Bob Dylan and The Band made music in upstate New York in 1967 that combined the unique talents of the men with a laid-back mindset brought on by their idyllic surroundings to create something magical. Much of the world heard this music before any official release via bootlegs. Finally, in 1975, the participants gave us their official rendering with the release of the double album The Basement Tapes.
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Even as just about all the material recorded by The Band and Dylan in that time period is now officially available, the music still captivates with an aura of weirdness and mystery. Let’s explore how the world’s most foremost bootleg finally became official.
Woodstock Retreat
In 1967, Dylan had fully recovered from his motorcycle accident the previous year, and was hanging out in Woodstock, New York. He invited his buddies from The Band (although they weren’t yet called that), who were still on his payroll after backing him on the incendiary tours of 1965 and ’66. Three members of The Band (Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko) moved into a house they called “Big Pink” in nearby West Saugerties. Robbie Robertson and Dylan would join them each day to make music.
The ostensible purpose of these recordings was to churn out some publishing demos, which would allow Dylan to make some scratch from others recording his songs. Although some songs emerged in that way (“This Wheel’s on Fire,” “The Mighty Quinn,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” to name a few that others covered not long after they were made available), most of the music the men were making was too willfully weird and obscure to be shaped into pop songs.
As the tapes were passed around to publishers and friends, copies were clandestinely made. These copies eventually made it to record stores and independent sellers, usually bearing the title Great White Wonder. The bootlegs became so prevalent that the music was actually reviewed by major publications like Rolling Stone, even though the sound quality was sometimes spotty and none of the participants had sanctioned a release.
Cleaning Out the Basement
Fast-forward to 1975. The prior year, Dylan and The Band had toured together in one of rock music’s first mega-tours. As such, the time was right to unearth the songs of ’67 and give them a proper release. Robertson went through the hours upon hours of tapes to prepare them for a double-album. The Basement Tapes arrived in June 1975, complete with a memorable cover featuring Dylan, The Band, and a wild assortment of characters.
When fans familiar with the bootleg heard The Basement Tapes, they noticed some differences. Chief among them was that Robertson had included some songs that were recorded by The Band without Dylan and separate from the Big Pink recordings. That allowed him to incorporate Levon Helm into the project, since Helm, who had briefly left The Band, really wasn’t a part of the original basement sessions until they were just about over.
Robertson also added some overdubs to clean up the messiness of the recordings. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of his process was song selection. He didn’t include songs like “I’m Not There” and “Sign on the Cross,” which weren’t all that well recorded but still stood out as utterly compelling.
An Acclaimed Excavation
The quibbles with Robertson’s decision-making start to fade when you cue up The Basement Tapes. Dylan seems at ease in a way that he’s never been at any point in his career, while The Band’s unshowy, earthy backing proves just the right foundation. And what a batch of songs: from the hilariously nonsensical (“Clothes Line Saga,” “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”) to the stunningly pretty and profound (“Tears of Rage,” “Goin’ to Acapulco”). Even if it might have been shoehorned in there, Band material like “Katie’s Been Gone” and “Ain’t No More Cane” fits seamlessly.
In November 2014, The Basement Tapes Complete was released as part of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. It contained just about every last reel of tape that Dylan and The Band compiled during that unforgettable time. And yes, there’s a lot of wonderful stuff on there that you need to hear if all you’ve heard is the original two-disc Basement Tapes.
That said, the 1975 release does a wonderful job summing up what Dylan and The Band were doing when the rest of the world wasn’t looking. The Basement Tapes managed to solve the mystery and perpetrate it all at once, which is all music fans could have hoped.
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