Records

Bob Dylan, "Blood On The Tracks",
Columba PC 33235

All right, I'll make my biases and my ignorance clear in front. Bob Dylan was never the end of the world for me. I had neither the means nor the maturity to get what he was saying when he first exploded onto the scene in 1960 or so. I was, after all, only nine years old and wouldn't even begin to regularly listen to the AM radio (let alone buy records) until a couple of years later when the Beatles and the Motown Sound combined to blow my tender mind. It wasn't until I reached college age myself that I ever heard enough Dylan to realize that he was worth investigating thoroughly and by that time his prophesizing days seemed over. I listened solid to all his records through John Wesley Harding and beyond and then wondered if perhaps it wouldn't have been better, at least as concerned his recorded legacy, if he had died in that motorcycle crash in 1966.

However, some mighty splashy hype has preceded Mr. D's latest release and be damned if it's not evident right from the first tune on the first side of "Blood On The Tracks"-there's something snapping at Dylan's ass again these days and whatever it is, it makes for some powerful music. We got our first exposure to this renewed high-intensity attack on Dylan's recent "live" tour album. That same desperation is evident here.

This is some mighty pared down stuff and, basically, for mature persons only. Certainly the intensity, the rawness of his singing and the spare, driving, mostly-acoustical musical configurations here, both of which recall his earliest albums, will appeal to a broad span of music lovers. But the heavy sum of the lyrical matter in 7 of the 10 songs on "Tracks, "Tracks" is expressive of Dylan's accumulated experience that "Situations have ended sad, relationships have all been bad". The unsinkable younger Dylan has apparently gone under a number of times since he last really sang it and it's as a survivor that he speaks to us now. He, too, has seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, his most precious loves dissolved, and he's been moved to live in the moment, having seen the end countless times before. Finally, on "Buckets Of Rain", the last tune on the album and quite haunting, he reaches out for love. It's a simple, magníficent, and affirmative gesture and makes the album for me.

The anger that has survived his finger-pointing days is marshalled into a long diatribe called "Idiot Wind". Ironically, at this point in time and in the context of his album, all this purple-faced excoriation merely sounds Dylanesque-rather like a paler "Like a Rolling Stone". And "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts", a cryptic parable built along the lines of "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest", is just tiresome. The imagery isn't strong enough to move me to fill in the rest of the story.

Mostly, though, "Blood On The Tracks" is stronger than you might have hoped for, stronger anyway, than I had expected. Dylan's up after a nine-count, counterpunching and wisecracking. It's good to have him with us again now when we need all the strength we can get.

Bill Adler