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An extraordinary two-part archive documenting the creation of Blood on the Tracks, widely regarded as Bob Dylan's masterpiece: a single sheet in Dylan's hand bearing working lyrics for two of the album's defining songs—the searing "Idiot Wind" on one side and the tender "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" on the other—accompanied by a notebook leaf on which Ellen Bernstein, the woman who inspired the latter song, transcribed its lyrics in her own hand the day Dylan first played it for her.
On the large double-sided sheet, 12 x 9, Dylan has written out both songs in a more deliberate and legible hand than the famously cramped, almost illegible script that fills his three Blood on the Tracks notebooks (two held by the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, the third at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York). One side contains working lyrics for “Idiot Wind,” opening with an early version of the song’s famous accusatory opening lines: “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press / I sure wish they’d cut it out but when they will, I can only guess.” Dylan continues with lines closely related to the released recording—“They say I shot a man named Gray, took his wife to Italy / She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me”—before moving into passages that reveal the song still in active development: “People see me all the time and they just don’t know how to act / Their minds are filled with wrong ideas, images and recorded facts.” The manuscript vividly captures “Idiot Wind” in transition, with lines that combine familiar ideas with language that was ultimately abandoned or substantially reshaped.
The reverse contains a nearly complete working draft of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” written in the same broad, deliberate hand, preserving the song's working title, "You're Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go," also found in the Morgan Library notebook, before Dylan settled on "Lonesome." The draft begins with a variant the famous opening lines: "I've seen love go by my door / but I've never been this close before, it's never been so easy & so slow." At the bottom of the page, he develops another sequence: "You gonna make me wonder what I'm doin' / Livin' this way without you / You gonna make me wonder what I'm sayin' / You gonna make me give myself a good talkin' to." The text includes an extra verse not present in the released recording ("Ain't no lines, ain't no jive / you woke me up when you arrived"), along with a revealing false start and cancellation in what would become the final verse ("But I'm gonna have to change my gears or else you gonna have to come back here" struck through and replaced with "I'll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and in ones I love").
Music historian and archivist Jeff Gold, who co-appraised The Bob Dylan Archive (which included 6,000+ manuscript pages) on behalf of Dylan's management and personally examined two of the Blood on the Tracks notebooks in the process, has stated that prior to encountering this sheet, he had never seen a single contemporaneous Blood on the Tracks lyric manuscript in private hands or on the market. In his words: "To have two of these songs on one sheet, on one page—maybe the most heartfelt song, and on the other side certainly the angriest song, from an album that a lot of people think is Dylan's greatest—was just extraordinary."
Accompanying the Dylan manuscript is Bernstein’s own two-sided handwritten transcription of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” accomplished in blue ballpoint on a 3 x 5 leaf torn from one of Dylan's own Blood on the Tracks notebooks. She recalls that on the day he first played her the song, she asked to see the words, and he handed her the notebook itself; she tore out a blank leaf and copied the lyrics down for her own keeping. The transcription is thus not a later copy but a page with direct physical origin in one of the three legendary notebooks, executed in the room, in real time, as the song was being written. Her transcription preserves fragments of meaningful lines—“I’ll look 4 U in Hon., SF + Ash”—and continues through early readings of the refrain and several verses, including the unreleased verse, “Ain’t no lines, ain’t no jive / U woke me up when U arrived.”
Consigned directly by Ellen Ziffren, who was known to Dylan in 1974 as Ellen Bernstein, then Director of West Coast A&R for Columbia Records in San Francisco, whose roster of artist relationships included Santana, Boz Scaggs, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Hook, and Roger McGuinn. Bernstein met Dylan in early 1974 at a party thrown for him in Sausalito by promoter Bill Graham; the two talked and played backgammon, and Dylan invited her to his Oakland Coliseum show that night. In the spring, Bernstein visited Dylan's Minnesota farm, where she witnessed him composing and revising the songs that became Blood on the Tracks.
"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is, by Bernstein's account, a song about her, not a breakup—a fact obscured by decades of critical speculation reading it as a lament for a failed relationship. She is from Ashtabula, Ohio, named directly in the lyric, and was preparing to leave for a vacation in Honolulu at the time, likewise reflected in the verse "I'll look for you in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Ashtabula." The song's Queen Anne's lace imagery originated on a walk the two took along a river near the farm, where Bernstein identified the wildflower for Dylan. As Gold put it: "What a beautiful revelation—that it wasn't a breakup song, but in fact she was heading off to Honolulu and he was going to miss her, and that she was from Ashtabula."
A further point of provenance: the notebooks Dylan used to write Blood on the Tracks—the same notebooks from which the transcription leaf was torn—were purchased for Dylan at his own request by Bernstein's brother, dispatched on an errand during one of Dylan's visits to the Bay Area.
In overall very good to fine condition, with intersecting folds, scattered creasing and handling wear (heavier to Bernstein’s notebook leaf), and light staining. A singular manuscript from the creation of Blood on the Tracks, placing one of Dylan’s angriest and most emotionally charged songs opposite one of his tenderest, and accompanied by an intimate, contemporaneous transcription made by the woman whose life and travels directly entered the lyric.
Accompanied by a letter of provenance from Ellen Ziffren.
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