In the era of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and so many others unjustly or unfortunately dubbed “the New Dylan,” and after a clutch of albums that fans had found less than satisfying, Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet, showing himself once again to be the master singer-songwriter and performer.īy the time the musicians who’d been hired to back Dylan arrived that afternoon, he had already cut eleven songs. Contrary to most accounts, Dylan was supremely prepared, and immediately went about delivering aching versions of some of the best-and most intimate-songs that he had ever written. What I quickly realized turned the legend upside down: Dylan entered the studio early on the sixteenth, long before any of the session musicians had arrived, intent on cutting an acoustic album-a sort of “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” for the mid-seventies. I listened while perusing Dylan’s fabled “red notebook,” in which he’d written the lyrics to the ten songs on “Blood on the Tracks” in his tiny, precise scrawl.

Photograph by Rick Diamond / WireImage / GettyĪs the author of the liner notes for “ More Blood, More Tracks,” the latest entry in Dylan’s “Bootleg Series,” I was one of the first people to hear the raw session tapes in chronological order. With “Blood on the Tracks,” Bob Dylan was throwing down the gauntlet, showing himself once again to be a master singer-songwriter.

Tangled up in blue