beauty walks a razors edge some day i’ll make it mine

This is the first in a continuing series of posts that will explore GPTN influences. A few months ago Grace Potter submitted her list of Top 10 CD’s to radio station WTMD. Now, I don’t suspect that this list is the “all time set in stone never change ever” list - but it will certainly be fun to explore.

Lester Bangs once wrote of Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks “I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with.” Incredibly, he meant this as a criticism: “I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be. Which was simply not enough.”

UPDATE: Dylan has a widely bootlegged version of sessions recorded in NYC during the “Blood On The Tracks” period. Download the entire recording here.

From Jon Landau’s review in Rolling Stone

Blood on the Tracks will only sound like a great album for a while. Like most of Dylan, it is impermanent. But like the man who made it, the album answers to no one and was made for everyone. It is the work of someone who is not just seeing through himself, but looking through us — and still making us see things that we haven’t seen before.

Pop Matters Review

Blood on the Tracks is the one album that rises above all other contenders, obscuring them in its titanic blaze, because it is, at once, so familiar as well as mysterious, and so seemingly simple and yet unruly. At its most blunt and congruent reception, Blood on the Tracks is a fully sustained work that expresses rage, pain, and, at times, cruelty. Undoubtedly, a product of Bob Dylan’s own struggles to come to grips with the dissolution of his 8-year long marriage to Sara Dylan, the album is deeply rooted in the dark side of life through themes of love lost, being lost, revenge, and regret. If there are any moments akin to exuberance, they invariably occur in moments of absolute contempt, as in one of series of lyrical crescendos from the epic “Idiot Wind”: “One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ across your eyes / Blood on your saddle”. As such, in its most assertive moments — for Blood on the Tracks is mostly a subdued affair of discreetly wavering impressions — the albums is either a concoction from a sorcerer’s brew of ill content or the ugly remains from an unruly carnival. I wondered to myself whether I would really want to be in the company of such a dark and troubled album through an indefinite period of solitude such as my imaginary sojourn on a deserted isle? Or to paraphrase Bob Dylan’s own appreciation of the album: why would anyone want to celebrate an album that is rooted in so much pain? Should Blood on the Tracks be the one album that I would want with me as I am helplessly cooking in the sun?

Blood on the Tracks ultimately achieves its singular universal greatness by stripping away the layers of specific and local pain (of the singer and the songwriter Dylan) that have been accumulated from private experience and by connecting these loose foci along the colossal and timeless themes of Love and Loss. In this imaginary journey from real life to that of art, Blood on the Tracks creates and refashions an unworldly world that is full of wonder, treachery, buffoonery, mystery, and reward; in short, the human condition.

Personally, I remember listening to this record on endless loop when a relationship of two years had fallen apart. In truth, the relationship only lasted 18 months and the last six were a long drawn out denial of the truth. “Blood On The Tracks” helped me heal if simply by exposing me to the universality of the pain I felt. This album is a lyrical treasure although I admit it’s still hard to listen to all the way through. The jagged pain of failed relationships is sometimes just too much to take.

“You’re A Big Girl Now”

Love is so simple, to quote a phrase,
You’ve known it all the time, I’m learnin’ it these days.
Oh, I know where I can find you, oh, oh,
In somebody’s room.
It’s a price I have to pay
You’re a big girl all the way.

Here’s Jeff Tweedy wearing his Dylan influence on his sleeve while singing “Simple Twist Of Fate” for the soundtrack of the Dylan mashup “I’m Not There”

“Simple Twist Of Fate”

Lot’s more Blood On The Tracks information
, Wikipedia.

Alternate takes on a few of the songs.

The original essay that appeared on the album sleeve

So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind. Don’t mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has just walked into the courtyard, padding across the flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about “flowers on the hillside bloomin’ crazy/Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme…” A girl, red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the poet sings to all of us:

But I’ll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love.
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.***
– Pete Hamill, New York, 1974