Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks poll

Don't quite get the dislike of "Idiot Wind." I mean the title refrain and its environs are pretty nasty but there are also other elements that point away from this, all kinds of classic Dylan wordplay that isn't part of the put-down as well as the self-recrimination at the end. It's not nearly as relentless in its attack as, say, "Positively 4th Street."

"Idiot Wind" is my favorite. Agreed that it has more going on to it than "Positively 4th Street" - it's a Dylan put-down track, sure, but the kind of put-down of a drunken sad sack who knows the whole time that he's the real asshole in this situation, he shows you the blusteryness rather than just let you relish the bluster. Yeah maybe it's a bit DO YOU SEE but it works, for me.

Voting "Jack of Hearts" since no one else will and I have to somehow atone for unwittingly creating a redundant retread of possibly the most unlikely and narrowly-defined ILM poll ever.

love idiot wind. didnt even really feel the song until i gave it another listen a few years ago and suddenly i was like, damn u crazy for this one bob. and plus yeah, we're idiots babe

wait a second... what the fuck... what the fuck. he says "split up on a dark sad night"? i thought it was THE DOCKS THAT NIGHT, holy shit

37

I really like the Rolling Thunder Revue version of Shelter From The Storm with the yelling and slide guitar etc., and the full-band, more country arrangement from the 90s that I think was posted here. I didn't like the album much, but that has to do with what a contrarian Dylan fan I am.

xxp whoa so did i

always picture her turning around to look at him as he walks away down the dock

Got to be Tangled for me. Back in my teens Tangled felt impossibly full of the mysteries of life. Like, why is this woman in a topless place bending down to tie the laces of his shoe?? And what's up with guy who started into dealing in slaves?

Probably one of my favourite Dylan albums.

Shelter from the Storm

xxxp I always heard it as "docks that night." With all the fishing boats etc later in the song, docks is way better than non-specific "dark sad night". You're killing me.

xxxxp It has always been docks that night. Mind blown.

is there an easy way to get ahold of the original version?

A toughie. Went with Shelter from the Storm, but it's pretty much tied with Simple Twist of Fate. Buckets of Rain and Meet Me in the Morning are second.

Close call with Idiot Wind, but I voted for the big girl. "Like a corkscrew to my heart..."

Meet Me in the Morning.

Pete Hamill's original liner notes, removed at some point:

http://www.bobsboots.com/CDs/cd-b28_Hamilltext.html

Haven't read them--supposedly wildly pretentious.

"Neighborhood Bully" and "Is Your Love in Vain," to name two, are far more hateful and unpleasant and hysterical than "Idiot Wind."

also ballad in plain d

Shelter from the Storm is nearly as ascerbic as Idiot Wind, but I'm going for You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome as the bitterest and most lyrically deft: dragon clouds so high above / I've only known careless love is imprinted on my adolescent soul.

wow great thread - and pretty much everybody OTM (except Mr. I don't like BOTT).
Apart from Lonesome, Rosemary or Meet me in the Morning - I could vote for any of these songs.

For the longest time my favorite was Say Hello - which, if you're lovelorn like I was when I was obsessed with this album, perfectly captures that specific type of narcistic melancholy: back-patting your heartbroken self with bogus lines like "whatever makes her happy, I won't stand in the way"

This album is such a big long slog Jesus. Voted Simple Twist of Fate cos it's got a nice chord sequence but fuck was Dylan getting good at out-staying his welcome at this time in his career. Same as Desire (albeit my favourite of his that I've heard) - 9 or 10 good songs that go on about 6x too long.

you go on about 6x too long

How is Desire a better album despite being 6 time too long

they both suffer from songs that go on too long is what i'm saying. i don't dislike any of these songs, but fuck listening to the whole of Hurricane again.

I think I get the same vibe from this album as Neil Young's On The Beach, which also has that long-song rainy day feeling but doesn't seem as boring.

you're boring and go on too long

i get the same vibe from you as i do from a lamppost

Nothing rainy about Tangled up in Blue - I always put it on a sunny day

also, how is Shelter from the Storm acerbic? WTF???

I like Desire better, personally, because I like fun stupid rambling story songs like "Isis," "Romance In Durango," and "Black Diamond Bay." There's some dreary filler on that record but it's way better for singalong fun times while you're doing the dishes, while this album really only has "Tangled Up In Blue," "Idiot Wind" and "Jack Of Hearts" for that.

like somebody thread, I pretty often have the "'some are mathematicians, some are carpenter's wives" line stuck in my head. Actually if this is an album about being in your 30's, that last verse of Tangled is a pretty good summary of it.

you go on about 6x too long

― zero dark (s1ocki), Thursday, 18 April 2013 14:59 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're boring and go on too long

― beef richards (Mr. Que), Thursday, 18 April 2013 15:04 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL

also, how is Shelter from the Storm acerbic? WTF???

― beef richards (Mr. Que), Thursday, April 18, 2013 10:06 AM (21 minutes ago)

I guess that depends on your reading of the title phrase? I don't trust it as genuine or hopeful – which would, to my mind, be out of sync with the album's general gist – but instead as sarcastic, regretful, self-pitying.

Also, the penultimate line If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born seems to me to shunt the woman/relationship back into a once-pleasant, now-embittered past, as the architect of the narrator's misery.

This album is such a big long slog Jesus

Hence the carpenter's wives and the woman bending down to tie the laces of his shoes

I think this album has some of his best-ever singing. It takes a lot to sell a line like "nothing really matters much/it's doom alone that counts" as something other than undergrad poesy. But he makes it sparkle, almost funny.

TRY IMAGINING A PLACE WHERE IT'S ALWAYS SAFE AND WARM

"she might think i've forgotten her/ don't tell her, it isn't so."

chilling line. i think this is my favorite dylan album by light years but i'm not sure if i think it's his "best"

aw go on say it anyway.

idiot wind idiot wind idiot wind

if you don't like mean dylan why are you even listening to dylan

good point.

i am going to listen to this album right now

i help her out of a jam i guess but i use a little too much force

i did always like the way he delivered "but I used a little too much force"

and "happy to just be ehM-PLOYED"

haha all these fantastic intonations on this album!

okay the "idiot wind" chorus still makes me catch my breath all these years after the first time i heard it.

and the organ makes you hurl

the way he sings "you're going to make me lonesome" is the dreamiest imo

Nah the NY version of TUIB is great (and better imo) !

I think the pov switch is kinda awkward; but having lived with the album version for so long before hearing the alt. version for the first time (on the first Bootleg Series set), it's hard to say how I'd feel if it were the other way around.

the way he delivers "and i'm just like that bird" on the ny sessions version of "you're a big girl now"... god, it's so bottomlessly sad. this gets lost in the minneapolis version (which has a gorgeous arrangement, so i like that we have both now)

Tangled is the one song that perhaps benefits from the bright MN sound, fitting for what is in essence a travelogue of a relationship. I sometimes prefer the ambiguity of the NY version, which fits into the long tradition of Dylan third-person shifting narratives.

i think this will always be my favorite dylan album

it just gets better as i get older and life starts sucking in new ways that blood on the tracks addresses

the way he delivers "and i'm just like that bird" on the ny sessions version of "you're a big girl now"... god, it's so bottomlessly sad.

^^^^The way he moans just after that line it’s like his heart is going to burst. One of my favorite moments in his entire career.

going to buy MBMT rn, don't know why i' waited so long

i've always found both "lily" and "idiot wind" to be such unbearable slogs and rather unfortunate tarnishes on a record that was otherwise deeply beautiful. the stripped-down versions are indeed a revelation; i'm hearing them as if for the first time and it's a punch in the gut for sure, these songs now feel like shimmering expanses rather than clumsy elephantine obstructions.

found a decent vinyl rip of the test pressing that they released for record store day this year. mostly sought it out bc, iirc, tylerw said the official ny sessions takes on the box set are remixed (which is fine, they sound lovely) and i wanted to hear the burble of the organ in "idiot wind" as it was originally intended i guess, lol. and... yeah, now i'm really in love with this version of the record, but it's so fuckin weird to me that dylan nearly released a drumless album after planet waves

(drumless aside from "meet me in the morning," the only song with a full band arrangement, which is ALSO very weird to me)

I've been meek
and hard as an oak

i've seen pretty people disappear like smoke
friends will arrive
friends will disappear

if you want me, honey baby i'll be here

Big Jim was no one’s fool, he owned the town’s only diamond mine

Always imagine that refers to Jim Thompson’s dad.

Idiot Wind is so good. I love that contrast of cosmic storytelling in the verses ("shot a man called Gray", "ran into the fortune teller") with the scathing frankness of the chorus. the attempt to weave a story that actually goes anywhere is reined in each time by Dylan's helpless anger. he acknowledges it himself when he concedes "the wheels have stopped".

there's also (of course) a gradual sense as the song goes on of Dylan being complicit in feeding the mindless emotional turmoil. I like it how it ends on "we're idiots, babe..." rather than "I'm an idiot, babe...". Seems more organic that he's only willing to go in for a half-compromise after so artfully -- and artlessly -- making others the subject of his vitriol.

there really aren't many albums better than this one.

^^^