Billy Peterson receives RIAA Award
Billy Peterson received his long due official recognition for his contribution on Bob Dylan´s most successful album “Blood on the Tracks”. The RIAA Award has been handed over to Billy Peterson on his birthday celebration last week.
You may ask yourself why Billy Peterson, such as all the other musicians from the Minneapolis crew, were not credited on the original album artwork? There is an easy explanation: Bob Dylan wasn´t totally satisfied with the recordings produced in New York and therefore decided to rerecord half of the tracks again, this time with musicians from Minneapolis, among them Billy Peterson. Five of the rerecorded tracks ended up on the album, but as the story goes the record label had already printed a half million of record sleeves and they didn´t want to destroy those sleeves that incorrectly only credited the New York crew. A mistake that unfortunately even carried on on subsequent releases.
“Blood on the Tracks” is Bob Dylan´s most critically acclaimed and biggest-selling album released by Columbia Records in January 1975. In 2003, magazine “Rolling Stone” ranked the album at number 16, on its list of the “500 greatest albums of all time”, in 2004, it was placed at number 5 on “Pitchfork Media’s” list of the “Top 100 albums of the 70s”, and in 2015, it was inducted into GRAMMY Hall of Fame due to its significance for musical, social, and cultural history. The album remains one of Dylan's all-time best-selling studio releases, with a double-platinum US certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).