In “Idiot Wind,” a song from his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan exudes anger, frustration, fury, and intense pain in the form of a sprawling, densely worded diatribe. Repeated listening reveals subtle nuances in Dylan’s lyrics and performances, transforming a scathing personal attack on a former lover into a more universal anthem.

The task of interpreting this complex piece of songwriting is made more challenging by the existence of two very different versions of “Idiot Wind.” Dylan wrote most of the songs for Blood on the Tracks during the summer of 1974. In New York City that September, he recorded the first version of the album, but four of the songs (including a rewritten “Idiot Wind”) were rerecorded at additional sessions in Minneapolis during December. It is the Minneapolis version of “Idiot Wind” that was included on Blood on the Tracks. The New York version remained unreleased until 1991, when it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961-91.

The “idiot wind” in the song’s refrains refers to the falsity, emptiness, cruelty, and superficiality the narrator finds coming at him from all sides, particularly from his ex-lover’s mouth: “Idiot wind/Blowing every time you move your teeth/You’re an idiot, babe/It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.” Pete Hamill’s rather overblown liner notes—printed on original pressings of the Blood on the Tracks sleeve, removed for subsequent pressings, and reinstated on the compact disc—tell us: “The idiot wind trivializes lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion, glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, in the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it blows through the human heart.”

The song’s verses detail manifestations of the idiot wind. In both versions of the song, the narrator begins by complaining about the fact that he is misunderstood, a victim of gossip and vicious rumors: “Someone’s got it in for me/They’re planting stories in the press.” The end of the first verse tells one such story: “They say I shot a man named Gray/And took his wife to Italy/She inherited a million bucks/And when she died, it came to me/I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

In the next verse, the narrator dismisses others’ ideas of him as “big ideas, images, and distorted facts,” then, for the first time, focuses his attention on one specific person: “Even you, yesterday/You had to ask me where it was at/I couldn’t believe after all these years/You didn’t know me any better than that/Sweet lady.” Tim Riley, in his book Hard Rain, looked beyond the personal dimension of this part of the song: “It’s such a clear analog to everyone’s soured romance with the sixties (which took a long time to go away), it makes you wonder why he bothered to follow it up with the last-gasp bohemian excursion of his Rolling Thunder Revue.”

Indeed, “Idiot Wind” can easily be seen not only as a song about a failed relationship and its lingering wounds, but also as a vicious slice of social criticism. Robert Shelton, in his biography No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, called it “a ranting truth attack, an expression of the narrator’s personal disorder, ruefulness, and suspicion in an equally disturbed society in which people’s spoken words are in apposition to their real emotions … a portrayal of a milieu where gossiping and backstabbing have replaced caring and believing.”

Who is this narrator? In his Bob Dylan: Performing Artistvolumes, Paul Williams suggested: “There is, in Blood on the Tracks, a very careful balance between songs in which the artist speaks directly to people in his life and of things that are happening to him, and songs set up as fictions to explore issues related to what’s been happening in his life. … The songs that are most obviously immediate, with the fiction (narrative) aspects receding into the background, are ‘If You See Her, Say Hello,’ ‘You’re a Big Girl Now,’ and ‘Idiot Wind.’ ‘Idiot Wind’ stirs the soup in a different direction, because transparently fictional material is impeccably mixed into what is unavoidably and primarily first-person direct address. No, Dylan didn’t shoot a man named Gray; but yes it is certainly Dylan and not some character he’s created who says, ‘I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.’”

So Dylan uses the shooting story to dramatize the media’s abuse of his own persona, and also to universalize his song as “the anthem for all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the knives of humiliation and hatred,” in the words of Hamill’s sleeve notes. Riley wrote that “it’s no coincidence that Dylan leads with a joke about the press, which was always his way of talking about his public persona, and the out-of-control anxiety he felt over his own image.” So, even if these lines are not literally true, they can be seen as referring to Dylan and not simply a fictional character.

It has often been pointed out that, in the New York take of “Idiot Wind,” the narrator is even easier to identify as Dylan than in the Minneapolis recording. Shelton wrote that the New York take has “even more direct personal links” than the other. Bill Flanagan, in his review of The Bootleg Series for Musician magazine, observed that in the Minneapolis version Dylan was “railing and wailing and we could, in those days, choose to hear it as a general indictment of collapsed obligations. This [New York] version offers no such possibility. It is bleak and confessional.” Flanagan goes on to quote a line from the last verse: “Ladykillers load dice on me behind my back/While imitators steal me blind,” which alludes to the scores of “new Dylans” permeating the music industry during the 1970s.

The “sweet lady” at the end of the second verse, the person to whom Dylan is speaking, is an estranged lover; their broken relationship is a central focus of the lyrics, particularly in the last verses. “It was gravity which pulled us down,” Dylan sings, “and destiny which broke us apart/You tamed the lion in my cage/But it just wasn’t enough to change my heart.” In the Minneapolis version, anger is the dominant emotion swirling through the narrator’s spiel: Dylan disgustedly spits out lines like “I can’t feel you anymore/I can’t even touch the books you’ve read.” But in the New York take, as John Bauldie observed in his Bootleg Series notes, “the mood is more of sorrow than anger, with the singer’s admission of shared responsibility for the break-up of the relationship.” The vengeful Minneapolis version is devoid of any such admissions, but in the New York cut Dylan sings: “We pushed each other a little too far/And one day it just turned into a raging storm.” In “Shelter from the Storm,” another song from Blood on the Tracks, Dylan sings about how a woman, often interpreted as his then-wife Sara, had given him shelter from the stormy life he had once lived. “So now, perhaps, he needed shelter from the storm his marriage, his shelter, had become,” wrote Williams.

Just as listeners with biographical knowledge of Dylan assumed “Shelter from the Storm” was about his wife, so they assumed “Idiot Wind”—and, indeed, most of Blood on the Tracks—referred to Dylan’s marital situation (he and his wife had separated at the time the album was made). “It’s interesting (on both versions) how the object of Dylan’s anger shifts,” Williams wrote. “Often it seems to be his wife.” Dylan denied this in a 1985 interview with Flanagan, when he was asked if he had ever given away too much of his personal life in a song.

“I came pretty close with that song ‘Idiot Wind,’” Dylan said. “A lot of people thought that song, that album Blood on the Tracks, pertained to me. Because it seemed to at the time. It didn’t pertain to me … I’ve read that that album had to do with my divorce. Well, I didn’t get divorced ’til four years after that. I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind.’ I might have changed some of it. I didn’t really think I was giving away too much; I thought that it seemed so personal that people would think it was about so-and-so who was close to me. It wasn’t.”

Williams’ contention that there is more than one victim of Dylan’s vitriolic assault (he suggested Dylan’s former manager Albert Grossman and some self-destructive alter ego as possibilities) is also debatable. In the fourth verse of both versions Dylan sings, “You hurt the ones that I love best/And cover up the truth with lies/One day you’ll be in the ditch/Flies buzzing around your eyes/Blood on your saddle.” This scathing condemnation, sung with a voice full of venom, could very well be addressed to the narrator’s former lover, just one of the many and often conflicting feelings he is experiencing. Williams acknowledged this view as plausible: “That verse, surely, couldn’t be addressed to the woman he loves. Or could it? The gloves are off in this song; Dylan dares everything, which is part of the song’s appeal.”

The changes Dylan made to “Idiot Wind” between New York and Minneapolis amount to much more than changing some of the more personal lines. As Williams observed, “The really striking change is in the tone of the performance. The earlier ‘Idiot Wind’ is folk rather than rock in its overall sound; Dylan’s singing is gentle throughout, which somehow serves to make the song more vicious than the later, louder version. Softspoken anger can be more threatening, more self-righteous, than uninhibited hollering.” Dylan’s restrained delivery in the New York cut is the inverse of the wailing Minneapolis performance; together with lines like “You can have the best there is/But it’s gonna cost you all you love/You won’t get it for money,” and “You didn’t trust me for a minute, babe,” the hushed New York performance exudes considerable anger, but the dominant emotions are sadness and regret.

The Minneapolis recording achieves something quite different: an intense, cathartic feeling, dripping with hostility (although this take sounds almost subdued compared to the live version found on Dylan’s 1976 album Hard Rain). “Dylan insists that we listen to a ‘primal scream,’” wrote Shelton, “so that we will not be as naive as he.”

The New York take could not be further from a “primal scream.” In fact, the two studio recordings are so different that they are almost entirely different songs. But they both succeed in venting torrential flurries of emotions directed toward the narrator’s ex-lover, as well as society in general. Bauldie managed to describe both versions at once by calling “Idiot Wind” “one of Dylan’s great songs, but also one of his most painful.”


this essay © 1998 Jeff Partyka

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