Idiot Wind
Dylan had moved to a farm in Minnesota with his brother, David Zimmerman, and there started to write the songs that were recorded for his album Blood on the Tracks.
[4] "Idiot Wind" was a derogatory phrase employed by Raeben and this may have inspired Dylan's use of it, although the term also appears in the poem June 1940 by Weldon Kees and that may have been the reference point.
[5] Dylan first recorded "Idiot Wind" in New York City on 16 September 1974 during the initial Blood on the Tracks sessions at A&R Studios.
That December, working from a suggestion from his brother that the album should have a more commercial sound, Dylan re-recorded half the songs on Blood on the Tracks, including "Idiot Wind", in Minneapolis.
[18] David Goldblatt and Edward Necarsulmer say that in the song, "Dylan explores the bitterness of resentment and revenge against a lover and one's own self who botched their love".
Which might be the same thing, I don't know.Timothy Hampton takes the song as political, and a commentary on the Vietnam War,[21] whereas David Dalton feels that Dylan draws parallels between his personal situation and the national one, and "turns his own fate into an allegory of a soured American dream".
Mick Farren's review of the album says that "It requires a considerable sleight of hand to get across the remorseless emotional attack of, say, 'Idiot Wind' without losing the party atmosphere.
"[28] In a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan, Dylan said that although many people thought that "Idiot Wind" and the album Blood on the Tracks related to his life, "It didn't pertain to me.
"[4] In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan claimed that Blood on the Tracks was "an entire album based on Chekhov short stories—critics thought it was autobiographical—that was fine.
[33] Music critic Lester Bangs originally regarded the song as "ridiculously spiteful" and was unimpressed, although he soon found himself listening to the album frequently.
In his 2003 book Dylan's Visions of Sin, literary scholar Christopher Ricks discusses a particular lyrical couplet from the song, namely: "Blowing like a circle around my skull/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol".
[35] In his 1976 review in The Village Voice, Paul Cowan also referred to these lyrics, saying that they evoked both Woody Guthrie in the language used and T. S. Eliot in the delivery of the vocal.
[36] The lyrics referencing the Capitol replaced the earlier "Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your jaw/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Mardi Gras" used in New York.
[15] In his book 1001 Songs, Toby Creswell says that the track is an "epic of elegantly phrased bile" and is "not ... based on logical exposition".
14, Sean O'Hagan remarked of the song "By turns paranoid, derisory and vengeful, it is a dark masterpiece of venomous intent, a great part of its raw power resting in the very discomfort the listener feels as it gathers momentum and the tone becomes ever more bitter.
[22]: 129 Artist Mohammad Omer Khalil produced a series of etchings, inspired by Dylan's music, that were displayed at the National Museum of African Art in 1994, including one entitled Idiot Wind.
[46] Novelist Peter Carey included "Idiot Wind" as one of his eight records for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 2008.
