The kickoff date of Bob Dylan’s Lights of Autumn European tour at Oslo’s Spektrum generated a lot of attention over the weekend due to the addition of guitarist Mike Seal, surprise covers of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” and Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues,”
and the first live rendition of “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” since 2005.
But the song we keep returning to from the remarkably clean recording of the show that emerged the next morning (recorded on an Apple Watch) is “Tangled Up in Blue.” Dylan hadn’t played the Blood on the Tracks classic in eight years, but it’s hardly a rarity since he did it 1,709 times between times between 1975 and 2018, fourth in the all-time records behind “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “All Along the Watchtower.”
Unlike those standards, however, “Tangled Up in Blue” continued to evolve in substantial ways over the decades, musically and lyrically. (The Dylan super-fan dylyricusonce launched the “Project Tangled” endeavor in which he listened to every single rendition and logged each alteration. Ray Padgett chatted with him about in 2021 on his blog Flagging Down the Double E’s.)
In Norway, Dylan gave Project Tangled a lot of new material by radically stripping back “Tangled Up in Blue” to a torch ballad he performed on the piano with minimal accompaniment. The saga of the star-crossed lovers begins in familiar fashion (“Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’/He was layin’ in bed/Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all/If her hair was still red”), but then the third verse takes a totally different course from all past renditions.
“Way up north in the frozen woods,” Dylan sings. “Teardrops touch the sky/The leaves are falling one by one/And the mornings pass you by/Sometimes it gets so quiet/Sometimes it’ll get in the way/Look here for another/Tomorrow’s another day.”
The verse concludes like the original (“And all the while I was alone/The past was close behind I seen a lot of women/But I never escaped her mind, and she just grew”), but then the next one is again totally different.
“Things were getting to cost too much,” Dylan sings. “Summer slipped through my hand/Certain truths about that thing I never did understand/You bury the hatchet, you put it to bed/Sometimes you go for a ride/Nothing ever looks the same/After you’ve been on the other side/They turns around, merge and disappear/What I know he was looking at/He never did find it here/Neither did you/Tangled up in blue.”
Just a few years ago, it would be near-impossible to get a clean transcription like that from a single live Dylan performance, since so much of it would have been slurred and garbled. But he’s wisely shrunk the band down and softened their approach in order to highlight what remains of his voice, which hasn’t sounded this crisp in quite a while.
We’ll resist analyzing new couplets like “Summer slipped through my hand/Certain truths about that thing I never did understand,” but it’s hard to imagine the Dylan of 1975 or even 1995 singing those lines. The song, one of his all-time greats, has grown along with him.
The first time he gave “Tangled Up in Blue” a significant re-write was in 1984 when he played a European stadium tour with co-headliner Carlos Santana and special guest Joan Baez, who bolted after just a few shows. (They haven’t shared a stage a single time since.) This wasn’t Dylan in his finest era as a live performer, as evidenced by the dismal concert LP Real Live, but this new “Tangled Up in Blue” was revelatory.
“I always wanted it to be the way I recorded it on Real Live,” Dylan told Bill Flanagan in 1985. “The old ones were never quite filled in. I rewrote it in a hotel room somewhere. I think it was Amsterdam. I wanted to sing that song so I looked at it again, and I changed it. When I sang it the next night I knew it was right. It was right enough so that I wanted to put it down and wipe the old one out. That was another of those songs where you’re writing and you’ve got it, you know what it’s about, but half of it you just don’t get the way you wanted to. Then I fixed it up, and now I know it’s where it should be.”
He didn’t touch the song again until the Never Ending Tour began in 1988, and it continued to mutate in significant ways over the next three decades. Most fans feel it reached its peak during the Charlie Sexton/Larry Campbell era of 1999 to 2002 where it would regularly be stretched out beyond the eight-minute mark, and became a showcase for the skills of each band member.
It’s hard for this brand new rendition of “Tangled Up in Blue” to compete with those turn-of-the-millennium ones on a musical level since that was one of the greatest bands Dylan ever used, and he was a relatively youthful 60. But on a purely emotional level, the one he debuted in Oslo is right up there.
Back in 1974, Dylan began writing “Tangled Up in Blue” in tiny red notebooks that now reside at the Morgan Library in New York City and the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa. He recorded it that September in New York, and almost immediately second-guessed himself and redid it that December in Minneapolis. But the story didn’t end there. And it’ll continue as long as he’s stays on the road, headed for another joint.
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