Among my favorite things to come out of the Infidels era is a song that’s neither on the album nor among the outtakes: the 1984 rewrite and rearrangement of Tangled Up in Blue, represented officially by a great seven-minute version on Real Live. Had this rewrite never come to be (and I should note that I haven’t yet fully or even glancingly explored the song’s long and storied live journey (Dylan having played it live almost two thousand times)) I would still treasure the song on the basis of (1) its Blood on the Tracks form, arranged gleamingly by the Minneapolis band, and (2) its crazy 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue incarnation, about which more later. If there were no 1984 rewrite, Tangled Up in Blue would appear on this list anyway, but significantly lower.
Tangled in 1984 is the most excellent evocation I’ve heard in song of the beauty, majesty, vulnerability, and inherent incipient pain of sexual love. A lot of early rock and its offshoots are about sex in a boring way (for one egregious example see Stephen Stills’ Make Love to You, on his nevertheless excellent collaborative album with Neil Young, Long May You Run) and a lot of hip hop is about sex in a raunchy way. Songs in the latter mode can sometimes be interesting, and the best I’ve heard—I’m In It by Kanye West—comes remarkably close to recreating the act using only sound, syllables, phrasing, and Justin Vernon. But I’ve heard nothing like the ’84 Tangled Up in Blue, which not only gets the physical side of things right, but also the feeling of the heart, the desire and the longing and the sweetness and the agony, the way all that complexity can, sooner or later, turn to ashes in your mouth; and it’s even got the vestiges, the lingering leftover emotions and memories that burden you long after the fact, and which hang around the more persistently the more you try to ditch them.
That’s how the song begins, after all, with one of the main characters waking up with a woman on his mind: “Early one morning, the sun was shining, he was laying in bed / Wondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red.” Swept up in the mood of the morning, he casts his thoughts far back to a bright time, one of openness, promise, and determination: “Her folks they said that their lives together sure was gonna be rough / They never did like Mama’s homemade dress, Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.” Then suddenly—in the time shifts that are characteristic of every version of Tangled—he’s remembering the aftermath of the separation: “And he was standing on the side of the road, rain falling on his shoes / Heading out for the old east coast, radio blasting the news, straight on through.”
Once, when I was nineteen and truly smitten for the first time, I had to drive three-hundred and sixty-four miles in the direction I least wanted to go, leaving my true love behind, against my will—a girl from what was locally known as the North Country, a fact that proved helpful when I got into Dylan a couple of years later. I don’t remember how the hours of that long drive passed, but I remember feeling like my mind was made of mud. “Radio blasting the news, straight on through.” No detour’s going to help in a situation like that, so straight on through is as good a way to proceed as any. What the radio’s playing doesn’t matter, either. Might as well be the news.
At the end of the next verse, we hear some words the two exchanged at the moment of their last parting, with her “[turning] around to look at him as she was walking away” (he just stands there, watching), and saying, “I wish I could tell you all the things that I never learned how to say,” a familiar enough kind of feint in the more sincere moments of lovers’ arguments; but his response is beautiful, sweet and generous as sometimes only the end of a relationship can let you be: “That’s all right, baby, I love you too.”
Next comes the glimpse of life in the middle of the rotting absence that is love gone wrong and not to be recovered: “He had a steady job and a pretty face and everything seemed to fit / One day he could just feel the waste, he put it all down and split.” The difference between the two lines is the difference between the inner world and the outer. “And all the time he was alone, the past was close behind”—so, in a sense, not exactly alone, and yet all the more lonesome for that ghostly companionship.
At the end of the verse, right in the center of the song, the first-person narrator shows up, suddenly addressing the same woman who we’ve heard about so far only in relation to “him.” And then a new love story begins… which if “he” had known about (and which he was no doubt busy tormenting himself imagining; “I don’t even care who you’ll be waking with tomorrow” as the line in an older song goes, the narrator’s saying so serving as proof that he is lying) would’ve made him feel still worse.
Not that the first-person narrator is much luckier. All we hear of his and her tale is the vividly remembered scene of their meeting, followed by reflections from the period of loss. Just like the man who in the first and second stanzas remembers the time “when they first met,” when “she was still married,” the narrator too fixates on their initial encounter, which Dylan paints tremendously, with details of color (“face so white”) and color’s absence (“the blinding light”), and snippets of seemingly mundane conversation, which under the surface (and as the singer reveals, singing the story out) couldn’t be farther from mundane. “What’s that you’ve got up your sleeve?” she asks, and he answers, terse but welcoming her attention, “Nothing, baby, and that’s for sure.” As Dylan sings it, you can feel the attraction blooming, the line not really “that’s for sure” but “that’s for suuuuuuuuure!” , all the turmoil of the heart bursting out in that howl. “I could feel the heat and pulse of her” (sung like “the heat and the pulse of HER”) “as she bent down to tie the laces of my shoes”—bent down to tie the laces, and also to—but the rest is left for us to imagine.
I love the interlude that the beginning of the fifth verse tells of: “I lived with them on Montague Street in a basement down the stairs / There was snow all winter and no heat, revolution was in the air.” No need to know who they were. Since they don’t stand out in the memories other than as the narrator’s landlords, or neighbors, or incidental friends, it wouldn’t change anything if we knew. I love how Dylan makes the weather and situation in town, so beautiful and so charged, feel like mere background for the main events, events that are confined to the narrator’s head and heart. Such, after all, are the inbetween stages of our lives. No matter what’s going on in the world outside, we go on living inwardly, remembering the past and (maybe) awaiting what’s next, as the narrator does as the song concludes.
But before the song ends, we hear about one more crisis, in which the first-person narrator relives (so to speak) what he from the song’s first half had suffered through when he was “heading out for the old east coast.” “When it all came crashing down,” the narrator says, “I was already south”—and though he might have successfully avoided meeting the catastrophe head on (“I was already south”), there’s no escaping the catastrophe’s aftermath: “I didn’t know whether the world was flat or round / I had the worst taste in my mouth that I ever knew.” That touchingly funny last detail, about the taste in his mouth, has brought me to tears before. The narrator’s heart is so overcome with sorrow that he can’t talk about the pain directly. What he can do is displace the awfulness to his sense of taste, and describe that instead.
There’s some resolution at the end—the song reaching so far through love and its timelines as to witness (partial) resolution—with the narrator “heading toward the sun” (or, in the classic ambiguity of the ’80s and on, “toward the Son” ?) “trying to stay out of the joints” (so as not to encounter another woman like the one on whose account he suffered?). He also says “I’ve got to find someone among the women and men whose destiny’s unclear,” which sounds to me like he hasn’t given up hope of love; he still wants someone whose fate isn’t wrapped up yet with another person’s, just like his isn’t. But the people he’s seeking seem to be moving in a different direction than the one he wants to go in: “Some are ministers of illusion, some are masters of the trade / All under strong delusion, all of their beds unmade.” An ambiguous ending, then.
Less ambiguous are the very last lines, in which the main character of the song’s second half thinks about the main character of the first: “We always did love the very same one / We just saw her from a different point of view.” It’s a reminder that there’s a curious part of the story which isn’t covered in the lyrics at all, but which is a prerequisite for their contents. Somewhere the narrator and the woman’s other lover, the he, must have met, and talked, and discovered that they had loved “the very same one.” Either that or the narrator is both a character and an omniscient narrator; how else, after all, would he know what he knows in the first verse, about the other guy’s thoughts upon waking? Or are both these men actually one man, and it’s just that the narrator draws a line between a former self, who drove with the woman to the west, and the later self who encountered her again “in the blinding light” ? I think these questions have been discussed and discussed and never worked out ever since Blood on the Tracks came out; and Dylan has always messed with the pronouns, from New York to Minneapolis and from stage to stage to stage. He talked in 1975 interviews about the influence of his painting teacher, Norman Raeben, on the songs he wrote that year (and, I think, thereafter). For me, that’s enough of a mystery to be glad about, that one art-form and way of creating (painting) can so fruitfully transform another (songwriting).
In the Real Live performance, the final verse is followed by a strange and terrific harmonica solo. I love the way the notes fall and collect.
Musically, the major differences between the 1984 arrangement and, say, the solo acoustic one from 1975, or for that matter from any full-band version that I’ve heard, are the long Am vamps added to the end of the (presuming a 13-line stanza) fourth and eighth lines of each stanza, which give the song a much darker tinge; and the long vocal wail on the last words of the ninth and eleventh lines (over the C chord). It may not sound like much when I write it out like this, but listen to Dylan play it and you’ll see.
A few words about my second-favorite edition of Tangled Up in Blue, full-band live with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1976, ventured only four times that year, and one of them at the legendary untaped tour-closing show in Salt Lake City, at which, in addition to giving this raggedy Tangled one more run, the Revue also supposedly performed Black Diamond Bay and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, two songs that you’d think would have been perfect for the Revue, whether in 1975 or 1976, but which had in fact never been played onstage before and were never played after. But back to Tangled. While I don’t doubt that there are a lot of worthy goes at the song in the “determined to stand” decades, I doubt that any of them could be as unusual as that worked up by the ’76 Revue. The arrangement takes the start-and-stop dynamic common that year (see also I Pity the Poor Immigrant) and uses it to “build a house made out of stainless steel” or something equally outrageous. It’s also constantly changing, constantly on the verge of totally falling apart—and lasts nine or ten minutes!
Some verses are done with the full-band, everybody playing fast, as if it were a punk song, and even (in classic British punk style... a year before British punk exploded into the mainstream) keeping each “song” (since, with all the dead air inbetween, each verse ends up sounding like a separate song) to about a minute or a minute and a half. Other verses are done solo by Dylan. He makes and breaks tentative rhythm after tentative rhythm with his electric guitar, sings and stops singing as he sees fit, as Howie Wyeth and maybe a couple others throw in a loose beat here, a stray note there. Finally, there’s a verse near the end done with the full band but slowly, as if it were now a blues song. And over all of this delicious chaos is the “raging glory” of Bob Dylan’s 1976 vocals.
No official edition of this Tangled Up in Blue is available (yet?), but the effort it might take to find a bootleg recording will be well rewarded. The relevant dates are April 21st, April 22nd, and May 23rd. Get thee out there and hunt.
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