Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard

It’s hardly fightin’ words to proclaim Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks the heavyweight champ of heartbreak records. Despite its spare arrangements, its shopworn imagery of storms and fences and its nine galumphing minutes of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” it gives us Dylan at both his most aching and, miraculously, his most accessible. It’s sad-sack music beyond the ken of our Nick Drakes and Elliott Smiths, fine as those troubled boys could be. In its timelessness and universality, this album is on the order of Sinatra and Holiday.

So it’s well worth a book. But this book, sadly, isn’t worth Blood on the Tracks.

The tale here is well-known to Dylan fans: After recording the songs with a crack (if confused) New York session crew, Dylan, dissatisfied with the results, delayed the album’s release as he tackled half of the tracks again with Minneapolis unknowns rounded up by his brother, David Zimmerman. The unknowns lit a fire under “Idiot Wind” and lifted “Tangled Up in Blue” from great to masterpiece, but because Columbia had already pressed the record sleeves, they never received credit on the album itself — or royalties and public acknowledgment from Dylan.

This book tells their story and it’s a good story, the kind of local-guys-make-good thing Dennis Quaid might star in. When the authors let the musicians tell it, A Simple Twist of Fate is compelling. The account of recording “Tangled Up in Blue” is particularly electric.

But these reminiscences make up less than half of the book. The rest is secondhand biography, an interview with a rabbi about what it’s like to have brothers, too much info on microphone placement, and an entire chapter sniffing at the cultural and political climate of 1973. (Our British authors are apparently not keen on Slade.)

Andy Gill’s musical analysis of Blood on the Tracks veers from insightful to rambling, and he never makes clear how the newer versions differ from the originals. A glaring fault coming as it does after pages and pages of interview subjects wondering why Dylan or Columbia never saw fit to credit the Minneapolis band. The authors chirpily mention having had lunch recently with David Zimmerman, but they apparently never broached the subject themselves.

The Dylan who emerges here is mercurial and pampered, bored and ferocious. Sometimes the authors forgive him for being an asshole. Sometimes they don’t. They make no more sense of him than anyone else has. In the end, then, perhaps the best thing is to stop thinking about it and just play the damn record.