The Basement Tapes
Encyclopedia
The Basement Tapes is a 1975 studio album by Bob Dylan
and The Band
. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at houses in and around Woodstock, New York
, where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records
, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release.
During his world tour of 1965–66, Dylan was backed by a five-member rock group, the Hawks, who would subsequently become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, the Hawks' members gravitated to the vicinity of Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was concealed from the public's gaze during an extended period of convalescence in 1967, they recorded more than 100 tracks together, comprising original compositions, contemporary covers and traditional material. Dylan's new style of writing moved away from the urban sensibility and extended narratives that had characterized his most recent albums, Highway 61 Revisited
and Blonde On Blonde
, toward songs that were more intimate and which drew on many styles of traditional American music. While some of the basement songs are humorous, others dwell on nothingness, betrayal and a quest for salvation. In general, they possess a rootsy quality anticipating the Americana
genre. For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music
in the late sixties.
When Columbia Records
prepared the album for official release in 1975, eight songs recorded solely by the Band—in various locations between 1967 and 1975—were added to sixteen songs taped by Dylan and the Band in 1967. Overdubs were added in 1975 to songs from both categories. The Basement Tapes was critically acclaimed upon release, and reached number seven on the Billboard 200
album chart. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan's best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.
had reached number three on the US album chart in November 1965; the recently released double-LP Blonde on Blonde
was widely acclaimed. From September 1965 to May 1966, Dylan embarked on an extensive tour across the US, Australia and Europe backed by the Hawks, a band that had formerly worked with rock and roll musician Ronnie Hawkins
. The Hawks comprised four Canadian musicians—Rick Danko
, Garth Hudson
, Richard Manuel
and Robbie Robertson
—and one American, Levon Helm
. Dylan's audiences reacted with hostility to the sound of their folk icon backed by a rock band. Dismayed by the negative reception, Helm quit the Hawks in November 1965 and drifted around the South
, at one point working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The tour culminated in a famously raucous concert in Manchester
, England, in May 1966 when an audience member shouted "Judas!" at Dylan for allegedly betraying the cause of politically progressive folk music.For his detailed account of the Manchester concert, C. P. Lee interviewed members of the audience about the reasons for their hostility. One explained, "It was as if everything we held dear had been betrayed. He showed us what to think, I know that's a stupid thing to say but there he was marching with Martin Luther King, and suddenly he was singing this stuff about himself. We made him and he betrayed the cause" . Returning exhausted from the hectic schedule of his world tour, Dylan discovered that his manager, Albert Grossman
, had arranged a further 63 concerts across the US that year.
, suffering cracked vertebrae and a mild concussion. The concerts he was scheduled to perform had to be canceled. Biographer Clinton Heylin
wrote in 1990 on the significance of the crash: "A quarter of a century on, Dylan's motorcycle accident is still viewed as the pivot of his career. As a sudden, abrupt moment when his wheel really did explode. The great irony is that 1967—the year after the accident—remains his most prolific year as a songwriter." In a 1969 interview with Jann Wenner
, Dylan said, "I had a dreadful motorcycle accident which put me away for a while, and I still didn't sense the importance of that accident till at least a year after that. I realized that it was a real accident. I mean I thought that I was just gonna get up and go back to doing what I was doing before ... but I couldn't do it anymore."
Dylan was rethinking the direction of his life while recovering from a sense of having been exploited. Nine months after the crash, he told New York Daily News reporter Michael Iachetta, "Songs are in my head like they always are. And they're not going to get written down until some things are evened up. Not until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened." After discussing the crash with Dylan, biographer Robert Shelton concluded that he "was saying there must be another way of life for the pop star, in which he is in control, not they. He had to find ways of working to his own advantage with the recording industry. He had to come to terms with his one-time friend, longtime manager, part-time neighbor, and sometime landlord, Albert Grossman."
, a few miles from Woodstock, in February 1967. The three of them moved into a house on Stoll Road nicknamed Big Pink; Robertson lived nearby with his future wife, Dominique. Danko and Manuel had been invited to Woodstock to collaborate with Dylan on a film he was editing, Eat the Document
, a rarely seen account of the 1966 world tour. At some point between March and June 1967, Dylan and the four Hawks began a series of informal recording sessions, initially at the so-called Red Room of Dylan's house, Hi Lo Ha, in the Byrdcliffe
area of Woodstock. In June, the recording sessions moved to the basement of Big Pink. Hudson set up a recording unit, using two stereo mixers and a tape recorder borrowed from Grossman, as well as a set of microphones on loan from folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary
. Dylan would later tell Jann Wenner, "That's really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody's basement. With the windows open ... and a dog lying on the floor."
For the first couple of months, they were merely "killing time", according to Robertson, with many early sessions devoted to covers. "With the covers Bob was educating us a little", recalls Roberston. "The whole folkie thing was still very questionable to us—it wasn't the train we came in on. ... He'd come up with something like 'Royal Canal
',Robertson is referring to "Banks of the Royal Canal (The Auld Triangle)" by Brendan Behan
, one of the basement recordings that has been bootlegged but never officially released. The song first appeared in Behan's play The Quare Fellow
, and Dylan probably learned it from Liam Clancy
, who recorded it in 1965 . and you'd say, 'This is so beautiful! The expression!' ... He remembered too much, remembered too many songs too well. He'd come over to Big Pink, or wherever we were, and pull out some old song—and he'd prepped for this. He'd practiced this, and then come out here, to show us." Songs recorded at the early sessions included material written or made popular by Johnny Cash
, Ian & Sylvia, John Lee Hooker
, Hank Williams and Eric Von Schmidt
, as well as traditional songs and standards
. Linking all the recordings, both new material and old, is the way in which Dylan re-engaged with traditional American music. Biographer Barney Hoskyns
observed that both the seclusion of Woodstock and the discipline and sense of tradition in the Hawks' musicianship were just what Dylan needed after the "globe-trotting psychosis" of the 1965–66 tour.
, "Bob and Robbie, they would come by every day, five to seven days a week, for seven to eight months." Hudson added, "It amazed me, Bob's writing ability. How he would come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write a song. And what was amazing was that almost every one of those songs was funny."
Dylan recorded around thirty new compositions with the Hawks, including some of the most celebrated songs of his career: "I Shall Be Released
", "This Wheel's on Fire
", "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
", "Tears of Rage
" and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
". Two of these featured his lyrics set to music by members of the Band: Danko wrote the music of "This Wheel's on Fire"; Manuel, who composed "Tears of Rage", described how Dylan "came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper ... and he just said, 'Have you got any music for this?' ... I had a couple of musical movements that fit ... so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn't sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn't run upstairs and say, 'What's this mean, Bob: "Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse"?
One of the qualities of The Basement Tapes that sets it apart from contemporaneous works is its simple, down-to-earth sound. The songs were recorded in mid-1967, the "Summer of Love
" that produced the Beatles
' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, their most technically elaborate album. In a 1978 interview, Dylan reflected on the period: "I didn’t know how to record the way other people were recording, and I didn’t want to. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper which I didn’t like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I didn’t think all that production was necessary." Of the sound and atmosphere of the basement recordings, Barney Hoskyns wrote that "Big Pink itself determined the nature of this homemade brew." "One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room", recalled Robertson. "So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn't hear the singing, you were playing too loud."
Mike Marqusee
describes how the basement recordings represented a radical change of direction for Dylan, who turned his back on his reputation for importing avant-garde
ideas into popular culture: "At the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness."
Dylan had married Sara Lownds
in November 1965. By the time the basement sessions started in Big Pink around June 1967, he had two children: Maria (Sara’s daughter from her first marriage) and Jesse Dylan
. Anna Dylan was born on July 11, 1967. Both Heylin and Griffin suggest that recording had to move from Dylan’s home to Big Pink when it became clear that the sessions were getting in the way of family life. Domesticity was the context of The Basement Tapes, as Hudson said in The Last Waltz
: "Chopping wood and hitting your thumb with a hammer, fixing the tape recorder or the screen door, wandering off into the woods with Hamlet [the dog Dylan shared with the Band] ... it was relaxed and low-key, which was something we hadn’t enjoyed since we were children." Several Basement Tapes songs, such as "Clothes Line Saga" and "Apple Suckling Tree", celebrate the domestic aspects of the rural lifestyle.
The intense collaboration between Dylan and the Hawks that produced the basement recordings came to an end in October 1967 when Dylan relocated to Nashville to record a formal studio album, John Wesley Harding
, with a different crew of accompanying musicians. The same month, drummer Levon Helm rejoined his former bandmates in Woodstock, after he received a phone call from Danko informing him that they were getting ready to record as a group.Griffin writes that Helm's arrival in October meant that he did not play on most of the Dylan–Band 1967 Woodstock recordings, including the sixteen Dylan Basement Tapes album tracks—and it is unclear whether the drums overdubbed on "Too Much of Nothing" in 1975 were played by Helm. Griffin believes Helm drummed on eight unreleased recordings made by Dylan and the Band in the house on Wittenberg Road that Danko and Helm shared after vacating Big Pink . Heylin has suggested that Helm might be the drummer on four tracks on The Basement Tapes: "Odds and Ends", "Clothes Line Saga", "Apple Suckling Tree" and "Goin’ To Acapulco" . In his autobiography, Helm recalled how he listened to the recordings the Hawks had made with Dylan, and remembered that he "could tell that hanging out with the boys had helped Bob to find a connection with things we were interested in: blues, rockabilly, R&B. They had rubbed off on him a little."
: "They weren’t demos for myself, they were demos of the songs. I was being PUSHED again into coming up with some songs. You know how those things go." In October 1967, a fourteen-song demo tape was copyrighted and the compositions were registered with Dwarf Music, a publishing company jointly owned by Dylan and Grossman. Acetates and tapes of the songs then circulated among interested recording artists.The songs on the demo were: "Million Dollar Bash", "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread", "Please Mrs. Henry", "Down in the Flood", "Lo and Behold", "Tiny Montgomery", "This Wheel's on Fire", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "I Shall Be Released", "Tears of Rage", "Too Much of Nothing", "The Mighty Quinn", "Open the Door, Homer" and "Nothing Was Delivered" .
Peter, Paul and Mary, managed by Grossman, had the first hit with a basement composition when their cover of "Too Much of Nothing" reached number 35 on the Billboard chart
in late 1967. Ian & Sylvia, also managed by Grossman, recorded "Tears of Rage", "Quinn the Eskimo" and "This Wheel's on Fire". In January 1968, Manfred Mann
reached number one on the UK pop chart with their recording of "The Mighty Quinn". In April, "This Wheel's on Fire", recorded by Julie Driscoll
, Brian Auger
and the Trinity, hit number five on the UK chart. That same month, a version of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by The Byrds
was issued as a single. Along with "Nothing Was Delivered", it appeared on their country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo
, released in August. The Hawks, officially renamed the Band,Hoskyns notes that when Albert Grossman was shopping around for a recording contract for the Hawks in late 1967, the group instructed him to sign them under the name the Crackers—a derogatory term for poor white Southerners. The band also mischievously dubbed themselves the Honkies. It was only when Helm joined them in Woodstock that they settled on calling themselves the Band . recorded "This Wheel's on Fire", "I Shall Be Released" and "Tears of Rage" for their debut album, Music from Big Pink
, released in July 1968. Fairport Convention
covered "Million Dollar Bash" on their 1969 album Unhalfbricking
.
As tapes of Dylan's recordings circulated in the music industry, journalists became aware of their existence. In June 1968, Jann Wenner wrote a front-page Rolling Stone story headlined "Dylan's Basement Tape Should Be Released". Wenner listened to the fourteen-song demo and reported, "There is enough material—most all of it very good—to make an entirely new Bob Dylan album, a record with a distinct style of its own." He concluded, "Even though Dylan used one of the finest rock and roll bands ever assembled on the Highway 61 album, here he works with his own band for the first time. Dylan brings that instinctual feel for rock and roll to his voice for the first time. If this were ever to be released it would be a classic."
Reporting such as this whetted the appetites of Dylan fans. In July 1969, the first rock bootleg
appeared in California, entitled Great White Wonder
. The double album consisted of seven songs from the Woodstock basement sessions, plus some early recordings Dylan had made in Minneapolis in December 1961 and one track recorded from The Johnny Cash Show
. One of those responsible for the bootleg, identified only as Patrick, talked to Rolling Stone: "Dylan is a heavy talent and he's got all those songs nobody's ever heard. We thought we'd take it upon ourselves to make this music available." The process of bootlegging Dylan's work would eventually see the illegal release of hundreds of live and studio recordings, and lead the Recording Industry Association of America
to describe Dylan as the most bootlegged artist in the history of the music industry.
, released that same month: "After Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes no longer had the status of a final reminder of Dylan's lost genius". In 1975, as well, the Band purchased Shangri-La ranch in Malibu, California, which they transformed into their recording studio.
Engineer Rob Fraboni was brought to Shangri-La to clean up the recordings still in the possession of Hudson, the original engineer. Fraboni had worked on Dylan's Planet Waves
album, with backing by the Band, and the live Dylan–Band album Before the Flood
, both released in 1974. Fraboni has described Robertson as the dominant voice in selecting the final tracks for The Basement Tapes and reported that Dylan was not in the studio very often. The stereo recordings made by Hudson were remixed to mono, while Robertson and other members of the Band overdubbed new keyboard, guitar, and drum parts onto some of the 1967 Woodstock recordings. According to Fraboni, four new songs by the Band were also recorded in preparation for the album's official release, one of which, a cover of Chuck Berry
's "Going Back to Memphis", did not end up being included. There is disagreement about the recording date of the other three songs: "Bessie Smith", "Ain't No More Cane" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry". While Fraboni has recalled that the Band taped them in 1975, the liner notes for the reissued versions of the Band’s own albums state that these songs were recorded between 1967 and 1970. Ultimately, eight of the twenty-four songs on The Basement Tapes did not feature Dylan, several of them studio outtakes postdating the sessions at Big Pink. In justifying their inclusion, Robertson explained that he, Hudson and Dylan did not have access to all the basement recordings: "We had access to some of the songs. Some of these things came under the heading of 'homemade' which meant a Basement Tape to us." Robertson has suggested that the Basement Tapes are, for him, "a process, a homemade feel" and so could include recordings from a wide variety of sources.
All songs by Bob Dylan, except where noted.
Side one
Side two
Side three
Side four
in the basement of a Los Angeles YMCA
. It poses Dylan and the Band alongside characters suggested by the songs: a woman in a Mrs. Henry T-shirt, an Eskimo, a circus strongman and a dwarf. Robertson wears a blue Mao-style suit
; Manuel wears a U.S. Air Force uniform. Musicians David Blue and Neil Young
are also present in the photo.
released The Basement Tapes on June 26, 1975. The album peaked at number seven on the Billboard chart, and reached number eight in the UK. It was acclaimed by critics. John Rockwell
of The New York Times
hailed it as "one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music." Rolling Stones Paul Nelson
called its contents "the hardest, toughest, sweetest, saddest, funniest, wisest songs I know". Robert Christgau
gave it an A+ in his Village Voice
"Consumer Guide" column. He commented on how the recordings sounded richer and stranger in 1975 than when they were made and concluded, "We don't have to bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967, too." The Basement Tapes topped the Voices Pazz & Jop Critics Poll
. The review in The Washington Post
declared, "He may perplex, irritate, and disappoint, but Dylan has to rank as the single greatest artist modern American pop music has produced."
describes the album's contents as "sixteen basement recordings plus eight Band demos". Critic Michael Gray
writes of the album, "The interspersed tracks by the Band alone merely disrupt the unity of Dylan material, much more of which should have been included. Key songs missing here include 'I Shall Be Released' and 'The Mighty Quinn'". Heylin similarly argues that compiler Robbie Robertson did Dylan fans "a major disservice" by omitting those two songs as well as "I'm Not There" and "Sign On The Cross". He writes, "The album as released hardly gave a real idea of what they had been doing in Woodstock. Not even the two traditional songs pulled to the master reels—'Young But Daily Growin' and 'The Banks Of The Royal Canal'—made the final twenty-four cuts."
The honesty of the 1975 album was questioned by a reviewer of the remastered version of the Band's Music From Big Pink, issued in 2000. Dave Hopkins noted that "Katie's Been Gone", which appears as a bonus track on the Big Pink reissue, is the same recording that appeared on The Basement Tapes, but now "in stereo and with improved sound quality beyond what the remastering process alone would provide". Hopkins declared, "The cat's out of the bag: 'Katie' and the other Band-only tracks on The Basement Tapes must have been intentionally muddied in the studio in 1975 so that they would fit better alongside the Dylan material recorded in the basement with a home reel-to-reel." Heylin also takes exception to Robertson's passing off the Band's songs as originating from the basement sessions. By including eight Band recordings to Dylan's sixteen, he says, "Robertson sought to imply that the alliance between Dylan and the Band was far more equal than it was: 'Hey, we were writing all these songs, doing our own thing, oh and Bob would sometimes come around and we'd swap a few tunes.'" Heylin asserts that "though revealing in their own right, the Band tracks only pollute the official set and reduce its stature."
Barney Hoskyns describes "Heylin's objections [as] the academic ones of a touchy Dylanologist: The Basement Tapes still contained some of the greatest music either Dylan or the Band ever recorded." Sid Griffin similarly defends the inclusion of the Band's songs: "'Ain't No More Cane' may be included under false pretenses, but it is stirring stuff. ... And while a Dylan fan might understandably grumble that he wanted to hear another Bob song, a fan equally versed and interested more generally in late 20th century American music would only smile and thank the Good Lord for the gift of this song." Of the Band's version of "Don't Ya Tell Henry", he writes, "True, the argument could be made that Robertson was way outside his brief in including this on the two-LP set, as this wasn't from Woodstock or '67, and has no Dylan on it. ... But it is a song from the Basement Tapes era and it swings like a randy sailor on shore leave in a bisexual bar. So give Robbie a break."
By 1975, Dylan showed scant interest in the discographical minutiae of the recordings. Interviewed on the radio by Mary Travers
, he recalled, "We were all up there sorta drying out ... making music and watching time go by. So, in the meantime, we made this record. Actually, it wasn't a record, it was just songs which we'd come to this basement and recorded. Out in the woods..." Heylin commented that Dylan seemed to "dismiss the work as unfinished therapy".
' and 'I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
'".
Singer-songwriter David Gray
commented that the great achievement of The Basement Tapes is that Dylan found a way out of the anguish and verbal complexity that had characterized his mid-sixties albums such as Blonde on Blonde: "It's the sound of Dylan letting his guard down. 'Clothes Line Saga' and all those ridiculous songs, he's obviously just making it all up, they were having such a great time. The sound of the Band is so antiquated like something out of the Gold Rush
and Dylan fits in because he's this storyteller with an ancient heart. At the time everything he did was so scrutinised, yet somehow he liberated himself from all that and enjoyed making music again. You hear an unselfconscious quality on this record which you don't ever hear again." "He mocks his own inertia and impotence", writes critic Mike Marqusee
, "but with a much gentler touch than in Blonde on Blonde. In place of that album's strangled urgency, Dylan adopts a laconic humor, a deadpan tone that speaks of resignation and self-preservation in the face of absurdity and betrayal."
Robert Shelton has argued that The Basement Tapes revolves around two sets of themes. One group of songs is "tinctured with the search for salvation": "I Shall Be Released" (on the demo, but not on the album), "Too Much of Nothing", "Nothing Was Delivered", "This Wheel's On Fire", "Tears of Rage" and "Goin' To Acapulco". "'Nothing' and 'nowhere' perplex and nag" in these songs, he writes. "The 'nothing' echoes the artist's dilemma: death versus life, vacuum versus harvest, isolation versus people, silence versus sound, the void versus the life-impulse." A second group, comprising "songs of joy, signaling some form of deliverance", includes most of the remaining songs in the collection.
In his sleeve notes for the 1975 release of The Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus wrote, "What was taking place as Dylan and the Band fiddled with the tunes, was less a style than a spirit—a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention." He compared the songs to fabled works of American music: "The Basement tapes are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory ... they are no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train
' or Robert Johnson's 'Love In Vain
."
In 1997, after listening to more than 100 basement recordings issued on various bootlegs, Marcus extended these insights into a book-length study, Invisible Republic
(reissued in 2001 under the title The Old, Weird America). In it, he quotes Robertson's memory of the recording: "[Dylan] would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn't know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn't tell." Marcus calls the songs "palavers with a community of ghosts. ... These ghosts were not abstractions. As native sons and daughters they were a community. And they were once gathered in a single place: on the Anthology of American Folk Music
". A collection of blues and country music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, the Anthology—compiled by Harry Smith
and originally released by Folkways Records
in 1952—was a major influence on the folk music revival
of the 1950s and the 1960s. Marcus suggests that Dylan's Basement Tapes shared with Smith's Anthology a sense of alchemy, "and in the alchemy is an undiscovered country".
' music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos." Patrick Humphries itemizes the ways in which Dylan's songs dissented from the dominant ethos of rock culture: "While the rock world vented its spleen on parents and leaders, Dylan was singing privately about parental fidelity. While George Harrison
was testifying that life went on within and without you
, Dylan was taking his potatoes down to be mashed. While Mick Jagger
was 2,000 light years from home
, Dylan was strapping himself to a tree with roots."
This aspect of the basement recordings became obvious when Dylan chose to record his next album, John Wesley Harding
, in Nashville in late 1967. The songs on that record, according to Howard Sounes, revealed the influence of Dylan's daily reading of both the Bible and the Hank Williams songbook. And its sound came as a shock to other rock musicians. As producer Bob Johnston
recalled, "Every artist in the world was in the studio trying to make the biggest-sounding record they possibly could. So what does [Dylan] do? He comes to Nashville and tells me he wants to record with a bass, drum and guitar." Dylan summed up the gap: "At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads."
When the Band began work on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in a New York studio in January 1968, they employed a recording technique similar to the one they had become familiar with during the Basement Tapes sessions. As Robertson described it, "We used the same kind of mike on everything. A bit of an anti-studio approach. And we realized what was comfortable to us was turning wherever we were into a studio. Like the Big Pink technique." That technique influenced groups including the Beatles, writes Griffin, who calls their Twickenham Get Back sessions in early 1969 an effort to record "in the honest, live, no frills, no overdubs, down home way that the Hawks/Band did for the Basement Tapes".
"Listening to The Basement Tapes now, it seems to be the beginning of what is called Americana
or alt.country
," wrote Billy Bragg
. "The thing about alt.country which makes it 'alt' is that it is not polished. It is not rehearsed or slick. Neither are The Basement Tapes. Remember that The Basement Tapes holds a certain cultural weight which is timeless—and the best Americana does that as well." The songs' influence has been detected by critics in many subsequent acts. Stuart Bailie wrote, "If rock'n'roll is the sound of a party in session, the Basement Tapes were the morning after: bleary, and a bit rueful but dashed with emotional potency. Countless acts—Mercury Rev
, Cowboy Junkies
, Wilco
, The Waterboys
—have since tried to get back to that place."
For Elvis Costello
, The Basement Tapes "sound like they were made in a cardboard box. I think [Dylan] was trying to write songs that sounded like he'd just found them under a stone. As if they sound like real folk songs—because if you go back into the folk tradition, you will find songs as dark and as deep as these."
In 2003, Rolling Stone
magazine ranked The Basement Tapes number 291 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time
. In a special issue devoted to Dylan's work, Q
magazine awarded the record five stars, its highest rating, commenting that "Dylan's work is by turns haunting, hilarious and puzzling—and all of it taps into centuries of American song".
" on Biograph
in 1985, "I Shall Be Released" and "Santa-Fe
" on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 in 1991 and "I'm Not There (1956)" on the I'm Not There soundtrack
in 2007. In the early 1970s, Dylan released new recordings of four compositions from the Basement Tape era: a performance of "Quinn the Eskimo" from the Isle of Wight Festival
on August 31, 1969, appeared on Self Portrait
, and October 1971 recordings with Happy Traum
of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "I Shall Be Released" and "Down in the Flood" appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II
.
In 2005, the Band compilation A Musical History
was released, which includes the 1967 Woodstock Band recordings "Words and Numbers", "You Don't Come Through", "Caledonia Mission", "Ferdinand the Imposter" and "Will the Circle Be Unbroken". In 1968, the Band re-recorded "This Wheel's on Fire", "Tears of Rage", "I Shall Be Released" and "Caledonia Mission" in studios in New York and Los Angeles for Music From Big Pink. Versions of other Band Basement Tape compositions, recorded in various locations between 1967 and possibly 1975, appear on Across the Great Divide and A Musical History, and as bonus tracks on the 2000 reissues of Music From Big Pink and Cahoots. Live versions by the Band of various Basement Tapes songs have also been issued: "I Shall Be Released" on Before the Flood
; "Caledonia Mission" and "This Wheel's On Fire" on Rock of Ages
, with "I Shall Be Released", "Down in the Flood" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" appearing on the album's 2001 reissue; "I Shall Be Released" on The Last Waltz and "This Wheel's On Fire" on the 2002 box set release of the album; "I Shall Be Released" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" on Live at Watkins Glen
; and "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos" recorded live at the Woodstock Festival
in August 1969, on Across the Great Divide.
On March 31, 2009, Legacy Records issued a remastered version of the original 1975 Basement Tapes double album, which critics praised for its improved sound quality. According to reviewer Scott Hreha, there was "something about the remastering that makes it feel more like an official album—the earlier CD version’s weak fidelity unfairly emphasized the 'basement' nature of the recordings, where it now possesses a clarity that belies its humble and informal origins."
In the early 1990s, a virtually complete collection of all Dylan's 1967 recordings in Woodstock was released on a bootleg 5-CD set, The Genuine Basement Tapes. The collection, which contains over 100 songs and alternate takes, was later remastered and issued as the 4-CD bootleg A Tree With Roots. Greil Marcus showed the set to Garth Hudson, who declared, "They've got it all." Nonetheless, a handful of basement songs not available on A Tree With Roots or other bootlegs have been documented, including the Band's "Even If It's a Pig Part I" (which has circulated in fragmentary form) and "Even If It's a Pig Part II", and Dylan's "Wild Wolf" and "Can I Get a Racehorse" (copyrighted as "You Own a Racehorse").
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
and The Band
The Band
The Band was an acclaimed and influential roots rock group. The original group consisted of Rick Danko , Garth Hudson , Richard Manuel , and Robbie Robertson , and Levon Helm...
. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at houses in and around Woodstock, New York
Woodstock, New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 at the 2000 census.The Town of Woodstock is in the northern part of the county...
, where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records
Bootleg recording
A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. The process of making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging...
, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release.
During his world tour of 1965–66, Dylan was backed by a five-member rock group, the Hawks, who would subsequently become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, the Hawks' members gravitated to the vicinity of Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was concealed from the public's gaze during an extended period of convalescence in 1967, they recorded more than 100 tracks together, comprising original compositions, contemporary covers and traditional material. Dylan's new style of writing moved away from the urban sensibility and extended narratives that had characterized his most recent albums, Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers...
and Blonde On Blonde
Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde is American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released in May or June 1966 on Columbia Records and produced by Bob Johnston. Recording sessions commenced in New York in October 1965, with a plethora of backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing...
, toward songs that were more intimate and which drew on many styles of traditional American music. While some of the basement songs are humorous, others dwell on nothingness, betrayal and a quest for salvation. In general, they possess a rootsy quality anticipating the Americana
Americana (music)
Americana is an amalgam of roots musics formed by the confluence of the shared and varied traditions that make up the American musical ethos; specifically those sounds that are merged from folk, country, blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and other external influential styles...
genre. For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
in the late sixties.
When Columbia Records
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
prepared the album for official release in 1975, eight songs recorded solely by the Band—in various locations between 1967 and 1975—were added to sixteen songs taped by Dylan and the Band in 1967. Overdubs were added in 1975 to songs from both categories. The Basement Tapes was critically acclaimed upon release, and reached number seven on the Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
album chart. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan's best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.
Background and recording
By July 1966, Bob Dylan was at the peak of both creative and commercial success. Highway 61 RevisitedHighway 61 Revisited
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers...
had reached number three on the US album chart in November 1965; the recently released double-LP Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde is American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released in May or June 1966 on Columbia Records and produced by Bob Johnston. Recording sessions commenced in New York in October 1965, with a plethora of backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing...
was widely acclaimed. From September 1965 to May 1966, Dylan embarked on an extensive tour across the US, Australia and Europe backed by the Hawks, a band that had formerly worked with rock and roll musician Ronnie Hawkins
Ronnie Hawkins
Ronald "Ronnie" Hawkins is a Juno Award-winning rockabilly musician whose career has spanned more than half a century. Though his career began in Arkansas, USA, where he'd been born and raised, it was in Ontario, Canada where he found success and settled for most of his life...
. The Hawks comprised four Canadian musicians—Rick Danko
Rick Danko
Richard Clare "Rick" Danko was a Canadian musician and singer, best known as a member of The Band.-Early years :...
, Garth Hudson
Garth Hudson
Eric Garth Hudson is a Canadian multi-instrumentalist. As the organist, keyboardist and saxophonist for Canadian-American rock group The Band, he was a principal architect of the group's unique sound...
, Richard Manuel
Richard Manuel
Richard George Manuel was a Canadian composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his contributions to and membership in The Band....
and Robbie Robertson
Robbie Robertson
Robbie Robertson, OC; is a Canadian singer-songwriter, and guitarist. He is best known for his membership as the guitarist and primary songwriter within The Band. He was ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time...
—and one American, Levon Helm
Levon Helm
Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm , is an American rock multi-instrumentalist and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and frequent lead and backing vocalist for The Band....
. Dylan's audiences reacted with hostility to the sound of their folk icon backed by a rock band. Dismayed by the negative reception, Helm quit the Hawks in November 1965 and drifted around the South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, at one point working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The tour culminated in a famously raucous concert in Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
, England, in May 1966 when an audience member shouted "Judas!" at Dylan for allegedly betraying the cause of politically progressive folk music.For his detailed account of the Manchester concert, C. P. Lee interviewed members of the audience about the reasons for their hostility. One explained, "It was as if everything we held dear had been betrayed. He showed us what to think, I know that's a stupid thing to say but there he was marching with Martin Luther King, and suddenly he was singing this stuff about himself. We made him and he betrayed the cause" . Returning exhausted from the hectic schedule of his world tour, Dylan discovered that his manager, Albert Grossman
Albert Grossman
Albert Bernard Grossman was an American entrepreneur and manager in the American folk music scene and rock and roll. He was most famous as the manager of Bob Dylan between 1962 and 1970.-Biography:...
, had arranged a further 63 concerts across the US that year.
Motorcycle crash
On July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his Triumph motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New YorkWoodstock, New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 at the 2000 census.The Town of Woodstock is in the northern part of the county...
, suffering cracked vertebrae and a mild concussion. The concerts he was scheduled to perform had to be canceled. Biographer Clinton Heylin
Clinton Heylin
Clinton Heylin is an English author who has written extensively about popular music and the work of Bob Dylan.- Education :...
wrote in 1990 on the significance of the crash: "A quarter of a century on, Dylan's motorcycle accident is still viewed as the pivot of his career. As a sudden, abrupt moment when his wheel really did explode. The great irony is that 1967—the year after the accident—remains his most prolific year as a songwriter." In a 1969 interview with Jann Wenner
Jann Wenner
Jann Simon Wenner is the co-founder and publisher of the music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.-Childhood:...
, Dylan said, "I had a dreadful motorcycle accident which put me away for a while, and I still didn't sense the importance of that accident till at least a year after that. I realized that it was a real accident. I mean I thought that I was just gonna get up and go back to doing what I was doing before ... but I couldn't do it anymore."
Dylan was rethinking the direction of his life while recovering from a sense of having been exploited. Nine months after the crash, he told New York Daily News reporter Michael Iachetta, "Songs are in my head like they always are. And they're not going to get written down until some things are evened up. Not until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened." After discussing the crash with Dylan, biographer Robert Shelton concluded that he "was saying there must be another way of life for the pop star, in which he is in control, not they. He had to find ways of working to his own advantage with the recording industry. He had to come to terms with his one-time friend, longtime manager, part-time neighbor, and sometime landlord, Albert Grossman."
Early recordings
Rick Danko recalled that he, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson joined Robbie Robertson in West SaugertiesWest Saugerties, New York
West Saugerties is an hamlet in Ulster County, New York, United States and part of the Town of Saugerties.West Saugerties is located at . It lies above sea level.-History:...
, a few miles from Woodstock, in February 1967. The three of them moved into a house on Stoll Road nicknamed Big Pink; Robertson lived nearby with his future wife, Dominique. Danko and Manuel had been invited to Woodstock to collaborate with Dylan on a film he was editing, Eat the Document
Eat the Document
Eat the Document is a documentary of Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of the United Kingdom with the Hawks. It was shot under Dylan's direction by D. A. Pennebaker, whose groundbreaking documentary Dont Look Back [sic] chronicled Dylan's 1965 British tour...
, a rarely seen account of the 1966 world tour. At some point between March and June 1967, Dylan and the four Hawks began a series of informal recording sessions, initially at the so-called Red Room of Dylan's house, Hi Lo Ha, in the Byrdcliffe
Byrdcliffe Colony
The Byrdcliffe Colony, also called the Byrdliffe Arts Colony or Byrdcliffe Historic District, was founded in 1902 near Woodstock, New York by Jane and Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and colleagues, Bolton Brown and Hervey White...
area of Woodstock. In June, the recording sessions moved to the basement of Big Pink. Hudson set up a recording unit, using two stereo mixers and a tape recorder borrowed from Grossman, as well as a set of microphones on loan from folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter, Paul and Mary were an American folk-singing trio whose nearly 50-year career began with their rise to become a paradigm for 1960s folk music. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers...
. Dylan would later tell Jann Wenner, "That's really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody's basement. With the windows open ... and a dog lying on the floor."
For the first couple of months, they were merely "killing time", according to Robertson, with many early sessions devoted to covers. "With the covers Bob was educating us a little", recalls Roberston. "The whole folkie thing was still very questionable to us—it wasn't the train we came in on. ... He'd come up with something like 'Royal Canal
The Auld Triangle
"The Auld Triangle" is a song written by Dominic Behan for his brother Brendan Behan and is featured in Brendan's play The Quare Fellow. It is used to introduce the play, a story about the occurrences in a prison the day a convict is set to be executed...
',Robertson is referring to "Banks of the Royal Canal (The Auld Triangle)" by Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan
Brendan Francis Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.-Early life:...
, one of the basement recordings that has been bootlegged but never officially released. The song first appeared in Behan's play The Quare Fellow
The Quare Fellow
The Quare Fellow is Brendan Behan's first play, first produced in 1954.The title is taken from a Hiberno-English pronunciation of queer, meaning 'strange' or 'unusual'. In context, the word lacks the denotation of homosexuality which it holds today...
, and Dylan probably learned it from Liam Clancy
Liam Clancy
William "Liam" Clancy was an Irish folk singer and actor from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. He was the youngest and last surviving member of performing group The Clancy Brothers. The group were regarded as Ireland's first pop stars...
, who recorded it in 1965 . and you'd say, 'This is so beautiful! The expression!' ... He remembered too much, remembered too many songs too well. He'd come over to Big Pink, or wherever we were, and pull out some old song—and he'd prepped for this. He'd practiced this, and then come out here, to show us." Songs recorded at the early sessions included material written or made popular by Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash
John R. "Johnny" Cash was an American singer-songwriter, actor, and author, who has been called one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century...
, Ian & Sylvia, John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker was an American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist.Hooker began his life as the son of a sharecropper, William Hooker, and rose to prominence performing his own unique style of what was originally closest to Delta blues. He developed a 'talking blues' style that was his trademark...
, Hank Williams and Eric Von Schmidt
Eric Von Schmidt
Eric "Rick" Von Schmidt was an American singer-songwriter and Grammy Award recipient. He was associated with the folk/blues revival of the 1960s and a key part of the East Coast folk music scene that included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.-Background and associations with Dylan:Von Schmidt's father,...
, as well as traditional songs and standards
Standard (music)
In music, a standard is a tune or song of established popularity.-See also:* Blues standard* Jazz standard* Pop standard* Great American Songbook-Further reading:* Greatest Rock Standards, published by Hal Leonard ISBN 0793588391...
. Linking all the recordings, both new material and old, is the way in which Dylan re-engaged with traditional American music. Biographer Barney Hoskyns
Barney Hoskyns
Barney Hoskyns is a British music critic and editor of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages.Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a First Class degree in English. He began writing about music for Melody Maker and New Musical Express, quitting his job as staff writer at NME to research...
observed that both the seclusion of Woodstock and the discipline and sense of tradition in the Hawks' musicianship were just what Dylan needed after the "globe-trotting psychosis" of the 1965–66 tour.
New compositions
Dylan began to write and record new material at the sessions. According to Hudson, "We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day. Some were old ballads and traditional songs ... but others Bob would make up as he went along. ... We'd play the melody, he'd sing a few words he'd written, and then make up some more, or else just mouth sounds or even syllables as he went along. It's a pretty good way to write songs." Danko told Dylan biographer Howard SounesHoward Sounes
Howard Sounes is a British author, journalist and biographer.Howard Sounes began his career as a newspaper journalist as a staff reporter for the Sunday Mirror. He broke major stories concerning one of the most notorious murder cases in British criminal history, that of Fred West and Rosemary West...
, "Bob and Robbie, they would come by every day, five to seven days a week, for seven to eight months." Hudson added, "It amazed me, Bob's writing ability. How he would come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write a song. And what was amazing was that almost every one of those songs was funny."
Dylan recorded around thirty new compositions with the Hawks, including some of the most celebrated songs of his career: "I Shall Be Released
I Shall Be Released
"I Shall Be Released" is a 1967 song written by Bob Dylan.The Band played it on their debut album, Music from Big Pink , with Richard Manuel singing lead vocals, and Rick Danko and Levon Helm harmonizing in the chorus...
", "This Wheel's on Fire
This Wheel's on Fire (song)
"This Wheel's on Fire" is a song written by Bob Dylan and Rick Danko. It was originally recorded by Dylan and The Band during their legendary 1967 sessions, portions of which comprised the 1975 album, The Basement Tapes...
", "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
"Quinn the Eskimo " is a folk-rock song written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967. The song was first released in January 1968 as "Mighty Quinn" by the British band Manfred Mann and became a great success...
", "Tears of Rage
Tears of Rage
"Tears of Rage" is a song written by Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel, the former writing the lyrics and the melody being provided by the latter.-Initial recordings:...
" and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" is a song written by Bob Dylan in 1967 in Woodstock, New York, during the self-imposed exile from public appearances that followed his July 29, 1966 motorcycle accident. A recording of Dylan performing the song was first officially released on the Bob Dylan's Greatest...
". Two of these featured his lyrics set to music by members of the Band: Danko wrote the music of "This Wheel's on Fire"; Manuel, who composed "Tears of Rage", described how Dylan "came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper ... and he just said, 'Have you got any music for this?' ... I had a couple of musical movements that fit ... so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn't sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn't run upstairs and say, 'What's this mean, Bob: "Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse"?
One of the qualities of The Basement Tapes that sets it apart from contemporaneous works is its simple, down-to-earth sound. The songs were recorded in mid-1967, the "Summer of Love
Summer of Love
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a cultural and political rebellion...
" that produced the Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles, released on 1 June 1967 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin...
, their most technically elaborate album. In a 1978 interview, Dylan reflected on the period: "I didn’t know how to record the way other people were recording, and I didn’t want to. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper which I didn’t like at all. I thought that was a very indulgent album, though the songs on it were real good. I didn’t think all that production was necessary." Of the sound and atmosphere of the basement recordings, Barney Hoskyns wrote that "Big Pink itself determined the nature of this homemade brew." "One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room", recalled Robertson. "So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn't hear the singing, you were playing too loud."
Mike Marqusee
Mike Marqusee
Mike Marqusee is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist in London. His partner is the barrister Liz Davies.Marqusee, who describes himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew" has lived in Britain since 1971...
describes how the basement recordings represented a radical change of direction for Dylan, who turned his back on his reputation for importing avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
ideas into popular culture: "At the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness."
Dylan had married Sara Lownds
Sara Dylan
Sara Dylan , born Shirley Marlin Noznisky and later known as Sara Lownds, was the first wife of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and mother of singer Jakob Dylan. She was married to Bob Dylan from November 1965 until June 1977.-Early life:Little is known about Sara Dylan's early life or family...
in November 1965. By the time the basement sessions started in Big Pink around June 1967, he had two children: Maria (Sara’s daughter from her first marriage) and Jesse Dylan
Jesse Dylan
Jesse Dylan is an American film director, and the founder, CEO and creative director of the media production company Wondros.-Personal Life:...
. Anna Dylan was born on July 11, 1967. Both Heylin and Griffin suggest that recording had to move from Dylan’s home to Big Pink when it became clear that the sessions were getting in the way of family life. Domesticity was the context of The Basement Tapes, as Hudson said in The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz
The Last Waltz was a concert by the rock group The Band, held on American Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco...
: "Chopping wood and hitting your thumb with a hammer, fixing the tape recorder or the screen door, wandering off into the woods with Hamlet [the dog Dylan shared with the Band] ... it was relaxed and low-key, which was something we hadn’t enjoyed since we were children." Several Basement Tapes songs, such as "Clothes Line Saga" and "Apple Suckling Tree", celebrate the domestic aspects of the rural lifestyle.
The intense collaboration between Dylan and the Hawks that produced the basement recordings came to an end in October 1967 when Dylan relocated to Nashville to record a formal studio album, John Wesley Harding
John Wesley Harding (album)
John Wesley Harding is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's eighth studio album, released by Columbia Records in December 1967.Produced by Bob Johnston, the album marked Dylan's return to acoustic music and traditional roots, after three albums of electric rock music...
, with a different crew of accompanying musicians. The same month, drummer Levon Helm rejoined his former bandmates in Woodstock, after he received a phone call from Danko informing him that they were getting ready to record as a group.Griffin writes that Helm's arrival in October meant that he did not play on most of the Dylan–Band 1967 Woodstock recordings, including the sixteen Dylan Basement Tapes album tracks—and it is unclear whether the drums overdubbed on "Too Much of Nothing" in 1975 were played by Helm. Griffin believes Helm drummed on eight unreleased recordings made by Dylan and the Band in the house on Wittenberg Road that Danko and Helm shared after vacating Big Pink . Heylin has suggested that Helm might be the drummer on four tracks on The Basement Tapes: "Odds and Ends", "Clothes Line Saga", "Apple Suckling Tree" and "Goin’ To Acapulco" . In his autobiography, Helm recalled how he listened to the recordings the Hawks had made with Dylan, and remembered that he "could tell that hanging out with the boys had helped Bob to find a connection with things we were interested in: blues, rockabilly, R&B. They had rubbed off on him a little."
Dwarf Music demos and Great White Wonder
Dylan referred to commercial pressures behind the basement recordings in a 1969 interview with Rolling StoneRolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
: "They weren’t demos for myself, they were demos of the songs. I was being PUSHED again into coming up with some songs. You know how those things go." In October 1967, a fourteen-song demo tape was copyrighted and the compositions were registered with Dwarf Music, a publishing company jointly owned by Dylan and Grossman. Acetates and tapes of the songs then circulated among interested recording artists.The songs on the demo were: "Million Dollar Bash", "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread", "Please Mrs. Henry", "Down in the Flood", "Lo and Behold", "Tiny Montgomery", "This Wheel's on Fire", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "I Shall Be Released", "Tears of Rage", "Too Much of Nothing", "The Mighty Quinn", "Open the Door, Homer" and "Nothing Was Delivered" .
Peter, Paul and Mary, managed by Grossman, had the first hit with a basement composition when their cover of "Too Much of Nothing" reached number 35 on the Billboard chart
Billboard Hot 100
The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...
in late 1967. Ian & Sylvia, also managed by Grossman, recorded "Tears of Rage", "Quinn the Eskimo" and "This Wheel's on Fire". In January 1968, Manfred Mann
Manfred Mann
Manfred Mann was a British beat, rhythm and blues and pop band of the 1960s, named after their South African keyboardist, Manfred Mann, who later led the successful 1970s group Manfred Mann's Earth Band...
reached number one on the UK pop chart with their recording of "The Mighty Quinn". In April, "This Wheel's on Fire", recorded by Julie Driscoll
Julie Driscoll
Julie Tippetts is an English singer and actress, known for her 1960s versions of Bob Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire", and Donovan's "Season of the Witch", both with Brian Auger & The Trinity...
, Brian Auger
Brian Auger
Brian Auger is a jazz and rock keyboardist, who has specialized in playing the Hammond organ.A jazz pianist, bandleader, session musician and Hammond B3 player, Auger has played or toured with artists such as Rod Stewart, Tony Williams, Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Boy Williamson, Led Zeppelin, Eric Burdon...
and the Trinity, hit number five on the UK chart. That same month, a version of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by The Byrds
The Byrds
The Byrds were an American rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1964. The band underwent multiple line-up changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member until the group disbanded in 1973...
was issued as a single. Along with "Nothing Was Delivered", it appeared on their country-rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Sweetheart of the Rodeo is the sixth album by American rock band The Byrds and was released on August 30, 1968 on Columbia Records...
, released in August. The Hawks, officially renamed the Band,Hoskyns notes that when Albert Grossman was shopping around for a recording contract for the Hawks in late 1967, the group instructed him to sign them under the name the Crackers—a derogatory term for poor white Southerners. The band also mischievously dubbed themselves the Honkies. It was only when Helm joined them in Woodstock that they settled on calling themselves the Band . recorded "This Wheel's on Fire", "I Shall Be Released" and "Tears of Rage" for their debut album, Music from Big Pink
Music from Big Pink
Music from Big Pink is the 1968 debut album by rock band The Band. It features the well-known song, "The Weight". The music was composed partly in 'Big Pink', a house shared by Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson in West Saugerties, in upstate New York...
, released in July 1968. Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock and later electric folk band, formed in 1967 who are still recording and touring today. They are widely regarded as the most important single group in the English folk rock movement...
covered "Million Dollar Bash" on their 1969 album Unhalfbricking
Unhalfbricking
The band's male vocalist Iain Matthews left during the recordings for Unhalfbricking to make his own album Matthews' Southern Comfort, after recording just one track, "Percy's Song". Sandy Denny sang lead vocals on all the other songs, including her own compositions, "Autopsy", and "Who Knows Where...
.
As tapes of Dylan's recordings circulated in the music industry, journalists became aware of their existence. In June 1968, Jann Wenner wrote a front-page Rolling Stone story headlined "Dylan's Basement Tape Should Be Released". Wenner listened to the fourteen-song demo and reported, "There is enough material—most all of it very good—to make an entirely new Bob Dylan album, a record with a distinct style of its own." He concluded, "Even though Dylan used one of the finest rock and roll bands ever assembled on the Highway 61 album, here he works with his own band for the first time. Dylan brings that instinctual feel for rock and roll to his voice for the first time. If this were ever to be released it would be a classic."
Reporting such as this whetted the appetites of Dylan fans. In July 1969, the first rock bootleg
Bootleg recording
A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. The process of making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging...
appeared in California, entitled Great White Wonder
Great White Wonder
Great White Wonder, or GWW, is the first notable rock bootleg album, released in July of 1969 and containing unofficially released recordings by Bob Dylan. It is also the first release of the famous bootleg record label Trademark of Quality...
. The double album consisted of seven songs from the Woodstock basement sessions, plus some early recordings Dylan had made in Minneapolis in December 1961 and one track recorded from The Johnny Cash Show
The Johnny Cash Show
The Johnny Cash Show is a live album by country singer Johnny Cash, recorded at the Grand Ole Opry and released on Columbia Records in 1970. Though one of Cash's lesser-known live records, it spawned the highly successful single "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down", which helped kickstart the career of...
. One of those responsible for the bootleg, identified only as Patrick, talked to Rolling Stone: "Dylan is a heavy talent and he's got all those songs nobody's ever heard. We thought we'd take it upon ourselves to make this music available." The process of bootlegging Dylan's work would eventually see the illegal release of hundreds of live and studio recordings, and lead the Recording Industry Association of America
Recording Industry Association of America
The Recording Industry Association of America is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States...
to describe Dylan as the most bootlegged artist in the history of the music industry.
Columbia Records compilation
In January 1975, Dylan unexpectedly gave permission for the release of a selection of the basement recordings, perhaps because he and Grossman had resolved their legal dispute over the Dwarf Music copyrights on his songs. Clinton Heylin argues that Dylan was able to consent following the critical and commercial success of his album Blood on the TracksBlood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks is Bob Dylan's 15th studio album, released by Columbia Records in January 1975. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia after a two-album stint with Asylum Records....
, released that same month: "After Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes no longer had the status of a final reminder of Dylan's lost genius". In 1975, as well, the Band purchased Shangri-La ranch in Malibu, California, which they transformed into their recording studio.
Engineer Rob Fraboni was brought to Shangri-La to clean up the recordings still in the possession of Hudson, the original engineer. Fraboni had worked on Dylan's Planet Waves
Planet Waves
Planet Waves is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's 14th studio album, released by Asylum Records in January 1974....
album, with backing by the Band, and the live Dylan–Band album Before the Flood
Before the Flood
Side threeSide four-Personnel:* Bob Dylan – vocal, guitars, harmonica, piano* Robbie Robertson – electric guitar, backing vocal* Richard Manuel – vocal, piano, electric piano, organ, drums* Garth Hudson – Lowrey organ, clavinet, piano, synthesizer, saxophone...
, both released in 1974. Fraboni has described Robertson as the dominant voice in selecting the final tracks for The Basement Tapes and reported that Dylan was not in the studio very often. The stereo recordings made by Hudson were remixed to mono, while Robertson and other members of the Band overdubbed new keyboard, guitar, and drum parts onto some of the 1967 Woodstock recordings. According to Fraboni, four new songs by the Band were also recorded in preparation for the album's official release, one of which, a cover of Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" , "Roll Over Beethoven" , "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B...
's "Going Back to Memphis", did not end up being included. There is disagreement about the recording date of the other three songs: "Bessie Smith", "Ain't No More Cane" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry". While Fraboni has recalled that the Band taped them in 1975, the liner notes for the reissued versions of the Band’s own albums state that these songs were recorded between 1967 and 1970. Ultimately, eight of the twenty-four songs on The Basement Tapes did not feature Dylan, several of them studio outtakes postdating the sessions at Big Pink. In justifying their inclusion, Robertson explained that he, Hudson and Dylan did not have access to all the basement recordings: "We had access to some of the songs. Some of these things came under the heading of 'homemade' which meant a Basement Tape to us." Robertson has suggested that the Basement Tapes are, for him, "a process, a homemade feel" and so could include recordings from a wide variety of sources.
Track listing
Bob Dylan – acoustic guitar, piano, vocals; Robbie Robertson – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, vocals; Richard Manuel – piano, drums, harmonica, vocals; Rick Danko – electric bass, mandolin, vocals; Garth Hudson – organ, clavinet, accordion, tenor sax, piano; Levon Helm – drums, mandolin, electric bass, vocals.All songs by Bob Dylan, except where noted.
Side one
- "Odds and Ends" – 1:47
- "Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)" (Richard Manuel) – 3:39
- "Million Dollar Bash" – 2:32
- "Yazoo Street Scandal" (Robbie Robertson) – 3:29
- "Goin' to Acapulco" – 5:27
- "Katie's Been Gone" (Manuel, Robertson) – 2:46
Side two
- "Lo and Behold" – 2:46
- "Bessie Smith" (Rick Danko, Robertson) – 4:18
- "Clothes Line Saga" – 2:58
- "Apple Suckling Tree" – 2:48
- "Please Mrs. Henry" – 2:33
- "Tears of Rage" (Dylan, Manuel) – 4:15
Side three
- "Too Much of Nothing" – 3:04
- "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" – 2:15
- "Ain't No More Cane" (Traditional) – 3:58
- "Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)" – 2:04
- "Ruben Remus" (Manuel, Robertson) – 3:16
- "Tiny Montgomery" – 2:47
Side four
- "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" – 2:42
- "Don't Ya Tell Henry" – 3:13
- "Nothing Was Delivered" – 4:23
- "Open the Door, Homer" – 2:49
- "Long Distance Operator" – 3:39
- "This Wheel's on Fire" (Danko, Dylan) – 3:52
Cover art
The cover photograph for the 1975 album was taken by designer and photographer Reid MilesReid Miles
and Reid Miles was an American graphic designer and photographer.Reid Miles was born in Chicago on 4 July 1927 but, following the Stock Market Crash and the separation of his parents, moved with his mother to Long Beach, California in 1929.After high school Miles joined the Navy and, following...
in the basement of a Los Angeles YMCA
YMCA
The Young Men's Christian Association is a worldwide organization of more than 45 million members from 125 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs...
. It poses Dylan and the Band alongside characters suggested by the songs: a woman in a Mrs. Henry T-shirt, an Eskimo, a circus strongman and a dwarf. Robertson wears a blue Mao-style suit
Mao suit
The modern Chinese tunic suit is a style of male attire known in China as the Zhongshan suit , and known in the West as the Mao suit...
; Manuel wears a U.S. Air Force uniform. Musicians David Blue and Neil Young
Neil Young
Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...
are also present in the photo.
Reception and sales
Columbia RecordsColumbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
released The Basement Tapes on June 26, 1975. The album peaked at number seven on the Billboard chart, and reached number eight in the UK. It was acclaimed by critics. John Rockwell
John Rockwell
John Rockwell is a music critic, editor, and dance critic. He studied at Phillips Academy, Harvard, the University of Munich, and the University of California, Berkeley, earning a Ph.D. in German culture....
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
hailed it as "one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music." Rolling Stones Paul Nelson
Paul Nelson (critic)
Paul Nelson was a folk and rock music critic who wrote for Sing Out! and Rolling Stone. He was instrumental in launching and supporting the careers of Bob Dylan, The New York Dolls, Elliott Murphy, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon...
called its contents "the hardest, toughest, sweetest, saddest, funniest, wisest songs I know". Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau is an American essayist, music journalist, and self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics".One of the earliest professional rock critics, Christgau is known for his terse capsule reviews, published since 1969 in his Consumer Guide columns...
gave it an A+ in his Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
"Consumer Guide" column. He commented on how the recordings sounded richer and stranger in 1975 than when they were made and concluded, "We don't have to bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967, too." The Basement Tapes topped the Voices Pazz & Jop Critics Poll
Pazz & Jop
The Pazz & Jop critics' poll is a poll of music critics run by The Village Voice newspaper. It is compiled every year from the top ten lists of hundreds of music critics...
. The review in The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
declared, "He may perplex, irritate, and disappoint, but Dylan has to rank as the single greatest artist modern American pop music has produced."
Criticism of 1975 album
Criticism of the 1975 official release of The Basement Tapes has centered on two issues: the recordings by the Band on their own, and the selection of the Dylan songs. In his book about the basement sessions, Greil MarcusGreil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...
describes the album's contents as "sixteen basement recordings plus eight Band demos". Critic Michael Gray
Michael Gray (author)
Michael Gray is a British author who has written extensively about popular music.Gray grew up on Merseyside, attended Birkenhead School, and read History and English Literature at the University of York. Gray subsequently lived and worked in North Devon, Birmingham, West Malvern, London and North...
writes of the album, "The interspersed tracks by the Band alone merely disrupt the unity of Dylan material, much more of which should have been included. Key songs missing here include 'I Shall Be Released' and 'The Mighty Quinn'". Heylin similarly argues that compiler Robbie Robertson did Dylan fans "a major disservice" by omitting those two songs as well as "I'm Not There" and "Sign On The Cross". He writes, "The album as released hardly gave a real idea of what they had been doing in Woodstock. Not even the two traditional songs pulled to the master reels—'Young But Daily Growin' and 'The Banks Of The Royal Canal'—made the final twenty-four cuts."
The honesty of the 1975 album was questioned by a reviewer of the remastered version of the Band's Music From Big Pink, issued in 2000. Dave Hopkins noted that "Katie's Been Gone", which appears as a bonus track on the Big Pink reissue, is the same recording that appeared on The Basement Tapes, but now "in stereo and with improved sound quality beyond what the remastering process alone would provide". Hopkins declared, "The cat's out of the bag: 'Katie' and the other Band-only tracks on The Basement Tapes must have been intentionally muddied in the studio in 1975 so that they would fit better alongside the Dylan material recorded in the basement with a home reel-to-reel." Heylin also takes exception to Robertson's passing off the Band's songs as originating from the basement sessions. By including eight Band recordings to Dylan's sixteen, he says, "Robertson sought to imply that the alliance between Dylan and the Band was far more equal than it was: 'Hey, we were writing all these songs, doing our own thing, oh and Bob would sometimes come around and we'd swap a few tunes.'" Heylin asserts that "though revealing in their own right, the Band tracks only pollute the official set and reduce its stature."
Barney Hoskyns describes "Heylin's objections [as] the academic ones of a touchy Dylanologist: The Basement Tapes still contained some of the greatest music either Dylan or the Band ever recorded." Sid Griffin similarly defends the inclusion of the Band's songs: "'Ain't No More Cane' may be included under false pretenses, but it is stirring stuff. ... And while a Dylan fan might understandably grumble that he wanted to hear another Bob song, a fan equally versed and interested more generally in late 20th century American music would only smile and thank the Good Lord for the gift of this song." Of the Band's version of "Don't Ya Tell Henry", he writes, "True, the argument could be made that Robertson was way outside his brief in including this on the two-LP set, as this wasn't from Woodstock or '67, and has no Dylan on it. ... But it is a song from the Basement Tapes era and it swings like a randy sailor on shore leave in a bisexual bar. So give Robbie a break."
By 1975, Dylan showed scant interest in the discographical minutiae of the recordings. Interviewed on the radio by Mary Travers
Mary Travers
Mary Travers , American singer-songwriter; member of the folk, pop group, Peter, Paul and Mary.Mary Travers may also refer to:* Mary Rose-Anna Travers , Québécoise singer known as Madame Bolduc or La Bolduc...
, he recalled, "We were all up there sorta drying out ... making music and watching time go by. So, in the meantime, we made this record. Actually, it wasn't a record, it was just songs which we'd come to this basement and recorded. Out in the woods..." Heylin commented that Dylan seemed to "dismiss the work as unfinished therapy".
Themes
Although The Basement Tapes reached the public in an unorthodox manner, officially released eight years after the songs were recorded, critics have assigned them an important place in Dylan's development. Michael Gray writes, "The core Dylan songs from these sessions actually do form a clear link between ... two utterly different albums. They evince the same highly serious, precarious quest for a personal and universal salvation which marked out the John Wesley Harding collection—yet they are soaked in the same blocked confusion and turmoil as Blonde On Blonde. 'Tears Of Rage', for example, is an exact halfway house between, say, 'One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
"One of Us Must Know " is a song written and recorded by Bob Dylan. It is the fourth track on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, and was released as the album's first single that February. The song is an emotional confession of misconnects and apologies from the singer to a woman who has tragically...
' and 'I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
"I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" is a song by Bob Dylan that was originally released on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. It was recorded at the first John Wesley Harding session on October 17, 1967. It has been covered by many artists, including Joan Baez, Vic Chesnutt, John Doe, Thea Gilmore,...
'".
Singer-songwriter David Gray
David Gray (musician)
David Gray is an English singer-songwriter. He released his first studio album in 1993 and received worldwide attention after the release of White Ladder six years later...
commented that the great achievement of The Basement Tapes is that Dylan found a way out of the anguish and verbal complexity that had characterized his mid-sixties albums such as Blonde on Blonde: "It's the sound of Dylan letting his guard down. 'Clothes Line Saga' and all those ridiculous songs, he's obviously just making it all up, they were having such a great time. The sound of the Band is so antiquated like something out of the Gold Rush
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands , and Latin America, who were the first to start flocking to...
and Dylan fits in because he's this storyteller with an ancient heart. At the time everything he did was so scrutinised, yet somehow he liberated himself from all that and enjoyed making music again. You hear an unselfconscious quality on this record which you don't ever hear again." "He mocks his own inertia and impotence", writes critic Mike Marqusee
Mike Marqusee
Mike Marqusee is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist in London. His partner is the barrister Liz Davies.Marqusee, who describes himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew" has lived in Britain since 1971...
, "but with a much gentler touch than in Blonde on Blonde. In place of that album's strangled urgency, Dylan adopts a laconic humor, a deadpan tone that speaks of resignation and self-preservation in the face of absurdity and betrayal."
Robert Shelton has argued that The Basement Tapes revolves around two sets of themes. One group of songs is "tinctured with the search for salvation": "I Shall Be Released" (on the demo, but not on the album), "Too Much of Nothing", "Nothing Was Delivered", "This Wheel's On Fire", "Tears of Rage" and "Goin' To Acapulco". "'Nothing' and 'nowhere' perplex and nag" in these songs, he writes. "The 'nothing' echoes the artist's dilemma: death versus life, vacuum versus harvest, isolation versus people, silence versus sound, the void versus the life-impulse." A second group, comprising "songs of joy, signaling some form of deliverance", includes most of the remaining songs in the collection.
In his sleeve notes for the 1975 release of The Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus wrote, "What was taking place as Dylan and the Band fiddled with the tunes, was less a style than a spirit—a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention." He compared the songs to fabled works of American music: "The Basement tapes are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory ... they are no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train
Mystery Train
"Mystery Train" is a song written by Junior Parker and Sam Phillips. It was first recorded in Phillip's Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee in 1953. Raymond Hill plays tenor sax and Matt Murphy plays lead guitar with Bill Johnson on piano, Pat Hare on...
' or Robert Johnson's 'Love In Vain
Love in Vain
"Love in Vain" is a 1937 blues song written by Robert Johnson.The song is noted for its sad lyrics, tone, and style. In the 1991 documentary film The Search for Robert Johnson, John P. Hammond plays Robert's recording of "Love in Vain" for the elderly Willie Mae Powell, the woman for whom it was...
."
In 1997, after listening to more than 100 basement recordings issued on various bootlegs, Marcus extended these insights into a book-length study, Invisible Republic
Invisible Republic
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes is a book by music critic Greil Marcus about the creation and cultural importance of The Basement Tapes, a series of recordings made by Bob Dylan in 1967 in collaboration with The Hawks, who would subsequently become known as The Band...
(reissued in 2001 under the title The Old, Weird America). In it, he quotes Robertson's memory of the recording: "[Dylan] would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn't know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn't tell." Marcus calls the songs "palavers with a community of ghosts. ... These ghosts were not abstractions. As native sons and daughters they were a community. And they were once gathered in a single place: on the Anthology of American Folk Music
Anthology of American Folk Music
The Anthology of American Folk Music is a six-album compilation released in 1952 by Folkways Records , comprising eighty-four American folk, blues and country music recordings that were originally issued from 1927 to 1932.Experimental filmmaker and notable eccentric Harry Smith compiled the music...
". A collection of blues and country music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, the Anthology—compiled by Harry Smith
Harry Everett Smith
Harry Everett Smith was an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic...
and originally released by Folkways Records
Folkways Records
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.-History:...
in 1952—was a major influence on the folk music revival
American folk music revival
The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States that began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob...
of the 1950s and the 1960s. Marcus suggests that Dylan's Basement Tapes shared with Smith's Anthology a sense of alchemy, "and in the alchemy is an undiscovered country".
Legacy
While removed from the public's gaze, Dylan and the Band made music very different from the recordings of other major artists. Andy Gill writes, "Musically, the songs were completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the pop world, which during the long hot summer of 1967 was celebrating the birth of the hippie movement with a gaudy explosion of 'psychedelicPsychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
' music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos." Patrick Humphries itemizes the ways in which Dylan's songs dissented from the dominant ethos of rock culture: "While the rock world vented its spleen on parents and leaders, Dylan was singing privately about parental fidelity. While George Harrison
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
was testifying that life went on within and without you
Within You Without You
"Within You Without You" is a song written by George Harrison, released on The Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.-Composition:...
, Dylan was taking his potatoes down to be mashed. While Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....
was 2,000 light years from home
2000 Light Years from Home
"2000 Light Years From Home" is a song from The Rolling Stones' 1967 psychedelic rock album Their Satanic Majesties Request. Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it also appeared as the B-side to the U.S. single "She's a Rainbow". Jagger reportedly wrote the lyrics in Brixton prison following...
, Dylan was strapping himself to a tree with roots."
This aspect of the basement recordings became obvious when Dylan chose to record his next album, John Wesley Harding
John Wesley Harding (album)
John Wesley Harding is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's eighth studio album, released by Columbia Records in December 1967.Produced by Bob Johnston, the album marked Dylan's return to acoustic music and traditional roots, after three albums of electric rock music...
, in Nashville in late 1967. The songs on that record, according to Howard Sounes, revealed the influence of Dylan's daily reading of both the Bible and the Hank Williams songbook. And its sound came as a shock to other rock musicians. As producer Bob Johnston
Bob Johnston
Donald William Robert 'Bob' Johnston is a noted American record producer, best known for his work with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson and many Nashville recording artists, as well as Simon and Garfunkel.-Early days:Johnston was born into a professional musical family...
recalled, "Every artist in the world was in the studio trying to make the biggest-sounding record they possibly could. So what does [Dylan] do? He comes to Nashville and tells me he wants to record with a bass, drum and guitar." Dylan summed up the gap: "At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads."
When the Band began work on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in a New York studio in January 1968, they employed a recording technique similar to the one they had become familiar with during the Basement Tapes sessions. As Robertson described it, "We used the same kind of mike on everything. A bit of an anti-studio approach. And we realized what was comfortable to us was turning wherever we were into a studio. Like the Big Pink technique." That technique influenced groups including the Beatles, writes Griffin, who calls their Twickenham Get Back sessions in early 1969 an effort to record "in the honest, live, no frills, no overdubs, down home way that the Hawks/Band did for the Basement Tapes".
"Listening to The Basement Tapes now, it seems to be the beginning of what is called Americana
Americana (music)
Americana is an amalgam of roots musics formed by the confluence of the shared and varied traditions that make up the American musical ethos; specifically those sounds that are merged from folk, country, blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and other external influential styles...
or alt.country
Alternative country
Alternative country is a loosely defined sub-genre of country music, which includes acts that differ significantly in style from mainstream or pop country music...
," wrote Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg
Stephen William Bragg , better known as Billy Bragg, is an English alternative rock musician and left-wing activist. His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, and his lyrics mostly deal with political or romantic themes...
. "The thing about alt.country which makes it 'alt' is that it is not polished. It is not rehearsed or slick. Neither are The Basement Tapes. Remember that The Basement Tapes holds a certain cultural weight which is timeless—and the best Americana does that as well." The songs' influence has been detected by critics in many subsequent acts. Stuart Bailie wrote, "If rock'n'roll is the sound of a party in session, the Basement Tapes were the morning after: bleary, and a bit rueful but dashed with emotional potency. Countless acts—Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev is an American alternative rock group, that formed in the late 1980s in Buffalo, New York. Original personnel were David Baker , Jonathan Donahue , Sean Mackowiak, a.k.a...
, Cowboy Junkies
Cowboy Junkies
Cowboy Junkies are a Canadian alternative country/blues/folk rock band. The group was formed in Toronto in 1985 by Margo Timmins , Michael Timmins , Peter Timmins and Alan Anton ....
, Wilco
Wilco
Wilco is an American alternative rock band based in Chicago, Illinois. The band was formed in 1994 by the remaining members of alternative country group Uncle Tupelo following singer Jay Farrar's departure. Wilco's lineup has changed frequently, with only singer Jeff Tweedy and bassist John...
, The Waterboys
The Waterboys
The Waterboys are a band formed in 1983 by Mike Scott. The band's membership, past and present, has been composed mainly of musicians from Scotland, Ireland and England. Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Spiddal, New York, and Findhorn have all served as homes for the group. The band has played in a...
—have since tried to get back to that place."
For Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
, The Basement Tapes "sound like they were made in a cardboard box. I think [Dylan] was trying to write songs that sounded like he'd just found them under a stone. As if they sound like real folk songs—because if you go back into the folk tradition, you will find songs as dark and as deep as these."
In 2003, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine ranked The Basement Tapes number 291 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
"The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" is the title of a 2003 special issue of American magazine Rolling Stone, and a related book published in 2005.Related news articles:...
. In a special issue devoted to Dylan's work, Q
Q (magazine)
Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...
magazine awarded the record five stars, its highest rating, commenting that "Dylan's work is by turns haunting, hilarious and puzzling—and all of it taps into centuries of American song".
Other released Basement Tape songs
Columbia has issued four additional 1967 recordings by Dylan from Big Pink since The Basement Tapes in 1975: take 2 of "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
"Quinn the Eskimo " is a folk-rock song written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967. The song was first released in January 1968 as "Mighty Quinn" by the British band Manfred Mann and became a great success...
" on Biograph
Biograph (album)
Biograph is a 53-track compilation spanning the career of Bob Dylan, from his 1962 debut album to the 1981 LP Shot of Love. Released in 1985 by Columbia Records, on both a 5-LP and a 3-CD Box set, it was one of the earliest and most successful examples of the CD Box set...
in 1985, "I Shall Be Released" and "Santa-Fe
Santa-Fe (Bob Dylan song)
"Santa-Fe" is a song that was recorded by Bob Dylan and the Band in the summer or fall of 1967 in the Woodstock area of New York State. It was recorded during the sessions that would in 1975 be released on The Basement Tapes but was not included on that album...
" on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 in 1991 and "I'm Not There (1956)" on the I'm Not There soundtrack
I'm Not There (soundtrack)
The soundtrack album for the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There was released as a double CD on October 30, 2007. It features only one recording by Dylan himself—his previously unreleased recording of the title song "I'm Not There" recorded during The Basement Tapes' sessions in 1967—plus...
in 2007. In the early 1970s, Dylan released new recordings of four compositions from the Basement Tape era: a performance of "Quinn the Eskimo" from the Isle of Wight Festival
Isle of Wight Festival 1969
The 1969 Isle of Wight Festival was held on August 30–31, 1969, at Wootton, and attracted an audience of approximately 150,000 to see the acts of Bob Dylan, The Who and Free. It was the second of three music festivals held on the Isle of Wight between 1968 and 1970...
on August 31, 1969, appeared on Self Portrait
Self Portrait (Bob Dylan album)
Self Portrait is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's tenth studio album, released by Columbia Records in June 1970.Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions...
, and October 1971 recordings with Happy Traum
Happy Traum
Happy Traum is an American folk musician who started playing music in the Fifties. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother...
of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "I Shall Be Released" and "Down in the Flood" appeared on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II
Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II
Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II , also known as More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, was the second compilation album released by Bob Dylan. With Dylan not expected to release any new material for an extended period of time, CBS Records president Clive Davis proposed issuing a double LP compilation of...
.
In 2005, the Band compilation A Musical History
A Musical History
A Musical History is the second box set to anthologize Canadian-American rock group The Band. Released by Capitol Records on September 27, 2005 it features 111 tracks spread over five Compact Discs and one DVD...
was released, which includes the 1967 Woodstock Band recordings "Words and Numbers", "You Don't Come Through", "Caledonia Mission", "Ferdinand the Imposter" and "Will the Circle Be Unbroken". In 1968, the Band re-recorded "This Wheel's on Fire", "Tears of Rage", "I Shall Be Released" and "Caledonia Mission" in studios in New York and Los Angeles for Music From Big Pink. Versions of other Band Basement Tape compositions, recorded in various locations between 1967 and possibly 1975, appear on Across the Great Divide and A Musical History, and as bonus tracks on the 2000 reissues of Music From Big Pink and Cahoots. Live versions by the Band of various Basement Tapes songs have also been issued: "I Shall Be Released" on Before the Flood
Before the Flood
Side threeSide four-Personnel:* Bob Dylan – vocal, guitars, harmonica, piano* Robbie Robertson – electric guitar, backing vocal* Richard Manuel – vocal, piano, electric piano, organ, drums* Garth Hudson – Lowrey organ, clavinet, piano, synthesizer, saxophone...
; "Caledonia Mission" and "This Wheel's On Fire" on Rock of Ages
Rock of Ages (album)
-Side two:-Side three:-Side four:-2001 bonus disc track listing:-Personnel:* Rick Danko - vocal, bass, violin* Levon Helm - vocal, drums, mandolin* Garth Hudson - organ, piano, accordion, tenor saxophone and soprano saxophone solos...
, with "I Shall Be Released", "Down in the Flood" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" appearing on the album's 2001 reissue; "I Shall Be Released" on The Last Waltz and "This Wheel's On Fire" on the 2002 box set release of the album; "I Shall Be Released" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" on Live at Watkins Glen
Live at Watkins Glen
-Personnel:*The Band – producers*Rick Danko – bass, vocals*Levon Helm – drums, mandolin, vocals*Garth Hudson – organ, clavinet*Richard Manuel – piano, drums, clavinet, vocals*Robbie Robertson – guitars*Wayne Watkins – reissue producer...
; and "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos" recorded live at the Woodstock Festival
Woodstock Festival
Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music". It was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in the Catskills near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969...
in August 1969, on Across the Great Divide.
On March 31, 2009, Legacy Records issued a remastered version of the original 1975 Basement Tapes double album, which critics praised for its improved sound quality. According to reviewer Scott Hreha, there was "something about the remastering that makes it feel more like an official album—the earlier CD version’s weak fidelity unfairly emphasized the 'basement' nature of the recordings, where it now possesses a clarity that belies its humble and informal origins."
In the early 1990s, a virtually complete collection of all Dylan's 1967 recordings in Woodstock was released on a bootleg 5-CD set, The Genuine Basement Tapes. The collection, which contains over 100 songs and alternate takes, was later remastered and issued as the 4-CD bootleg A Tree With Roots. Greil Marcus showed the set to Garth Hudson, who declared, "They've got it all." Nonetheless, a handful of basement songs not available on A Tree With Roots or other bootlegs have been documented, including the Band's "Even If It's a Pig Part I" (which has circulated in fragmentary form) and "Even If It's a Pig Part II", and Dylan's "Wild Wolf" and "Can I Get a Racehorse" (copyrighted as "You Own a Racehorse").