66. Simple Twist of Fate

Perhaps it’s the color and the feel of the early versions, or “She was born in spring,” or that September 1974 was cold and, with Minneapolis on the radar, Dylan was already longing for warm spring weather, but Simple Twist of Fate and Blood on the Tracks in general sound like one of the ultimate springtime records to me. Blood on the Tracks and Astral Weeks… aaand, having written that, it suddenly occurs to me that this is because I first heard both in a dazzlingly green and rainy late March. I would put on a raincoat, wander the greenest streets my neighborhood had, and listen to these two records one after another, until they blended, irrevocably, with the season.

A springtime sound, or springtime images, uphold a record as sad as this one. When I first heard Blood on the Tracks I was 22, and for a moment I felt almost glad that I’d had my heart broken so thoroughly at 19 that I was still mourning that particular loss three years later—because at least, having suffered in love, I could tune in to the record better.

There’s also a taste of summer about the song. “He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train,” after all, but more so just the atmosphere of the “waterfront docks where the sailors all come in.” The final verse you could maybe call, following Dostoevsky, “autumn notes on summer impressions.” It’s not until the final verse that the “he” owns up to being an “I,” a shift that suggests enough distance from the event for the narrator to accept that it really had happened to him. The gentle tone of the song helps with that as well, the roiling heart underneath the façade speaking out only on the “fate” rhymes of each verse.

I love the uselessly confident assurance in the final verse of the Rolling Thunder Revue lyrics, the “she should have caught me in my prime / she would have stayed with me.” It’s answered nicely by the words in the woman’s note, as reported in 2014 live performances: “You should have met me back in ’58 / We could have avoided this simple twist of fate.”

More than any other song from Blood on the Tracks, Simple Twist of Fate is a feast of telling details. The full story isn’t much to summarize: man and woman meet, spend the night together at a hotel, and she leaves in the morning before he wakes (or, if it’s live in 1984, he hears “her bootheels in the hallway click” and lets her go, like the narrator in Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s Midnight Getaway). Yet these events, as Dylan presents them, feel cosmic, pre-ordained, and life-altering.

In fact, life and emotion do concentrate themselves in details: in William Carlos Williams’ famous red wheelbarrow, or in the various (and endlessly changing, if you track the song live across the decades) items of clothing that the narrator “puts … back on” alone in the hotel room in the morning. By the time he’s half-forlornly, half-disinterestedly walking along the daylit docks, keeping an eye out for the woman he won’t meet again, the song achieves an effect like that John Cowper Powys conjures on page 79 of the Overlook Press edition of his novel Owen Glendower (one of my favorite novels of all time), where time itself falls away, and (back to Simple Twist of Fate) instead of 1970s America the scene could just as well be the seashore of Rhodes in the days of Hesiod or Homer.

Simple Twist of Fate hovered for a while between its identities as an acoustic song and a full-band one. It was first attempted solo, but on the same day Dylan ran through it with Deliverance; the album take he settled on is, of course, down to just Dylan and Tony Brown’s bass accompaniment. The song didn’t get worked over with the Minneapolis magicians, and was solo acoustic again during the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, but thanks to Columbia’s multi-disc 1975 live recordings package, we also get a terrific glimpse at how a full-band Revue version might have sounded, as Bob runs spiritedly through the song with Howie Wyeth on drums and Rob Stoner on bass, at a mahjong parler in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Since 1975, Dylan has performed all sorts of full-band versions, so many across so many years that I can forgive the song having been overlooked in Minneapolis. My favorite of those I’ve heard is from November 10^th, 2010, in Washington, D.C. The arrangement, which floats along on sad and lovely slide guitar riffs, is practically reggae, which would be enough to sell me on it, but better still, Dylan plays lead guitar, his soul riding the notes out into the aether, not so much rubbing against the edges of the band’s arrangement as breaking right through it and leaving puddles of blood all over the dusty roads below.

Tamer are the softly-treading Jerry Garcia Band renditions from the late ’70s. They’re worth a listen even if you like Jerry or the Dead only a quarter or eighth as much as I do. Jerry sings in a melodic whisper and sighs in the guitar solos, his band capturing the beauty if not the edge and raggedness of how I imagine a version of Simple Twist of Fate from Minneapolis might have sounded. You can find one excellent 1978 JGB performance on the Garcia Plays Dylan compilation.