Too ‘Tangled Up in Blues’: A Look Inside Bob Dylan’s 1974 Notebooks
By W. Jason Miller, North Carolina State University
Over twenty pages of Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “Tangled Up in Blue” (1974) are now available for study at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[1] These lyrics are located in two small 5 in. x 3 in. spiral notebooks from 1974.[2] All forty-five pages of each notebook are filled, and one contains personal notes commingled with revised song lyrics to what would become the iconic 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. The album chronicles Dylan working through a painful separation on the way to being divorced, and references to his family are central throughout one of these notebooks.
The cover of one of Dylan’s two notebooks advertises its cost: “19.” Opening it up reveals the most minuscule letters I have ever encountered in over twenty years of conducting archival research.[3] I needed a magnifying glass to read Dylan’s handwriting. Dylan’s practice of writing out a full stanza on the left, using the right side across from the spiral wire for revisions, meant I had to scan left to right (rather than up and down) to track his complex process. It was no small challenge to untangle the lyrics in notebooks now finally available to scholars.
Before they were officially made available for research at the Bob Dylan Center, the notebooks passed before Anne Margaret Daniel in 2019, who previewed them for Hot Press.[4] Where Daniel scanned parts of every written song that eventually became Blood on the Tracks, my article here zeros in on only “Tangled Up in Blue.” As such, I newly identify such details as exactly how Dylan arrived at his final title for the song. The other moments I examine in the drafts further reveal that the theme of “change” is present in the earliest iterations of the song. Moreover, the now famous pronoun shifts also surface in Dylan’s early drafts. These final two ideas, communicating change through shifting pronouns, rest latently for us now as visual reminders of what Dylan eventually reinscribed back into the song over decades of endless revisions for his live performances. As such, this article grounds the innovations that eventually emerge in the long history of “Tangled Up in Blue” as items permanently archived in Dylan’s earliest handwritten versions.
The moment that shook me most while studying these pages was encountering three previous titles of the song that eventually became known as “Tangled Up in Blue.” Dylan cycled through various iterations of the three titles—“Dusty Country Blues,” “Blue Carnation,” and “Tangled Up in Blues”—before dropping this final “s” and settling on the now familiar “Tangled Up in Blue.” These two notebooks make it clear that “Tangled Up in Blue” is at least Dylan’s fourth title for the song. That each of the three earlier titles dawns in the moments Dylan is composing intricate passages about his own life with his invented characters offers new insight into how dispersed his own biography eventually becomes in the many varied verses he delivers across decades of alternative performances.
Because the third (and most significant) of these titles brings the role of the artist into sharp relief, this article also provides a new entry point for interpreting what it means to be “Tangled Up in Blues.” This exploration begins by noting exactly where in the process Dylan discovers his fully considered title. Dylan moves away from the title “Blue Carnation,” something that gestures toward marriage, to instead index his own persona as a bluesman. Hence, the final song title captures this once lost originary emphasis on both marriage and the “blues.” By instead presenting the final ambiguity of merely “blue,” this color in the final title of “Tangled Up in Blue” simultaneously unites (and veils) the two foundational impulses for mixing music and marriage.
The 19¢ Notebooks
Dylan’s “Blue Notebook #2” (circa 1974). Photo courtesy of the Bob Dylan Archive.
In terms of sequencing, Dylan used at least three notebooks contemporaneously. The two notebooks at the Bob Dylan Center are identical, produced by the Mead Corporation of Dayton, Ohio. One cover is missing. The other complete front piece reads “45-2152.” I will use the names Notebook #1 and Blue Notebook #2 for clarity.[5] Notebook #1 is missing its front red cover, but the back red cover is still intact. At one time, a “red-orange edge” (presumably left over from the torn cover) was also identified, caught in the spiral spine, further confirming that the original cover was in fact red.[6] In addition to the first versions of Dylan’s songs, Notebook #1 includes later personal entries and random notes that are themselves sometimes dated October 1974.
Blue Notebook #2 does not include any dates; however, as it includes only rewrites of Dylan’s songs, it speaks back and forth with entries from his two other notebooks. Absent any personal journaling, it may very well either be contemporaneous or immediately succeeding Notebook #1. Dylan here alternates writing in black and blue ink.
The third notebook is The Red Cover Notebook. It contains various near-finalized drafts Dylan prepared with clear intentionality for his recording sessions at Columbia studios in New York on September 16-19, 1974. Unlike the other two notebooks, where random ideas are recorded, explored, and wholly rewritten, the lyrics here are remarkably clear and direct. It is as deliberate a version of the songs as Dylan performed them during the New York sessions as one could expect to encounter. It is held at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, and all but three of its pages appeared in 2018 inside the More Blood, More Tracks, Bootleg Series vol. 14, Deluxe Edition. The missing pages include one page containing the full lyrics to the song “You’re a Big Girl Now” and the final two pages of “Tangled Up in Blue” (featuring verses four through seven).[7] As with the other two, this notebook would seem to date to sometime between summer and fall of 1974.
Random personal notes are interspersed only throughout the first of Dylan’s two notebooks held at the Bob Dylan Center. Here, in Notebook #1, Dylan writes out everything from the profound to the absurd. Clearly the most “used” of the three notebooks, it appears to have lost its red cover simply from being revisited on so many different occasions by Dylan himself. Though not in journal form, Dylan makes playful notes about a squeeze play[8] where the runner scores from third and even records new Italian words he seems to have learned. He includes “plusvlta” and defines it as “the highest point capable of being attained (entranced),” and also “nephbitis: kidney disease.” In one place, Dylan even muses about getting an updated Polaroid camera image of himself.
This notebook captures Dylan reflecting on lines from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1955) as he writes out the line: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Unmistakable reminders of Dylan’s fame include references to people he meets at an undisclosed October 30 party. He lists film stars Natalie Wood, Jack Nickolson, Ryan O’Neil, and filmmaker Roman Polanski. Original lines to songs drafted for Blood on the Tracks offer new ways of re-hearing the familiar. In his drafts to “Idiot Wind,” for instance, Dylan writes: “From the Grand Coulee Dam to Omaha.”[9]
“Tangled Up in Blues”
Before the Bob Dylan Center made research access available to its two notebooks, various images of Dylan’s drafts to “Tangled Up in Blue” were made available to the public.[10] Two fine articles by those with special preliminary access also appeared, written by Jeff Slate and, as mentioned, Anne Margaret Daniel. Because the song was composed during Dylan’s changing relationship with his wife, I wondered: “What information about their relationship gets invoked, altered, or dispersed on the way to recording the original album version of ‘Tangled Up in Blue?’”[11] First, one of Dylan’s drafts reads: “There were many books up in a box, I opened up to see.”[12] Perhaps thinking of Suze Rotolo on McDougal Street more than his current wife, by his final revision this image is switched entirely from voyeuristic snooping to voluntary sharing about being shown a book of poems. Equally interesting, Sam Sussman suggests these lines refer to his own mother and Dylan reading the poems of Plutarch together.[13] Yes, as Dylan tells us himself in the published version, this is a song about “all the people we used to know.” Second, the 1974 recording’s odd reference to “slaves” has a very different beginning. In its place, Dylan first wrote: “We listened to a lot of Coltrane / tried to find happiness.” Other variations for this stanza include: “Some are digging Coltrane” and “Coltrane came up” and “They stopped listening to Coltrane.” On this topic, Anne Margaret Daniel has suggested that “anything by Coltrane intimates revolution.”[14]
Despite these noteworthy ideas and lines, the most remarkable discovery from studying these newly available notebooks concerns how Dylan arrived at his final title. In Notebook #1, Dylan considers titles to the song. He writes the two words, “Blue Carnation,” at the top of a page, underlined so that it stands alone as a title. Because we engage in an inquiry and not an autopsy, we might thoughtfully ask: Does this image gesture toward a flower one might wear at a wedding? Is this what Dylan was likely alluding to when he said this song “took ten years to live, and two years to write?”[15] What else might that symbol represent to Dylan or his invented characters? The possibilities are limitless. To be clear, there is not one single reference to a “blue carnation” in any extant draft of the lyrics in either of these two notebooks. As with so many of Dylan’s compositions, this is a title he creates regardless of the actual words never appearing anywhere within the song.
After writing out the title “Blue Carnation” and placing it at the top left of one page, Dylan is still in the mode of thinking how to title this work.[16] It is at this point that Dylan returns to a single line he has drafted within one of the verses in Notebook #1. Underneath “Blue Carnation,” he writes a second title and again underlines it. It reads: “Tangled up in Blues.” The words first appear from Dylan’s pen to end a full verse of the song, arriving at a moment in drafting what would become the fourth verse on the album version. Here, he suddenly falls into a reflective biographical mode of thought that is very revealing. Writing out the line, “I wish we’d tied the knot just like I tied the laces of my shoes,” Dylan completes this line by adding further insight into this marriage knot coming undone in what can be read as a personal reckoning: “The circle has come to an end / Guess I always been too tangled up in blues.” This precise moment (and rhyme with “shoes”) is how Dylan arrived at the song’s title. It is stunning to see Dylan’s life as a musician so directly linked to the knot of his marriage being broken. In no uncertain terms, Dylan’s marriage and career are each linked in this single rhyming verse. As such, these lines embody the personal pain and reckoning Dylan first explored before concealing it by dropping the final “s” in “Blues” for the final title, “Tangled Up in Blue.”
In this same drafted verse, Dylan goes further into self-confession. His next lines read: “When you needed me most I was always off by myself / Always too busy or too stoned.” The implications appear when he concludes: “And everything that we had planned / Had to be postponed.”[17] Not only is the title found in this verse, but Dylan is also writing with the personal “I” that will soon become dispersed in the pronoun “he.” The key dispersive shift, one that moves from “I” to “he,” also begins in the same critical verse. As such, this is the most decisive moment in the history of one of Dylan’s most iconic songs. That history cannot be found in interviews: it’s here in the notebooks.
The artist’s need for isolation and drugs to perhaps both create and escape culminate in what it means to be tangled up in blues. While scholars such as Elizabeth Randall Upton have wisely reflected on “what it might mean to be entangled with a color,” here we finally have some insight.[18] Dylan’s early drafts suggest being tangled up in blues means to be saddled with the blues, stoned, and perhaps even on the verge of divorce. It is both why and how the blue carnation of marriage wilts.
This title also points, however, to the profession of being an artist who performs blues music. In the first released version of the song on Blood on the Tracks, this traveler goes from “west to east and back in the first two stanzas” and then north and south in the third.[19] In some ways, this movement is reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, linking Dylan’s song with the Beat writer he knew so well. All these directional movements in the song point as much to touring as they do to experiencing alternative points of view over the course of one’s life. It is noteworthy that a focus on Dylan’s profession has informed so many discussions of this song already. For Tim Riley, the leading figure in the song “has become a slave to the road.”[20] For Greil Marcus, the blues informs so many of Dylan’s songs. Hence, Marcus suggests that even more than Woody Gutherie, it is “the bluesman” Robert Johnson who represents a “mythic emblem for a central strain of Dylan’s musical experience.”[21] The notebook drafts of this song make this direct comment finely explicit.
Throughout this draft that references to being stoned, having the clap, and writing in solitude, Dylan eventually revises out of the song anything that hints at music’s most overworn cliche: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. By subsequently dropping the “s” in “Blues,” the song disperses most elements of his personal life and leaves listeners with the pleasure of confronting art in all its mysteries. Moving from the personal to the obscure—along with the choosing to disperse one’s experience—is part of what makes Dylan’s artistic process so captivating and elusive. Nonetheless, two key aspects of Dylan’s life remain in his final title, “Tangled Up in Blue”: his dissolving marriage and the idea of being a bluesman.[22] The color “blue” coalesces both the image of the wedding carnation and Dylan’s persona of being a “bluesman.” To be clear, this color animates both marriage and music. At the moment of composition, with no one watching, does Dylan consider blaming the inevitable trappings of life on the road for dissolving his marriage? Or perhaps even his own willingness to embrace the persona of a bluesman who must be rambling on? If the petals of the carnation die and fade to obscurity in further iterations of the song, the figure of the “blues musician” nonetheless remains. It is indeed diluted, but it also lingers as a substantive trace in the final stanza where Dylan asserts: “I’m still on the road / Heading for another joint.”[23] Not a concert or an arena: a juke “joint.”
A Living Poem
As is well-known, beyond these notebooks, Dylan relentlessly revised and altered “Tangled Up in Blue,” so that the song models change itself when performed. As Jeff Slate has wisely noted, “‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is the one song in Dylan’s vast catalogue that he has never seemed to be finished with.”[24] According to a surprisingly accurate and honest insight from Dylan, the key moment in this long string of changes occurred with purpose and intent in the summer of 1984: “I rewrote it in a hotel room somewhere. I think it was in Amsterdam . . . When I sang it the next night, I knew it was right.” [25] On what does indeed appear to be the first night of this new version, Dylan includes this line in the last stanza: “So now I’m going on back again / To that forbidden zone.” He continues: “Me, I’m still walking towards the sun / Trying to stay out of the joint.”
In subsequent versions (captured on 1984’s Real Live), the shifting perspectives on the lovers in the song results in the implication that the speaker can “no longer even speak of them as we.”[26] This may owe something to Dylan’s desire to make this song resemble a painting, in its ability to present multiple representations of time, as Dylan was taking painting classes with Norman Raeben at the time of composition in 1974.[27] In Kat Peddie’s discussion of how “I is somebody else,” for both Arthur Rimbaud and Dylan, any attempt at representations of the self are further undermined:
This instability is also a facet of musical performance. Actually, the way in
which indeterminacy in Dylan is most frequently experienced, the way in which
he defies audiences’ desires for stable interpretation, is through variation in musical performance, most particularly his famous refusal to settle on any one variant of any song, and certainly not to regard the first version as any kind of ur-text.[28]
Indeterminacy of both a fixed self and static song is something Timothy Hampton has extended through his own reading of the prose poems of Illuminations (1896) by Arthur Rimbaud: “there are two moments of the different ‘lives’ that Rimbaud posits for all creatures; ‘To each being it seemed to me that several other lives were due.’”[29] As Hampton further delineates, “the question of the ‘I’ poses interesting problems when we consider Dylan’s own location in his songs” as his presence may indeed be “felt most clearly in songs that cannot be linked in any narrative way to ‘Bob Dylan.’”[30] In this way, the Dylan who drafts about his personal memories in first person can bend his lived experience into something easily ascribed to another. Dylan’s artistry blurs these other selves by beginning in the notebooks with his own distant, other self; concealing that identity behind the vague pronouns of “he” and “she”; and blending these identifiers into a wholly new “I” and “we.”
In fact, Notebook #1 documents what seems to be Dylan’s first reckoning with this shift. In permanent ink, this notebook records the most complex and powerful theme Dylan is circling when he writes: “And now we’re changing again.” Though this remarkably illuminating line never makes its way into any actualized version of the song, its logic is absolutely central to the core theme at work in “Tangled Up in Blue.” Acting like a poet, Dylan removes the overt nature of this thought as an immature or expository overview all too easily defined, like the moral that summarizes a fable. Instead, he eventually activates the remarkable pronoun shifts in the song to communicate this change and starts looking back on the speaker as a distant “he” rather than just a younger “I.” Hence, The Red Cover Notebook at the Morgan Library shows Dylan making five intentional pronoun shifts that depersonalizes the song. Taking his black pen to the second verse of “Tangled Up in Blue,” he turns “you” in line one to “They’; “You” becomes “He” to start the second line; and two other iterations of “you” become “he” to end the same second line. Both times “you” appears in line three, Dylan inks over them with “they.” The overall effect is that the lives of the speaker’s past selves and acquaintances all feel like they were lived by different people.
Moreover, as can now be heard, Dylan even confuses himself on two occasions during the first recording sessions in New York. Take 2, Remake 2 (September 18, 1974 | Disc 5) ends at the 1:31 mark when Dylan sings line one of the second verse as “he was married.” After an audible, “Oh,” Dylan mumbles the correction: “she was married.” Take 2, Remake 3 (September 19, 1974 | Disc 6) ends abruptly as well when Dylan mixes up these pronouns at the end of verse one. The “And she was” he sings is supposed to be “And he was standing on the side of the road.” Hence Dylan’s own performative errors when singing highlight the actual written changes of these pronouns in his notebooks. It lets us hear what we cannot see: neither “he” nor “she” was ever firmly fixed in these ever-changing, handwritten lyrics.
Over the decades after its initial release, the changing nature of “Tangled Up in Blue” has only expanded as Dylan both refined and amplified the song’s key artistic trait of change.[31] On December 10, 1978, the audience in Charlotte, NC, did not hear Dylan sing about reading 13th century poetry, but rather having a women quote to him a section of the Bible from “Jeremiah, chapter 17, / From verses 21 and 33.” By the final verse, the list of people he had to get back to included “bricklayers,” “bank robbers,” and “burglars.”[32] To this idea of change, one “Mondo Scripto” iteration of Dylan’s lyrics blends the original draft with elements of the new. His passage about living on “Montague Street” and listening to Coltrane indexes the idea of transformation again as he writes of his unnamed hosts: “Suddenly they changed on me.”[33]
Remarkably, when Dylan performs the song on tour (over 1,725 times through 2018), he has continued to further alter and revise new verses. None of this is coincidental: actual lyrical change itself is more central to this song than any other in Dylan’s entire discography. Not only do the changes capture the spirit of evolving relationships, they summon the expected spontaneity of a blues musician. At a March 20, 2004, show in Toronto, Dylan pushed his pronoun shifts to new gender-bending extremes when he sang: “Some are Mathematicians / I’m a truck driver’s wife.” On October 14, 2016, the Las Vegas crowd heard him sing: “He helped her out of a jam I guess / Then he let the law take its course.”[34] Such changes can be heard across the full spectrum of his live performances. The last known live performance of the song dates to August 24, 2018, in Brisbane, Australia. Even here, Dylan can still be heard inserting new ideas all throughout the song. In the last verse alone, new lines about “yesterday” and “tomorrow” replace references to people who are merely illusionary now.[35] The effect is plain: both descriptions and connections to the people we love (both others and our past selves) are fluid rather than fixed. In this way, “Tangled Up in Blue” is a living poem as it expresses the constant change we each experience over time in our relationships with both others and the memory of ourselves. Moreover, Notebook #1 & Blue Notebook #2 make it clear these eventual performative changes are present in the song, in one form or another, from its earliest written inception to delivery. Making art initiates the change, and performing it allows it to evolve. In this way, the song is a remarkable example of what rhetoricians call iconicity: it models the very topic it addresses. As such, “Tangled Up in Blue” is a poem where memory breathes. Dylan shows us exactly what the idea of change sounds like: it is a song that never codifies.
Works Cited
Collins, Mattew. “Bob Dylan and that Poet From the Thirteenth Century.’” Dante e l’arte 6 (2019): 11-24.
Daniel, Anne Margaret. “The Full Bob Dylan Cover Story from the Hot Press Annual 2019.”
Hot Press, 23 April 2019. https://www.hotpress.com/music/full-bob-dylan-cover-story-hot-press-annual-2019-22771539
Davidson, Mark and Parker Fishel, eds. Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. New York: Callaway, 2023.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Ballad of Bob Dylan. New York: Harper, 2011.
Hampton, Timothy. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work. Princeton, NJ. Princeton UP, 2020.
Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. New York: Marrow, 2001.
Gray, Michael. Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. New York: Cassell, 2003.
Mai, Anne-Marie. “Time Slots in Dylan’s Oeuvre.” Aktualitet: Litteratur,
Kultur og Medier 17.3 (2023): 31-43.
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music. New York: Plume, 1975.
Margotin, Philippe and Jean-Michel Guesdon. Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track.
New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2015.
Metsa, Paul and Rick Shefchik. Blood in the Tracks: The Minnesota Musicians Behind Dylan’s Masterpiece.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Peddie, Kat. “‘I is somebody else’: Bob Dylan / Arthur Rimbaud.” Popular Music History,
8.2 (2013): 169-188.
Philips, Muziekcentrum Frits. https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/listening-to-every-tangled-up-in
Ricks, Christopher. Dylan’s Visions of Sin. New York: Ecco, 2003.
Riley, Tim. Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. New York:Knopf, 1992.
Sisario, B. “Bob Dylan’s Secret Archive.” New York Times, 2 March 2016.
Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan’s First Day with ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’” The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 2018.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/bob-dylans-first-day-with-tangled-up-in-blue
Sussman, Sam. “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dyaln’s Son,”
Harper’s Magazine, May 2021.
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/the-silent-type-on-possibly-being-bob-dylans-son/
Upton, Elizabeth Randall. “Bob Dylan’s ballade.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies,
10.4 (2019): 452-465.
[1] I thank Mark Davidson and Stephanie Stewart at the Bob Dylan Center for so kindly and expertly guiding me through these (and other) materials at the Bob Dylan Center in June of 2024.
[2] These two notebooks from 1974 are held at the Bob Dylan Center (Series IV: Notebooks, Box 99, Folders 05 and 06). In terms of chronological sequence, they are followed by The Red Cover Notebook filled with song drafts for Blood on the Tracks held at the Morgan Library and Museum.
[3] This includes (but is not limited to) reading the handwriting of Martin Luther King, Jr. in several archives (in Boston and Atlanta) as well as hundreds of letters of correspondence both written and addressed to poet Langston Hughes held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
[4] For more, see Anne Margaret Daniel’s 2019 article: https://www.hotpress.com/music/full-bob-dylan-cover-story-hot-press-annual-2019-22771539
[5] When not on display in the main museum, Notebook #1 is located in Series IV: Notebooks, Box 99, Folder 05; Blue Notebook #2 is located in Series IV: Notebooks, Box 99, Folder 06.
[6] Anne Margaret Daniel notes seeing this in her 2019 article: https://www.hotpress.com/music/full-bob-dylan-cover-story-hot-press-annual-2019-22771539
[7] The Morgan Library and Museum has presented the three missing pages of both “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “Tangled Up in Blue” from The Red Cover Notebook. They can be located online: https://www.bobdylan.com/news/missing-notebook-pages/. I thank Dale Stinchcomb, the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at The Morgan Library & Museum, for directly sharing these remaining three pages with me.
[8] Though the timeline synchs perfectly, it is ultimately unclear if this is in any way connected to Game 1 of the 1974 World Series played on October 12, 1974, between the Oakland A’s and the Los Angeles Dodgers. After he hit a double in the fifth inning of Game 1, A’s pitcher Ken Holtzman eventually scored from third on Bert Campaneris’s suicide squeeze bunt to trim the Dodgers lead to 2-1.
[9] Notebook #1.
[10] In addition to the wonderful color image in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (Davidson and Fishel, 300-01), the first page of “Tangled Up in Blue” from The Red Cover Notebook was included inside the 2018 More Blood, More Tracks – Bootleg Series Vol. 14 Deluxe Edition. Finally, the New York Times also shared another image in 2016 from one of the two notebooks held by the Bob Dylan Center (Sisario).
[11] As Christopher Ricks wisely notes in Dylan’s Visions of Sin, as “a work of art,” a song “is always going to be larger than and other than what precipitated it” (344).
[12] This may have some significance to those who have tried to identify who the song references as the “poet from the thirteenth century.” For more, both Elizabeth Randall Upton and Mattew Collins explore the possibility of this being either Dante or Plutarch in their respective articles “Bob Dylan’s ballade” and “Bob Dylan and that ‘Italian Poet from the Thirteenth Century.’” Quite simply, Dylan may have mistakenly thought the 1300s are called the 13th century.
[13] For more, see the opening section of Sam Sussman’s “The Silent Type”: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son”: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/the-silent-type-on-possibly-being-bob-dylans-son/
[14] Daniel also lists several songs by John Coltrane from 1958-66 to support her thought: https://www.hotpress.com/music/full-bob-dylan-cover-story-hot-press-annual-2019-22771539
[15] Quoted in Margotin & Guesdon, p. 416.
[16] This title appears in Notebook #1, page 15 (recto).
[17] Notebook #1, page 15 (recto).
[18] Upton, p. 457.
[19] Ibid, p. 456.
[20] Riley, p. 236.
[21] Marcus, Mystery Train, pp. 39-40; Zak, pp. 623-24.
[22] While various styles of musicians make use of open tuning, it is sometimes directly identified with blues guitarists. Also, as Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik note in Blood in the Tracks (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), Dylan wrote almost all the songs for Blood on the Tracks on a Martin 00-18 acoustic guitar set in open D tuning. With fascinating implications for the color used throughout this discussion of “Tangled Up in Blue,” Metsa and Shefchik also suggest that Dylan had a concurrent obsession with Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, which also used open tuning exclusively (7-8).
[23] Gray notes that another element of blues quietly conceals itself in Dylan’s song as “keep on keeping on / Like a bird that flew” alludes to a line in the song “Road Runner” by bluesman Junior Wells & The All-Stars (356).
[24] Slate notes some of the most recent changes and additions to the song (as of 2018) that “recasts the song in the spirit of our times, in the same way the original was so much a product of the Vietnam and Watergate era.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/bob-dylans-first-day-with-tangled-up-in-blue
[25] Quoted in Heylin, p. 566. Dylan did not play a show in Amsterdam, but he did play two in Rotterdam on June 4 and 6, 1984. Dylan’s timing (if not city) seems correct: a new version emerged on June 4, 1984. To hear a version of the song, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if8lWlmIwSM
[26] Epstein, p. 323.
[27] Mai, p. 31.
[28] Peddie, p. 178.
[29] Surprisingly, Hampton connects this shift in selves within the context of his astute discussion of “All Along the Watchtower” rather than “Tangled Up in Blue.” For more, see Hampton, p. 116.
[30] Hampton, p. 18.
[31] And this study of the lyrical changes does not even scratch the surface of the various instrumental alterations. Percussionist Gary Burke recounted Dylan running the band through two hours of rehearsing only “Tangled Up in Blue” before their 1976 show in Fort Collins, Colorado, only to hear how Dylan then “takes off in a whole other direction” when they actually took the stage. Burke said: “It was like we didn’t even spend any time on it the night before. I’m just hanging on for my life.” To actually hear leaked versions of that epic two-hour rehearsal, see Ray Padgett’s “Now it Goes like This: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’” https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/now-it-goes-like-this-tangled-up
[32] These alterations can be found at https://glyphobet.net/strthrwr/bob/18-01.html
[33] For the full page of this draft, see Daniel.
[34] Muziekcentrum Frits Philips notes these two alterations. For this, and many more, see: https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/listening-to-every-tangled-up-in
[35] Dylan’s mumbled lines of this version can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2870z57nVQY&t=200s
