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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 23) Two Bitter Love Songs from ‘Blood on the Tracks’
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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 23) Two Bitter Love Songs from ‘Blood on the Tracks’

Two Bitter Love Songs from Blood on the Tracks EXTRACTS (Full text here) In the only live version on the Rolling Thunder Tour, recorded at Lakeland Florida on April 18th 1976, the lyrics are completely rewritten, now in an AABB rhyming scheme. The woman is now in ‘North Saigon’. Despite the fact that the American...

Extract from ‘DETERMINED TO STAND’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest
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Extract from ‘DETERMINED TO STAND’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest

As chaos takes over we return to our friend Leo, who can now make no sense of what is happening in this bizarre, hallucinatory scenario: …Leo turned to Cleo/ “I think I’m going mad”/ But he’d lost his mind already/ Whatever mind he had… We are never told who ‘Cleo’ is. Meanwhile the description of Leo trying to …block the doorway to save all those from harm/ Blood from an open wound pouring down his arm… seems to be a version of the scenes in the movie where Jack performs heroics in order to save some of the passengers. But this is the last we will hear of Leo and we will never find out whether he shares Jack Dawson’s fate. In the next verse we hear that: …Petals fell from the flowers/ ‘Till all of them were gone/ In the long and dreadful hours/ The wizard’s curse played on… The mention of the ‘wizard’s curse’ suggests that this dream-version of the sinking of the ship is indeed a kind of Hollywood movie in which the passengers have been bewitched by an unseen manipulator. Given that the trouble with the ship appears to have been started by a whirlwind, perhaps this ‘remake’ of the famous movie has somehow incorporated elements of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends are however, nowhere to be seen.