Blood on the Tracks
How I Finally Understood Dylan—and Why Future Generations May Never Find the Time
I didn’t get Dylan when I was young. Because I didn’t live in his time. Or maybe because I just didn’t get him. Youth and all they say about it is true.
The mistake that everyone who did get him (or pretended to) made when they tried to make me understand was to tell me to listen to the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. So I did. And I still didn’t get it. Because the character arc of Dylan’s music doesn’t start there. It might end there. Or at least reach its mortal climax before the legend descends into the domain of the gods where one can only admire from afar. But it doesn’t start there. For me it starts with the step-down note just before he starts singing “Girl from the North Country” on his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the first album where Dylan wrote the majority of the songs. From there he drags us through the longing and disillusionment that I never had the chops to dig into when I was the age that people tend to do that. And I’m not alone. One secret about Dylan is that I suspect most people fake it until they make it.
From where I sit, in the season of the commercial success that was the movie about Dylan’s early life, I run some risk of discovering America here. Obviously I’ve discovered nothing. And providing my own appreciation for his work is throwing nothing on the infinite heap of something that is the collective appreciation of humankind toward his music. But what maybe might be interesting is why I get it now. And why it was lost on me before. And why it will be lost on most generations going forward.
There’s something from Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 that keeps rattling around in my head when I watch the world my sons have grown up in. Which, while vastly different from the one I grew up in, is more accurately an extreme continuation of the path we’ve been on for generations in a way that was already clear to Bradbury in 1953. My world was more bookless than my parents. We had cable TV and video games and the internet by the time I was in college. Down the rabbit hole of progress, my kids have an endless universe approaching Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk metaverse that is even more bookless than my youth. The world in Fahrenheit 451 is bookless by design. Bradbury’s Professor Faber explains to the protagonist, Montag, that it’s not merely the physical presence of books a society loses, but rather the attributes they provide. There are three:
Quality or “texture”- Books (and by extension, thoughtful media like folk music lyrics) capture the richness, complexity, and sometimes uncomfortable truths of life. They contain details that reflect real human experiences and encourage deeper understanding.
Leisure or time to reflect – It’s not enough to have information; people need genuine mental space—free from constant noise and distraction—to sit with new ideas, process them, and let them resonate.
The freedom to act on what’s learned – After absorbing and contemplating the content, individuals must be able to use those insights to influence their decisions, behaviors, and, ultimately, society itself.
To tumble through Highway 61 Revisited; to fall in love during Blonde on Blonde; to protest with satire and wit and truth instead of mindless assimilation and volume. Dylan sounds any way he wants to. Whether it’s wailing like Kurt Cobain at the end of the best version of “The House of the Rising Sun” you’ve never heard, or whatever that weird romantic crooning is on Nashville Skyline. But all of it is on purpose. All of it is intentional texture. All the way through the broken heart that leaves the Blood on the Tracks. Anger. Pain. Longing. And a weariness that I think one has to have felt to hear.
Which takes me back to suburban America in the 1980s and 90s when I grew up. And the lack of Professor Faber’s leisure that I wouldn’t find until I was stuck on a ship sailing around the world. Or a tent or trailer in the desert. And the RPMs came down a bit for me to first find books. Then find symphonies. Then Dylan. There was nothing natural in the world I came from that would have allowed me to find it. And so it’s far more severe a truth that there’s nothing natural in the worlds of the generations that come after.
I don’t know how many kids read Moby-Dick for fun in 1989. But it surely wasn’t many. And I’m sure far less today. Not because there’s something wrong with the kids or the world has gone mad with progress. But because something so simple as a guitar and the uneven vocals of a kid from the North Country of Minnesota won’t land anymore. It takes time. And there is no time.
Why don’t we write war protest songs anymore?