Filming the best break-up album ever - Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks is being made into a movie

Dylan's iconic LP Blood On The Tracks, inspired by the demise of his marriage, is to be made into a movie, writes Ed Power

Bob Dylan with wife Sara Lownds in 1977. The demise of their relationship inspired ‘Blood On The Tracks.’ Photo: Getty Images

On Christmas Eve 1974, a phone at Columbia Records' New York HQ began ringing urgently. It was Bob Dylan, requesting his label pull the plug on his new album. The plan had been for Dylan's 15th LP, Blood On The Tracks, to come out on Christmas Day. That would have been a bad joke in itself as the record was a bitter chronicling of the breakdown of his marriage of eight years to ex-model Sara Lownds.

But, literally at the 11th hour, Dylan had a change of heart. Half of the album, he decided, wasn't up to scratch. He wanted to go home to Minneapolis and record the songs over. So, at enormous expense, the vinyl presses were stopped - and Dylan fans were left wondering what their idol would do next.

The album has gone on to have an unlikely afterlife. It's the Dylan LP even non-Dylan fans can appreciate (Ricky Gervais says it's his favourite album ever and novelist Rick Moody described it as "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape".) And now it's destined for the big screen with news that Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is to turn it into a movie.

The film, to be shot next spring, will delve into the narrator's heartache and the tension between his desire to live a quiet family life and embrace his icon-hood.

"When they're repressing, we dramatise the repression, and what that does to them," one of the producers told The New Yorker. "And we dramatise what happens when you let your passions take over too much."

So revolutionary is the idea of turning an album into a film that it's impossible to think of any concrete examples. The Beatles released a Yellow Submarine movie and record - but the latter flowed from the former, rather than the other way around.

Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson was inspired to write Magnolia after listening to unreleased songs by his friend Aimee Mann but the music was a jumping-off point rather than the ultimate destination.

But Dylan has never been like other rock stars. He famously/notoriously won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature and has for the past several decades appeared to take a bloody-minded delight in performing almost unrecognisable versions of his best loved songs. Blood On The Tracks is, for its part, ripe with drama. Delving into the circumstances in which it was written would be fuel for a wrenching character study.

Today the record is regarded as his definitive break-up LP, even though Dylan's marriage didn't finally sputter out until three years after its release (it finally came out in January 20, 1975). However, the relationship was in a rocky place when Dylan set about committing his feelings to vinyl. In 1970 many Dylan fans had reconciled themselves to the fact that the generational touchstone was coasting to irrelevance. He'd blazed brightly through the previous decade, but after a string of classic albums and years of wild living, had started to burn out. So he gratefully reinvented himself as a family man, settling down in Woodstock with Sara, with whom he would have four kids (he also adopted her daughter from her first marriage).

"Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everything that was going on," he wrote in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles. "Outside my family, nothing held any real interest for me."

Yet as time passed, Dylan discovered that domestic bliss wasn't quite for him. He'd started off happy but, according to subsequent biographies, soon felt the nagging desire to rip up his life and start anew. The downfall of his marriage - and the first glimmerings of Blood On The Tracks - can probably be dated to the record deal he signed with David Geffen's Asylum Records in 1973. As part of the arrangement, he set out on the road with his long-time collaborators The Band for what was by all accounts one of Dylan's most debauched ever tours.

His restlessness led him to undertake affairs with 24-year-old record executive Ellen Bernstein and 19-year-old actress Ruth Tyrangieand. He would eventually break with Geffen and go back to Columbia, but by the time he started writing Blood On The Tracks on a farm in his home state of Minnesota, he was living with Bernstein semi-permanently, his family at one remove back on the east coast.

Dylan was clearly uneasy about the upheavals. In 1966, he'd written 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' about Sara. Now he was singing about the impossibility of their romance on 'Tangled Up In Blue', the painfully lilting dirge with which Blood On The Tracks opens.

Dylan has denied Blood On The Tracks is autobiographical, claiming it was based on the short stories of Chekhov. But his nearest and dearest were never in doubt as to where the music was coming from.

Jakob Dylan recalls being taken to see his father record the songs when he was just five years old. Even then, he knew what his dad was getting at. "When I'm listening to Blood On The Tracks," he said, "that's about my parents."