Tag Archives: 1974

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan recording sessions

Dec 27: Bob Dylan Blood On The Tracks, 5th recording session in 1974

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blood-on-the-tracks-album-cover

By November 1974 Dylan had cut a test pressing of “Blood On The Tracks” based on his 4 recording sessions in New York (in September), and Columbia was aiming for a pre-christmas release.

Our earlier posts on the “New York Sessions”:

But after “sleeping on it” & getting advice from his brother David Zimmerman, he decided to re-record several songs @ Minneapolis’ Sound 80 Studios.

Unfortunately, one of the people Dylan had played his test pressing to, his younger brother David, told him that it would never sell, presumably based on the sheer starkness of the sound, rather than the nakedness of his brother’s soul, and convinced him to rerecord half a dozen of the songs in Minneapolis, with a set of local musicians that he would assemble at a studio he knew well, Sound 8o, making himself producer..
~Clinton Heylin (Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited)

Sound 80 Studio
Minneapolis, Minnesota
27 December 1974
Produced by David Zimmerman

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Call Letter Blues

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Bob Dylan call letter blues

The children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, the children cry for mother
I tell ’em, “Mother took a trip.”
Well, I walk on pins and needles
I hope my tongue don’t slip.
~Bob Dylan (Call Letter Blues)

Such self-consciously autobiographical imagery probably told for it in the end. I just can’t imagine Dylan releasing the line ‘Children ask for mother, I tell ’em mother took a trip’ into the world back in 1974. But at least he got as far recording this one with Weissberg’s band on that first night, cutting it in three takes, before deciding that he would rather replace it with an entirely fanciful morning blues, a.k.a. ‘Meet Me In The Morning’. The tune, he kept. Literally. As the 1991 release of ‘Call Letter Blues’ fully revealed.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

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Bob Dylan’s best songs: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

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bob dylan - the jack of hearts

The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down
Anyone with any sense had already left town
He was standin’ in the doorway lookin’ like the Jack of Hearts
~Bob Dylan (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)

The uses of a ballad have changed to such a degree. When they were singing years ago, it would be as entertainment . . . A fellow could sit down and sing a song for a half hour, and everybody could listen, and you could form opinions. You’d be waiting to see how it ended, what happened to this person or that person. It would be like going to a movie … Now we have movies, so why does someone want to sit around for a half hour listening to a ballad? Unless the story was of such a nature that you couldn’t find it in a movie.
-Bob Dylan (to John Cohen, June 1968)

This epic ballad appears to have been wholly inspired by Dylan’s experience of making the movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a genre which suited both ballad and b-movies: The Western.
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs – Tangled Up In Blue

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A song that took me ten years to live and two years to write
~Bob Dylan

So that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or you see it altogether. I wanted that song to be like a painting.
~Bob Dylan

Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue. And it affected me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And it just stayed in my head and when I wrote that song I wondered, what’s that mean? And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that’s what happened, y’know.
~Bob Dylan (to Craig McGregor, March 1978)

This masterpiece in number 3 on my list of Dylans 200 best songs. Listening to it almost never fails to put me in a state of flow.. time stops.. there is nothing except this beautiful piece of art occupying my attention.. best form of mindful meditation if you ask me.

It is the best song from one of his best albums: “Blood On The Tracks” (1975):

We allow our past to exist. Our credibility is based on our past. But deep in our soul we have no past. I don’t think we have a past anymore than we have a name. You can say we have a past if we have a future. Do we have a future? No. So how can our past exist if the future doesn’t exist?
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Cott, Dec 1977)

But we’re only dealing with the past in terms of being able to be healed by it. We can communicate only because we both agree that this is a glass and this is a bowl and that’s a candle and there’s a window here and there are lights out in the city. Now I might not agree with that. Turn this glass around and it’s something else. Now I’m hiding it in a napkin. Watch it now. Now you don’t even know it’s there. It’s the past… I don’t even deal with it. I don’t think seriously about the past, the present or the future. I’ve spent enough time thinking about these things and have gotten nowhere.
~Bob Dylan (to Jonathan Cott, Dec 1977)

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

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Verlaine & Rimbaud
“Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud”

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go
~Bob Dylan (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)

Much of the song is thus delivered, so lightly as to suggest that it’s in brackets, with the same sparkling, generous humour. Astonishing that a man who, by the time he made this album, had been monstrously famous for over a decade and had been acclaimed as a genius before he was 25, could have the down-to-earth self-knowledge to
throw out, in this song, so ordinarily humorous and puckish a phrase as the one that ends this stanza: ‘You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’ / Stayin’ far behind without you / You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’— / You’re gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to . . .’
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

And how smoothly the album slips from this orgy of marital upchuck into the lightest, most innocent, most enticing love song of the whole batch, a throwaway which on closer inspection seems quite as brilliant (in composition and performance) as anything else here: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” So clever, so perfect, to have a song that puts any separation squarely in the future, instead of present, near past, or distant past.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

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