Bob Dylan and the Band began recording The Basement Tapes 55 years ago and officially released The Basement Tapes album 47 years ago today.
The album was Dylan's sixteenth studio album. 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 the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July, 1966, four members of the Hawks 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 public view 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 recorded 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 #7 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
Rick Danko recalled that he, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson joined Robbie Robertson in West Saugerties, 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 Dylan's 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 Robertson. "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,' 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. 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."
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"?'"
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.
In January, 1975, Dylan unexpectedly gave permission for the release of a selection of the basement recordings. Engineer Rob Fraboni was brought to clean up the recordings still in the possession of Garth Hudson, the original engineer.
The cover photograph for the 1975 album was taken by designer and photographer Reid Miles 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 who has been identified as Angelo Rossitto.
Robertson wears a blue Mao-style suit and Manuel wears an RAF flight lieutenant uniform.
"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."
Greil Marcus reads from “The Old, Weird America”
Photo by Frank Beacham
In the 1960s, figures from an older world reappeared like ghosts.
Between June and October of 1967 — 55 years ago — they met almost daily in the basement of a house in West Saugerties, New York. The house was called Big Pink.
The group recorded more than a 100 performances of commonplace or original songs. Fourteen of the songs were pressed as an acetate and sent to other musicians. The basement tapes became a public secret — then a legend.
When the first Basement Tapes was officially released on this day in 1975 — 44 years ago — it climbed to the Top 10. Dylan expressed surprise: “I thought everybody already had them.”
Greil Marcus, in his book, The Old, Weird America, wrote the recordings were “a laboratory where, for a few months, certain bedrock strains of American cultural language were retrieved and reinvented.’’ The basement sessions, Marcus wrote, are buried outside the margins of the history books, in characters like Dock Boggs.
He believes there was “a fatal confusion’’ of art and life promulgated during the folk revival, when, as he puts it, “The kind of life that equaled art was defined by suffering, deprivation, poverty and social exclusion.’’
To the purist who prizes “authenticity’’ over individual vision, wrote Marcus, “the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection.” For a musician to create songs that could stand alongside the folk legacy — which Dylan called “nothing but mystery’’ — there must be conscious artifice, Marcus wrote.
After Dylan’s “unmasking’’ by hostile audiences, Marcus argued, the basement sessions were Dylan’s reassertion that “sometimes it is only the mask of distance, of vanishing, that lets you speak, that gives you the freedom to say what you mean without immediately having to stake your life on every word.’’
In Marcus’ view, the occult lineage of “the old, weird America” is a passing down of that ability to “begin the story again from the beginning” and raise a living present from the dead artifacts of the past.
What Marcus heard in the “sepias and washed-out Technicolor’’ of the basement tapes is a song of that resurrection.
The basement studio in 2011 at Big Pink where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded many of The Basement Tapes 55 years ago.
The room is still being used as a studio
Photo by Frank Beacham