What happened to Bob Dylan’s basement tapes tracks?
The 1960s were a pivotal decade for developments in music production, and the biggest bands of the era were keen to stay on top of them. Abbey Road became the undisputed home of The Beatles, where they would record on a futuristic four-track console. The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix opted to record at the similarly forward-thinking sister studio Olympic. But while most artists were trying desperately to stay ahead of the curve in production developments, Bob Dylan preferred to stick to his roots.
While The Beatles recorded their ambitious concept album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at EMI Studios and Hendrix worked on his debut between Olympic and De Lane Lea, Dylan spent 1967 in the basement of a salmon-coloured house in West Saugerties, New York. Forgoing state-of-the-art studios in favour of home recording, he spent his days in the basement of the Big Pink, a house rented out by several members of The Band.
Dylan was content recording in a cosy basement with a couple of microphones and some truly trusted collaborators. In fact, he saw it as the ideal recording experience. “I’d do it all again,” he once told Rolling Stone of The Basement Tapes recording sessions, “You know… 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.”
It certainly sounds serene, and it proved to be a particularly lucrative environment for Dylan’s songwriting. In the months he spent in the Big Pink basement, he would pen well over a hundred new songs, though it seems that he never intended for them to be curated onto an album. They became bootlegs and songs that other artists would take on, but it would be almost half a century before we could hear Dylan’s work in its entirety.
As Garth Hudson said of the strangely mystic madness: “We were doing seven, eight, 10, sometimes 15 songs a day.” The Band’s bearded keyboardist continued: “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 certainly slipped into a prolific vein of form, shedding the ‘voice of a generation’ pressures that once cloistered his songwriting.
However, it took 47 years for The Basement Tapes to be unveiled to the public in their entirety, finally receiving a physical and digital release in 2014. Some songs from the collection had been heard before, on bootlegs or on the 1975 release, The Basement Tapes, but most had remained unreleased since they were first recorded back in the late 1960s.
But the full Basement Tapes were well worth the wait for Dylan enthusiasts and more casual fans alike. The collection provided folk fans with 139 more examples of his lyrical prowess, familiar vocal style, and folky soundscapes, with every element of his sound further emphasised by his production setting of choice.
From a cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ to two takes of the harmonica-led ‘Million Dollar Bash’, every song on The Basement Tapes makes you feel like you’re right there in the rose-coloured residence with Dylan and The Band. The production style is intimate and candid, letting listeners in on any mistakes and quirks that might have occurred during live recording. It’s a collection that warranted decades of patience. As Tom Waits said when declaring them his favourite collection of Dylan’s work: ”There is a joy and an abandon to this record; it’s also a history lesson.”
The Basement Tapes doesn’t sound as high-tech as some of the albums that were recorded and released in the same era, but it didn’t need to be. Dylan’s honest songwriting thrived in an equally honest setting, in a basement in a big pink house, in the company of his The Band collaborators and in home-taped recordings.
As the liner notes by Greil Marcus state: ‘The Basement Tapes’ are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory… [They are] no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley’s ‘Mystery Train’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain.’”
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