Back In The Rain: The Making, Unmaking And Remaking of Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks is considered by many to be his masterpiece. Routinely labelled “Dylan’s Divorce Album,” it is also widely taken as a painfully autobiographical account of the deterioration of his first marriage: “the greatest break-up record of all time.” But the reality behind the making of the record is far more complex, and the result of a struggle that saw Dylan attempting to rediscover his own art on his own terms, after a long period away from the rock and roll fray, during which, for many, he seemed to turn his back on the implications of his own 1960s work.

How difficult a struggle that turned out to be is borne witness by the fact that, just days before Blood On The Tracks was due to be released, Dylan suddenly decided to halt the presses, scrap half the tracks, and return to the studio to quickly record them again. In Back In The Rain, Doc Pasquale vividly positions Blood On The Tracks not simply in the context of Dylan’s marriage, but his long “retreat” from rock and roll and public life: the big silence that lasted from his 1966 motorcycle crash, to his return to touring in 1974.

Peeling back the layers in an extensive track-by-track analysis, he also examines the differences between the version of Blood On The Tracks that Dylan originally recorded and the version that he eventually released, and what those differences reveal about this album that won't let go.