One notebook, with a tomato-red cover and long out of Dylan’s hands by means unknown, is at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. This has long been referred to as “the” Blood On The Tracks notebook. In April 1975, promoting the album, Dylan gave his first radio interview in nearly a decade to a friend, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary). After she told him how much she enjoyed Blood On The Tracks, Dylan replied, “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, that, people enjoying the type of pain, you know.”
But the Dylan Archive holds two more, and these virtually unknown and unpublished twins are my topic here. One is coverless, though the ghost of a red-orange edge remains trapped beneath the wire. Very battered and fragile, it is a working book of lyrics but also of lists of art supplies, thoughts and telephone numbers, observations, addresses, and reminders of various kinds. The other is pale marine blue, and is a gold mine, a quarry, a map of creating, a veritable trove of compositional ferment. Taken together, they show Dylan’s drafting process and artistic creation in a richness and detail that it has not been possible to chart until now.
During the summer of 1974, Dylan took painting classes in the Carnegie Hall studio of Norman Raeben, and has acknowledged, long ago, the way those classes influenced his songwriting.
” For Mondo Scripto, his current show of writings and drawings at London’s Halcyon Gallery, Dylan has released a much-revised version of the song — one that has some roots in his earliest drafts. On the first page of the coverless Notebook, with mentions of a movie trailer, a Volvo, and daily appointments, are the words “2 miles off Delacroix” and then a draft of what would become the sixth verse of the alternate “he/she” version of “Tangled Up In Blue,” released on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991. Eighteen pages later, it reappears, and Dylan is working on the same verse:
Dylan doesn’t specify what John Coltrane record is on the turntable, but anything by Coltrane intimates revolution, from the swiftly classic Blue Train (1958) through his avant-garde jazz, recordings of chant and prayer, to the wild Ascension (1966). In the earliest takes recorded of “Tangled Up In Blue,” the song is so blue it’s almost dirge. To read the full artilce click here
