Bob Dylan at His Most Sincere
Cosmo Adair
New York City, 16th September 1974. A waning singer returns to the studio where he recorded his first album. He plays a new song called ‘Idiot Wind’; it’s vitriolic, disgusted, a paean to the difficulties of fame. The production team and the session musicians are astounded. He finishes the song and turns to them. “Was that sincere enough?”
Of course, he knew it was. ‘Humble’ isn’t an epithet very often used to describe Bob Dylan. You can picture him as he speaks: the dark sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his lips and a grin of elusive circumspection. In fact, there’s a degree of sincerity to every track on the album. After all its title, Blood on the Tracks, wasn’t chosen at random. In Dylan’s most lyrical album he exposes his bloody heart and lets it bleed upon the airwaves.
The only thing lacking sincerity, however, is the singer himself. He consistently denies that the album is of any autobiographical interest. What does he call it, then? ‘An entire album based on Chekhov short stories’. Even the most loyal Dylan fans can’t deny that remark is pretentious. Yet there’s something strangely human in his suggestion that this tender expurgation of feeling isn’t personal. Even after singing for 45 minutes on the subject, he’s still incapable of discussing it.
It’s hard not to begin with ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. It’s the first song on the album and, I dare say, it’s the most elusive. To me, the song seems to discuss how being overly tangled up in one’s own emotions and seeing things from a single standpoint makes a relationship impossible. It’s that age-old issue of not being able to enter the belovéd’s mind. But Dylan brings new vigor, new sincerity to this issue — and he does so by scrapping linear narrative and allowing the song to drift between the first and third person singular. He plays with this in the song’s concluding lines:
‘We always did feel the same
We just saw it form a different point of view
Tangled up in blue’.
With time-granted distance, Dylan recognises that his inability to understand his lover made the relationship impossible. The conscious use of several perspectives makes it clear that now he is able to understand these things.
If you’re listening on vinyl or CD, there’s a brief pause. Then you’ll hear the gentle strums of an acoustic guitar escape the muffled amplifier. The progress from E Major, to E Major 7, to E7 calls the listener into its world of melancholy languor and summer evenings. It’s ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, and the painfully eidetic recall of a past romance sits atop of the chords. There’s the clocks, the saxophones, the neon lights. Love once heightened his perception of things, but now it’s gone by ‘a simple twist of fate’.
Similar techniques are at play here: the seamless transitions between time-periods, and the changes in perspective. The romance of the first 4 verses is undermined by the 5th: ‘He woke up; the room was bare’. Has this whole story so far been a dream? The directness of that line hammers home her absence. Such bareness — the lack of images, the sensory void — seems purposefully contrasted to the earlier details (the ‘neon burning bright’, ‘the heat of the night hit him like a freight train’). A distance between then and now is established; whatever he tries, he cannot resurrect that distant night.
Throughout the album, the idea of fate is crucial to a successful relationship. In ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, this constantly reunites the lovers, but in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ it condemns them to be apart. The heartbreakingly cryptic line, ‘She was born in Spring, but I was born too late’, hammers this home.
This idea reappears in ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’. There’s a geographical distance between them (‘she might be in Tangier’), but we later discover,
‘And though our separation
It pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me
We’ve never been apart’.
Memory is able to cancel geographical distance. He negates the distance in a figurative sense, thus what we’d suspected becomes true: that he’s still hopelessly in love with the person, and that he feels they’re so deeply bonded that true separation is impossible. A sense of fate, or fatedness, is present in that belief in such a deep bond. His conviction that their fates are shackled together seems almost Catholic — it’s as if once married, they can never truly be separated, at least in a spiritual sense, in God’s eyes.
In his book Dylan’s Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks makes much of the Keastian side of ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’. “And I’m just like that bird …” But here Dylan does one better than Keats; through a direct simile, he not only aligns himself with the bird but becomes it. And, like the bird, he is singing for the sake of singing; he’s very aware that he won’t necessarily get anything in return. But he sings on, anyway, just to please her, to be background music to which the belovéd can live out their day.
The sincerity of the song is also present, I feel, in its less beautiful side: the almost patronizing remark that ‘You’re a Big Girl now’. There are hints of Dylan’s earlier, derisively misogynistic ‘Just Like a Woman’. It’s certainly Dylan speaking here. And he seems to almost resent Belovéd’s self-agency, which has led to her departure.
Whatever Dylan might say about the album, whether or not the reader likes the album, I think it’s impossible to deny its sincerity. And, with that, I urge you to listen to it. Then perhaps you’ll agree with me that it’s not only
