The Changing Face of 'Idiot Wind'

When I was originally getting into Bob Dylan back in 2013, one of the first things I did (being blissfully unaware of Spotify at the time) was go to the library and take out a bunch of Dylan CDs. If I remember correctly, I came home with Blood on the Tracks, Good as I Been to You, Together Through Life, and Tempest – a pretty random selection, but one that offered a sampling of three distinct periods in Dylan’s career. I loved Tempest, and liked parts of Good as I Been to You and Together Through Life (my appreciation for them would grow over time), but the one that made the strongest impression was Blood on the Tracks, and one song in particular: 'Idiot Wind'.

I had never heard anything like 'Idiot Wind' before. In hindsight, I think this was the first time I had heard a song that was angry. The voice was hissing, spitting and snarling, soaked in sarcasm and contempt. What was this? More than anything I had heard up to that point, 'Idiot Wind' felt real, almost frighteningly so. Listening to it almost felt uncomfortable, as though I were intruding on a private conversation.

At the time, I had no idea about the convoluted backstory to this song and the album as a whole, and even less of an idea about the existence of studio outtakes and live versions of 'Idiot Wind' that cast the song under a new light altogether. But now that I am aware of all of that, I find the way this song evolved over time absolutely fascinating, to the point where I now hear each version as complementing the others, with all of them telling a larger story when considered as a whole. My own personal 'Idiot Wind series' is comprised of a) the album version b) a studio outtake recorded at the earlier New York sessions, commonly known as ‘the organ version’ thanks to Paul Griffin's haunting keyboard work c) the live performance from Fort Collins in 1976, which was featured as the final track of the Hard Rain album, and d) a live performance from 5th May 1992 in San Francisco.

The atmosphere of the album track is one of bitterness and recrimination, but the ‘organ version’ could not feel more different. This take has a peacefulness about it, as if the narrator has taken a walk after an argument with their spouse and, now that the initial anger has died down, is staring thoughtfully at the stars, thinking it all over. There’s a surprising tenderness in this version of the song – even the “you’re an idiot, babe” line is softer here, sometimes directed inwards, sometimes outwards, sometimes both – coupled with a deep sadness and confusion. He can see it’s all slipping away, but he doesn't know what to do about it. He's scared. This really hits home in a verse that didn’t make it onto the album, which is gut-wrenching in its portrayal of the narrator's bewilderment and fear:


Figured I’d lost you anyway

Why go on, what’s the use?

In order to get in a word with you

I’d have had to come up with some excuse

And it just struck me kind of funny...

The Fort Collins/Hard Rain version of 'Idiot Wind' once again offers us another mood altogether. It still feels like the same narrator from the previous two versions, but now he’s in a totally different frame of mind. He knows his marriage is broken beyond repair, and now he’s taking a perverse, drunken glee in demolishing what’s left of it. Of all of the performances of the song I’ve heard, this one is  the most unsettling. It has a self-destructive quality about it: it makes me think of things spectacular moments of destruction like a star imploding, or the death throes of some enormous sea creature. This is the end of the road set to music.

Except it wasn’t the end of the road. Sixteen years later, Bob unexpectedly returned to this song and this character, unveiling a new arrangement in Melbourne on 2nd April 1992, which remained in the setlist for the next several months and arguably peaked during May of that year. For a long time, my favourite performance of Idiot Wind from this period was the spectacular rendition from San Jose, but this has recently been knocked off the top spot by the version from 5th May in San Francisco, which has the added bonus of Jerry Garcia sitting in on electric guitar.

I often think that Garcia might have been the best sideman Dylan never had. As Andrew Muir remarked in One More Night: Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, the Grateful Dead frontman was “one of the few who could walk onto Dylan’s stage and instantly be in tune to what was going on and able to add, almost immediately, something to the overall sound.” Jerry certainly does that here; just the way his guitar dances around Dylan’s vocal on the lines “What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good/ You find out when you reach the top, you’re on the bottom” is enough to make me wish he had joined Dylan’s band full time.

Dylan, meanwhile, brings an amazing range of emotion to his performance, everything from regret to paranoia to despair. This is still the same narrator from the earlier versions, but we now find him a shell of his former self, haunted by his past actions but still too proud to apologise, and perhaps knowing deep down that it’s far too late for that anyway. All he can do is keep arguing the same old points even though he knows he’s wrong, his every word another shovelful of dirt on the burial mound of this relationship. In the liner notes for his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, Dylan referred to this period of his Never Ending Tour as “The One Sad Cry of Pity Tour”, and that description suits this haunting version of 'Idiot Wind' down to the ground.

All of this speaks to Dylan’s extraordinary ability to rework his songs over the years, not just through rearrangement (apart from changing the key, the rearrangements to Idiot Wind have been relatively minimal) but also through dramatic interpretation. This skill is reminiscent of artists like Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra, who were frequently able to infuse their old songs with new meaning and gravitas years after originally recording them. It remains to be seen if the story of 'Idiot Wind' is truly over for good, or if there is still a chapter yet to be written.