Riots, heart transplants, and the album Bob Dylan said nobody was supposed to hear
If a musician told you they were flying to New York airport, you would quickly assume that they were heading to the glittering worlds of Manhattan, to record at a string of iconic studios and play on the stages of even more legendary venues.
But less is said about New York State than the city itself. We blindly associate modernity with innovation and forget that somewhere in the hills of its rolling forests, the true essence of musical greatness exists. Because, just two hours north of Manhattan, the Bowery Ballroom and, of course, the iconic Greenwich Village, sat the Catskill Mountains, a quiet that has long been a part of music history and some of the finest folk and rock records known to man.
Modern artists have all flocked there, in a bid to tinge their records with the iconic folk rock laid down by Bob Dylan and The Band. The prince of Greenwich Village upped sticks at the end of the 1960s, a time when the growing pains of folk expectation weighed heavily on him, and the freedom of being a plugged- in rock and roll player beckoned.
He stepped away, joining The Band, for whom he had developed a deep affinity, and made music the old school way. No fancy studios and no interfering producers, just a set of microphones and a list of ideas. What came out was the achingly beautiful Basement Tapes, Dylan’s 16th studio album that harnessed the natural harmonic influences of the mountains that surrounded him.
But as ever, Dylan wanted his songs to be somewhat political and so used this place of isolated calm to offer a more observational view. With The Band, Dylan would flick through the newspaper, take a glimpse at what was happening in the world and quickly lay down a track, offering an unfiltered and intimate view of it.
He explained, “When China first exploded that hydrogen bomb, that just kind of flashed across the headlines in newspapers. So, you know, we just go in and write tears of rage. Things were just happening. There were riots in the street. There was rioting in Rochester, New York, so that wasn’t that far away. So we wrote ‘Too Much of Nothing’, and then one thing led to another.”
The track acted as a collaged view into a mind detached from modernity. Just two hours from the city, yet feeling like a universe away, Dylan and The Band juxtaposed this feeling of concern and excitement from someone watching from a distance.
He continued, “You know, the human heart, that’s the first time anybody had ever heard of a human heart being transplanted. That was incredible. It was a real breakthrough. So we came up with a song”.
It was a deliberately scrappy musical diary entry from Dylan, who later professed that no one was supposed to hear the record. But the popularity it garnered from bootleg tapes proved that his stream of consciousness approach to songwriting was just as sought after as his more carefully crafted political ballads. It was a master commentator at work, watching the world change through modernity, from his rather ancient backdrop.
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