The album The Basement Tapes occupies a special place in Bob Dylan’s discography. When the album was released in stores on June 26, 1975, the twenty-four tracks had been recorded over eight years before, during a pivotal moment in Dylan’s life and work: the fifteen months of recovery after his motorcycle accident.
In the summer of 1966, Dylan was totally exhausted from concerts and recording sessions. On the morning of July 29, he had a motorcycle accident outside Woodstock in upstate New York. He skidded and crashed his Triumph 500 at high speed and he was thrown violently to the ground. Even now, the extent of his injuries has never been fully disclosed. Rumors are widespread. According to some, the consequences were terrible: he broke his neck and was reduced to a vegetative state. Others made a morbid parallel with James Dean, said he nearly died, or hypothesized a conspiracy involving President Lyndon Johnson, the Pentagon, and the CIA… After the accident Dylan did not appear in public and saw only a few close friends, which only amplified rumors. Dylan later said he had broken vertebrae and had a concussion.
His convalescence lasted fifteen months and kept him out of the spotlight at rest in his home in Woodstock. This period was very productive, both for his writing and his musicmaking. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson all visited Dylan at his home in Woodstock. With the exception of Levon Helm, who had his own musical projects, the four members of the Hawks visited Dylan to work on editing D. A. Pennebaker’s footage for the documentary of their UK tour. The group, which was struggling to find a rehearsal space in New York City, decided to rent houses, including the famous “Big Pink,” located at 2188 Stoll Road (now 56 Parnassus Lane in West Saugerties). They started recording in the basements of their homes, where they could work freely and avoid the exorbitant rents for rehearsal studios in the city. Thus began a period of intense creativity and intense collaboration between Dylan and the Hawks, who subsequently became famous as the Band.
During this time, Dylan read and wrote a lot. Allen Ginsberg brought him books, and in May 1967 Dylan told New York Daily News reporter Michael Iachetta that he spent his time “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.” These books included The Outsider by Colin Wilson, a philosophical essay on alienation, and The Prophet by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, who sought to harmonize Western and Eastern religions. Gibran had a great influence on the counterculture movement of the time. Finally, and most importantly, Dylan immersed himself for hours in the Bible. A Bible was placed on a pedestal in the middle of the living room and, according to various testimonies, next to a collection of the songs of Hank Williams.
Even though Dylan stopped writing Tarantula, a long experimental poem/novel that he began working on a few months earlier, he wrote up to ten songs a week, according to the journalist Al Aronowitz. Over the months, Dylan transformed himself slowly, both spiritually and artistically, in a way that some describe as a rebirth.
The village of Woodstock, popular with artists since the early twentieth century, has played host to painters of the Hudson River School and the Byrdcliffe Art Colony. In 1963, Bob Dylan fell in love with this haven of peace during a visit with his friend Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), who had a house there. Two years later, following his manager Albert Grossman, he bought an eleven-room house on Camelot Road called “Hi Lo Ha.”
Originally, the songs of The Basement Tapes were not intended for an album, but were just demos. At that time, Dylan renegotiated his contract with Columbia, which was renewed in the summer of 1967. He was, however, required to provide demos to his manager Albert Grossman for Wit-mark. He recorded some songs with his friends. Garth Hudson recalls, “The Basement Tapes were initially demos for Dylan. He would come over to the house and write funny stuff like ‘Million Dollar Bash’ and we would go into the basement and record it… Dylan would be coming round the house three or four days a week and there was a little typewriter on the coffee table in the living room that he would bash away on it while we were in the basement. Richard [Manuel] wrote a song about that, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs.’”73 In 1969 the songwriter told Jann Wenner, “[T]hey weren’t demos for myself; they were demos of the songs. I was being PUSHED again… into coming up with some songs. You know how those things go.”20 What Dylan was implying was that he was obligated to provide songs under his contract with his manager. Acetates and tapes of the songs were available to interested artists immediately after recording. Fortunately, surrounded by members of the Band in a friendly and relaxed setting, the work was fun. “They were just fun to do. That’s all. They were a kick to do.”20
During this period, Bob Dylan and the Band—and then the Band on their own—recorded 138 songs together, including many original compositions by Dylan, but also covers selected from the songwriter’s favorites, some traditional tunes, and several improvisations. Everything was recorded in a relaxed atmosphere. He later described it to Jann Wenner as “a peaceful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with windows open and a dog lying on the floor.”5 All the recordings represent what might be called an informal journey to the heart of American popular music.
Among the themes found in The Basement Tapes is the inner turmoil of the creator of Blonde on Blonde and the (re)discovery of a kind of obsession with the sacred that continued through the album he composed the same year, John Wesley Harding.
Musically, the songwriter was distinct from contemporary artists. Groups on the West Coast celebrated the Summer of Love in long psychedelic beads and endless guitar solos, and the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bob Dylan and the Hawks recorded shorter, simpler, down-to-earth songs, which were in the folk and country tradition.
The photograph for the cover was taken by Reid Miles in 1975. He became famous for designing some of the aesthetically best covers for the jazz label Blue Note, including Art Blakey’s A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 (1954) and Bud! The Amazing Bud Powell (Vol. 3) (1957). Miles took his shot in the basement of a Los Angles YMCA. The photograph shows Dylan posing in the foreground, playing the mandolin as if it were a violin with the members of the Band behind him. On the back cover, characters mentioned in the songs appear.
According to some sources, recording for The Basement Tapes could have begun as early as March 1967; according to others (more numerous), in June. It is commonly admitted that they were completed in November, which corresponds with the return of Levon Helm (credited on several songs). Recordings initially took place in the so-called Red Room of Dylan’s house but later moved to the basement of Big Pink, a house rented by the members of the Band with the exception of Robbie Robertson.
Produced by Bob Dylan and the Band, as noted on the cover of the double album, the songs were recorded by Garth Hudson. According to Hudson, “We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day. Some were old ballads and traditional songs, some were written by Bob, but the others would be songs Bob made up as he went along. We’d play the melody [and] he’d sing a few words he’d written or else just mouth sounds or syllables as he went along. It’s a pretty good way to write songs.” According to Robbie Robertson: “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. Shitty little tape recorder… We had that freedom of thinking, Well, no one’s ever gonna hear this anyway, so what’s the difference? And then we thought, Well, maybe some of these songs would be good for other people to record.”83
Many of these basement demos, including “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” (the Byrds), “Tears of Rage” (Richard Manuel), and “This Wheel’s on Fire” (the Band) were indeed in the repertoires of other artists. In July 1969, the first bootleg album, Great White Wonder, was released in California, including seven songs from the basement sessions in Big Pink. This was the beginning of the long series of bootlegs of Dylan’s work.
Dylan disagreed with his manager Albert Grossman for several months about the rights of his publishing catalog. In January 1975, Bob Dylan authorized Columbia to release these tapes officially (after adding a few overdubs), probably because Dylan and Grossman had reached an agreement in their legal dispute over the Woodstock recordings. The double album was logically called The Basement Tapes and released on June 26, 1975, eight years after the beautiful adventure in Big Pink and a year and a half after the release of Blood on the Tracks. The double album included twenty-four songs, eight by the Band on their own.
A unanimous success, The Basement Tapes reached number 7 on the US Billboard chart and number 8 in the United Kingdom. It was acclaimed by critics. John Rockwell of the New York Times regarded it as “one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music.” Billy Bragg wrote, “Listening back to The Basement Tapes now, it seems to be the beginning of what is called Americana or alt-country.” Rolling Stone magazine ranked The Basement Tapes at 292 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”
Garth Hudson, the Band’s keyboard player, recorded The Basement Tapes. Although the final recordings have been criticized for their poor quality, he managed a technical coup with few materials. The sound alteration came from various transfers and the conservation of soundtracks. Hudson had experience recording local groups and different sounds. When he started recording The Basement Tapes, he probably used a portable Ampex 602 tape recorder, not the Revox A77 as featured on the album cover. He borrowed a set of microphones from the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, also managed by Albert Grossman. Thus, he had two Neumann U47 microphones for vocals (he seems to remember a Telefunken U47 without being able to confirm that), and a Neumann KM56 for the guitar. However, the exact number of microphones used is not clear. In 1975, sound engineer Rob Fraboni, who cleaned up and mixed The Basement Tapes, thought that there were no more than two or three microphones. According to others, there might have been six. By listening to some songs, the clarity and accuracy of different voices and the harmonies suggest that more than three microphones were used by the group. Dylan’s vocal was reverberated using a Binson Echorec. Two lamp tube mixers permitted recording from different microphones and ran them into the Ampex 602 tape recorder. Finally, for listening, Hudson had Klipsch Klipschorn speakers borrowed from the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary’s sound system.
Bob Dylan played only acoustic, certainly a Martin 0-18, as can be seen in some photos. He also played a 12-string guitar. He may have borrowed it from Robbie Robertson or another musician. It is the first time he did not play harmonica. For the musicians of the Band, there is no list of instruments used, except the extraordinary acoustic Gibson Style O of 1920 that Robbie Robertson has in his hands on the album cover. He gave a good overview on how each of the Band’s musicians played: “Everybody would play different instruments… I’d come down and somebody else would be playing guitar, so I’d pick up the bass or play drums, something like that—somebody would pick up a horn or a riffle or a mandolin, whatever, and just try their best to handle it! It wasn’t like anybody had a real idea for something, they would just look around, see an instrument sitting there, and start doodling around on it until something started happen.”24