Bob Dylan & The Band
by Steve Matteo
While Bob Dylan and members of The Band performed together as early as 1965, it was in the summer of 1967 that they recorded the most mythical music of all their collaborations.
By the summer, the group formerly known as The Hawks and now officially dubbed The Band moved their families to a rented house in West Saugerties, N.Y., not too far from Dylan's. This bland, more suburban than country, small split-level would become one of the most important physical landmarks in all of rock music history, and its name would be taken from the color it was painted. The house was called Big Pink.
The members of The Band had played with Dylan on and off over the previous year or so in different configurations. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson had played a great deal, but Levon Helm, reportedly not all that thrilled with the less than enthusiastic response many of the shows received, especially in England, sometimes was replaced by Mickey Jones, a drummer who had played with Trini Lopez.
The house that Danko, Hudson and Manuel were renting, Big Pink, was not the original recording location for what came to be known as The Basement Tapes, recorded between June and October of 1967. The initial recordings took place at Dylan's house, a few miles away, in what was oddly called the "red room." Recording at Big Pink finally got underway with microphones borrowed from Peter, Paul and Mary and a tape recorder and two stereo mixing consoles on loan from Albert Grossman. The recordings were to take place for several reasons, mostly just to have fun and give Dylan and The Band a chance to make music away from the confines and pressures of the recording studio and the concert stage. Dylan would not tour, as it would turn out, for eight years, other than the occasional performance. The recordings would also be demos of new songs that Dylan had written or was writing, with 14 of the reported 100 eventually being pressed onto acetate to be heard by other musicians who might want to record them. These songs included the Manfred Mann hit "Quinn The Eskimo," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," which would be the lead-off track of The Byrds' 1968 release, Sweetheart of the Rodeo (the one and only Byrds album that featured Gram Parsons, and for many the first country-rock album), and "Too Much of Nothing," recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. The oft-bootlegged recording called The Basement Tapes, in its unedited entirety, included much more music and much more than the official 1975, double-album release, which was made up of 16 basement recordings and eight Band demos. These recordings and the later infamous Great White Wonder were in many respects the beginning of the bootleg recording underground.
The music itself was very different from both the exploding, psychedelic acid-rock of the day and from the music Dylan had made on his three previous studio albums. In fact, it would have more in common with Dylan's earliest influences of country, folk, blues and other sounds from the earlier part of the century—and even from the 19th century. If the pop music of the day was multi-colored day glo, The Basement Tapes was black and white and gray, burnished in brown and honey sepia tones. There was a richness and a warmth to it, yet with an edge of grit, honesty and folk amateurishness. It was odd yet familiar, old but timeless. The music would also have more in common with the sound The Band would make on its early albums, and after listening to The Basement Tapes, The Band's first few albums and the post-Blonde On Blonde Dylan albums, it's hard to tell who actually influenced whom.
Along with the old songs played for fun, there were songs recorded that would make up an important part of future projects. Dylan's composition "I Shall Be Released" would turn up on The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, and would, along with the traditional "We Shall Overcome" and Dylan's own later composition "Forever Young," become a timeless anthem of hope, celebration and bravery. "Forever Young," one of Dylan's most touching compositions, according to the Biograph box-set notes, came rather quickly and unexpectedly: "... I wrote [it] in Tucson," Dylan said. "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental. The lines came to me, they were done in a minute. I don't know. Sometimes that's what you're given. You're given something like that. You don't know what it is exactly that you want but this is what comes. That's how that song came out. I certainly didn't intend to write it—I was going for something else. The song wrote itself—naw, you never know what you're going to write. You never even know if you're going to make another record, really." There are two songs that Dylan co-wrote with the members of The Band that would also make it to 1968's Big Pink Band debut: "Tears of Rage" was a mournful ballad co-written by Dylan and Richard Manuel that conjured up a long-lost America from perhaps the 1800s, and "This Wheel's On Fire," co-written by Dylan and Rick Danko, jauntier but no less reflective in its sense of looking back to another time, was another song of timeless eloquence. On the liner notes to the 1975 official, double-record set of The Basement Tapes, Dylan described the music from the sessions and his kinship with the blues with his unique sense of humor intact: "... with a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it ... you may have to lean forward a little."
The easygoing playing and attitude that went into these recordings are obvious, but this is not to suggest that they are frivolous. These were recordings started by a man who had been at the top of the new rock game, who faced death, and who was seeking the companionship of likeminded musicians, who, as it turned out, themselves were piecing together what would become their own unique, everlasting collective sound. These recordings are a real key to the Dylan story. Dylan arrived at this place after years of immersing himself in the music of country, blues, folk, rock and pop. It is his love of the songs, singers and players that still sustains him, right up until today. He is the true working musician, and The Basement Tapes sessions were perhaps the first time he fully realized it.
