The elusiveness of “Blood on the Tracks” has been integral to its allure, and so it remains. You will have to study the track listings to assemble the original record. The box set has all of the discarded tracks, but they are scattered through a complete chronological survey of the four days of sessions-five and a half hours of Dylan at the height of his powers. Yet the single disk gives you only two of the test-pressing tracks, alongside some admittedly riveting outtakes. The logical move would have been to include the entire album in its initial guise. 14.” Available both as a single-disk compilation and as a six-CD “deluxe edition,” it is both more and less than what Dylan obsessives have been tiresomely clamoring for.

Last month, Columbia issued “ More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series, Vol. Artists tend to dislike personal readings of their most personal work. Dylan has denied that “Blood” is autobiographical in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” he suggests that the songs were based on Chekhov. Although several of the tracks have shown up in Columbia’s long-running Bootleg Series, the perennial absence of the full album has made fans wonder whether Dylan is wary of revisiting a turbulent time of his life, when his first marriage, to Sara Lownds, was dissolving. The compact disc that I picked up in a basement Greenwich Village store had a pleasant overlay of vinyl noise-the result of a transfer from a test pressing. It was not, however, the masterwork of melancholy that he created in Studio A.įor decades, the first “Blood” circulated on a bootleg called the New York Sessions. The revised “Blood” sold extremely well, reaching the top of the Billboard album chart, and it ended talk of Dylan’s creative decline. According to Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, the authors of the book “A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ ” from 2004, Dylan feared a commercial failure.

Mournfulness and wistfulness gave way to a feisty, festive air.

The Columbia label released an album with that title in January, 1975, but Dylan had reworked five of the songs in last-minute sessions in Minnesota, resulting in a substantial change of tone. It is a ten-song study in romantic devastation, as beautiful as it is bleak, worthy of comparison with Schubert’s “Winterreise.” Yet the record in question-“Blood on the Tracks”-has never officially seen the light of day. In September, 1974, Bob Dylan spent four days in the old Studio A, his favorite recording haunt in Manhattan, and emerged with the greatest, darkest album of his career.

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