Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks poll

"If You See Her, Say Hello"

This song just wounds me.

"Mozambique" started as a game, to see how many rhymes for "-ique" Dylan and Levy could find.

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.

The version on Hard Rain is like Dylan backed by Carlos Alomar. I absolutely love it.

we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view

tangled up in blue was of enormous importance to me in high school. i almost feel like i betrayed my 15 y/o self by voting for if u see her... which was of enormous importance to me this year after i broke up with my gf

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.

In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus.

<stops reading>

but really, this is one of those albums that is "lived with" more than "listened to"... that has continual relevance throughout one's life. it is like the Ulysses of albums; you can never be finished with it.

i love bob dylan.

they gave Pete Hamill a Grammy for those liner notes, in case anybody wants to make the case that the Grammys were ever not ridiculous

they give Grammys for liner notes? does that still happen?

it does.....though lately all that seems to win is big reissue boxes.

Wanted to do a poll but can't find enough good linkable ones......

Did the notes for that one Van Morrison album written by Janet Planet win anything?

ok, worst Literary Liner Notes of the Rock Album Era might work

Nominees:

Blood on the Tracks
Aja
Velvet Underground 1969 Live

anybody got any faves?

xp--I believe that a woman has NEVER WON the Grammy for "Notes!"

i guess at this point in my life' i'll never get to love Dylan, no matter how many chances i'll give his music.

he'll survive

if anyone wants those NY sessions http://hungryears.tumblr.com/post/31923051004/bob-dylan-the-new-york-sessions-blood-on-the-tracks

Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.

" Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains abides "

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

surprised lily, rosemary, and the jack of hearts got votes because it is terrible and does not fit in with the other songs on this album at all

surprised there wasn't more love for "if you seer her"

me too, that's the one i voted for. one of the best songs of the 70s imo.

surprised lily, rosemary, and the jack of hearts got votes because it is terrible and does not fit in with the other songs on this album at all

This is true except that it's awesome and totally fits into the album wtf

otm color me perplexed

i don't like it. maybe it would be a good track on some other dylan album, but it's too much of a non-sequitur for this album, and among dylan's freewheeling, long narrative songs with kooky characters i don't think this is one of the strongest. all those poker metaphors.

i should add that i am mostly talking about the lyrics. it sounds pretty good, especially the organ and the bass.

i think of it as sort of a fun intermission. the album would be just a little too heavy-spirited without it.

It's about people dealing with/not dealing with/escaping/not escaping their complicated pasts and promises and betrayals, just like everything else on the album. (And being too preoccupied with their own dramas to notice the drilling in the wall.)

xpost JD hm, i can see that. i am listening to it now -- and am really easily swayed in my opinions -- and i am thinking that this song reminds you that you're listening to a dylan album. this song is really the only one that celebrates verbal inventinveness and imaginative digressions for their own sake, which are both important hallmarks of dylan's style

Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts is quite fun to listen to, but every time it's on I try to follow the words to understand what it's actually about and it's just impossible - my mind wanders after a couple of verses. I couldn't tell you anything that happens in the song.

He'd have been fine if we just held the poll results until he'd had a chance to compose an essay about them.

Whoops wrong poll

Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts - seems like the kind of song that thinks its gonna thrill you through wit and cleverness but ends up just being pretty boring. Even when I was pathologically obsessed with that album, I would nearly always skip it.

"Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" is not out of place out all, it is like the story within the story, a little cornell box of the rest of the album. The play's the thing.

There is some kind of weird rattle on the alternate take of "Tangled Up in Blue."

it's the buttons on dylan's jacket, apparently.

Being rattled as the idiot wind blew threw them!

this thread inspired me to order this album on vinyl and it should be here tomorrow. i'm excited. i'm going to give lil, rosemary, etc. a charitable listen this time and see if i can really "get" why an allegorical version of the narrative arc of the rest of the album was necessary.

I missed this poll, but the results seem reasonable to me. The younger me would have voted "Tangled" easily. "Back in my teens Tangled felt impossibly full of the mysteries of life", as someone wrote above and that definitely holds for me as well. In those days, "Idiot Wind" was one of my least favorite tracks - it's so big and ugly, like 1960s brutalist architecture. But now the rawness of it gives me a thrill. My vote for most overrated would go to "Shelter from the Storm" which has always seemed to me to overreach slightly for mythic significance. Most underrated is probably "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" which earns the emotional punch that "If You See Her, Say Hello" tries to grasp a bit too easily.

forgot to vote in this but shout out to that massive buddy cage pedal steel in meet me in the morning.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-amoeba-has-an-insanely-rare-bob-dylan-test-pressing-for-12-000-20150702-story.html

By AUGUST BROWN contact the reporter

Right now at Amoeba Music in Hollywood, the store has one copy of one of the rarest pieces of Dylan ephemera ever produced. It's a test pressing of his landmark 1975 album "Blood On The Tracks" that contains alternate versions of half the songs on the LP.

Legend has it Dylan test-pressed this version to listen to in 1974 to prepare for its Columbia Records release, but after taking advice from his brother David that too many songs sounded alike, he stopped the presses and re-recorded five songs on the album.

The alternate take of "You're A Big Girl Now" had been previously released on 1985's "Biograph" set, but “Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts,” “Idiot Wind,” “If You See Her, Say Hello” and “Tangled Up In Blue” are all unreleased versions that you can only hear for the cost of an entry-level new car.

Only five copies of this test pressing are known to exist.

The store said it came upon this one during a massive buy from a collection in New Jersey, and it is the most expensive thing Amoeba Music in Hollywood has ever sold. It's still, however, a far cry from what believed to be the most expensive rock and roll LP for sale - the first known acetate demos of a little-known English group called the Quarrymen (who, of course, later re-formed as the Beatles) which fetches an estimated $300,000.

The Dylan LP is available for perusal and sale to the general public, and placed right alongside the rest of the rare Dylan music behind the counter in the sprawling record store.

Who says nobody will pay for music anymore?

Heh heh, wonder if it'll sell. Annoying how articles of this kind suggest that NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD THIS BEFORE, when in fact people have had this stuff for 40 years.

THIS is criticism!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmGCrNfSb9s

I'm gonna be bummed if it ain't the kid singing lead. Hey there's an idea for another series!

Hard to beat tangled in blue

I feel the way he says about poems when I hear damn by Kendrick Lamar

...sounds like Wally Pleasant.

video not available for me...

that video really is quality edutainment. i knew there were alt versions of blood on the tracks but had never really heard it all in sequence. the silly song was also reasonably well-argued so it piqued my curiosity and made a playlist. it's excellent and might become my default way of listening to it

I disagree about meet me in the morning but agree about lily, rosemary etc.

mmmhhh sounds p interesting that vid...

i don't wanna interrupt the rolling thunder discussion on the bootleg series thread, so: i'm digging into more blood more tracks and, as someone who loves documents of process, it's wonderful, the way the arrangements of certain songs start full and brimming and on further takes gradually recede into nothing as he realizes how little he needs to get the feeling across

i had never heard the og acetate/ny sessions version of this record, and i gotta say i think dylan was a little right to second-guess himself, the minneapolis recordings inject the record with an energy that helps it go down smoother. some of this might be me preferring the versions i'm familiar with, for instance i just want "idiot wind" to steamroll over everything bc that's what the lyric wants to do. having said that, my ideal version of this record would have the spare ny sessions takes of "lily, rosemary etc." and "you're a big girl now," a song i will never tire of hearing in its different permutations, it's just he seemed to nail the feeling and the delivery in the acoustic takes