In September 1974, Dylan took what he’d been writing to the A&R Studios in New York, where, with producer Phil Ramone, he made what could have been a solo acoustic blues record. Dylan worked on the songs through 1974, writing lyrics in a series of tiny spiral notebooks. I could absolutely have stayed forever and never realised the time, but my purpose, on a first visit, was to review the Blood On the Tracks song drafts written in two spiral notebooks that have, until now, been inaccessible.īlood On The Tracks was released in January 1975, after a brief but convoluted recording history. As James Joyce did, Dylan writes on anything and everything to hand, when the words and phrases strike, which seems to be any time, all the time. In pristine acid-free grey boxes and brand-new mylar sleeves rest notebooks, shards of note pads, hotel stationery, business cards, even bits of brown paper bags, covered in Dylan’s small, hard-to-read handwriting. The Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, now open for research on a strictly regulated basis, provides astonishing revelations about Dylan’s care in drafting, revising, rewriting, and perfecting. Literary archives are the most intimate way for a scholar to gain access to a writer’s creative process. One reason for the delay was that Dylan didn’t want it released already a famously private public personality, perhaps he’d had second thoughts about letting anyone else see what he said to himself. “Now somebody else is going to be allowed to see what I said to myself.” Bob Dylan to Paul Robbins, 1965īob Dylan said this about his novel Tarantula, which was not officially published until 1971.

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