From Newsgroup: rec.music.dylan
don freeman wrote:
Before Lester Bangs gets to his critique of Desire, he describes his
build up of anticipation because of his disappointment with Blood in the Tracks:
"When Blood on the Tracks was released, 1 felt as ambivalent about it as
it was about its subject matter and I remained that way After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess
whose key was the ridiculously spiteful "Idiot Wind," I found myself
drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced
was entirely wholesome.
I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms
alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled
enthusiasm: "Goddamn, he's still got it!" Then I would sober up and it
would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite
and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan. But I
persisted; there was something^ that mattered to me, and I ultimately
found I out what it was. I discovered that I only really wanted to
play this I
record whenever I had a fight with someone l was falling in love with
we would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home
and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album playing it
over and over, wallowing in Dylan's wretched reflection of my own
confusion: "Women-who can figger 'em I imagine it was also a big hit
with the recently (or soon to be) divorced
At length I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay
in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best, innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not
going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women,
myself or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to
be. Which was simply not enough."
The Lester Bangs review of "Blood on the Tracks" by Bob Dylan is worth a read, I think:
"When Blood on the Tracks was released, 1 felt as ambivalent about it as
it was about its subject matter and I remained that way After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess
whose key was the ridiculously spiteful "Idiot Wind," I found myself
drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced
was entirely wholesome.
I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms
alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled
enthusiasm: "Goddamn, he's still got it!" Then I would sober up and it
would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite
and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan. But I
persisted; there was something^ that mattered to me, and I ultimately
found I out what it was. I discovered that I only really wanted to
play this I
record whenever I had a fight with someone l was falling in love with
we would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home
and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album playing it
over and over, wallowing in Dylan's wretched reflection of my own
confusion: "Women-who can figger 'em I imagine it was also a big hit
with the recently (or soon to be) divorced
At length I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay
in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of
self-abuse, at best, innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not
going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women,
myself or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to
be. Which was simply not enough."
This response appears in the discussion at:
http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=675106205#675106205
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