Bob Dylan All the Songs

by Philippe Margotin

  Planet Waves Outtakes

  The sessions of Planet Waves gave rise to one outtake, “Nobody ’Cept You,” the only piece not to make the final track listing. Dylan chose “Wedding Song” to conclude his opus. Love triumphed over reggae…

  Nobody ‘Cept You

  Bob Dylan / 2:41

  Musicians: Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica; Robbie Robertson: guitar; Richard Manuel: drums (?); Garth Hudson: keyboards; Rick Danko: bass; Levon Helm: drums (?) / Recording Studio: The Village Recorder, West Los Angeles, California / Studio B: November 2–5, 1973 / Producers: Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Rob Fraboni / Sound Engineer: Rob Fraboni Set Box: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991 (CD 2) / Release Date: March 26, 1991

  FOR DYLANOLOGISTS

  Dylan ended this song singing, “I’m still in love with you.” However, this line is absent from the 1973 copyright text. Why? Mystery!

  “Nobody ’Cept You” is another evocation of Bob Dylan’s past. The song is once again about his childhood in Minnesota, where he “used to play in the cemetery / Dance and sing and run.” The lyrics include an exaltation of the sacred: “There’s a hymn I used to hear / In the churches all the time,” which “Make[s] me feel so good inside / So peaceful, so sublime.” For whom does he show his devotion? For God? For Sara? For both? Certainly, this song, written as a confession, shows that Dylan will continue his journey, guided by Love with a capital L.

  “Nobody ’Cept You” is the second of the three songs demoed in June 1973. During the sessions for Planet Waves in November 1973, it seems that the song was recorded in two sessions: on or around November 2, the group performed one take with Richard Manuel playing drums, and on or around November 5 another attempt with Levon Helm. The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961–1991 most likely includes the November 2 recording. The song was originally planned for inclusion on Planet Waves, then removed at the last minute from the track listing, Dylan preferring his new composition “Wedding Song.” This is a shame, as “Nobody ’Cept You” is a very good song, with excellent lyrics and a melody that curiously has some reggae color. Robertson’s guitar, using a wah-wah pedal, and Hudson’s organ playing are enough to kick the song into overdrive. With some additional attempts, “Nobody ’Cept You” could have easily found its place on Planet Waves.

  Blood On The Tracks

  Tangled Up In Blue

  Simple Twist Of Fate

  You’re A Big Girl Now

  Idiot Wind

  You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

  Meet Me In The Morning

  Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts

  If You See Her, Say Hello

  Shelter From The Storm

  Buckets Of Rain

  THE OUTTAKES

  Up To Me

  Call Letter Blues

  DATE OF RELEASE

  January 20, 1975

  on Columbia Records

  (REFERENCE COLUMBIA PC 33235)

  Blood on the Tracks:

  The Album of a Wounded Sensibility

  The Album

  Blood on the Tracks marked Bob Dylan’s return to Columbia Records after two albums with Asylum, Planet Waves and the double live album Before the Flood, released on June 20, 1974. In Rolling Stone, Asylum’s David Geffen said, “Bob Dylan has made a decision to bet on his past. I was more interested in his future.”107 According to some sources, the songwriter would have disagreed with Geffen, whom Dylan criticized for his failure to properly promote and advertise the release of Planet Waves. According to a member of the Columbia team, “He thought Geffen was just interested in being a celebrity.”107

  Dylan returned to Columbia Studios for his fifteenth studio album. There he worked again with legendary producer John Hammond, with whom he had started out years before. He told Hammond these were only “personal songs” before booking a recording studio in September 1974. At the conclusion of his tour with the Band between January 3 and February 14, he wrote some material on his farm in Minnesota, where he had settled with his children and his brother David Zimmerman in mid-July. Sara was conspicuous by her absence. Their relationship had begun to deteriorate after they moved to Malibu in April 1973 and worsened when Dylan began touring in January 1974. Dylan’s road manager Jonathan Taplin told Howard Sounes, “She despised the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle [and] people who just wanted to talk about music were boring to her.”108 Therefore, she preferred to keep her distance, hoping for better days. On tour again, Dylan’s old devils—a taste for the scene, women, tobacco, and alcohol—were all back.

  “The Odyssey of a Mythical Lover”

  When Blood on the Tracks was released on January 20, 1975, two figures entered Dylan’s life. Ellen Bernstein, a twenty-four-year-old Columbia Records executive with whom he began an affair, and the artist Norman Raeben, whose art classes he attended in New York City between May and July 1974. His marriage to his wife Sara seems to have reached the point of no return. In fact, for many journalists and Dylan disciples, the album Blood on the Tracks may be a reflection on Dylan’s breakup with his wife, which resulted in deep emotional turmoil and inner torment. The album is filled with sad love stories, a way for Dylan to express his feelings and suffering. Robert Shelton wrote, “The new album was the spiritual autobiography of a wounded sensibility.”7 For Greil Marcus, the album was an “odyssey of a mythical lover possessed by an affair he can never resolve.”7 This feeling was shared by Jakob, Bob and Sara’s youngest child, who described the album this way: “When I’m listening to Blood on the Tracks, that’s about my parents.”47 Bob Dylan has always denied or ridiculed these interpretations. He followed a new artistic approach: write the way the artist perceives his object. “[The painter Norman Raeben] taught me how to see… in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt… I wasn’t sure it could be done in songs because I’d never written a song like that. But when I started doing it, the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.”15 Similarly, the shadow of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov hovered over Dylan’s typewriter, as he confirmed in his book Chronicles: “Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories—critics thought it was autobiographical—that was fine.”1

  The Album Cover

  Paul Till, a twenty-year-old Canadian artist and Dylan fan, took the cover photograph for Blood on the Tracks during Dylan’s show at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in January 1974. In an interview with The Rock and Roll Report, Till explained how he created the cover. “The negative was enlarged in the darkroom onto another piece of film in such a way that just Dylan’s head was on it. This would normally result in a positive image on the film which, if you printed it onto a piece of photo paper, would give you a negative print. However, I solarized this piece of film (that is, re-exposed it to light) as it was being developed. This partially reversed the image and also gave it the distinctive line between what was dark to start with and what was made dark by the solarization. Technically, this technique is actually called ‘the Sabbatier effect,’ and the lines are called ‘Mackie lines.’ This resulted in a quite dark and low-contrast piece of film to make a print from. I had to use the very high-contrast grade 6 Agfa Brovira paper to get a print with enough contrast.” In September 1974, Till, who had never met Dylan, sent two images to Dylan’s office in New York City, which selected one. On the back cover, the design is credited to Ron Coro. The illustration is signed by David Oppenheim, a painter from Marseille, whose work Dylan knew from an exhibit in New York.

  The Recording

  After writing most of these songs in Minnesota, Dylan played them for a few friends before going to New York for the recording sessions. He returned to the former Studio A, where he had recorded his masterpieces for Columbia. The studio had since been bought by Phil Ramone at the end of 1967, when it became A&R Recording Studios. Ramone, who was assisted in the control room by a young eighteen-year-old sound engineer named Glenn Berger, was asked by Dylan to
recruit musicians. Ramone chose guitarist Eric Weissberg and his Deliverance Band, named after the film Deliverance, directed by John Boorman (1972). Weissberg and Steve Mandell co-signed the arrangement and the recording of the classic instrumental composition “Dueling Banjos.” Glenn Berger remembers, “I set up for drums, bass, guitars, and keyboard. I placed Dylan’s mics in the middle of the room. In the midst of the hubbub, Dylan skulked in. He grunted hello and retreated to the farthest corner of the control room, keeping his head down, ignoring us all. No one dared enter his private circle.”108 No one but John Hammond came to say hello to the songwriter on the first day. Berger recalls, “To any Dylan aficionado, this was a classic moment: Dylan and Hammond in this studio together again for Dylan’s return to Columbia.”108

  The first session was held on September 16, 1974, from 6 p.m. to midnight. Ten songs (and thirty attempts) were recorded with Weissberg and his musicians. But the musicians could not keep up with Dylan, who kept changing chords without warning for the same song after each take. And he was not patient. As a result, only “Meet Me in the Morning” was retained for the album, and only bassist Tony Brown was brought back the following day, along with the veteran organ player Paul Griffin, who had also worked on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The other musicians were simply told one by one to stop playing. There were two other sessions on September 17 and 19, and two overdub sessions and a remix on September 24 (according to some sources, September 18) and October 8.

  Phil Ramone thought the record was complete, but that only showed he didn’t know Bob Dylan. Glenn Berger recalls, “When we returned from the Christmas holiday, Phil sat down with me, pale and dispirited. Bob had panicked. While visiting his brother in Minnesota, over the break, he had decided to rerecord a bunch of the tracks in Minneapolis.”108

  Two months after the New York recordings, Dylan listened to the acetate of ten songs for the promotion of the new album with representatives of a few radio stations and some journalists and was unhappy with what he heard. Was he influenced by David Zimmerman or Ellen Bernstein, as some have suggested? He asked Columbia to delay the release of the album, which was scheduled for before Christmas. He absolutely wanted to rerecord five songs.

  With David Zimmerman, Dylan’s brother, as producer, and local musicians Chris Weber (guitar), Gregg Inhofer (keyboards), Bill Peterson (bass), and Bill Berg (drums), Dylan cut new versions of “Idiot Wind,” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

  Despite the sessions originally held in New York and the rerecording sessions in Minneapolis with different musicians, Blood on the Tracks appears as a homogeneous album and was acclaimed by the majority of critics as Dylan’s best since Blonde on Blonde. The fifteenth Dylan album reached number 1 in the United States and number 4 in the United Kingdom.

  Technical Details

  The five recording sessions in New York City took place in the former Columbia Studio A located at 799 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan (where “Like a Rolling Stone” had been recorded on June 16, 1965). Phil Ramone, who had already participated in the recording of the live album Before the Flood, assumed the function of sound engineer. Ramone had worked with the biggest names in music, including Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney, and Frank Sinatra. To capture Dylan’s guitar, he had a Sony C37 and a Neumann KM56 microphone. For the vocals, he chose a Sennheiser 421, the same mic that Rob Fraboni used for Planet Waves.

  The two final sessions for the album were recorded in Minneapolis at Sound 80, one of the best studios in the city at the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street and Twenty-Fifth Avenue South. Paul Martinson was in charge of the recording. For Dylan’s vocals, he used a Neumann U87, a Pandora compressor/limiter, and an EMT reverb plug-in. To mic the guitars, he chose to use the AKG 451 model. The console was an MCI 416-B with twenty-four channels.

  The Instruments

  Dylan remained faithful to Martin guitars, since he recorded Blood on the Tracks with a Martin 00-21. He also played a 1934 Martin 00-42 G during the Minneapolis sessions. Harmonicas were in E, G, and A.

  FOR DYLANOLOGISTS

  On the back cover of the album were liner notes by journalist Pete Hamill. In it, he wrote of the “land where the poets died. Except for Dylan.” The text was later replaced by a painting by David Oppenheim. When Hamill won a Grammy Award for his liner notes, the text was put back on.

  Tangled Up In Blue

  Bob Dylan / 5:41

  Musicians

  Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica

  Kevin Odegard: guitar

  Chris Weber: guitar

  Gregg Inhofer: keyboards

  Bill Peterson: bass

  Bill Berg: drums

  Recording Studio

  Sound 80, Minneapolis: December 30, 1974

  Technical Team

  Producer: David Zimmerman

  Sound Engineer: Paul Martinson

  Genesis and Lyrics

  “Tangled Up in Blue” characterizes the return of the great Bob Dylan, the author of the trilogy Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all written under the influence of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The song shares the desire for journeys to far-off places (see the reference to slave traders in the sixth verse). This banal tale of a love that has ended takes on an epic dimension. Dylan continuously reworked the lyrics during the recordings, mostly telling the story in the third person singular, probably to signify that the narrator was a witness, not an actor. In the official version, however, he sings in the first person singular, as if he wants to indicate a personal involvement. In the first verse, the main character is “heading out for the East Coast,” but continues to be haunted by his ex-girlfriend. In the second, we learn that she was married when they first meet, and then they ran away together out West. The third is about their separation with this amazing line, “But all the while I was alone / The past was close behind.” Dylan explained to Jonathan Cott that he wanted to talk about the delusion in which we sometimes live, saying, “Delusion is close behind.”20 The fourth and fifth verses are about meeting again “in a topless place,” while the sixth refers to “[living] with them on Montague Street” (unless the third person is the narrator’s double). The song ends as it began: with the departure of the hero, regretting that the woman he loved (and probably still loves) has a different point of view.

  Onstage, Dylan has introduced this song from different angles. He once said that “Tangled Up in Blue” was about “about three people who were in love with each other, all at the same time.”31 During the tour of 1978, he stated that “Tangled Up in Blue” took “ten years to live, and two years to write.” This interpretation seems more plausible. He also said, “I guess I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do… with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person in talking. But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn’t matter.”

  Although the songwriter denied the autobiographical interpretation, it was difficult not to make a connection with his personal turmoil at the time. Separated from Sara, Dylan attended an art class with the painter Norman Raeben, whom he called his spiritual guide. Clinton Heylin wrote about Dylan’s relationship with his wife Sara at the time: “Having married a mathematician, she’d woken up with a poet.”66 A poet and a painter, because through successive layers he tells his story, a series of romanticized impressions that are part of a difficult and delicate experience.

  Bob Dylan has never been satisfied with all the different versions of “Tangled Up in Blue.” However, he said that the version recorded during his 1984 tour and released on the album Real Live is the best.

  Production

  “Tangled Up
in Blue” is one of five songs initially recorded in New York City in September, and rerecorded in Minneapolis in December 1974. Under the leadership of Phil Ramone, Dylan recorded the first version at the former Columbia Studio A. He executed several takes on September 16, 17, and 19. One version, released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, is a narrative in the third person singular, with Dylan on guitar, playing in open tunings as he did on his first records, accompanied only by Tony Brown on bass. The liner notes date this version to September 16, the only day Weissberg and his band were present alongside Dylan, but it seems that it is actually the version of the test pressing of September 19 (there are no other guitarists, contrary to the indications on the liner notes).

  Dissatisfied with the results, Dylan reworked the song on December 30, this time with Paul Martinson in the control room and his brother David as producer. A first take was recorded in a higher tone than the New York version. When he asked the musicians about the results, Chris Weber, guitarist, said they could do better and even suggested raising the pitch from G to A. First Dylan was surprised, and then convinced. After two additional takes the song was cut.

  With a higher pitch, this version has a voltage in accordance with the text, and allows Dylan to offer an outstanding performance. The accompaniment by the other musicians is excellent. Weber plays a superb Guild F-512 12-string.

  Since November 13, 1975, in New Haven, Connecticut, Dylan has performed “Tangled Up in Blue” about fifteen hundred times. Note the energetic version from the Rolling Thunder Revue (included on The Bootleg Series Volume 5).