Blood On The Tracks: An Introspection

In the darkest places the most beautiful things can grow. This is especially true of Bob Dylan's acrimonious relationship with his wife, Sara. Their eventual seperation led to what has become, arguably, the greatest studio album of all time. There are no lyrics so bitter and recriminatory as those that feature on the 1975 album Blood On the Tracks.


The shy, young Sara Lownds had dragged Dylan out of his mid-60s breakneck descent and saved him from his own destructive nature. He adored her. In 1965 they disappeared from the public eye all together and Dylan found himself exiled by his own desire to escape fame and the fans that came with it. The couple moved away from New York City to Woodstock. They married and started their own family after Dylan adopted Sara's daughter, Marie. The couple would go on to have four more children in quick succession.

Life at Woodstock was good, for a while. Lazy mornings in the long grass, painting and writing, walking the kids to the school bus. Dylan found a strange peace in the normality that his exile afforded him. He was living the life he had longed to lead but something scratched at his soul, there was something he craved beyond this idyllic retreat. Dylan found himself frustrated at his dwindling creativity. His genius was collapsing in on itself. The family man and the rockstar were at an unforgiving impasse. It was high time the "daily journey into nothingness” drew to a close.

In 1969 Dylan moved his family back to the heart of Greenwhich Village where a return to city life proved too much for Bob. Self styled Dylanologists picked through his garbage and picketed his house. AJ Weberman went as far as to push his way past an outraged Sara into their home. A tormemted Dylan battered him in the street as his cohort looked on. New York, or Dylan, had changed.

In November of 1972, the Dylans fled across the border to Mexico for the filming of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. “I’d gotten them out of New York, that was the important thing, there was a lot of pressure back there,” Dylan recalled. The schedule and lifestyle of a bloody western set against the drunken back drop of the blistering Durango sun was no place for a family. “My wife got fed up almost immediately. She’d say to me, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ It was not an easy question to answer.”

One last attempt at breaking free found the Dylans at Point Dume, California where they would build up and tear down their dream home for the next two years. The costs spiralled out of control and the project put an enourmous strain on the relationship. The couple argued furiously over fixtures and fittings and cracks started to appear in their marriage. In 1971, Dylan split from both his manager Albert Grossman and long time record label, Columbia records, and as if by magic the songwriting machine crept back into action and the 1974 world tour was born.

Dylan was reinvigorated by the tour. He started drinking and smoking again and then came the girls. Dylan started, what would later to be revealed to be, an 18 year affair with record company executive. After a year on the road with The Band for his 1974 tour and the explosive double album, Before the Flood, Dylan returned to New York and anonymously took classes at Carnegie Hall with painter Norman Raeben who taught Dylan a whole new way of seeing. Their relationship became one of father and son, of master and apprentice, the 73 year old painter luring Dylan further away from Sara and into new ways of thinking. When Dylan returned to his wife, he was a different man, by his own admission. “I went home after that and my wife never did understand me ever since that day. She never knew what I was talking about. And I couldn’t possibly explain it.” Dylan recalled. In summer 1974, they separated.

For the second time in his life Dylan was wounded and on the run. He made for a farm he’d just bought with his brother David back in Minnesota. Sara was rarely seen. Here, from the ashes of bitter-sweet abandoned love, Blood on The Tracks was born. A tacit tribute to grief and hatred; A dissection of love and pain so absolute that it broke the skin of Dylan's dark disguise and painted him as a man on the knife edge of burning sorrow.

Initial recordings of the album were to be made in New York and the story of how the original acetate was made into the final record is another story for another day...