Is Blood On The Tracks autobiographical?

Recalling the ups and downs of writing my first book eighteen years on.

Opinions are like _______; everybody’s got one. Heard that one?  Of course you have. For my next trick I offer you my opinion of a book of opinions I co-wrote in 2003-2004, secluded in a blue music studio. Blue as the paint on the walls, I became so immersed in the subject matter that my life began to imitate the art I was researching. Exhausted, I lost everything after the book was published; job, family, home, car and self-respect.

Following a book rollout and BOTT band reunion at The Pantages Theater in Minneapolis, I came apart and committed to an extended stay at Hazelden treatment center, where I found myself in mens group sessions quoting Idiot Wind. “Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped, what’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, You’ll find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom”.

Released to the wild several months later, I first heard Steve Berkowitz’ Super Audio Compact Disc remixes, isolating my guitar track to the right rear speaker. I heard my guitar part on Tangled Up In Blue clearly for the first time as the ink dried on my divorce. Surprisingly, it sounded good enough to begin restoring my sense of self respect. I discovered that had played better in those six minutes of Tangled Up In Blue, interacting with Bob and the others in our thrown-together garage band, than I had ever, or would ever play that Martin guitar in my life, before or since. 

The only “Pro” I’ll put forward before getting into the nitty gritty is that our little book, A Simple Twist Of Fate: Bob Dylan and The Making Of Blood On The Tracks, is still in print at this writing, available at all online booksellers. Let’s get on to the “Cons”.

Critics were fair, then and now. No single fact, date or attribution in our book has ever been challenged. I told the story as a firsthand witness and left my own opinions on the editing room floor.

My collaborator, the late Andy Gill, whom I never actually met, played by similar guidelines. Readers got cranky about our skewed subjectivity and let us know. Fortunately we had a wise-beyond-his youth editor in Ben Schafer who rode continuity to establish and retain a flow. When pop music maven Jon Bream read it, the first thing he said to me was this. “I can tell exactly, sentence by sentence, which sections you wrote, apart from Gill’s”.

At the time, I knew I was lucky to get the deal; that it was contingent upon collaborating with an established author made me the junior partner, mediator, go-between and errand-boy for the duration, a role which I eagerly accepted with, um, gratitude.

Readers fell into two categories, as they remain today. Musicians like the tech I brought to the project; guitar makes, mics, verbatim engineering and production notes and recollections of all six Minnesota musicians. To his credit, Andy interviewed NYC engineer Phil Ramone and all of the September, 1974 New York City session players, one of whom had his name removed from the log sheets in disgust, one of my favorite sidebars in the book, among other sad tales from the frustrated New York cats whose work was cut from the original Columbia release on January 20, 1975.

You can hear it all now on More Blood, More Tracks, the 2018 Columbia 6-disc release containing every take of every song. It’s a fascinating look at Dylan’s work style, his perfectionist drive to get the words and music just right. It’s not boring. I can listen straight through in an afternoon and, much like Viewing Francis Ford Coppola’s extended 7-hour NBC re-cut Godfather Epic, it’s an epic entertainment. It’s the only genuine update to our book, telling the story with pristine, revelatory manuscripts.

Other readers, as we find among diners when they are insulted by a bad waiter on Yelp, were and are are less than kind, picking at their self-owning trifles with a lobster fork. “It’s too short”. “There are no Dylan interviews”. “It’s all been said before”. No, it hasn’t, dear readers, and unless Dylan brings us Chronicles, Volume 2, in which he identifies which Chekhov plays he drew from to write his breakup masterpiece, as he once stated, we’ll never have the whole story. Isn’t the work itself enough? Why do we always want more?

And now to the point of my little rant. On Mary Travers’ radio show, Dylan responded to a well-intentioned compliment on Blood On The Tracks, saying he didn’t know how people can relate to “That kind of pain”. Then Jakob Dylan was quoted saying about the album “That’s my mom and dad talking”. I understand interviews now, forty seven years later. I know how things can slip out. Hell, I allowed whole passages to slip out in print In all three editions of our book. Things I could have cut. Hurtful things that needn’t be said, ever, about people I loved, a family whose trust I betrayed. Regrets? You betcha.

Did Bob write his breakup masterpiece based on his own life? Not entirely. Lily, Rosemary, the Jack of Hearts and a tangled up cast of characters in three tenses are welcome visitors to this outing. If there is overlap from Dylan’s own experience, that’s his business; so be it. Does Blood On The Tracks still resonate with our experience?. Yes, it grows in stature as the years go by. Dylan’s lyrics have always been a fluid amalgam; dada-esque, from the ether transmuted. Even Bob doesn’t claim to know how he’s wired; just that he was, is and will ever be.

First thing every morning I recite my two favorite Dylan quotes to start my day on the right note. “If I’ve ever had anything to tell anybody, it’s that: You can do the impossible; anything is possible. And that’s it; no more”, and this: “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do”. To Bob the songwriter, the painter, the metal sculptor and the role model who came into my life when I needed one, I say thank you.

Dylan’s recorded body of work has been studied, PHD’d, analyzed, reversed, anagrammed, posterized, pasteurized, homogenized, covered, banned, censored, redacted, spin-dried and proven time out of mind to mean different things to different people. That’s the way our most revered laureate has said that he likes it; open-ended, subject to all interpretations, reflecting a civilization that changes with the amorphous hues of day turning to night.

*The Tangled Up In Blue guitar lives on in the archives of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, set to open to the public on May 10, 2022.

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