Album: The Basement Tapes
Recorded: Summer 1967
Released: June 1975
Songs / length: 24 / 76:41
A stressful touring schedule, the pitfalls of fame, his father Abe having his first heart attack in summer 1966 (Abe died of a second one in June 1968), and the motorcycle accident – all this conspired to make Dylan shy away from the limelight from mid-1966 onwards. As Dylan puts it himself in his Chronicles: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses."
Some question whether the accident even happened, and believe it was just an excuse to take a big step back, but I've not seen any good reason to doubt him. In any case, Dylan moved his family to Woodstock, in upstate New York, in July 1966. According to reports, more shows had been scheduled for Dylan in the summer and autumn of 1966, which his manager Albert Grossman was forced to cancel. This meant his band, The Hawks (later The Band), were still on retainer and, after Dylan spent the autumn and winter recuperating with his family, they started jamming and recording again in spring 1967. First, the sessions were in the "Red Room" at Dylan's Woodstock home, but they later moved to the basement of Big Pink in June 1967.
Thanks to Garth Hudson, there are nine reels of tapes from all these recordings, and out of these sessions came not only the first ever rock bootleg in recording history, but also the birth of an entire industry of bootlegging from the late 60s onwards. Labelled the Great White Wonder, it appeared in the summer of 1969 in a few, selected LA record shops as a double LP – two white discs in a cardboard sleeve – with the letters GWW emblazoned on the front. For the full story on the Great White Wonder and the history of "album leaks", I recommend Clinton Heylin's book, Bootleg.
According to Heylin, the best Dylan bootlegs are Royal Albert Hall, History / Dylan, Ten of Swords, Great White Wonder, You Can't Kill An Idea and The Genuine Basement Tapes. While GWW contained some songs from the basement tapes (most others were recorded in a Minnesota hotel room in late 1961, making the bootleg a bit of a mess), they only really scratch the surface of these sessions – just like the official release of The Basement Tapes, with overdubs, released in summer 1975.
Nonetheless, the official release sold well, which caused Dylan to express his surprise, as he'd thought his fans already had the songs on bootleg. That said, most of his fans would have been disappointed by the fact that known favourites like I Shall Be Released and Mighty Quinn were left off the official release, causing even greater demand to build up for a fuller release of the tapes.
Much of the huge interest in the basement tapes is down to the fact that the sessions form a bridge that helps explain Dylan's transition from Blonde on Blonde rock & roll to rootsy Americana, and music fans were keen to join the dots. When they heard The Band's Music From Big Pink and covers from The Byrds (You Ain't Goin' Nowhere), Manfred Mann (The Mighty Quinn) and others, they knew a big piece of the Dylan jigsaw was missing. In fact, some music magazines like Rolling Stone actively campaigned for the album's release (see this longform article for the full story).
Apart from the 1975 release, nothing really substantial emerged until the early 1990s, when The Genuine Basement Tapes bootleg was released as five CDs. I picked up a copy of the 4-CD remastered version of this bootleg, known as Tree With Roots, in my final year at university in 2001 (the year it was released). This included over 100 songs and alternate takes, and it took Columbia 13 years to improve on it, with the release of the official bootleg, containing 139 songs (including 30 "uncirculating" songs, mainly from the Red Room), in November 2014. Priced at over £100 for the 6-CD set, Vol. 11 can be purchased for much less as MP3 files (or even streamed in full on some platforms), and you can combine that with the helpful liner notes here.
For the best in-depth account of the sessions, and their relevance to music history – notably as the fountainhead of the Americana genre – you can't do any better than Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic. It's arguably my favourite Dylan book, aside from Dylan's own Chronicles. He manages to convey so well how these basement sessions were a workshop for Dylan, enabling him to stretch out and connect with his musical roots, tapping into an "old, weird America" in the process. Marcus also wrote the liner notes for the 1975 release, in which he described how The Basement Tapes "summon up sea chanteys [sic], drinking songs, tall tales, and early rock and roll". For Marcus, the abiding message of The Basement Tapes is: "If the past isn't alive in you, the future's dead."
To my mind, the full sessions deserve your time, but it does require sorting through lots of dodgy takes, loose fragments and poorly recorded cuts to discover the gems. Below I've picked my own favourites from both official releases (10 songs from 1975 and 20 from 2014):
Notable mentions: There are also several great covers of Dylan's previous songs in the sessions, but two that stand out for me are the gospel-funk version of Blowin' In The Wind and the soulful One Too Many Mornings. Dylan's version of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues is also of interest, but nothing compared to the original.
Album rating: A
Recorded: Summer 1967
Released: June 1975
Songs / length: 24 / 76:41
A stressful touring schedule, the pitfalls of fame, his father Abe having his first heart attack in summer 1966 (Abe died of a second one in June 1968), and the motorcycle accident – all this conspired to make Dylan shy away from the limelight from mid-1966 onwards. As Dylan puts it himself in his Chronicles: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses."
Some question whether the accident even happened, and believe it was just an excuse to take a big step back, but I've not seen any good reason to doubt him. In any case, Dylan moved his family to Woodstock, in upstate New York, in July 1966. According to reports, more shows had been scheduled for Dylan in the summer and autumn of 1966, which his manager Albert Grossman was forced to cancel. This meant his band, The Hawks (later The Band), were still on retainer and, after Dylan spent the autumn and winter recuperating with his family, they started jamming and recording again in spring 1967. First, the sessions were in the "Red Room" at Dylan's Woodstock home, but they later moved to the basement of Big Pink in June 1967.
Thanks to Garth Hudson, there are nine reels of tapes from all these recordings, and out of these sessions came not only the first ever rock bootleg in recording history, but also the birth of an entire industry of bootlegging from the late 60s onwards. Labelled the Great White Wonder, it appeared in the summer of 1969 in a few, selected LA record shops as a double LP – two white discs in a cardboard sleeve – with the letters GWW emblazoned on the front. For the full story on the Great White Wonder and the history of "album leaks", I recommend Clinton Heylin's book, Bootleg.
According to Heylin, the best Dylan bootlegs are Royal Albert Hall, History / Dylan, Ten of Swords, Great White Wonder, You Can't Kill An Idea and The Genuine Basement Tapes. While GWW contained some songs from the basement tapes (most others were recorded in a Minnesota hotel room in late 1961, making the bootleg a bit of a mess), they only really scratch the surface of these sessions – just like the official release of The Basement Tapes, with overdubs, released in summer 1975.
Nonetheless, the official release sold well, which caused Dylan to express his surprise, as he'd thought his fans already had the songs on bootleg. That said, most of his fans would have been disappointed by the fact that known favourites like I Shall Be Released and Mighty Quinn were left off the official release, causing even greater demand to build up for a fuller release of the tapes.
Much of the huge interest in the basement tapes is down to the fact that the sessions form a bridge that helps explain Dylan's transition from Blonde on Blonde rock & roll to rootsy Americana, and music fans were keen to join the dots. When they heard The Band's Music From Big Pink and covers from The Byrds (You Ain't Goin' Nowhere), Manfred Mann (The Mighty Quinn) and others, they knew a big piece of the Dylan jigsaw was missing. In fact, some music magazines like Rolling Stone actively campaigned for the album's release (see this longform article for the full story).
Apart from the 1975 release, nothing really substantial emerged until the early 1990s, when The Genuine Basement Tapes bootleg was released as five CDs. I picked up a copy of the 4-CD remastered version of this bootleg, known as Tree With Roots, in my final year at university in 2001 (the year it was released). This included over 100 songs and alternate takes, and it took Columbia 13 years to improve on it, with the release of the official bootleg, containing 139 songs (including 30 "uncirculating" songs, mainly from the Red Room), in November 2014. Priced at over £100 for the 6-CD set, Vol. 11 can be purchased for much less as MP3 files (or even streamed in full on some platforms), and you can combine that with the helpful liner notes here.
For the best in-depth account of the sessions, and their relevance to music history – notably as the fountainhead of the Americana genre – you can't do any better than Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic. It's arguably my favourite Dylan book, aside from Dylan's own Chronicles. He manages to convey so well how these basement sessions were a workshop for Dylan, enabling him to stretch out and connect with his musical roots, tapping into an "old, weird America" in the process. Marcus also wrote the liner notes for the 1975 release, in which he described how The Basement Tapes "summon up sea chanteys [sic], drinking songs, tall tales, and early rock and roll". For Marcus, the abiding message of The Basement Tapes is: "If the past isn't alive in you, the future's dead."
To my mind, the full sessions deserve your time, but it does require sorting through lots of dodgy takes, loose fragments and poorly recorded cuts to discover the gems. Below I've picked my own favourites from both official releases (10 songs from 1975 and 20 from 2014):
Million Dollar Bash
Goin' To Acapulco
Clothes Line Saga
Tears Of Rage
Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread
Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)
Tiny Montgomery
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
Open The Door, Homer
This Wheel's On Fire
Santa-Fe
The Hills Of Mexico
All-American Boy
All You Have To Do Is Dream – Take 2
I'm Not There
900 Miles From My Home
Too Much Of Nothing – Take 2
Bourbon Street
The Auld Triangle
Joshua Gone Barbados
Four Strong Winds
A Satisfied Mind
I Shall Be Released – Take 2
My Woman She's A-Leaving
Wild Wolf
Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) – Take 2
Sign On The Cross
Big River – Take 2
Bonnie Ship The Diamond
Young But Daily Growing
Album rating: A
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