Blood on the Tracks

Blood on the Tracks is a 1975 album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In September 1974, Dylan entered the studio with a clutch of newly written songs, many inspired by his recent estrangement from his wife of ten years, Sara Lownds Dylan.

Outtakes and alternate versions

Tim Riley describes "Up to Me" as "another buried treasure that becomes a sublime cover on Roger McGuinn's Cardiff Rose (1976)...its armload of self-referencing touches operate as blueprints for Blood on the Tracks major themes of obession, denial, and melancholy humor. 'Up to Me' works as both the engine of feeling underlying the album and one of the sliest self-references Dylan ever gets up the nerve to sing: 'How my lone guitar played sweet for you that old-time melody / And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for you, free... / You know it was up to me.'" A serious contender for the album, it was omitted due to an overabundance of material. It was later issued on 1985's Biograph.

Related Topics:
Roger McGuinn - Biograph

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Blood on the Tracks also produced one of Dylan's most popular bootlegs, a replicated version of the acetate test pressings created for the album's original configuration. With both the original 'New York' master takes and the Minneapolis re-recordings made available for comparison, there's been much debate among critics and fans alike over Dylan's decision to replace five songs on Blood on the Tracks with the Studio 80 re-recordings.

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Riley argues that Dylan "was probably right to chuck the New York tracks for the Minneapolis band, not only because with new players the songs get a refreshingly naive surface that rubs up against their world-weary outlook, but because Dylan's singing in New York is so soft it sounds swallowed - a whole record of that couldn't have carried the same load."

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Critic Robert Christgau wrote, "The first version of this album struck me as a sellout to the memory of Dylan's pre-electric period; this , utilizing unknown Minneapolis studio musicians who impose nothing beyond a certain anonymous brightness on the proceedings, recapitulates the strengths of that period."

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However, Clinton Heylin argues that the Studio 80 version of "You're a Big Girl Now" was "a mere reflection of the ghost of a pale shadow of its New York self" while the Studio 80 version of "If You See Her, Say Hello" was "subjected to a number of minor changes and one line - 'If you're making love to her' became 'If you get close to her' - that stepped back from the intimacy and real hurt in the original." Though he concedes that Studio 80 versions of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" and "Tangled Up in Blue" "may have the edge on the New York takes," he also criticizes the Studio 80 version of "Idiot Wind," arguing that although "the rewrites made for a more poetic lyric, they worked at the expense of the song's sense, which, when aligned to its Minneapolis performance, is overwrought, and belies all the underlying sorrow rippling through the original vocal."

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