50 years later, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ remains the standard by which all albums are measured
In 1975, Dylan introduced a whole new way of songwriting.
Bob Dylan performs with The Band in 1974, one year before the release of ‘Blood on the Tracks.’ Photo by Getty Images
The first sounds you hear when you drop the needle — or click the digital file — on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks are guitars ringing and chiming, almost like bells. They serve as a kind of preface or overture or opening statement or call to prayer for what the listener is about to hear: 56 minutes of a journey through dark heat into the heart and soul of an artist at the depths of sadness driving him to the heights of creative achievement.
Released 50 years ago on Jan. 20, 1975, Blood on the Tracks has since served as a marker for every Dylan album that has followed, such that the phrase “the best Dylan album since Blood on the Tracks” has become something of a cliché, almost even a joke (as it has been applied to almost every album Dylan has released since then). And depending on where you land personally in the ratings game, “the best since Blood on the Tracks” can also mean the best, period, as that mid-1970s song-cycle about the breakdown of a marriage in the context of a breakdown of the prevailing political and social order is often considered Dylan’s greatest album, vying only with the mid-1960s trilogy of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde (take your pick) for that honor.
While the album produced no pop hits — the only single, “Tangled Up in Blue,” peaked at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — Blood on the Tracks did rise to the top position on the album charts and remains one of Dylan’s all-time best-selling albums. It also spawned a plethora of soon-to-be Dylan standards, songs that would perennially show up in his concert setlists and in versions by a host of other artists — songs including “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Shelter from the Storm” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.” Coming as it did at the height of the folk-rock singer-songwriter era (in significant part kicked off by Dylan himself), which saw contemporaries including James Taylor, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Carly Simon carving out a significant place in the pop realm for their carefully crafted, closely observed “confessional” songs, Blood on the Tracks raised the bar on the genre itself as well as for Dylan’s own songwriting.
This wasn’t Dylan’s first attempt at writing songs that seemingly came right out of his own personal life — in this case, the well-chronicled, storm-tossed tempest of the death throes of his failing marriage, not yet fully over but on its way toward an inevitable end — but it was the first album-length song cycle that almost completely addressed Dylan’s private life (or so it seemed by virtue of the song lyrics). Dylan had written personal songs before, at least as far back as on his second album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which included “Girl from the North Country,” often assumed to be about one of two Minnesota girlfriends — Echo Helstrom and/or Bonnie Beecher.
Blood on the Tracks captured Dylan at the height of his writing powers, his vocals, and his guitar-playing in 10 mostly acoustic folk-rock songs featuring deceptively simple melodies, all of which combined to create the perfect vehicle with which to deliver these songs of searing pain, desperation and regret. The result was arguably the greatest account of love and loss ever put to vinyl.
Those opening chimes usher in the album’s most enduring song, “Tangled Up in Blue,” which became a fan favorite and a concert staple over the ensuing decades, despite (or perhaps because of) the song’s enigmatic nature. While Dylan on Dylan is always to be taken with many grains of salt, the future Nobel Prize-winner has pointed out in interviews over the years that the song is Exhibit A in how an obscure art teacher in New York City helped Dylan discover a new way of writing at a time when Dylan seemed to have lost the mystical, transcendental power of channeling those early-to-mid-1960s songs that flowed directly from inspiration to words on a page, bypassing Dylan’s ego or rational mind. (This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but one that Dylan has stuck to over the years.)
“Tangled Up in Blue” introduced a whole new way of songwriting. Dylan’s painting teacher, Norman Raeben, whose father happened to be the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, by all accounts was a prophetic, Old Testament-like character. Raeben, said Dylan, “didn’t teach you so much how to draw … he looked into you and told you what you were.” More specifically, Raeben challenged Dylan’s sense of time, both in his painting and in his songwriting, nudging Dylan away from linearity and more towards a free-flowing, experimental, cinematic style wherein, to quote Dylan, “Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast.” In “Tangled Up in Blue” and over the course of the entire song-cycle, narrators and narratives change (jumping from first-person to third-person and back again), characters recur and disappear, and individual songs open up and connect to each other like scenes in a movie.
Dylan teasingly mixes real-life detail with wholly imagined scenes. “She was married when we first met / Soon to be divorced,” he sings in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which was exactly the situation when Dylan first met Sara Lownds, who would eventually become Sara Dylan. “There was music in the cafés at night / And revolution in the air” is another line that evoked Dylan’s early days in Greenwich Village (and, more recently, seems to have served as a guidepost to the makers of the Hollywood biopic A Complete Unknown). And the song’s final couplet serves as a kind of acknowledgment of Raeben’s influence on Dylan’s way of thinking and writing: “We always did feel the same / We just saw it from a different point of view.”
While Blood on the Tracks is probably most often identified with “Tangled Up in Blue” — partly because it’s such a great song and also because it opens the album, it has come at the expense of what serves as the real emotional center of the album. “Idiot Wind” is a kind of remake or update of “Like a Rolling Stone” 10 years later, in which Dylan trains his emotional guns equally on a person and the country at large (much like “Like a Rolling Stone” did). Musically it is patterned after “Like a Rolling Stone,” and to drive home the point, Dylan himself overdubbed an organ track that sounds eerily like the one played by Al Kooper on “Like a Rolling Stone.”
The first line of “Idiot Wind” is one for the ages: “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press.” One can imagine Dylan himself, as the subject of tabloid fodder nearly from the beginning of his career, feeling beleaguered by the depths to which reporters would go to dig up dirt (or rummage through his garbage) to come up with wholesale nonsense, such as a 1963 Newsweek account claiming that Dylan didn’t write “Blowin’ in the Wind” but rather stole or purchased it from a New Jersey high school student. I’ve always heard the line “You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies” to refer to critical distortions of the meaning of his songs.
On one level, “Idiot Wind” is another of Dylan’s “hate” songs, which date back at least as far as 1965’s “Positively 4th Street,” with its immortal opening verse, “You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend / When I was down, you just stood there grinning.” One can hear those lines echoed in “Idiot Wind” when Dylan sings,
Even you, yesterday you had to ask me where it was at
I couldn’t believe after all these years
You didn’t know me better than that
Sweet lady
Dylan famously told an interviewer that after his stint studying with Norman Raeben, he and his wife, Sara, were no longer able to communicate.
But the genius of “Idiot Wind” lies in its juxtaposition of the personal and the universal. In one of several such lines in Blood on the Tracks songs, Dylan seems to refer to President Nixon and the Watergate scandal — which became the national obsession around the same time Dylan was writing songs for the album — when he sings, “Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” As for the song’s title and its recurring refrain, I explored in detail its origins in a Talmudic concept connecting sin and idiocy in these pages in January 2022.
This could also be another result of Dylan’s brief apprenticeship with Norman Raeben. In addition to his reputation as a charismatic art teacher, Raeben was also known as a scholar of Judaism and Kabbalah, and some suggest Dylan initially sought him out for religious study and not for painting. Also, one of Raeben’s favorite epithets was reportedly “idiot,” often directed at his students.
“Idiot Wind” is one of several songs on Blood on the Tracks featuring Dylan’s vocals at their most dynamic and expressive. He sounds alternately angry and wounded, irate and in pain. He even finds a way to phrase “idiot” as a four-syllable word, as if the ordinary three syllables are not enough to carry the weight of the idiocy he portrays. This sort of vocal stretching characterizes much of his singing on the album. On “You’re a Big Girl Now,” Dylan emphasizes the pain of knowing his beloved has moved on to someone else when he sings, “I know where I can find you, OH, in somebody’s room,” that “OH” being a high-pitched cry of despondency. Dylan employs that same “OH” in the final verse of the song when he sings
I’m going out of my mind, OH
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart.
Has anyone ever so directly and effectively written and sung about pain and heartbreak?
Also of note – and often overlooked on an album with such universal love/heartbreak songs as “If You See Her, Say Hello” and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” — is the nine-minute “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” Written almost like a screenplay (and indeed, within months of the album’s release there were reports that the song had been optioned to be made into a feature film; alas, that never happened), the song, a kind of neo-revisionist Western, serves as a bit of comic relief that comes early on side two of the album. But buried in the convoluted plot about a mortal card game with characters right out of a Sam Peckinpah film (Dylan had acted in Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which I wrote about in these pages, and which was filmed in Mexico, also referred to in the song) are more references to Watergate and possibly to Dylan himself during this time period.
The phrase “drillin’ in the wall” appears twice in the song, almost as a stage direction but which may have been an allusion to the Watergate burglaries. Upon first mention, it acts as a scene-setter, a bit of background noise against which the main plot plays itself out. Much later in the song, the phrase recurs as “The drillin’ in the wall kept up, but no one seemed to pay it any mind.” This time around, Dylan nearly elides the “r” in “drillin’” such that he could well be singing “The Dylan in the wall kept up but no one seemed to pay it any mind,” perhaps a cheeky, knowing nod to the fact that, despite continuing to release albums since 1966, Dylan was no longer at the center of the cultural discussion (at least not in the way he would be once again with Blood on the Tracks and the Rolling Thunder Revue tour that would follow later in 1975). Finally, one of the characters winds up “killed by a penknife in the back.” Why a penknife, which isn’t typically thought of as a murder weapon? Again, Dylan seems to suggest, words can kill.
Dylan concludes the album with a quiet, bluesy love song called “Buckets of Rain.” But even here, where the narrator is seemingly content with a relationship, he is betrayed by his inner demons when he sings,
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.
No Dylan album ever sounded quite like Blood on the Tracks, and none has since, accounting for the perennial judgment on every subsequent recording: “His best since Blood on the Tracks.” Blood on the Tracks, while almost an anomaly in Dylan’s vast catalog, remains to this day the gold standard — the album by which all others are measured.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
