The notebooks that Bob Dylan used to scribble his lyrics for Blood on the Tracks have been poured over by scholars and fans.

Most songs went through many revisions but – according to the cheap A6 Spiral pads – one composition had a near-complete transition from page to wax. 🧵 It's extraordinary that Shelter From the Storm appears to have undergone so little editing.

Not only is it a complex and elaborate lyric, its extravagant imagery and relentless focus make it one of Dylan’s finest.

By standard rock parlance, Bob Dylan’s two-month run of live shows across the US in 1974 should have been known as the Planet Waves tour.

Yet by the time Dylan’s 14th studio album was released, few songs from the record were still part of his live set. 🧵 The audience at the tour’s opening date in Chicago witnessed the debut of four songs that Dylan had recorded with The Band in late 1973.

Given the performers’ recent familiarity with the material, it’s no surprise that the live renditions sound great.

Planet Waves engineer Rob Fraboni remembers Bob Dylan telling him about a song he’d been carrying in his head for five years.

The time was finally right to record Forever Young but after the long gestation came a difficult birth. 🧵 Dylan said the song was sparked by the birth of his sons Jesse and Jakob.

While he may have been living with the idea since the late 60s, the desire to finally write it down came after hearing Neil Young’s Heart of Gold on the radio throughout 1972.

🧵 of highlights after Bob Dylan’s superb Bournemouth show on Nov 1st.

The twisted cabaret of Black Rider, which is rarely a Rough and Rowdy Ways standout for me, but this live take was a high point of the set. The relentless drums of Jim Keltner propelling a glorious trip to Desolation Row and a searching piano solo from Dylan.

The Istanbul not Constantinople riff on When I Paint My Masterpiece with an appropriately exotic harmonica solo.

In 1971 Bob Dylan’s versions of popular Big Pink basement tracks were the preserve of in-the-know bootleg buyers.

When Dylan decided to recreate some of these songs for a mainstream audience, he still wanted some upstate influence. 🧵 Woodstock resident and longtime acquaintance Happy Traum got the call to come to New York and play some music with Dylan.

He recalled that the presence of just a single studio engineer supporting the pair seemed to recreate a basement-style intimacy.

Catching up with an episode of Iggy Pop’s 6Music radio show from a couple of weeks back and discovered that he goes deep on Bob Dylan by playing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue “in triplicate”. 🧵

bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0… The Stooge says that Baby Blue is a song he’s “always admired” as “it had such feeling” and “was full of beautiful imagery”.

First, he plays the twinkling version from the recent Shadow Kingdom performance.

Bob Dylan did not arrive in Nashville in Feb 1969 intending to complete an album – he only brought four finished songs with him.

But over two weeks in Tennessee, he wrote just enough additional material to make Nashville Skyline - his shortest record yet. 🧵

📷 Elliott Landy That quartet of pre-completed songs included One More Night – a tribute of sorts to Hank Williams and one of Nashville Skyline's more traditional country songs.

Like his hero, Dylan’s narrator is so “lonesome” that though the moon and stars are out, “no light will shine on me.”

Eat the Document opens with a shot of Bob Dylan snorting something off a tabletop then asking, "Have you ever heard of me?”

An ego indulging itself is an appropriate introduction to this film. 🧵 Eat the Document reunites Dylan with Dont Look Back director D.A. Pennebaker, who had free rein to capture that 1965 UK tour.

But for the following year’s return to Europe, Dylan wanted more control over the filmmaking process.

During those frustrating Blonde on Blonde sessions in New York, Bob Dylan tried 14 takes of a song slated as Freeze Out.

Not only was he was still working on the lyrics of what would eventually become Visions of Johanna, he was unhappy with his band. 🧵 Drummer Bobby Gregg’s struggles to land on a satisfactory tempo were especially exasperating.

Dylan diagnosed the New York musicians as the problem.

The first Nashville session that captured the master take of Visions of Johanna suggests he was right.

“Suggest it one more time and you’re fired.”

Al Grossman didn’t want Bob Dylan to record Blonde on Blonde in Nashville and threatened Bob Johnston, whose suggestion it was.

But with Dylan unhappy after the New York sessions, the producer put his job on the line. 🧵 Dylan didn’t believe his New York musicians could help him capture the specific sound he had in his mind.

When Johnston risked the wrath of Grossman by conveying the calibre of the players he knew in Nashville, Dylan was intrigued.

Five of the songs on Blonde on Blonde feature a bridge.

By my count, just one song – Ballad of a Thin Man – does on Bob Dylan’s previous two album combined.

Which makes me think Dylan wanted his seventh album to be more of a pop record. 🧵 And it’s not just the bridges. Blonde on Blonde has more sing-along choruses than before and the lyrics are more direct expressions of love, longing and leaving.

The core of Blonde on Blonde is pop music. But this is Dylan, so the result is naturally unconventional.

Before Al Kooper sat behind the Hammond organ during the Like a Rolling Stone sessions, he first tried out on guitar. After all, he was a guitarist, not an organ player.

But then Mike Bloomfield arrived and Kooper abandoned any hope of being Bob Dylan’s new guitarist. 🧵 As soon as Bloomfield started to play, Kooper realised that The Paul Butterworth Blues Band guitarist was streets ahead of him.

So Kooper retreated back behind the glass and waited for his next opportunity, while Bloomfield impressed more than just the hopeful usurper.

After his outsized impact on the final version of Like a Rolling Stone, Al Kooper became a key member of Bob Dylan’s circle.

He would make more significant contributions to the sound and style of Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan’s sixth studio album. 🧵

Image via @GeekingOnMusic Before returning to the studio, Kooper joined Dylan at the 1965 Newport Festival.

There he endured the boos as part of the band that plugged in to perform Like a Rolling Stone, It Takes a Lot to Laugh... and that dynamite version of Maggie’s Farm:

https://twitter.com/DylanRevisited/status/1575069156507983872

June 16, 1965. Session musician and songwriter, Al Kooper is about to blag his way into rock history by playing an instrument he doesn't even know how to turn on.

Such is the unplanned majesty of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and the album it opens, Highway 61 Revisited. 🧵 Producer Tom Wilson had invited Kooper along to watch the second day of Bob Dylan and his band attempt to record an unusual and awkward new song.

But the ambitious Kooper had no intention of sitting on the sidelines behind the glass and instead sidled in among the musicians.

If Bob Dylan’s fourth album really does present Another Side to the man, it’s the increasing influence of symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and, especially, Arthur Rimbaud. Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto proclaims a hostility to “matter-of-fact descriptions”. Instead, life should be represented through “veiled reflections of the senses”.

Dylan applies this technique to philosophical songs like My Back Pages and is equally adept about love.

On Another Side..., Bob Dylan sings about anything but social issues.

He eventually addresses this rejection of the topical on the final song recorded for the album and torches his protest icon status with a crimson flame.

Image: Cat Power by @matzazzo My Back Pages is Dylan reclaiming himself from the folk crowd. He had said, “I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.”

In the song, he dismisses his past self as a romantic who believed “lies that life is black and white”.

While Suze Rotolo’s presence is felt on The Time They Are a-Changin’s few songs about love, she’s certainly not the focus of that record as she was on The Freewheelin’.

But Another Side of Bob Dylan returns to her with greater candour that ever. Suze could certainly be the “long lost lover” lamented on Black Crow Blues.

Though Another Side’s second song is more memorable as the first time Dylan plays piano on an album and he goes in hard with a rocking, boogie-woogie style.

The stark, serious monochrome cover of The Times They Are a-Changin’ provides a notable contrast with the warm glow of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

But Times’ austere Woody Guthrie impression is an accurate representation of the album’s mood. 🧵 And it’s the Freewheelin’s cuddled cover star who is partly the reason for this sombre tone.

Despite Suze Rotolo returning to the US after her year in Europe, she and Dylan went through a bitter breakup that fuelled two of the record’s finest songs.

On Aug 28, 1963, 250,000 people marched on Washington demanding better economic and civil rights for African Americans.

They witnessed Dr King’s I Have a Dream speech and cheered Blowin’ in the Wind, as sung by Peter Paul and Mary. But Bob Dylan wasn’t as widely well received. Where other Dylan songs about violence against black people – The Death of Emmet Till, Oxford Town, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – take a straightforward liberal approach, in Washington he chose to perform Only a Pawn in their Game.

The late addition of Masters of War to The Freewheelin’ helped with Bob Dylan’s desire for more finger-pointing songs.

His next record upped the accusatory ante even further. If the Times were supposed to be a-changin’, here he shows how far they have to go.

Image via @Fergal The hope engendered by the opening title track is immediately dashed by The Ballad of Hollis Brown.

It's a devasting account of a South Dakota farmer mired in poverty and beset by bad luck that concludes with mass murder.

What is this shit?

That infamous Self Portrait review opener by critic Greil Marcus had been posed directly to Bob Dylan six years earlier by a friend who had just read the lyrics to the title track of his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin’. A friend and fellow musician from Dylan’s Minnesota days, Tony Glover was in New York to make his own record.

Visiting Dylan in his apartment, he saw the Times lyrics sheet and was particularly unimpressed with the line, “come senators and congressmen please heed the call”.