About 20 years ago - possibly longer - I picked up an orange cassette of my dad’s. It was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. It was anything but simple, but somehow it clicked with me in a way that few albums have ever truly clicked.
Since then, I’ve owned it on vinyl (well, actually, borrowed from Liverpool city library, but never returned); and on CD twice. It was, needless to say, one of the first albums I ripped, and I listen to bits of it at least once a wek.
Over the years, I’ve bought dozens of albums by Dylan, and I say I’m into him: but in truth, my addiction is really to Blood on the Tracks. Frankly, if I lost all the other albums but kept that one, I’d be fine. If I lost that one: there would be trouble!. Should I ever make it onto desert Island discs, ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ will by my first song.
This is normally something I keep quite quiet. But, Uncut has gone and done one of those ‘the full story behind the album’ things on it this month, as it celebrates its 30th anniversary. It’s the first time I’ve read one of their cover stories four about a year or so, and while it’s a bit of a cuttings job, it’s still an album I could read about for ever. However, I could have done with a lot more about the music: a bit more of a song by song breakdown. In fact, if they want to do a regular Blood on the Tracks feature, that’s fine by me
I knew it was all about his break up with Sara, and I knew he re-recorded a chunk of it just before it was due to go out, but I never realised just how poisonous the lyrics to Idiot Wind were (then again, for he first five years of listening to it, I thought it was about two people called ‘Eeee - eddy and Win’)
They say their site is going to have some of the original recordings of Tangled Up In Blue and Idiot Wind (a less nasty version), but they don’t seem to be there yet. Worth looking out for.
Meanwhile, if you’ve never heard it. Or tried it and didn’t like it. Buy it. Try it, or try it again.