Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | Stealin' | |
| Bob Dylan | No Direction Home: A Martin Scorsese Picture | <p>It's virtually impossible to approach No Direction Home without a cluster of fixed ideas. Who doesn't have their own private Dylan? The true excellence of Martin Scorsese's achievement lies in how his documentary shakes us free of our comfortable assumptions. In the process, it plays out on several levels at once, each taking shape as an unfailingly fascinating narrative. There is, of course, the central story of an individual genius staking out his artistic identity. But along with this Bildungsroman come other threads and contexts: most notably, the role of popular culture in postwar America, art's self-reliance versus its social responsibilities, and fans' complicity with the publicity machine in sustaining myths. All of these threads reinforce each other, together weaving the film's intricate texture.</p><p>Scorsese's 200-plus-minute focus on Dylan's earliest years allows for a portrayal of unprecedented depth, with multiple angles: a rich composite photo is the result. The main narrative has an epic quality: it moves from Dylan growing up in cold-war Minnesota through Greenwich Village coffeehouses and the Newport Folk Festival, climaxing in the controversial 1966 U.K. tour that crowned a period of unbridled and explosive creativity. In his transition from Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, we observe him concocting his impossible-to-describe, unique combination of the topical with the archaic, like an ancient oracle. Scorsese was able to access previously unseen footage from the Dylan archives, including performances, press conferences, and recording sessions. He also uses interviews with Dylan's friends, ex-friends, and fellow artists, and, intriguingly, with the notoriously reclusive Dylan himself (who looks back to provide glosses on the early years), fusing what could have turned into a tiresome series of digressions and tangents into a powerful whole as enlightening, eccentric, contradictory, and ultimately irreducible as its subject.</p><p>Some of the deeply personal bits remain unrevealed, but Dylan's preternatural self-assurance acquires a slightly self-deprecating, even comic edge via some of his reflective comments. Alongside the arrogance, we see touching moments of the young artist's reverence for Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. Joan Baez, in a poignant confessional mood, comes off well, and the late Allen Ginsberg is so seraphically charming he almost steals the show a few times. A crucial throughline is Dylan's hunger for recognition and ability to shape perceptions so that would be singled out as not just another dime-a-dozen folk singer. It's illuminating--particularly for those familiar with the artist's latter-day aloofness on stage--to see his reactions to audience booing in the wake of his "betrayal" in this fuller context. No Direction Home also makes clear--in a way that wasn't possible in D.A. Pennebaker's iconic Don't Look Back--how Dylan's ability to manipulate his persona always, at its core, protects the urge for expression: Dylan's ultimate mandate, as an artist, is never to be pinned down. As Scorsese masterfully shows, the myth around Dylan only grows bigger the more we discover about him.</p><p>— <strong>Thomas May</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | No Direction Home: The Soundtrack | <p>The seventh volume of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series doubles as the soundtrack to No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's feature-length documentary covering Dylan's career from its beginnings to 1966 (it was aired in two parts on PBS in September 2005 and released in expanded form on DVD that same month). Unlike the previous three installments of The Bootleg Series, which focused exclusively on live concerts, No Direction Home is assembled from a variety of sources, including home recordings, publishing demos, alternate studio takes, and live recordings, with the first disc devoted to early acoustic recordings and the second to electric music. In fact, No Direction Home proceeds chronologically, filling in gaps between the proper albums or, more often, providing a parallel history of the most productive era of Dylan's career. All of this material - with the exception of "Song to Woody," taken from his debut, and a cataclysmic version of "Like a Rolling Stone" taken from the Royal Albert Hall show that was released as The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4 - is previously unreleased, and much of it has not been widely bootlegged (and the cuts that have been bootlegged, such as "Dink's Song," have never been heard in such crystal-clear fidelity). Where the inaugural edition of The Bootleg Series had many previously unreleased Dylan originals, there is only one here, the tentative opener, "When I Got Troubles," a sweet, simple 1959 song that finds Dylan in his formative stage. In place of unheard songs are a slew of alternate versions of familiar tunes. On the first disc, these are largely live versions of such warhorses as "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," recorded when the songs were still fresh. These live performances have an immediacy and intimacy that not only illustrate what a powerful folksinger Dylan was, but also suggest how the songs might have sounded when they were new tunes. Toward the end of the first disc, alternate versions that are significantly different from the final versions begin to surface with an early take on "Mr. Tambourine Man" recorded at the Another Side of Bob Dylan sessions with Ramblin' Jack Elliott on second guitar and backing vocals. The second disc has several alternates that are similarly notably different, highlighted by a lively, careening "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" with a different final verse, a "Desolation Row" with electric guitar, "Highway 61 Revisited" without the siren whistle, a slower, heavier, blusier take on "Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat," a relaxed version of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" that lacks the carnivalesque swirl of sound from the Blonde on Blonde version, and a lean, insistent "Visions of Johanna."</p><p>As different as some of these versions are, there are no great revelations here, apart from the realization that the best takes really did make the finished records. But looking for revelations on this seventh edition of The Bootleg Series may be setting the bar too high, particularly because even if few things here are earth-shaking (a rampaging "Maggie's Farm" from Dylan's legendary electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 could qualify, thanks in great deal to an incendiary Mike Bloomfield), everything here is uniformly excellent and worth hearing well more than once. That alone, of course, would make this yet another worthwhile addition to any serious Dylan collection, but what makes No Direction Home noteworthy as an album is that it is the first Dylan record to offer an aural biography of Dylan. This does a superb job of tracing the development of Dylan as a musician, taking him from a young folkie singing standards, through the rush of his early standards, and to the visionary music he made once he went electric. Put in this context, the electric music on disc two sounds as bracing and brilliant and surprising as it did in the '60s, while the acoustic folk on disc one sounds vibrant, pure, and alive. After all these years, that's a hard accomplishment to pull off, and to the credit of everybody involved in this terrific release, they've been able to make even the most familiar Dylan tunes feel new again.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>In his 2004 memoir Chronicles, Bob Dylan writes of his time in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s: "Down in the Village, nothing seemed wrong. Life was not complex. Everybody was looking for openings. Some would get 'em and they'd be gone and others never did. Mine was coming, but just not yet." No Direction Home traces Dylan's career from the summer of 1961 (when Dylan first moved to New York) through the 1966 release of Blonde on Blonde, and doubles as the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese documentary of the same name, which will be aired on PBS later this month.</p><p>Unlike the previous three installments of the Bootleg Series, which captured complete live performances, No Direction Home is a collection of demos, alternate takes, and live recordings, ranging from a barely audible "When I Got Trouble", recorded in 1959 by one of Dylan's high school classmates (making it, in all probability, the first original song Dylan ever laid to tape, all strummy guitar and dim, somersaulting blues-vocals) to the raucous, full-band explosion of "Like a Rolling Stone" (the infamous "Judas!" version, which also appeared on the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series, Live 1966). The songs are laid out chronologically, designed to let listeners see exactly how far Bob Dylan came in six years. 2005 has seen a new glut of Dylan insight, and Chronicles, No Direction Home, and Live at the Gaslight 1962 (a companion piece to No Direction Home, presently available only at your local Starbucks, and sadly worth the stench of burned milk and spilled espresso) are impossibly telling when swallowed together: the end result is a comprehensive glimpse into Dylan-at-21, an oddly detailed examination of a perpetually misunderstood artist.</p><p>"This Land Is Your Land", recorded in 1961 at New York's Carnegie Chapter Hall (little sister to the famed concert space) is an earnest homage to Dylan's beloved muse Woody Guthrie, growled with endearing conviction. "This Land" is followed by a wobbly-voiced "Song to Woody" ("I'm singing you this song, but I can't sing enough/ 'Cause there's not many men who've done the things that you've done"); Dylan's unfettered admiration for Guthrie's work is perfectly (and prominently) posed, captured six years before Dylan perched himself on Guthrie's deathbed. Both feature Dylan's early caw and watchful strums, his veneration for Guthrie's politics and practices heartbreakingly rendered.</p><p>Dylan has always been an especially convincing protest singer, and given the post-Katrina events of the last week, his heartfelt rendition of "This Land is Your Land" is almost too much to take: it may be every Kindergarten class' premier singalong, but "This Land" is still one of the most elegant and subversive folk songs ever written. Guthrie's anthem was scribbled in terse response to Irving Berlin's comparably one-sided "God Bless America," and the song's telling fourth verse (typically censored in service of patriotism) seems just as apt now as it did in 1940: "One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple/ By the Relief Office I saw my people/ As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering/ If God Blessed America for me." Appropriately, "Song to Woody" features Dylan's response: "It's sick and it's hungry/ It's tired and it's torn/ It looks like it's dying and its hardly been born/ But hey Woody Guthrie, I know that you know." Guthrie and Dylan's distress is palpable, thick: Nudge your dial, put CNN on mute, and sob yourself to sleep. (Don't stop when you get to "Masters of War", or, worst of all, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall").</p><p>An early demo of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" (sometimes circulated as a part of the Witmark Demos) sees Dylan cawing with atypical prettiness, his guitar nimble and soft. Recorded in Lou Levy's office at Columbia ("I opened my guitar case, took the guitar out and began fingering the strings. Lou had put a microphone on the desk in front of me and plugged the cord into one of the tape recorders, all the while chomping on a big, exotic stogie," Dylan writes), "Don't Think Twice" justifies the purchase price of No Direction Home all on its own: Levy had Dylan recording original songs, which would eventually be transposed into sheet music and offered around to other artists, Brill Building-style. Accordingly, Dylan seems less concerned with perpetuating his own mythology than with capturing the grim soul of the song, and we're rewarded with three and a half minutes of pure, un-smirking, alarmingly honest Dylan (read: three minutes more than usual).</p><p>Disc Two features some outstandingly weird studio outtakes, including Take 9 of Highway 61 Revisited's "Tombstone Blues", complete with loping fuzztone bass, backing vocals, noodling by guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Band, and Dylan's own giggles. Largely electric, Disc Two also offers a source-tape recording of Dylan's infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance of "Maggie's Farm", where he plugged-in, brazenly defaming the acoustic-only preservationists present, most of whom had comprised much of his fanbase (supposedly, Pete Seeger was hovering nervous backstage, muttering to himself and threatening to cut the power lines.) The Newport Folk Festival had long admitted a thorny relationship with amplifiers, even when the music demanded magnification—festival organizers often stuck howling blues musicians with tiny, whispering stacks, smugly denying their right to wail. Even though Dylan had released the largely electric Bringing It All Back Home earlier that year, "Maggie's Farm" was ultimately received with a mixture of limp, knee-jerk applause and wildly dissatisfied boos—and folk music changed.</p><p>No Direction Home is fairly essential listening for Dylan enthusiasts and an interesting history lesson for everyone else. Not only is American politics skewered and forked apart, but one songwriter's artistic evolution is laid out bare. As ever, Dylan reminds us that there is plenty left to learn.</p><p>— <strong>Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 | |
| Bob Dylan | Live 1966 | <p>Bob Dylan's transformation from folksinger to rock 'n' roll poet in the mid-sixties horrified many of his early fans. Traditionalists saw his use of loud amplified instruments as a corruption of folk music's purity. In 1965 and 1966, Dylan hit the road with an electric band, confronting his listeners face to face with his new rock oriented sound. Bootleg recordings of these incendiary performances have circulated among collectors for decades. Now the most famous of these bootlegs, known as the "Royal Albert Hall" show (even though it comes from the May 17, 1966 performance in Manchester, England and not the later show at the London venue) has finally been officially released. Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert documents one of the most fascinating and electrifying concert battles in music history.</p><p>On the first disc of the two CD set, Dylan plays solo, armed with only an acoustic guitar and harmonica. Perhaps because he still carries the tools of a folksinger, the audience responds to Dylan's seven song acoustic set with respectful silence and warm, enthusiastic applause. One listen to the lyrics, however, and it is clear that Dylan is well past the protest songs of his folk music roots. Like the work of the Beat poets, "Visions of Johanna" and "Desolation Row" pile one surrealistic image on top of another to present a world full of absurdity and madness. Dylan's performance too is otherworldly. His rough ghost of a voice sounds as if it is coming from out of a dream. But Dylan is obviously tuned into every word as he twists and turns the meaning of his prose by emphasizing different aspects of each syllable. The halting tenderness of "Just Like a Woman" is breathtaking and the harmonica solos in "Mr. Tambourine Man" are so hypnotic that Dylan seems to lose himself in their simple beauty as they spiral around his simple but effective guitar strumming. Asthe first half of the show ends, it appears that Dylan's masterful performance has captivated the skeptics in the audience.</p><p>The sound of electric guitars tuning up opens disc two and warns that the second set is an altogether different story. A distant voice and boot-stomp count in the beat before Dylan and his backing musicians called the Hawks, later named the Band, explode into the opening number, the previously unreleased "Tell Me, Momma." The sound is loud and dense, with Robbie Robertson's splintering guitar riffs and Garth Hudson's hurdy-gurdy keyboards giving the roar a playfully ominous texture, as Dylan shouts like a madman and asks, "Tell me, Momma. What's wrong with you? This tiiiime?" The crowd hesitates a moment before applauding as if stunned by the assault. Dylan quickly plays a melody on his harmonica and introduces the next song, saying, "That was "I Don't Believe You." It used to go like that, now it goes like this." A searing rocked-up version of a tune from his folk days follows, coming across like a psychedelic, acid-dosed versionof Buddy Holly.</p><p>The battlelines are drawn. From now on, angry audience members greet each song with shouts and slow rhythmic handclapping to show their disapproval. Yet somehow, Dylan rises to the challenge and puts the protesters in their place every time. At one point, in order to quell the disruptive clapping, Dylan mumbles nonsense into the microphone until people quiet down in order to hear what he's saying. Once the noise subsides, he clearly implores, ". . . if you only wouldn't clap so hard." You gotta hand it to Bob. Who else carries out crowd control with such finesse and humor?</p><p>The music itself is also a response to the hostility in the air. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is more menacing than ever. In the charged atmosphere, its chorus, "You know there's something happening he explains....</p><hr/><p>The most famous bootleg in rock history, with the possible exception of Dylan's own Basement Tapes, finally makes its official appearance 32 years after the event, and nearly 30 years after it started circulating in the underground. Although often identified as a Royal Albert Hall show, this May 17, 1966, concert, in which Dylan played electric material in front of a British audience, was actually recorded in Manchester (hence the unwieldy title with quotes around "Royal Albert Hall"). Even those who've owned this recording for many a year might be tempted by this official package, as it has been expanded into a two-CD set that not only includes the eight electric rock songs from the original bootleg, but also the seven solo acoustic performances that comprised the first half of the show. It's all in very good fidelity, about as good as any copies you could find through unofficial sources. More importantly, the electric half in particular is an important document of rock history. It captures the point at which Dylan was at his most controversial and hard rocking as he blazes through mid-'60s classics such as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man," radical electric arrangements of songs that had originally been recorded acoustically ("One Too Many Mornings," "I Don't Believe You"), and the hard rocker "Tell Me, Momma," which Dylan never recorded in the studio. The acoustic disc is not as epochal, but on par with the electric half in the quality of material and performance. On top of everything else there's a 56-page booklet with a fine essay by Dylan's friend Tony Glover (a notable folk musician in his own right). It's not just an interesting adjunct to Dylan's '60s discography; it's as worthy of attention as anything else he recorded during that decade.</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Blonde On Blonde | <p>If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde on Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period -- he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Blonde On Blonde | <p>If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde on Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period -- he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Live In Europe 1966 | <p>The most famous bootleg in rock history, with the possible exception of Dylan's own Basement Tapes, finally makes its official appearance 32 years after the event, and nearly 30 years after it started circulating in the underground. Although often identified as a Royal Albert Hall show, this May 17, 1966, concert, in which Dylan played electric material in front of a British audience, was actually recorded in Manchester (hence the unwieldy title with quotes around "Royal Albert Hall"). Even those who've owned this recording for many a year might be tempted by this official package, as it has been expanded into a two-CD set that not only includes the eight electric rock songs from the original bootleg, but also the seven solo acoustic performances that comprised the first half of the show. It's all in very good fidelity, about as good as any copies you could find through unofficial sources. More importantly, the electric half in particular is an important document of rock history. It captures the point at which Dylan was at his most controversial and hard rocking as he blazes through mid-'60s classics such as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man," radical electric arrangements of songs that had originally been recorded acoustically ("One Too Many Mornings," "I Don't Believe You"), and the hard rocker "Tell Me, Momma," which Dylan never recorded in the studio. The acoustic disc is not as epochal, but on par with the electric half in the quality of material and performance. On top of everything else there's a 56-page booklet with a fine essay by Dylan's friend Tony Glover (a notable folk musician in his own right). It's not just an interesting adjunct to Dylan's '60s discography; it's as worthy of attention as anything else he recorded during that decade.</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Royal Albert Hall | <p>The most famous bootleg in rock history, with the possible exception of Dylan's own Basement Tapes, finally makes its official appearance 32 years after the event, and nearly 30 years after it started circulating in the underground. Although often identified as a Royal Albert Hall show, this May 17, 1966, concert, in which Dylan played electric material in front of a British audience, was actually recorded in Manchester (hence the unwieldy title with quotes around "Royal Albert Hall"). Even those who've owned this recording for many a year might be tempted by this official package, as it has been expanded into a two-CD set that not only includes the eight electric rock songs from the original bootleg, but also the seven solo acoustic performances that comprised the first half of the show. It's all in very good fidelity, about as good as any copies you could find through unofficial sources. More importantly, the electric half in particular is an important document of rock history. It captures the point at which Dylan was at his most controversial and hard rocking as he blazes through mid-'60s classics such as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man," radical electric arrangements of songs that had originally been recorded acoustically ("One Too Many Mornings," "I Don't Believe You"), and the hard rocker "Tell Me, Momma," which Dylan never recorded in the studio. The acoustic disc is not as epochal, but on par with the electric half in the quality of material and performance. On top of everything else there's a 56-page booklet with a fine essay by Dylan's friend Tony Glover (a notable folk musician in his own right). It's not just an interesting adjunct to Dylan's '60s discography; it's as worthy of attention as anything else he recorded during that decade.</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Blonde On Blonde | <p>If Highway 61 Revisited played as a garage rock record, the double album Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde on Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Throughout the record, the music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"). It's the culmination of Dylan's electric rock & roll period -- he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | The Basement Tapes: Raw | <p>A double-disc distillation of the six-disc box The Basement Tapes Complete, The Basement Tapes: Raw can't quite be seen as an expansion of the 1975 double-LP The Basement Tapes but rather a necessary revision. Shepherded by the Band's Robbie Robertson, that 1975 double-vinyl inserted Band recordings where they didn't belong, suggesting the group were equal partners when it was really Dylan's show. The Basement Tapes: Raw rights this wrong, stripping away the excess overdubs and excising the ten Band songs -- a process which includes handing some of the tunes back over to Bob, including a wildly careening version of "Don't Ya Tell Henry" -- and then adding in all the major Dylan originals missing from the 1975 LP ("I'm Not There," "Santa-Fe," "Minstrel Boy," "Quinn the Eskimo," "Get Your Rocks Off," "Sign on the Cross") and then adding hints of the covers and general madness that can be found in the complete haul. Naturally, some gems are available only in the big box, including a bunch of folk tunes, a rangy "Big River" and "Kickin' My Dog Around," plus the goofs "See You Later Allen Ginsberg" and "All American Boy," but that's the kind of stuff that seems better in context, when it's surrounded by the heavyweight songs showcased here. On their own on this superb two-disc set, those songs amount to a version of the Basement Tapes that not only represents what happened at Big Pink more accurately, but is a thrilling, endlessly captivating listen in its own right.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | The Basement Tapes | <P>The official release of The Basement Tapes -- which were first heard on a 1968 bootleg called The Great White Wonder -- plays with history somewhat, as Robbie Robertson overemphasizes the Band's status in the sessions, making them out to be equally active to Dylan, adding in demos not cut at the sessions and overdubbing their recordings to flesh them out. As many bootlegs (most notably the complete five-disc series) reveal, this isn't entirely true and that the Band were nowhere near as active as Dylan, but that ultimately is a bit like nitpicking, since the music here (including the Band's) is astonishingly good. The party line on The Basement Tapes is that it is Americana, as Dylan and the Band pick up the weirdness inherent in old folk, country, and blues tunes, but it transcends mere historical arcana by being lively, humorous, full-bodied performances. Dylan never sounded as loose, nor was he ever as funny as he is here, and this positively revels in its weird, wild character. For all the apparent antecedents -- and the allusions are sly and obvious in equal measures -- this is truly Dylan's show, as he majestically evokes old myths and creates new ones, resulting in a crazy quilt of blues, humor, folk, tall tales, inside jokes, and rock. The Band pretty much pick up where Dylan left off, even singing a couple of his tunes, but they play it a little straight, on both their rockers and ballads. Not a bad thing at all, since this actually winds up providing context for the wild, mercurial brilliance of Dylan's work -- and, taken together, the results (especially in this judiciously compiled form; expert song selection, even if there's a bit too much Band) rank among the greatest American music ever made.</P><P>— <B>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</B></P><HR><BR><STRONG>Wikipedia<BR></STRONG><BR><SPAN class=mw-headline><STRONG>The Story of the Basement Tapes</STRONG></SPAN> <P>In the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan was at the peak of his creativity, having officially broken into the mainstream with his popular and acclaimed albums <I><A title="Highway 61 Revisited" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_61_Revisited">Highway 61 Revisited</A></I> and <I><A title="Blonde on Blonde" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_on_Blonde">Blonde on Blonde</A></I>. In the latter half of 1965, during the interim between those two albums, Dylan began touring with The Hawks (later known as <A title="The Band" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band">The Band</A>). Their live collaboration would continue into the first half of 1966, culminating in a legendary 'world' tour documented in <I><A title='The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert' href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bootleg_Series_Vol._4:_Bob_Dylan_Live_1966%2C_The_%22Royal_Albert_Hall%22_Concert">The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert</A></I>.</P><P>According to Hawks/Band guitarist <A title="Robbie Robertson" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Robertson">Robbie Robertson</A>, "When I first met [Dylan] [in 1965], I played him this ballad from <A title="The Impressions (American band)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impressions_%28American_band%29">The Impressions</A>' <I>Keep On Pushing</I> album, 'I've Been Trying,' written by <A title="Curtis Mayfield" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Mayfield">Curtis Mayfield</A>. I said: 'They're not saying anything much and this is killing me, and you're rambling on for an hour and you're losing me; I mean, I think you're losing the spirit.'" Whether or not Robertson's comments had any real influence on Dylan's decision to change his musical direction, within a couple of years Dylan would be writing quite different styles of songs.</P><P>On July 29th that year, Dylan suffered a mild concussion and cracked vertebrae when he crashed his Triumph 650 Bonneville motorcycle near <A title="Woodstock, New York" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock%2C_New_York">Woodstock, New York</A>. He was taken to a local hospital where he phoned the members of the Hawks, informing them of his injuries. Dylan and the Hawks were scheduled to perform at several concerts later in the year, but with Dylan's current condition, those concerts had to be cancelled.</P><P>A little more than a week later, Dylan was back in Woodstock, wearing a neck brace and recuperating at a local doctor's house. While he was recovering, Dylan reviewed a preliminary cut of <A title="D. A. Pennebaker" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._A._Pennebaker">D. A. Pennebaker</A>'s documentary of the 1966 'world' tour. "They had made another <I><A title="Dont Look Back" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_Look_Back">Dont Look Back</A></I>, only this time it was for television," recalled Dylan in 1978. "I had nothing better to do than to see the film. All of it, including unused footage. And it was obvious from looking at the film that it was garbage. It was miles and miles of garbage." Dissatisfied with Pennebaker's results, Dylan re-edited the footage into a surrealistic film, titled <I><A title="Eat the Document" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_the_Document">Eat the Document</A></I>. (Howard Alk, who shot much of the footage, and Robbie Robertson also accepted Dylan's invitation to help him edit the film.)</P><P>As biographer Clinton Heylin writes, "in the latter months of 1966 Dylan was certainly re-evaluating where he had come to at the age of twenty-five, and reviewing the raw film footage [of <I>Eat the Document</I>] was only part of that process."</P><P>Dylan later recalled, "The turning point was back in Woodstock. A little after the accident. Sitting around one night under a full moon, I looked out into the bleak woods and I said, 'Something's gotta change.'"</P><P>According to the late <A title="Rick Danko" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Danko">Rick Danko</A>, the Hawks joined Robbie Robertson at their house in West Saugerties in February of 1967. Nicknamed "Big Pink," the house originally belonged to "Rick Danko, <A title="Richard Manuel" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Manuel">Richard Manuel</A> and <A title="Garth Hudson" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Hudson">Garth Hudson</A>," according to Robertson. "I think Levon eventually moved in there, too. I didn't live there, but the whole idea was that we had been living in New York City, and we ended up moving upstate really to get a clubhouse, a place where we could woodshed. It was a real clubhouse, and we were just like a street gang — only we played music instead of going out fighting. We would get together every day at the clubhouse, just like the Bowery Boys. And as soon as Bob got well from his motorcycle accident, he started coming up every day."</P><P>The date is uncertain, but sometime between March and June, Dylan and the Hawks began a series of informal recording sessions. Originally taking place at Dylan's house, "in the equally color-conscious Red Room" (according to Heylin), these informal sessions eventually moved to the basement of Big Pink.</P><P>"We used to get together everyday at one o' clock in the basement of Big Pink, and it was just a routine. We would get there and to keep [every] one of us from going crazy, we would play music every day ... There was no particular reason for it. We weren't making a record. We were just fooling around. The purpose was whatever comes into anybody's mind, we'll put it down on this little tape recorder." That tape recorder was actually an old Uher that was used on their legendary 'world' tour in 1966. Equipped with a couple of Altec PA tube mixers and allowing up to three microphones to be input per channel, with four or five studio-quality Neumann microphones, the machine was operated by the Hawks' Garth Hudson during the recording sessions. Dylan would later say in 1969, "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."</P><P>For the first couple of months, they were just "killing time," according to Robertson. Apparently, much of the early months was spent on covers. "With the covers Bob was educating us a little," recalls Roberston. "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 '[The Banks of the] Royal Canal,' and you'd say, 'This is so beautiful! The expression!' ... he remembered too much, remembered too many songs too well. He'd come over to Big Pink, or wherever we were, and pull out some old song — and he'd prepped for this. He'd practiced this, and then come out here, to show us." Circulating tapes from these sessions reveal a large, diverse number of popular songs, including compositions written or made popular by <A title="Johnny Cash" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Cash">Johnny Cash</A>, <A title="The Stanley Brothers" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanley_Brothers">The Stanley Brothers</A>, <A title="Ian Tyson" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Tyson">Ian Tyson</A>, <A title="John Lee Hooker" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lee_Hooker">John Lee Hooker</A>, <A title="Hank Williams" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Williams">Hank Williams</A> and <A title="Eric Von Schmidt" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Von_Schmidt">Eric Von Schmidt</A> as well as "sea shanties ... country tearjerkers, from pure gospel to morality tales ... material from the English and Irish dales, the <A title="Appalachian Mountains" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_Mountains">Appalachian Mountains</A>, the <A title="Mississippi Delta" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Delta">Mississippi Delta</A>, <A title=Nashville href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville">Nashville</A>'s Music Row, and even <A title="Tin Pan Alley" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Pan_Alley">Tin Pan Alley</A>," according to Heylin.</P><P>Dylan was soon writing and recording new compositions at these informal sessions. "We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day," recalls Hudson. "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."</P><P>Two of the first songs Dylan recorded was "Tiny Montgomery" and "Sign on the Cross"; the former "rediscovered his flair for characters out of left field," wrote Heylin, while the latter "captures the deathless fatalism of gospel and country Dylan was after in much of his later born-again albums," according to <A title=NPR href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR">NPR</A>'s Tim Riley.</P><P>In a matter of months, Dylan would record at least thirty new compositions with the Hawks, including some of the most celebrated songs of his career: "I Shall Be Released", "This Wheel's On Fire", "<A title="Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>", "Million Dollar Bash", "Tears Of Rage", "You Ain't Going Nowhere", "Going To Acapulco", "I'm Not There (1956)", "All You Have To Do Is Dream", "Apple Suckling Tree", etc. At least two songs were co-written with members of the Hawks: "Tears Of Rage" with Richard Manuel and "This Wheel's On Fire" with Rick Danko. "He came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper ... and he just said, 'Have you got any music for this?'," recalled Manuel. "I had a couple of musical movements that fit ... so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn't sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn't run upstairs and say, 'What's this mean, Bob: 'Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse'?'"</P><P>In May of 1967, Dylan gave his first interview in roughly a year. He told Michael Iachetta that "What I've been doing mostly is seeing only a few close friends, reading a little 'bout the outside world, poring over books by people you never heard of, thinking about where I'm going, and why am I running, and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowing, and what am I giving and what am I taking ... Songs are in my head like they always are. And they're not going to get written down until some things are evened up. Not until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that happened."</P><P>According to Heylin, that someone expected to atone 'for some of the things that happened' was Dylan's manager, <A title="Albert Grossman" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Grossman">Albert Grossman</A>. Within weeks of the interview, Dylan recorded a <A title="Bobby Bare" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bare">Bobby Bare</A> song that dated back to 1959. Titled "All-American Boy", it was originally a thinly veiled critique of <A title="Elvis Presley" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley">Elvis Presley</A>'s notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, but Dylan rewrote some of the verses, adding some personal references regarding his relationship with Grossman.</P><P>Though Dylan still owed Columbia one more album, he did not want to fulfill that obligation with the songs written and recorded at Big Pink. In fact, Dylan's original intentions for those songs remain unclear. At the end of August, ten of them were dubbed down from their original stereo recordings to mono and copyrighted by Dwarf Music; in January of 1968, Dylan copyrighted another batch of songs including "Tears of Rage", "<A title="Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_The_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>," "Nothing Was Delivered", and "Open the Door Homer." Jointly formed by Dylan and Grossman, Dwarf Music was established in 1965 in order to copyright demos intended for other artists. In an interview taken in 1978, Dylan admitted that the songs written and recorded at Big Pink "were written vaguely for other people ... I don't remember anybody specifically those songs were ever written for ... At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads."</P><P><A title="Peter, Paul and Mary" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter%2C_Paul_and_Mary">Peter, Paul and Mary</A> were the first to chart with a Big Pink composition when they issued their single of "Too Much of Nothing" in November of 1967. Soon after, <A title="Manfred Mann" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Mann">Manfred Mann</A> topped the charts with "<A title="Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>." When <A title="The Byrds" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Byrds">The Byrds</A> released their groundbreaking, country-rock album <I><A title="Sweetheart of the Rodeo" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetheart_of_the_Rodeo">Sweetheart of the Rodeo</A></I> in 1968, they opened and closed it with "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and "Nothing Was Delivered". In the UK, "This Wheel's on Fire" made the top 5 for <A title="Julie Driscoll" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Driscoll">Julie Driscoll</A> and the <A title="Brian Auger" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Auger">Brian Auger</A> Trinity; the song was also covered by <A title="The Byrds" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Byrds">The Byrds</A> for their second album of 1968, <I><A title="Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Byrds_%26_Mr._Hyde">Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde</A></I>, while the Hawks — reunited with Levon Helm and rechristened <A title="The Band" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band">The Band</A> — recorded their own version on their celebrated debut, <I><A title="Music from Big Pink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_from_Big_Pink">Music from Big Pink</A></I>, an album that also featured "I Shall Be Released" and "Tears of Rage." <A title="Fairport Convention" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairport_Convention">Fairport Convention</A> would also record "Million Dollar Bash" on their celebrated third album, <I><A title=Unhalfbricking href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhalfbricking">Unhalfbricking</A></I>.</P><P>Eventually, rumors of Dylan and The Band's enormous stash of unreleased recordings began to circulate. <I><A title="Rolling Stone Magazine" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Stone_Magazine">Rolling Stone Magazine</A></I> even ran a cover story in June of 1968, claiming that "there is enough material ... to make an entirely new Bob Dylan record, a record with a distinct style of its own ... These tapes could easily be remastered and made into a record. The concept of a cohesive record is already present."</P><P>The fourteen songs copyrighted by Dwarf Music brought those particular songs into private circulation, as demo acetates were soon cut for those songs. With no planned release in sight, these demo acetates became the source material for a number of bootlegs, the first of which was titled <I>Great White Wonder</I>. Bootlegs had existed for many years, mostly among other forms of music, but with <I>Great White Wonder</I>, rock music had its first commercially (albeit illegally) available bootleg ever.<BR></P><P><A id=Columbia.27s_release_of_The_Basement_Tapes_compilation name=Columbia.27s_release_of_The_Basement_Tapes_compilation></A></P><H2><SPAN class=mw-headline><FONT size=4>Columbia's release of <I>The Basement Tapes</I> compilation</FONT></SPAN></H2><P>On June 26, 1975, Columbia officially released a 24-song, double-album titled <I>The Basement Tapes</I>. Compiled and produced by Robbie Robertson, eight of the twenty-four songs did not feature Dylan, and of those eight, only four actually dated from the Big Pink sessions. All of the tracks were 'remixed' to mono while Robertson and other members of The Band overdubbed new piano, guitar, and/or drum parts over four of the original Dylan-Band recordings. Furthermore, songs like "I Shall Be Released," "<A title="Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>," "Sign on the Cross," and "I'm Not There (1956)" were omitted, and the rough, first take of "Too Much of Nothing" was used in place of the later, comparatively flawless take copyrighted by Dwarf Music. (Critic <A title="Greil Marcus" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greil_Marcus">Greil Marcus</A> would later hail "I'm Not There (1956)" and "Sign on the Cross" as the best and second best songs, respectively, of the Big Pink sessions.)</P><P>Nevertheless, <I>The Basement Tapes</I> was initially hailed by critics, with <A title="Robert Christgau" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Christgau">Robert Christgau</A> giving it a rare A+ in his "Consumer Guide" column. "These are the famous lost demos recorded at Big Pink in 1967 and later bootlegged on <I>The Great White Wonder</I> and elsewhere," wrote Christgau, apparently unaware of some of the changes made by Robertson. "Because the Dylan is all work tape, the music is certifiably unpremeditated, lazy as a river and rarely relentless or precise — laid back without complacency or slickness. The writerly 'serious' songs like 'Tears of Rage' are all the richer for the company of his greatest novelties — if 'Going to Acapulco' is a dirge about having fun, 'Don't Ya Tell Henry' is a ditty about separation from self, and both modes are enriched by the Band's more conventional ('realistic') approach to lyrics. We needn't bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967 too. And it's sure to sound great in 1983." Other critics agreed as <I>The Basement Tapes</I> topped <I><A title="The Village Voice" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_Voice">The Village Voice</A>'</I>s <A title="Pazz & Jop" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazz_%26_Jop">Pazz & Jop</A> Critics Poll for 1975, beating out <A title="Patti Smith" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_Smith">Patti Smith</A>'s <I><A title="Horses (album)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_%28album%29">Horses</A></I>, <A title="Bruce Springsteen" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Springsteen">Bruce Springsteen</A>'s <I><A title="Born to Run" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Run">Born to Run</A></I>, Dylan's own <I><A title="Blood on the Tracks" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_on_the_Tracks">Blood on the Tracks</A></I>, and <A title="Neil Young" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young">Neil Young</A>'s <I><A title="Tonight's the Night (album)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonight%27s_the_Night_%28album%29">Tonight's the Night</A></I>, the #2, 3, 4 and 5 ranking albums, respectively.</P><P>At the time, some critics lamented omissions like "<A title="Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>" and "I Shall Be Released" from <I>The Basement Tapes</I>, but the double-album only represented a fraction of the Big Pink recordings, and sure enough, a nearly-complete collection of the known recordings was eventually bootlegged as a 5-compact disc set known as <I>The Genuine Basement Tapes</I>; this collection is the centerpiece of <A title="Greil Marcus" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greil_Marcus">Greil Marcus</A>' well-known book of music journalism <I><A class=new title="The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Old%2C_Weird_America:_The_World_of_Bob_Dylan%27s_Basement_Tapes&action=edit">The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes</A></I>. In this book, the Basement Tapes are compared to <A title="Harry Everett Smith" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Everett_Smith">Harry Smith</A>'s <A title="Anthology of American Folk Music" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthology_of_American_Folk_Music">Anthology of American Folk Music</A>. The thesis of Marcus' book is that both collections accurately describe an alternate weirder history of the <A title="United States" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States">United States</A>.</P><P>While Columbia has issued only three more Big Pink recordings since <I>The Basement Tapes</I> ("I Shall Be Released" and "Sante Fe," both issued on <I><A title="The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bootleg_Series_Volumes_1-3_%28Rare_%26_Unreleased%29_1961-1991">The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991</A></I>, as well as take 2 of "<A title="Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_%28The_Mighty_Quinn%29">Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)</A>" issued on <I><A title="Biograph (album)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biograph_%28album%29">Biograph</A></I> in 1985), even more complete collections of Basement Tape material circulate freely among Dylan fans and collectors, under such titles as <I>A Tree With Roots</I>; most recent commercial bootlegs of the material are actually sourced from noncommercial fan projects.</P> |
| Bob Dylan | Basement Tapes | |
| Bob Dylan | Burn Some More | |
| Bob Dylan | Great White Wonder | <p>In 1969, an underground Bob Dylan album featuring unreleased material found its way into the world; 40 years later, the effects of this early leak are still playing out.</p><p>If you were driving around certain parts of southern California in the summer of 1968, you may have heard Bob Dylan's version of "This Wheel's on Fire" on the radio. KNAC in Long Beach, KPPC and KMET in L.A., KCSB in Santa Barbara, and KRLA in Pasadena were playing it in heavy rotation. A different version of the song was included on side B of Music from Big Pink, the debut album from the Band, which was released that July. At the time, the Band were mostly known for their Dylan affiliation-- if they were known at all. Dylan, of course, was the most highly regarded solo musician since Elvis, though he'd been out of the public spotlight for two years after a motorcycle accident. For many Dylanites, "Wheel's" suggested a return to the looser, harder-rocking Blonde on Blonde after the more reserved folk record John Wesley Harding, which was issued the prior December. It's likely that many hearing the song were under the impression that it was an advance single from a forthcoming Dylan LP. But why was the quality so terrible?</p><p>The small readership of upstart San Francisco rock magazine Rolling Stone were more clued in. Its publisher Jann Wenner had written a June cover story advocating not just for the official release of "This Wheel's On Fire", but 12 other songs that Dylan had recently recorded in a basement in upstate New York. In a lead feature titled "Dylan's Basement Tape Should Be Released", Wenner reported-- in a manner predicting modern music journalists filing copy after a leak-avoiding listening party-- "Bob Dylan… made a rough but very listenable tape with thirteen songs… There is enough material-- most all of it very good-- to make an entirely new Bob Dylan record, a record with a distinct style of its own." Turned out that Dylan and the Band had set up shop to make a demo tape of new songs for other artists to record, and then circulated it privately. It worked: A cover version of "Wheel's" by English pop singer Julie Driscoll reached No. 5 in the UK that summer, Manfred Mann's take on "The Mighty Quinn" peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard chart, Peter, Paul & Mary hit the Top 40 with "Too Much of Nothing", and the Byrds' "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", a centerpiece of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, hit FM radio that April. Dylan's music was everywhere, but Dylan himself remained secluded.</p><blockquote>While history records Great White Wonder as rock's firstwidely circulated bootleg, underground releases ofits ilk are like the cool uncle of the digital leak.</blockquote><p>Was he retiring to start a lucrative career as a one-man Brill Building? Were these new tunes what someone would later call "deserter's songs," a retreat from a political climate threatening to boil over? Wenner's column-length advocacy, along with the radio play of "Wheel's" and other songs from that demo tape, were working to push against this possibility, creating demand for what was called The Basement Tape to be released on its own. "Dylan brings that instinctual feel for rock and roll to his voice for the first time," Wenner claimed. "If this were ever to be released, it would be a classic." Columbia would release these songs, and they would be very highly regarded and commercially successful... seven years later, in 1975.</p><p>Instead, in June of 1970, fans got the double-album Self Portrait, which, although reappraised in subsequent years, did not fare well initially. In his Rolling Stone review, Greil Marcus claimed, "Self-Portrait, though it's a good imitation bootleg, isn't nearly the music that Great White Wonder is." If you were a regular Rolling Stone reader, you were familiar with Great White Wonder--they'd covered it well. You may have bought a copy if you lived in L.A., or near an independent record store willing to stock it. While it's not part of Dylan's official catalog, Wonder did become a classic in its own right, though not as Wenner intended it to be. It was a demand-driven solution to The Basement Tape's scarcity. Great White Wonder was the first album leak.</p><p>Cheaply pressed as a double album in an initial run of 1 to 2,000 copies by two anonymous L.A. music industry insiders who went by Dub and Ken, Great White Wonder started appearing in record stores in summer 1969, the title gleaned from its plain white jacket, decorated only with a titular stamp. There were 23 tracks on Wonder, subscribing to a sequencing logic that is hard to pin down. Ten cuts were drawn from the "Minnesota Tapes", a collection of American standards Dylan recorded in May and December 1961. "Only a Hobo" and "Bob Dylan's New Orleans Rag" came from 1963 Columbia demos, and "Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence" and "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" were great-sounding studio outtakes from the Highway 61 sessions. A version of "The Death of Emmitt Till" was pulled from a session with the folk magazine Broadside, and "Living the Blues" was recorded off of the television, from Dylan's May 1969 appearance on "The Johnny Cash Show". Wonder was a grab-bag retrospective of Dylan's career to that point, serving as something of a corrective to his absence and a harbinger of a career that wouldn't continue along the path it had taken for the first half of the decade.</p><blockquote>The low grade of the recordings on Great White Wonderonly added to their aura, and to the sense that fans werelistening in on a secret meeting between collaborators.</blockquote><p>Just those 16 tracks alone wouldn't have amounted to much, however. Alternate versions of already existing songs are a nice bit of collectible ephemera for die hards, but they're nothing compared to the voyeuristic and legally dubious revelation of new songs. Wonder had seven of them; more than half of the Basement Tape demos recorded just before Dylan left to make John Wesley Harding in Nashville. Along with "Wheel's", "Quinn", "Nothing", and "Nowhere", there was "Open the Door, Homer", as well as "Tears of Rage" and "I Shall Be Released", which had respectively opened and closed Big Pink.</p><p>In terms of recording quality, these songs sounded absolutely horrible. They were only intended as demos, and odds are the versions that were circulating had been dubbed numerous times, resulting in a significant loss of fidelity. But the low grade of the recordings-- particularly in comparison to the other, better-recorded songs on Wonder-- only added to their aura, and to the sense that fans were listening in on a secret meeting between collaborators. "We went in with a sense of humor… It was all a goof," the Band's Robbie Robertson later told Greil Marcus. "We were playing with absolute freedom; we weren't doing anything we thought anybody else would ever hear, as long as we lived. But what started in that basement, what came out of it… came out of this little conspiracy, of us amusing ourselves." This was the nature of a leak in 1969-- a rare glimpse into the backstage life of a superstar. A conspiracy built from a conspiracy.</p><p>In 1969, Bob Dylan was one of three artists famous enough to create the kind of demand required to trigger a leak of unreleased studio recordings (the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would soon both fall prey to now-legendary leaks). While history records Wonder as rock's first widely circulated bootleg, underground releases of Wonder's ilk are like the cool uncle of the digital leak. By definition, they're indistinguishable: recordings (live or studio-made) which are not released on the artist's label but instead sold or traded in ancillary or underground markets (Dub and Ken had a "label" they called TMQ, or "Trademark of Quality"). Fans had been trading magnetic tapes of already-released albums for years by this point, but Wonder was different: It was the first time that unheard recordings of a superstar's new compositions had leaked to the public, and were being sold. It's easy to take such a thing for granted today, when leaks circulate freely online, but Wonder represented the earliest moment when advancing technologies combined with popular demand and illicit entrepreneurship to create cracks in the record industry's otherwise firm facade.</p><p>Despite the fact that many copies of Wonder were pressed at professional operations, the quality was extremely poor: Oftentimes, the top layer of vinyl would literally scrape off after about 20 plays.</p><p>In 2012, a simple Google search can turn up Wonder in full via BitTorrent, with few worries about private investigators tracking your movements. In 1969, however, the stakes were significantly higher, and much more money was being put into Wonder's production-- and exchanged for access to it. Southern California record stores saw it flying off the shelves-- or, more accurately, out from under the counter. Dub and Ken were wholesaling the album just like any other, reported Jerry Hopkins for Rolling Stone in September 1969, charging $4.50 each and lowering the price to $4.25 after the first 50. A typical markup was $2, though some stores were charging much more. "Those shops carrying the LP seem happy," Hopkins noted, "with many reporting the album's arrival has had the same effect on business as a new Beatles or Stones LP might have." By October, Wonder had spread to New York, and the Times reported that "at a small record stop near Columbia University, the proprietor just winked when asked where he had gotten the albums."</p><p>Dubs of dubs of dubs of Wonder, some with different track orders and most with different cover art, were proliferating through the underground. This is how Norton Beckman and Ben Goldman, two record store owners from the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, acquired their copies. They took an early version of the tape to an audio engineer in downtown L.A., who made acetates from it, which were then used to make "stampers"-- the master versions that were pressed to be sold. These were processed in the off hours of a record processing company-- "one of the many in the city who ask no questions," Rolling Stone noted, then pressed and inserted into plain white sleeves at S&R Record Manufacturers in Gardena. Despite the fact that many copies of Wonder were pressed at professional operations, the quality was extremely poor: Oftentimes, the top layer of vinyl would literally scrape off after about 20 plays.</p><p>Beckman and Goldman became the target of Columbia's investigation into Wonder bootlegging. They were given up to Columbia's A&R department by "an anonymous phone call from a woman who said she knew who the bootleggers were," Rolling Stone claimed. The woman was an acquaintance of the bootleggers, and was reporting them because the two "had been bad-mouthing some friends of hers." Columbia was quick to make a public show of finding and stopping the Wonder bootlegs, though they had already proliferated far out of their legal control. "We consider the release of this record an abuse of the integrity of a great artist," Columbia said in a 1969 press release. "They are at one time defaming the artist and defrauding his admirers." But to many fans, Wonder was the opposite of fraud; particularly with countercultural vibes in the air, Columbia was the bad guy.</p><p>Though they had to make a public stance against bootlegging, Dylan's label was fully aware that their legal options were significantly limited. Columbia sent private detectives to uncover record stores selling Wonder and filed cease and desist orders against transgressors, but that was about the limit of their capabilities. They had no idea who Dub and Ken were, let alone where they were, so they couldn't serve the two pirates with a legal order. As Clinton Heylin observed in his great 1995 book Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, Wonder's tracklisting might have seemed random, but Dub and Ken weren't dumb-- they made sure to craft it to fit in a liminal legal zone. Columbia couldn't verify if the "Minnesota Tape" songs were recorded after Dylan signed with them (and he was a minor when he signed his contract with the label, to boot). The traditional songs were mostly in the public domain. Furthermore, the Basement Tape material wasn't recorded in a Columbia studio, the Band weren't under contract, and Dylan was himself between contracts with the label. (For some inexplicable reason, Columbia failed to do anything about the Highway 61 sessions included on the album.) And Dub and Ken were savvy enough not to include Dylan's name or likeness anywhere on the packaging, so as to avoid a lawsuit over those aspects of his identity.</p><p>In the wake of Wonder, bootlegging flourished, though quality was never guaranteed. Devoted rock fans near in-the-know stores could rely on buying unauthorized recordings cobbled together from leaked studio tapes, audience recordings of live performances, and televised appearances from Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. "In Minnesota, Come Back is being sold illegally," reported Rolling Stone in 1970. "This is a poor quality copy of the Beatles' Let It Be album, due to be released God only knows when… Quality is… poor, as if the tape was recorded by a mike off a speaker, instead of directly dubbed."</p><p>Other bootlegs were of a much higher quality, and the practice was turning into a bonafide industry. Greil Marcus reviewed three bootlegs in a 1970 issue of the magazine: the Wonder followup Stealin', the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace in Toronto, and the tremendous live Stones LP Live'r Than You'll Ever Be (recorded and released by Dub himself). Marcus took into account the vagaries of quality as well as the content. "Consider them new records by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan," Marcus wrote. "They aren't going to be around for very long, and simply on the basis of their musical quality, they should be bought right now. None of these albums is a mere 'collectors item,' like the Great White Wonder stuff-- all of them are listenable and exciting on their own terms."</p><p>In early 1970, the idea of flooding the market with consistent streams of new material from huge artists wasn't part of record labels' plans, though perhaps it should have been. B-side collections and live albums were expensive to produce and publicize, and their market was still very limited, at least in the labels' imaginations. It must have been thrilling to hear what Marcus claimed was "the ultimate Rolling Stones album," a high quality version of a show at the Oakland Coliseum in 1969 (which Marcus suspected was done from the stage by a sound technician, but which Dub confessed was accomplished merely by "the Sennheiser shotgun pointed at the PA system"). "Whatever we take out of their pockets, we're doing as much for them in terms of publicity and interest in their music," one bootlegger told Rolling Stone, in language that echoes down to 21st century downloading defenses. He continued, asserting that the rules of market competition still apply in the underground. "The word 'moral' doesn't apply. It's a matter of get what you can, and when someone else pops up copying our stuff, we do what we can to get more product at less cost. Maybe that's what the big record companies should do-- compete with us. They weren't going to release this material anyway, were they?"</p><p>What happens with mp3 leaks illuminates a very basic economic fact: Official markets will always lead to unsanctioned ones that feed off of the legit products-- and often operate much more efficiently.</p><p>While labels tried everything they could (at least publicly) to stamp out bootlegging, the artists themselves were much more amenable to their existence. The Live'r boot was so good, in fact, that after the Stones' road manager heard a copy at KSAN in San Fransisco, he bought a copy for himself and five more-- one for each band member. When the entirety of the Basement Tapes was finally released in 1975, Dylan himself was publicly surprised at the reception and strong commercial showing: "I thought everybody already had them." It makes sense that artists then and now would be more tolerant of leaks than their labels. While they need only concern themselves with making music to be discovered and heard by as many people as they wish, the labels have to foot the bill for production, distribution, and promotion.</p><p>On one basic level, what happened in 1969 with Wonder-- and what happens every day with mp3 leaks-- illuminates a very basic economic fact: Official markets will always lead to unsanctioned ones that feed off of the legit products-- and often operate much more efficiently. Consumer desire has never automatically limited itself to strictly legal operations, particularly when fans can convince themselves (often rightly) that they're doing no harm to the artists. In his recent book Pop Song Piracy, Barry Kernfeld pointed out that for as long as companies have been selling musical objects-- from sheet music to albums, cassettes, compact discs, and mp3s-- they have been faced with threats to their monopoly over distribution due to unauthorized duplication and circulation. Playing devil's advocate, since consumers are always encouraged to get the most product for the least amount of money and time, why should music fans make moral distinctions that capitalism itself doesn't?</p><p>Thanks to the unpredictable interplay of record labels, artists, laws, technologies, and music journalism, bootlegging and leaks can upend the the power structure when it comes to rolling out new releases-- but only the scope, not the idea, has changed in the last 40-plus years. In the late 60s, FM was still the Wild West compared to today's radio landscape, and rock journalism was in its infancy. Music copyright laws were full of loopholes, and duplication technologies were developing at an unprecedented pace. It was a moment when renowned critics would review hot new bootlegs, and Rolling Stone's publisher could openly lobby Columbia to release a particular Bob Dylan album. When record store owners could feel relatively safe moving illicitly pressed LPs from behind the counter, and radio jocks would play unofficial tracks in regular rotation. Labels filed lawsuits against bootleggers in vain, resenting a significant loss of control over their own operations, but often reaped their promotional benefits nonetheless.</p><p>And now: Bloggers and status updaters rewrote the guidebook for music journalism and promotion, leaving them in an unsettled state akin to the late 60s and early 70s (though now with much more gratis labor). Leaks are mass duplicated on the same machines that also serve as jukeboxes and publishing outlets, driving money not to labels or record stores or shady pressing plants but international file-locker sites like Mediafire, corporately owned ISPs, and proprietors of cloud servers. Fans take to Twitter and message boards begging for a leak of whatever new album has just been announced. And when these records are inevitably set free, they're often cloaked in the modern equivalent of plain white wrappers with a generic stamp-- .zip or .rar files renamed to travel online, unnoticed by label employees and Google-scouring security firms. Great White Wonder may be a modern impossibility in its original incarnation, but 40 years later, in a vastly de-industrialized music climate, its ongoing legacy suggests less a digital revolution than the mundane fact that, in the face of innovation, some old habits die hard.</p><p>— <strong>Eric Harvey, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | <p>Bob Dylan returned from exile with John Wesley Harding, a quiet, country-tinged album that split dramatically from his previous three. A calm, reflective album, John Wesley Harding strips away all of the wilder tendencies of Dylan's rock albums -- even the then-unreleased Basement Tapes he made the previous year -- but it isn't a return to his folk roots. If anything, the album is his first serious foray into country, but only a handful of songs, such as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," are straight country songs. Instead, John Wesley Harding is informed by the rustic sound of country, as well as many rural myths, with seemingly simple songs like "All Along the Watchtower," "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," and "The Wicked Messenger" revealing several layers of meaning with repeated plays. Although the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic, the music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late '60s.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Troubled Troubador | |
| Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | <p>Bob Dylan returned from exile with John Wesley Harding, a quiet, country-tinged album that split dramatically from his previous three. A calm, reflective album, John Wesley Harding strips away all of the wilder tendencies of Dylan's rock albums -- even the then-unreleased Basement Tapes he made the previous year -- but it isn't a return to his folk roots. If anything, the album is his first serious foray into country, but only a handful of songs, such as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," are straight country songs. Instead, John Wesley Harding is informed by the rustic sound of country, as well as many rural myths, with seemingly simple songs like "All Along the Watchtower," "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," and "The Wicked Messenger" revealing several layers of meaning with repeated plays. Although the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic, the music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late '60s.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| Bob Dylan | Let Me Die In My Footsteps | |
| Bob Dylan | Nashville Skyline | <p>John Wesley Harding suggested country with its textures and structures, but Nashville Skyline was a full-fledged country album, complete with steel guitars and brief, direct songs. It's a warm, friendly album, particularly since Bob Dylan is singing in a previously unheard gentle croon -- the sound of his voice is so different it may be disarming upon first listen, but it suits the songs. While there are a handful of lightweight numbers on the record, at its core are several excellent songs -- "Lay Lady Lay," "To Be Alone With You," "I Threw It All Away," "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You," as well as a duet with Johnny Cash on "Girl From the North Country" -- that have become country-rock standards. And there's no discounting that Nashville Skyline, arriving in the spring of 1969, established country-rock as a vital force in pop music, as well as a commercially viable genre.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
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