“There Was Music In The Cafes At Night And Revolution In The Air…”
OK, it’s looking like the next podcast might not get released until Saturday, so to hold you over until then, today’s Song I Never Get Tired Of is one that gets discussed on the podcast, Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue.”
Unfortunately, Sony won’t let me embed the video in this post, so to see an incredible live version from the Rolling Thunder Tour in 1975-76 (that gets referenced on our show), go here.
Maybe it’s the tight focus on his face, maybe it’s the juxtaposition of his eyes against the white makeup, but it’s one of the most compelling performances I’ve ever seen. This is the only song I played at every one of my gigs when I was a solo acoustic act, and it was a song I thought I did really well and did more than mimic the record, but I could never match the intensity of Dylan’s performance there.
He changes the pronouns here so that he’s more of an observer than a participant, and there are also some different lyrics here and there from the version released on Blood On The Tracks, but it doesn’t affect the beauty of the song one bit. It may even make it more interesting, I don’t know.
The way in which it shifts times and places is also its greatest strength. It allows us to find something in the story that we can relate to our own lives, which is my Rule #1 for singer-songwriters. How many among you don’t have a “Her folks they said our lives together/Sure was gonna be rough/They never did like Mama’s homemade dress/Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough,” or “We drove that car as far as we could/Abandoned it out West/Split up on a dark sad night/Both agreeing it was best” somewhere in their past?
And how many of us have ever thought that it was “Split up on the docks that night”? Yeah, me too.
In Chronicles, Dylan talks about crashing with a couple in the Village when he first got to New York. So while a lot of people think that this song is about his first wife, Sara, this version leads me to believe that it’s about them, especially in the last two verses.
I wish I could remember the first time I heard “Tangled Up In Blue” like I can with some songs (including “Shelter From The Storm”). It was/is such a staple of classic rock radio that it’s impossible for me to say when that even was, other than knowing that I got into it when I was in college, probably around 1989 or 1990. I included it on a compilation tape I made from a friend’s copy of the Biograph box set and that was when I started getting heavily into Dylan.
If I ever get around to compiling a list of classic albums, Blood on the Tracks will be there, no matter how exclusive it is.
It’s not everyday listening — now that it’s been 11 years since my last breakup and maybe 15 years since the last one that was anything other than a relief, I don’t relate to it as well as I did in college. But it’s the noblest expression of melancholy I’ve ever heard.