Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Ian Bell Page B

that came off. I had a few weeks in the summer when I wrote the songs. I wrote all the songs for
Blood on the Tracks
in about a month and then I recorded them and stepped back out of that place where I was when I wrote them and went back to whatever I was doing before. Sometimes you’ll get what you can out of these things, but you can’t stay there. Co-writer. That was probably an album where I didn’t have anything and I wasn’t even thinking about making a record. I think I ran into Jacques downtown and we went off and just wrote some songs.
    ‘I didn’t have anything’: was that truly the case? He had written ‘Abandoned Love’, after all, such as it then was, and composed a better song during his trip to the south of France in late spring. In each version of the tale of his first efforts with Levy, ‘Isis’ was already begun. Equally, Dylan’s typically casual assertion that ‘we went off and just wrote some songs’ did not quite match Levy’s memory. He would tell the writer and editor John Bauldie that the pressure on the pair during the writing process was ‘tremendous’. 4 Dylan was not just messing around.
    Nevertheless, the fact that in this of all years he felt the need for a co-writer is hardly insignificant. It is as though the masterpiece that was
Blood on the Tracks
had drained him in some peculiar way, or that the effort had been so singular it was impossible to repeat. Dylan, having ‘stepped back out of that place’, might have felt no desire, if that’s the word, to accept the further emotional consequences of the Raeben method.
Blood
, his artistic life’s blood, had been the only word for the experience. In any case, and contrary to public appearances, he was not quite as certain of his restored gifts as he might have seemed.
    Consider the claims Dylan would make about the insights gleaned from his art teacher in 1974. In April of 1978, the journal
Rock Express
would learn that he had understood how to explore ‘all the different selves that were in there’. In November of the same year,
Rolling Stone
would be told of an artist who had managed at last ‘to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously’. By helping Dylan to put mind, hand and eye together, Raeben, it was asserted, had given him conscious control of unconscious impulses. What had become of all that when the new songwriting partners were trading lines for unreliable topical songs, or sketching out their corny verse fictions? Collaboration involves an inevitable, if partial, surrender of artistic identity. The Dylan of
Blood on the Tracks
had disappeared, or had been suppressed. Perhaps he was too much to bear.
    In the second half of July 1975 Dylan would fill an album of songs with Levy’s help. Certain of the recordings would become, as they remain, much admired. For all that, it is open to question whether Dylan’s songwriting was enhanced by the partnership. A better question might involve asking why this singular intelligence felt in any need of support, and why a supposedly reborn writer would seek out a passing supplier of words. The artist who embarks upon such an arrangement has either made a calculation involving the sum and its parts, or he is none too sure of himself.
    Each of the songs created by Dylan and Levy, first in New York and then at the artist’s house on Lily Pond Lane in the village of East Hampton, out on the Long Island shore, are treated still as works by the former. A couple of the pieces are held by some fans to be among the most significant of all ‘Bob Dylan’ songs. No one, it seems, thinks twice about it, as though Dylan’s imprimatur is as close to authorship as makes no difference. Nevertheless, in another interview with Flanagan, this time a 2009 promotional effort arranged and published by his own bobdylan.com , the artist would state flatly that Levy ‘wrote the words’ for at least one song. ‘I just sing it,’ Dylan would maintain of the piece entitled