Over the weekend I was suddenly struck the need to hear Tangled Up In Blue, one of Bob Dylan's finest songs- the words, the playing, the production and the singing, the way he paints so many vivid images of five minutes, the internal rhymes and the lovers crossing paths as the song shifts back and forth in time and across places, Delacroix and Montague Street, New Orleans and the great north woods. The ending, where Dylan returns to find the her, and he sings that all those people he used to know are an illusion to him now, 'some are mathematicians/ some are carpenters' wives', a line that always jumps out- mathematicians and carpenters' wives is so specific and so odd.
Having scratched my Tangled Up In Blue itch I sat down and listened to Blood On The Tracks all the way through. There's an argument thatit's Dylan's best album. It's definitely his best album of the 70s and after shedding fans and critical adoration with a run of albums in the first half of the decade (Self Portrait, New Morning, Dylan and Planet Waves all have their moments but none touch his 60s work or Blood On The Tracks) it can be viewed as a comeback with nine absolute top drawer Dylan songs (and Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts which is fun but for me inessential).
It's widely seen as an album that describes the breakdown of his marriage to Sarah Lowndes following an affair he had. Jakob Dylan says the album is 'about my parents'. Dylan denies that the album is autobiographical or confessional, saying in Chronicles Vol. 1 that all the songs were inspired by short stories by Chekhov (Anton Chekhov not Star Trek's Mr. Chekhov). I'm not sure Dylan is a completely reliable witness but then again, he's Bob Dylan, who are we to doubt him?
Four songs in to Side One of Blood On The comes the epic seven minutes and forty eight seconds of Idiot Wind. It starts off with a complaint about someone who has it in for him, 'planting stories in the press', and goes on from there, by turns reflective, indignant, vindictive and despairing. Some of it is aimed at a 'sweet lady', some at himself perhaps, the idiot wind that blows 'every time you move your mouth... it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe'. There's biblical imagery, fortune tellers, boxcars and lone soldiers, a chestnut mare and a priest wearing black on the seventh day. The idiot wind blows everyone away and eventually the nation, 'from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol' (and this is the mid- 70s of defeat in Vietnam, Nixon's disgrace and resignation so the idiot wind has blown all the way to the very top).
In the end though it blows on him and on her- 'Idiot wind/ Blowing through the buttons of our coats/ Blowing through the letters that we wrote/ Blowing through the dust upon our shelves/ We're idiots babe/ It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves'.
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