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.

Writing and recording Blood on the Tracks

More than two months after finishing his 1974 American tour with The Band, Dylan travelled back to New York City, where he looked up an art teacher, Norman Raeben. Dylan was working on his skills as a painter, and Raeben was recommended to him by his friends in California. In 1978, Dylan recalled that his friends "were talking about truth and love and beauty, and all these words I had heard for years, and they had 'em all defined...I asked them, 'Where do you come up with all those definitions?' and they told me about . I made a point to look him up the next time I was in New York, which was the spring of 1974. I just dropped to see him one day and I wound up staying there for two months...Five days a week I used to go up there, and I'd just think about it the other two days of the week. I used to be up there from eight o'clock to four. That's all I did for two months."

Related Topics:
The Band - New York City

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As biographer Clinton Heylin writes, Blood on the Tracks, Desire (album), and Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara (filmed in the fall of 1975) "share a fascination with identities that stems as much from Raeben as Dylan." In 1978, Dylan recalled that his time with Raeben "locked me into the present time more than anything else I ever did...I was constantly being intermingled with myself, and all the different selves that were in there, until this one left, then that one left, and I finally got down to the one that I was familiar with... taught me how to see...in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt. And I didn't know how to pull it off. I wasn't sure it could be done in songs because I'd never written a song like that. But when I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks. Everybody agrees that that was pretty different, and what's different about it is there's a code in the lyrics, and also there's no sense of time."

Related Topics:
Desire (album) - Renaldo and Clara

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After spending two and a half months in New York, Dylan flew to Minnesota. Ellen Bernstein recalls, "He was at his best there, at his most comfortable, with his brother's house down the road. He had a painting studio out in the field, and the house was far from fancy, out in the middle of nowhere. He was very relaxed, and that's where and when he was writing Blood on the Tracks."

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Heylin writes that "only when had a fully formed prototype for the song would he show it to Ellen, and invariably, by then, it had been copied into little red notebook from the scraps of paper on which his initial thoughts had been sketched." Ellen Bernstein recalls "Dylan would do his writing early in the morning and then kinda materialize around midday, come downstairs and eventually, during the day, share what he had written. It was in the notebook, but he would play it, and ask me what I thought, and it was always different, every time, he would just change it and change it and change it. You definitely had this sense of a mind that never stopped." Dylan would eventually fill his little red notebook with a total of seventeen complete songs.

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On July 22nd, Dylan played Stephen Stills and Tim Drummond at least half a dozen of the new songs composed that spring and summer. Stills and Drummond heard these songs in a room at the St. Paul Hilton Hotel, after a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert, and soon after hearing them Drummond would praise them, describing them as "gutsy, bluesy, so authentic...it's the first time I've sat in a room and liked everything I heard."

Related Topics:
Stephen Stills - St. Paul - Crosby, Stills and Nash

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Dylan began planning his next album, and at one point, he considered hiring guitarist Michael Bloomfield for the recording sessions. (Bloomfield was a key element on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.) However, Bloomfield recalls, " came over and there was a whole lot of secrecy involved, there couldn't be anybody in the house. I wanted to tape the songs so I could learn them so I wouldn't 'em up at the sessions...and he had this look on his face like I was trying to put out a bootleg album or something...He started playing the songs from Blood on the Tracks and I couldn't play, I couldn't follow them...There was this frozen guy there. It was very disconcerting...He took out his guitar, he tuned to tuning, and he started playing the songs nonstop! And he just played them all and I just sort of picked along with it...I was saying, 'No, man, don't sing the whole thing, just sing one chorus and if it's not gonna change, let me write it down so I can play with you.' And he didn't. He just kept on playing...They all began to sound the same to me, they were all in the same key, they were all long. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life."

Related Topics:
Michael Bloomfield - Highway 61 Revisited

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Though his meeting with Bloomfield was not a success, Dylan continued to audition his songs to a select number of people, including bluegrass picker Pete Rowan and songwriter/poet Shel Silverstein, who was introduced to Dylan by Bernstein. "He was very interested in people's reaction," recalls Bernstein. "When Bob and I went to New York to do Blood on the Tracks he wanted to go and visit this friend of his in some Hasidic neighborhood...we went out in the backyard and he played the songs for these friends of his..."

Related Topics:
Bluegrass - Shel Silverstein

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On August 2nd, Dylan also renewed his relationship with Columbia Records, Bernstein's employer and Dylan's original label. Dylan had a falling out with Columbia that led Dylan to record briefly with David Geffen's Asylum Records, but Columbia mended its relationship with Dylan, going as far as reverting the rights to Dylan's previous album masters on the delivery of a new product. (Bernstein insists that she had no part in Dylan's decision to re-sign with Columbia.)

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With a new contract secured, Dylan took his little red notebook to New York and began recording his next album. The sessions were held at A&R Studios in New York, formerly known as Studio A, back when Dylan was recording six of his albums within its confines. The first session was to be held on September 16th, with Dylan himself producing and Phil Ramone engineering.

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On the morning of the 16th, guitarist and banjo player Eric Weissberg was up at A&R Studios working on an advertising jingle when he ran into Phil Ramone in the hallway. A successful session musician who, according to Weissberg, "was just about the only guy who could play all the folk instruments - mandolin, fiddle, Dobro, etc. - and read music and follow a chart," he had recently scored a major hit with "Dueling Banjos," a banjo instrumental he had written and recorded for the 1973 film Deliverance. The success of that single led him to form a group called Deliverance, consisting of drummer Richard Crooks, keyboardist Thomas McFaul, guitarist Charlie Brown III, and bassist Tony Brown. According to Weissberg, Ramone asked him if he had a band. Weissberg told him about Deliverance, and Ramone reportedly told him that he needed a band for Dylan's recording session, set to take place that evening.

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When the session first began, Dylan was recording solo, but eventually Weissberg and Deliverance arrived and they began recording with Dylan. Sometime during this session, John Hammond, Sr. dropped by to welcome Dylan back to Columbia. Dylan reportedly told Hammond that he wanted his next album to be "easy and natural" with little, if any, overdubbing.

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Dylan recorded at least nine songs during that first session. At least six of them were recorded with Deliverance. According to Weissberg, Dylan had made things difficult for Deliverance, just as he had done with Bloomfield. "It was weird. You couldn't really watch his fingers 'cause he was playing in a tuning arrangement I had never seen before. If it was anybody else I would have walked out. He put us at a real disadvantage." Weissberg also recalls Dylan drinking a lot of wine, and that he seemed uninterested in "correcting obvious mistakes." As some critics would later note, Dylan didn't even seem fazed when his jacket's buttons rattled against his guitar. "There were certain ones where you can hear the sound of his fingernails on the guitar," recalls Bernstein. "That didn't matter to him. None of that stuff was important to him. What was important was the overall weight of the song."

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Master takes of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," "Meet Me in the Morning," and "Idiot Wind" were successfully recorded at this session and set aside for the album, but the rest of the recordings were deemed unsatisfactory. ("Call Letter Blues," an outtake recorded on the 16th, would eventually be released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991.

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Another session was held the following day, but this time, at Dylan's request, only bassist Tony Brown would return. Dylan also recruited organist Paul Griffin to join the sessions. (Griffin had also previously recorded with Dylan.) At this session, master takes of "You're a Big Girl Now," "Shelter from the Storm," and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" were successfully recorded and set aside for the album.

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On the 19th, accompanied only by Tony Brown, Dylan successfully recorded master takes of "Buckets of Rain," "If You See Her, Say Hello," "Simple Twist of Fate," "Up to Me," and "Tangled Up in Blue," which were set aside for the album. On this day, Dylan also overdubbed a new lyric for "Meet Me in the Morning" onto a "Call Letter Blues" backing track recorded with Deliverance on the 16th.

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Recording was deemed complete, but during the preliminary mixing and sequencing of the album, Dylan realized he had to remove one, possibly two of his chosen songs as the final product would have been 58 minutes in length, too much for a single LP but too short to give a double LP release serious consideration. As a result, "Up to Me" was excised, eventually seeing release on 1985's boxed-set retrospective, Biograph.

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Dylan had completed his album in less than a week, and Columbia was now preparing to release it by Christmas. Test pressings were eventually made and Columbia was soon printing sleeve artwork as well. On his return to Malibu, Dylan played his own test pressing to a number of friends, including Robbie Robertson. However, when Dylan went to see his younger brother, David, in Minneapolis, David apparently convinced Dylan that the album would never "sell." Put off by the album's stark sound, David convinced Dylan to re-record half of the album in Minneapolis with local musicians that he would assemble at a studio he knew well. The decision would force Columbia to push back the release date for Blood on the Tracks.

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On December 27th, Dylan's brother assembled guitarist Kevin Odegard, mandolin player Peter Ostroushko, bassist Billy Peterson, keyboardist Gregg Inhofer, and drummer Bill Berg at Studio 80 in Minneapolis where Dylan proceeded to re-record "You're a Big Girl Now" and "Idiot Wind" backed by these local musicians. Master takes selected from this session would ultimately replace the 'New York' master takes on the final album.

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On December 30th, the same local musicians re-convened at Studio 80, where Dylan proceeded to re-record "Tangled Up in Blue," "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," and "If You See Her, Say Hello." Master takes selected from this session would also replace the 'New York' master takes on the final album.

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The revised edition of Blood on the Tracks was eventually released on January 17th, 1975, but test pressings of the original version were eventually replicated and heavily bootlegged.

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When Blood on the Tracks was released, the original album credits were not changed, omitting the Minneapolis musicians from the sleeve notes. Columbia allegedly wanted to exhaust their supply of album sleeves (printed before Dylan's decision to hold additional sessions at Studio 80), after which new sleeves would be printed with the correct album credits. However, this was never done, and subsequent re-issues of Blood on the Tracks still incorrectly list Deliverance as the only musicians involved.

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