Throughout the Kingdom, it has been long contended that the apogee of American songwriting is found in 4 of the cuts from Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. While arguments are had as to which make the list, at least two of the songs are set in stone: “Tangled up in Blue” and “Idiot Wind.” I’d also throw in “Up To Me” (inexplicably kept off the original LP and not released commercially until 1990) and “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”

None of these are my favorite songs, nor even my favorite Bob Dylan songs. I am, and will always be, a bigger fan of imperfection. Especially when it comes to Bob Dylan, an artist whose mistakes and accidents are always as fascinating as his triumphs and conquests. The Basement Tapes, for instance, with all their glitches, false starts and nonsense lyrics speak more directly to my tastes; but I know well enough that my preferences are subjective and not the final arbiters of quality. It is impossible to deny the awesome and solemn power of the 4 Blood songs. It is as if, for a brief period, God decided that He would write lyrics directly and His instrument would be Bob Dylan.

The songs mark a significant shift in Dylan’s writing– gone is the singular phraseology, gone is the unique delivery, gone is the clever word play, gone is the possible social commentary, gone is the humor, gone is the Individual Viewpoint, gone is everything that distinguished Dylan throughout the 60s. And in its place is a vision of reality, a solid, explicable thing of itself, where the people and subjects under discussion as are real as Dylan or you or I. All those silly, one line characters from the long, tedious songs of the 1960s have been discarded and replaced by actual personages.

Dylan’s brilliance is in the economy with which he achieves this and in the fact that these Monumental Works are still, you know, killer as songs. They transcend their form without breaking it. When compared against Dylan’s earlier work, they also happen to be an excellent demonstration of the shift from the lyrical to epical that James Joyce writes about in the last part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Today, while looking for something else entirely, I came across young men (always the men) distributing videos of themselves performing “Tangled up in Blue”. There’s a certain admirable arrogance to the idea of any joe with a guitar trying to master a song of which Dylan himself lost control immediately after it was recorded, and so I thought I’d share some of these videos, just to demonstrate that even though you might have the world’s hottest song, you still gotta be a certain hella kid of performer to pull off a line like, “Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through.”

So here goes!