#292 - Bob Dylan & The Band - The Basement Tapes (1975)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
BACKGROUND – BOB DYLAN & THE BAND
Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, was born in 1941 in Minnesota. He grew up on music from radio station's from all over, exposing him to blues, country, and rock n roll. After forming a few bands in high school, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota, and performed folk music at local coffee houses. This was also around the time he started to go by "Bob Dylan" (it would be legally changed a few years later). He dropped out after 1 year, and moved to New York City in 1961. His folk prowess continued to grow, but he also started to become influenced by African-American poets he heard on the NY streets. By 1962, he hooked up with manager Albert Grossman and signed his first management contract. The first of his 39 (!) studio albums came out later that year, but he started to get attention as a strong singer-songwriter with his 1963 release "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan". Dylan also wrote about topical issues going on in the 1960s, including the Civil Rights movement. He released two albums in both 1964 and 1965, which included his recording with electric instruments, which he received a lot of backlash for from the folk music community.In 1966, he released the double album "Blonde on Blonde", which was recorded in Nashville, which combined the musical cultures of both NYC and the country world. After touring to support the album, Dylan was in a motorcycle accident that changed his perspective. After that he made very few public appearances for some time, and did not tour again for almost eight years. But he did record over a 100 songs with various musicians at his home, which would later be whittled down to 24 songs and be released as The Basement Tapes. Dylan's motorcycle accident is still viewed as the pivot of his career.
The Hawks were Dylan's five member backing band that supported him on his tours in 1965 and 1966. The Hawks comprised four Canadian musicians—Rick Danko (bass), Garth Hudson (organ, piano, accordion, piano), Richard Manuel (piano, drums, vocals) and Robbie Robertson (guitar and vocals) —and one American, Levon Helm (drums, vocals, mandolin). 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. Helm rejoined the group for the basement recording sessions, and was a part of "The Band" without Dylan after 1968. They were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989 and the RnR HOF in 1994. In 2008, the group received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award ,and in 2014, they were inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Dylan has been nominated for 49 Grammys with 15 wins. He was inducted in to the RnR HOF in 1988, received and Oscar and Golden Globe Award in the 2000s, and also a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. He added a Nobel Prize for literature in 2016.
The only other album BD & The Band released was their debut "Music From Big Pink" in 1968. Some of the 11 songs were written during these basement sessions, while others were recorded in NY or LA.
ALBUM BACKGROUND – THE BASEMENT TAPES
The Basement Tapes is the 16th album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and his second with the Band. It was released in June 1975. 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. 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. Recording sessions began at Dylan's house in Woodstock, New York, then moved to the basement of Big Pink, a house that one of the members of The Band rented.
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.
The Basement Tapes was critically acclaimed upon release, reaching #7 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape album chart.
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!'
One of the qualities of The Basement Tapes that sets it apart from other works of the time 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."[30] Of the sound and atmosphere of the basement recordings, Robbie Robertson recalled "One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room. So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn't hear the singing, you were playing too loud."
In October 1967, a 14 song demo tape was copyrighted and the compositions were registered with Dwarf Music, a publishing company jointly owned by Bob Dylan and manager Albert Grossman. Acetates and tapes of the songs then circulated among interested recording artists. As they 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, "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, and one track recorded from The Johnny Cash Show. One of those responsible for the bootleg, said 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.