#idiotwind

I still think Idiot Wind is one of Bob’s best and most heartbreaking songs he’s ever written. I feel like out of the whole of Blood on the Tracks he threw every bit of his bitterness and tears into that one. Obviously no one will ever really know what went on behind closed doors, but listening to Idiot Wind dispelled all the rumours that had been circling around Bob and Sara for me. I don’t believe for even a split second that he hit Sara; he adored the woman, so much more than any song he could have written about her. I’m also apprehensive to believe he brought another woman to the breakfast table. Here’s my take on what happened: being thrown headfirst into fame like he was, he learned pretty quickly how to shell himself from the judgments and questions and expectations of the people he sang to. For years he’d put on an act. It’s known that he was very, very reserved, and shy and sensitive to others, feigning egotism to hide his nerves. I think the type of fame he received wasn’t the type of fame he really expected, even if he acknowledged that he was ‘gonna be big’. Nobody could have predicted what would grow within those early six or seven years. I think that by the time he met Sara in 1964, he was already feeling the strains of life on the road, compounded by his pretty vacant actions in Eat the Document two years later. I know it’s been said before, but I too feel like the motorcycle accident came as a god-sent, because whether it was faked or not it gave him the damn good rest that he needed, and I feel it was Sara he was able to lean on after all those years of drugs, mistakes and barriers through it. She was an intelligent women - she could spot his problems from a mile off, and I think he fell for her especially because she never let it get in between them. She saw him as the broken and lonely boy he was inside, but she also saw him as new, a place for her also to begin again after her first failed marriage. She was the only one to see him like this. He hadn’t been new in a long, long time and she came around at the perfect moment in his life. I’ve said before on here that I feel like his happiest period was watching their kids grow up over the next few years. Things were rolling along pretty smoothly, Sara hadn’t changed that much even if Bob had mellowed considerably and touring like he had in ‘66 must’ve seemed light years away. So when he came to the fork in the road and suddenly the one and only person on Earth that he had adored, leant on, and trusted whole-heartedly no longer understood him, oh man, my heart just breaks for him. How lonely and bitter must he have felt? I did have a thought once actually, about the woman he allegedly cheated with: I know there’s never an excuse for that, but what if he cheated to get Sara back for the connection that was lost between them? Yes, he was shy and sensitive, but his heart could be cold as ice too. Perhaps he justified cheating in that way to get back at Sara for no longer understanding him, as though he was welcoming that dissociation with the world from the time before back again with open arms. Whatever happened, Idiot Wind so perfectly captures the pain of the loss that he felt at returning to that scared and isolated place that Sara had helped him out of.