Trivia / Blood on the Tracks

For the Album:

• Creator Breakdown: Dylan and his wife Sara Lownds were separated when he wrote the album's songs (they reconciled, but divorced a couple years later). Exactly how autobiographical the songs are has been much-discussed, but the context is clearly important. Dylan worked on the lyrics in a series of handwritten notebooks, one of which was reprinted in the deluxe More Blood, More Tracks Bootleg Series edition's booklets. It shows that earlier drafts of several of the songs (particularly "Idiot Wind") had lyrics that were clearly Dylan venting over his personal situation, before he rewrote them to be less specific. "Call Letter Blues", left off the album, is also obviously autobiographical.
  The children cry for mother
  I tell them "Mother took a trip"
  Well, I walk on pins and needles
  I hope my tongue don't slip
• Cut Song: Two songs were recorded but left off the album: "Up to Me" and "Call Letter Blues". Dylan also did an impromptu version of the cowboy song "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" (which he's released three other versions of over the years). The notebooks he used to pen the album's lyrics include several songs he never attempted to record, with titles like "There Ain't Gonna Be Any Next Time" and "Don't Want No Married Woman".
• Deleted Scene: More Blood, More Tracks restored some deleted material from the original recording sessions.
  • The New York version of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" has an extra verse that Dylan left out of the released version.
    Lily’s arms were locked around the man that she dearly loved to touch
    She forgot all about the man she couldn’t stand who hounded her so much
    “I’ve missed you so,” she said to him, and he felt she was sincere
    But just beyond the door he felt jealousy and fear
    Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts
  • "Meet Me in the Morning" has a little over a minute of band jamming that was trimmed for the album.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Columbia Records distributed limited edition promo copies of the original version of the album before Dylan called off the release to rework it. After the official album was released, the original versions of the five songs he re-recorded circulated widely among fans. More Blood, More Tracks ostensibly released the entire recording sessions for the first time (minus any alternate takes of the Minneapolis tracks), but the version of "Idiot Wind" on the promo release was not included. Dylan's camp reportedly rejected that version and chose one with a different organ overdub, forcing fans who wish to reconstruct the original album to scour the 'net for the proper version.
• Referenced by...: In 1991 NME issued a set of "pop music playing cards", with the faces of various icons. Naturally, Dylan was the Jack of Hearts.
• Throw It In!:
  • One of the factors leading to Dylan rejecting the original New York takes of the songs may well have been that on several of them, you can hear the buttons on the sleeve of his jacket scraping on his guitar. It's especially noticeable on the NYC version of "Tangled Up in Blue".
  • The take of "Simple Twist of Fate" chosen for the album has Dylan slightly fumble one line. He sings "above a blind man at the gate" instead of just "of a blind man at the gate".
• Troubled Production: Dylan recorded all the songs in the course of a few days in New York in September 1974, then sent it off to Columbia for a December release. After listening to an acetate copy on his Minnesota farm a couple weeks before the album's release date, he decided he didn't like it and told Columbia to postpone the release. Shortly after Christmas he went to Minneapolis for a couple hastily-arranged dates with local musicians and re-recorded half the album ("Tangled Up in Blue", "You're a Big Girl Now", "Idiot Wind", "Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts", "If You See Her, Say Hello").

For the Manga

• Colbert Bump: The manga got a massive boost in readership, at least among Western audiences, when Youtuber Super Eyepatch Wolf made a video about it. Notably, the title of the video ("The Manga That Breaks People") is tied in with an image of Seiko's face, chillingly smiling directly at the viewer with her eyes tinted red, which likely aided in giving people who probably wouldn't have given the manga a second thought a reason to click and see what it was all about.

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