After almost a decade in which his supernova celebrity had seemed on the decline, Bob Dylan released back-to-back original albums in the mid-1970s that reminded everyone why he was the most dominant figure at the intersection of folk music and rock & roll.
In 1975, he released Blood on the Tracks, perhaps the most fantastic break-up album ever recorded. A year later, he released Desire, a musical book of short stories that he crafted with the help of Jacques Levy.
The double shot left no doubt that Dylan had not lost his touch, as many had opined throughout the early 1970s. In between those two giants, Dylan had his name on another album of essentially original material that was part legend, part curiosity. A double album that remains to this day one of the most singularly enjoyable records Bob Dylan was ever associated with.
Fifty years ago, in late June, 1975, the public got to hear The Basement Tapes.
Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes became a fascinating piece of musical history
Dylan was intimately involved in creating what became The Basement Tapes, but he had little to do with its release. The album is credited to Dylan and The Band, and Band leader Robbie Robertson was the driving creative force behind what the album eventually became.
To understand what Robertson did, we have to go back almost ten years to the mid-1960s when Dylan was a lightning rod for the evolving conflict in popular music.
After releasing a trio of albums that sped up that evolution – Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966) – Dylan suffered a devastating motorcycle accident that removed him from the public spotlight for more than a year. The near-death experience also led him to rethink the way he functioned as a musician.
Dylan’s songs had been getting longer and more elliptical in the mid-‘60s, and the rest of rock and roll followed suit. It was considered a natural pattern of growth. But Dylan was bothered by the bigger, splashier production that began finding its way into rock and roll. While on the mend, he began exploring simpler, more direct song structures with a more basic orchestral approach.
Roots music and Americana didn’t have formal names yet, but that’s what he was helping invent. Or re-invent. The style had been around forever.
And he had help. This wasn’t like Bruce Springsteen – the artist who emerged in Dylan’s absence as his most likely successor – holed up on his own creating Nebraska in the early ‘80s. Dylan may have been holed up, but he had a band hanging out with him.
They would come to be known as The Band, but in 1966-67, just a handful of Canadians could play and sing authentic roots-style music with the best of them. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson served as Dylan’s backing band when he toured in the mid-‘60s, enraging and energizing fans with a new electric sound.
As Dylan recovered from his accident in Woodstock, New York, the others would drop by to hang out and play music. They played traditional folk songs, contemporary covers, and eventually, a bunch of new songs that Dylan was dashing off on the spot.
They recorded more than 100 of these songs in total, though at the time, no real thought was given to turning them into an album.
Reports of the sessions began to spread. When Dylan went to Nashville to start recording a few original albums of borderline and actual country music, his four supporting players teamed up with American drummer Levon Helm and officially became The Band. They began to earn a stellar rep for themselves in the late 1960s into the early ‘70s.
Even though Dylan and the Band were releasing new music right along, interest in those 1966 recordings continued to grow. Some of the songs had leaked out in bootleg copies from concerts, but few people had heard the original recordings.
That changed in 1975, when Dylan gave Robertson the OK to gather whatever recordings he deemed worthy and put them together in a “new” album. Robertson chose 16 of those Woodstock recordings and added eight more songs that The Band had cut in the intervening years.
There was enough material for a double album.
Oh, and I think I forgot to mention that those Woodstock recordings had been done in the basement of Dylan’s recovery house. Hence the album’s name – The Basement Tapes.
When the album finally came out, some Dylan fans objected to the Band numbers that Robertson included. Others lamented the absence of some well-known songs that had been recorded but were not included.
But fifty years later, those seem like very minor quibbles. The songs that are included range from slapdash and silly to almost-too-poignant-for-words beauty. Every last one of them – even those slapdash and silly – is a gem.
From the opening track – Dylan’s rollicking Ódds and Ends” – which serves as a thematic statement for the project as a whole – to the harrowing Dylan composition “This Wheel's on Fire,” which closes Side Four, we get a series of elite artists working near the very top of their games.
They are relaxed but tight. The music seems to come from prehistory, but comments on what is happening today.
Or rather, what was happening about ten years earlier. That is one of the remarkable things about The Basement Tapes. It feels just a touch out of time because it is. The songs did not sound much like Blood on the Tracks or Desire because they came from a different era.
Fifty years later, that barely matters, but the album retains that timeless quality. It still manages to be old and contemporary at the same time.
As for those songs that did not feature Dylan, I can’t think of another song more painfully poignant than “Katie’s Been Gone,” a song written by Manuel and Robertson that features one of Manuel’s most affecting vocals. The songs sung by Levon Helm – “Ain’t No More Cane” or the boisterous “Yazoo Street Scandal” – are magnificent slices of American folk and blues.
Dylan's originals feature the casual nonsense of “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” and “Lo and Behold.” There’s the shaggy dog “Clothes Line Saga” and the hilarious mini-soap opera of “Please Mrs. Henry.”
Then there are the character sketches of “Ruben Remus,” “Tiny Montgomery,” or the somewhat more complete Band number “Bessie Smith,” which features the beautiful harmonies of Danko and Robertson, while Hudson’s organ lends a majestic note.
Those songs are all great fun, and if they made up the entire album, The Basement Tapes would be a raucous novelty. But there are a handful of other songs that became standards, and whose immense power seems almost impossible given the casual nature of their creation.
Dylan’s “Too Much of Nothing,” with Manuel and Danko combining on the haunting backing vocals, is timeless Dylan poetry. A few songs later, he sings God’s retribution in “Crash on the Levee,” riding a bouncy Hudson organ riff.
Then there are the two numbers that close each of the two discs – “Tears of Rage” and the aforementioned “Wheels on Fire.” Both songs could have come from Blonde on Blonde or its successor, John Wesley Harding. That makes sense, since that’s when they were initially created.
Lyrically and conceptually, The Basement Tapes do not make the coherent statement that Dylan’s albums from the mid-'60s or the mid-'70s manage. But musically, whether coming from Dylan or the members of the Band, they are all of one cloth, and that cloth is as purely wondrous Americana as you will ever hear.