Liner Notables: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks

Garnering an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits from note-perfect liner notes... 

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts…
Idiot wind blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote…

Okay, so I exaggerate for effect when I suggest some senselessness to journalist and novelist Pete Hamill’s liner notes for Bob Dylan’s acoustic-based and soul-searing 1975 masterwork Blood On The Tracks. After all, Hamill—whose liner notes on the back cover were so lengthy they had to be reproduced in tiny print—did win that year’s Annotator's Grammy for his efforts. The commentary, nevertheless, was removed from and then restored to the jacket - creating two different traces of Blood.

A case could still be made that over a third of the liner notes should have been lopped off with not only no discernible ill-effects, but with better results overall. But I suppose - since I’m sure the esteemed Mr. Hamill didn’t just wander in off the streets into Columbia studios past Mr. Dylan and engineer Phil Ramone and slip by the art direction and album cover folk—that he didn’t hold the musicians’ cocaine hostage or something like that and force the powers that be to use his suspiciously parodic and sporadically tongue-in-cheek liner notes sight unseen and unauthorized.

Yet, undeterred, I will persevere in my endeavor to take up Blood’s disjointed liner notes, part of which—the “big ideas, images and distorted facts” part—are in contrast to the bittersweet confessional tone in which Dylan tries to musically reconcile with the end of his marriage as he asserts, in "Tangled Up in Blue," that “We always did feel the same / We just saw it from a different point of view.” Hamill‘s stance, in grandiloquent post-apocalyptic overstatement—with serendipitous election year message included—starts out better matched to the mythopoeic, wide-scale, and often-surreal and skewed sensibilities of such albums as 1965's Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde from 1966, 1983’s Infidels (“Jokerman”), Oh Mercy from 1989, and 2006's Modern Times ("Ain‘t Talkin’"):

In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising life and delivering death. The infected young men machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on, while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned to mud…

“…And here at home, something died…” There’s a couple more paragraphs that go into more about the knowledge of something happening here—but you don‘t know what it is—unless you can riddle yourself something pieced together from the abundant literary and historical allusions and pop cultural likes of Betty Grable and Jo Stafford, and vivid images of a “brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies,” and how "we browned ourselves in the Creamsicle summers.”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
…

Visit Gordon Hauptfleisch's author page — Gordon Hauptfleisch's Blog