Now It Goes Like This: "Tangled Up in Blue"

Tracking the song's live arrangements from 1975 through 2018

Photo by Guido Harari

So far, two of the three songs for which I’ve done Now It Goes Like This pieces—the series where I track a single song’s live arrangements—come from Blood on the Tracks. And I swear I’ll branch out again eventually, but, with the album’s 50th anniversary upon us, I thought I’d do one more. The big kahuna. The song he’s performed 1,725 times. “Tangled Up in Blue.”

Since Bob Dylan first performed it in 1975, on a tour also turning 50 this year, “Tangled” has borne a lot of different arrangements. Below, I go chronologically through them all.

Well, “all” depends on your definition. There are so many performances that I am focusing on major rearrangements. Not, like, he played it in the key of A one night and in the key of B the next, or he added a harmonica solo. Dramatic new musical arrangements that turn the song inside out. Which he did a lot.

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1975: Rolling Thunder 1 (Solo acoustic)

“Tangled Up in Blue” got its live debut at the twelfth Rolling Thunder show, in New Haven, Connecticut. He played it a handful of times throughout the tour, always during his solo-acoustic set. Which means that, unlike many songs that start out in concert sounding kinda like the record and then evolved, “Tangled” boasted a big rearrangement right from the jump.

Then again, in a way this solo version brings it closer to its origins, those first New York sessions for Blood where “Tangled” was just him on guitar and Tony Brown on bass, before he re-recorded it in Minneapolis with a larger group of musicians.

1976: Rolling Thunder 2 (full band)

“Tangled Up in Blue” returned for the second Rolling Thunder tour. At first, it remained solo acoustic. He played it a few times that way. Then he shelved it until the last two shows of the tour, Fort Collins and Salt Lake City. Now, suddenly, it was full-band—its first live version with a band.

Percussionist Gary Burke told me about rehearsing this version in my book, the day before the Hard Rain taping in Fort Collins, Colorado:

I will tell you one story about “Tangled Up in Blue” from that show. We were staying at the Stanley Hotel, another old historic hotel about a half hour into the woods from Boulder.

Stephen King based The Shining off of it.

Yes, exactly. At the last minute we heard, “Bob wants to rehearse. Get down to the ballroom.” They were scrambling to get gear set up.

Howie didn’t make it. He was under the weather, and they were concerned that I would have to do the whole show on drums, which I hadn’t done before. I knew the material, but from the perspective of playing percussion. Most of it, Howie was playing drums.

I remember all we did was we played “Tangled Up in Blue” for about two hours! Because there’s a lot of stops in it and things like that; it’s an involved arrangement. He wanted us to stop here, start here, stop here. Then he gets on stage the next day and he takes it off in a whole new direction. It was like we didn’t even spend any time on it the night before. I’m just hanging on for my life.

Interestingly, some of those rehearsal tapes have leaked. You can hear them working on it on the rehearsals compilation Guam Thunder. It’s a fascinating listen that reminds me of the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, where you can hear it taking shape slowly and awkwardly, with lots of dead ends and false starts. Some versions are uptempo and rambunctious; others are meandering and bluesy. “We’ll do it slow and fast,” he tells the band at one point, confusingly. At one point it sounds like he asks Burke to play like Keith Moon.

You can hear on this aborted early attempt, it was being conceived as a duet. I’m guessing that’s Donna Weiss singing with him. [Update: It’s not! It’s Rob Stoner. Donna had left the tour before then. Thanks for the correction Rob!]

Listen to how they try extending the title line on this rehearsal version:

Three takes earlier they held even more of the chorus, building the music as they head towards that title line:

Then one take later there’s this slow blues approach:

Or this wild one, that starts slow, with Stoner again singing with him, then ramps up before it falls apart:

The resulting live version sounds kinda like a weird hybrid of all these. It starts fast with a rapid-fire backbeat and those cool dropouts to hold the title line. Then it slows down partway through to that blues, before kicking back into gear. Kinda awkward, but fascinating. A Hard Rain outtake video leaked a couple years ago: You can see Dylan constantly turning around to cue the band, who must be hanging on for dear life.

1978: Sax-piano trio

The 1978 tour featured many supersized big-band arrangements, but for “Tangled” Dylan swerved in the opposite direction. It’s a stripped-down trio arrangement, just him on guitar and vocals, Alan Pasqua on organ, and, most prominently, Steve Douglas on saxophone. He didn’t begin doing it until the summer leg, which is one more reason I pray one day we get a proper post-Budokan 1978 box set. This is a stunning version.

1984: Solo acoustic, lyric changes

In 1984, “Tangled Up in Blue” went back to solo-acoustic. I suspect you knew that already though. It’s probably the most widely-acclaimed track on Real Live.

The story there isn’t the musical changes though. It’s the lyrical changes. Is the 1984 “Tangled Up in Blue” the most radically rewritten lyric of his entire career? In general, “Tangled” has gone through many, many lyric changes. So many that friend-of-the-newsletter dylyricus is working on a whole years-long project tracking them. You can read about that here, and hear his fascinating mega-medley of all the 1984 changes here:

1987: Dead / Heartbreakers

Two different versions of this song in 1987, with two different bands.