent release, Rough and Rowdy Ways. If one thing is certain, it’s that you can never count Bob Dylan out. His catalog is rife with classics and it’s never clear what direction he will go in next.
But if you’re looking for his best album of the ‘70s — or the album when he wore his heart on his sleeve with all its pain and beauty — well, that album would be Blood on the Tracks.
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