The Basement Tapes
The Basement Tapes is the sixteenth album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and his second with the Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records. Two-thirds of the album's 24 tracks feature Dylan on lead vocals backed by the Band, and were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, in the lapse between the release of Blonde on Blonde and the subsequent recording and release of John Wesley Harding, during sessions that began at Dylan's house in Woodstock, New York, then moved to the basement of Big Pink. While most of these had appeared on bootleg albums, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release. The remaining eight songs, all previously unavailable, feature the Band without Dylan and were recorded between 1967 and 1975.
This article is about the 1975 album. For the 2014 box set, see The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. For a full list of 1967 Basement Tapes recordings, see List of Basement Tapes songs. For the videotapes made by the Columbine shooters, see Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold § Journals and investigation.The Basement Tapes
June 26, 1975
June–September 1967 (Dylan and the Band)
- 1967–1968 (The Band)
- 1975 (overdubs)
76:41
Bob Dylan, The Band
During his 1965–1966 world tour, Dylan was backed by the Hawks, a five-member rock group who would later become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, four members of the Hawks came to Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was out of the public's eye during an extended period of recovery in 1967, he and the members of the Hawks recorded more than 100 tracks together, incorporating 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 16 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, reaching number seven on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape 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.
Legacy[edit]
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 'psychedelic' music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos."[32] 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."[104]
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.[105] 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."[105] Dylan summed up the gap: "At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads."[106]
When the Band began work on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in a New York studio in January 1968,[107] 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."[108] 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".[108]
"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."[109] 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."[110]
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."[20]
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked The Basement Tapes number 291 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[111] number 292 in a 2012 revised list,[112] and number 335 in the magazine's 2020 list.[113] 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".[114]
Hip hop group Public Enemy referenced the album in their 2007 Dylan tribute song "Long and Whining Road": "From basement tapes, beyond them dollars and cents / Changing of the guards spent, now where the hell the majors went?"[115]
Other released Basement Tape songs[edit]
Between 1985 and 2013, Columbia issued five additional 1967 recordings by Dylan from Big Pink: take 2 of "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" on Biograph in 1985,[116] "I Shall Be Released" and "Santa-Fe" on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 in 1991,[117] "I'm Not There (1956)" on the I'm Not There soundtrack in 2007,[118] and "Minstrel Boy" on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 – Another Self Portrait (1969–1971) in 2013.[119] In the early 1970s, Dylan released new recordings of five compositions from The Basement Tape era: live performances of "Minstrel Boy" and "Quinn the Eskimo" from the Isle of Wight Festival on August 31, 1969, appeared on Self Portrait,[120] 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.[121]
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".[64] 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.[122] Versions of other Band Basement Tape compositions, recorded in various locations between 1967 and possibly 1975, appear on Across the Great Divide[123] and A Musical History,[64] and as bonus tracks on the 2000 reissues of Music From Big Pink and Cahoots.[122][124] Live versions by the Band of various Basement Tapes songs have also been issued: "I Shall Be Released" on Before the Flood;[125] "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;[126] "I Shall Be Released" on The Last Waltz and "This Wheel's On Fire" on the 2002 box set release of the album;[127] "I Shall Be Released" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" on Live at Watkins Glen;[128] and "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos" recorded live at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, on Across the Great Divide.[123]
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.[79][129] 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."[79]
In the early 1990s, a virtually complete collection of all of Dylan's 1967 recordings in Woodstock was released on a bootleg five-CD set, The Genuine Basement Tapes. The collection, which contains over 100 songs and alternate takes, was later remastered and issued as the four-CD bootleg A Tree With Roots.[23] On November 4, 2014, Columbia/Legacy issued The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, an official 6-CD box set containing 139 tracks which comprises nearly all of Dylan's basement recordings, including 30 never-bootlegged tracks.[130] A companion 2-CD set containing highlights from the recordings, The Basement Tapes Raw, was also released.[130]