By summer 1966, something had to snap; Dylan had simply been working too hard for too long on too many fronts.
His tour with the Hawks seemed to go on forever, and despite the extraordinary music they were making (as evidenced by the widely-distributed live bootleg purporting to come from the Royal Albert Hall concert in London, but actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall), in country after country they encountered the same mix of hysteria and hostility. Things got so bad that at the Paris Olympia concert, when sections of the crowd started whistling during a break between songs, Dylan responded, “I’m just as anxious to go home as you are. Don’t you have a paper to read?”
Even his more supportive fans posed a threat, as he realized when a girl lunged at his head with scissors as he was leaving the stage at one concert, snipping off a lock of his hair. Things were getting dangerous out there, strapped to the accelerating projectile of fame at exactly the moment that celebrity became a global concept. Few others—the Beatles and the Stones, perhaps—had experienced such hysterical adulation before, and there had been more of them to share it around: for though he had his band alongside him, they went largely unrecognized; Dylan was the complete focus of attention.
The debilitating effects of the tour were exacerbated by his increasingly out-of-control offstage lifestyle, which involved lots of drugs and little sleep. Donn Pennebaker, who was filming the tour for another cinema-verité film, remembered Dylan being physically sick in the back of the limousine in which he and John Lennon were traveling. But he refused to slow down, snatching every opportunity to work on songs. Pennebaker recalled watching Dylan and Robbie Robertson dashing off dozens of songs in a row one night, never even letting up enough to write them down; the next day, nobody could remember them. “I did it enough to know that there must be something else to do,” he said later of this period of constant touring. “It wasn’t my own choice; I was more or less being pushed into it—pushed in, and carried out…”
He was not best pleased, then, when upon his return to America, he discovered that Albert Grossman had lined up another 60 concerts. Besides that, there was the usual round of interviews and promotional duties to be carried out in support of the just-released Blonde On Blonde, and there were broadcasters and publishers pushing for completion of the new tour film, Eat The Document, which Dylan was intent on editing himself, and his book Tarantula, which had seemed a good idea a year before when he had signed up to write it, but which had since become more of a chore. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a part of him. “Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes and things like that,” he told Nat Hentoff, “but not to be thankful for their obscurity.” His values were changing.
The atmosphere was changing, too, as the downside of the fast life began to take its toll. Old friends like Richard Fariña, Geno Foreman and Paul Clayton had died—Fariña in a motorcycle accident, the others through drugs—and many of his own inner circle of friends, like David Blue and Bob Neuwirth, had slipped into drug addiction or alcoholism. Dylan had exhibited a fascination with death since his first album, and had recently admitted to Robert Shelton, “You know, I can think about death openly. It’s nothing to fear. It’s nothing sacred. I’ve seen so many people die.” All around Dylan, darkness seemed to be drawing in.
It seemed almost inevitable, then, when on July 29, 1966, Dylan was badly injured in an accident while out riding his Triumph 500cc on Striebel Road, near his home in Woodstock. Dylan had been an avid rider ever since buying his first bike, a Harley 45, as a teenage tearaway back in Hibbing. He was, however, a terrible driver, by all accounts. “He used to hang on that thing like a sack of flour,” recalled Joan Baez of her times out riding with Bob. “I always had the feeling it was driving him, and if we were lucky we’d lean the right way and the motorcycle would turn the corner. If not, it would be the end of both of us.” It was not the first accident he had been in: back in Hibbing in 1958, he had been badly shaken after hitting a three-year-old boy who had run out between parked cars, chasing an orange. Luckily, the child wasn’t badly injured. All he could remember, he told his girlfriend Echo Helstrom, was the orange rolling across the street.
After the motorbike crash in Woodstock, it was reported that Dylan had broken his neck, and rumors swiftly spread that he was either dead or in a persistent vegetative state, the next worst thing to dead. As it happened, he had merely cracked a vertebra, but he grabbed gratefully at the opportunity to take time out from his schedule to recuperate. All of a sudden, the biggest rock star in the world became its most reclusive, as Dylan followed the examples of his friends Marlon Brando and Phil Spector, and shut himself away from the world in Byrdcliffe, his Woodstock home. For the next few years, he shunned public contact, settling down to raise a family, paint, and maybe make a little music when the fancy took him.
As luck would have it, the Hawks had moved into a large pink house nearby, where, after more than a decade spent on the road, they were coming to terms with life as a group, trying to find their own sound in their own time. With equipment borrowed from Peter, Paul & Mary, they set up a makeshift rehearsal studio in their basement, and set about working on some new material.
“The tape machine was set up behind Garth,” recalls Robbie Robertson, “and he would just turn it on and turn it off, mostly. It was just a stereo input, so I think we used four mikes mixed down to a stereo pair—it could have been more—but some of the sound was leakage on to another mike: a lot of things didn’t even have a microphone on them, it would just leak on to another microphone. “It was just getting an idea down on tape, most of those things, so there was no care taken whatsoever with the quality of the recordings and the balances. They were done exactly the opposite to everything that you learn in how-to-make-a-record school: the worst thing you can have is cement walls, all studios have sound stuff all over the walls; and then there was a big furnace right in the middle of all this, which is bad for the sound—but nobody was thinking about what was right for the sound, it was just a case of getting an idea down on tape as a little blueprint or something like that. It was a discovery process, which was quite different from what we had done on our own in the past, and quite different from what we had done with Bob.”
Before long, Dylan was driving on over to hang out with them and play. The results, never intended for consumption, would take on legendary status when they were bootlegged as Great White Wonder, and were eventually officially released eight years later as The Basement Tapes.
“For the most part, we did them in the afternoons,” recalls Robbie Robertson. “The idea was just for the Band to have our little clubhouse, where everybody could go every day, hang around, play a little music, work on some songs, without disturbing anybody. We said, ‘God, this place is really starting to feel good,’ and so Bob would come over and hang around just like the rest of the guys. Up in the living room, there were a couple of typewriters, and every once in a while, somebody would sit down and hammer something out, just fooling around, having some fun. Somebody would say, ‘I have an idea for this,’ and go down in the basement, and pretty soon everybody else would lumber down, and we’d start fooling around on things. And it started to take on a character, almost. We’d record these things and listen back to them, and it would be so funny to us, it would just crack us up! It was such a good-spirited situation, so non-pressured, that it just felt good to be there.”
The sound of the recordings made in the basement was warm and intimate, markedly different from the big, powerful rock sound that Dylan had pumped out in concert with the Hawks. This was partly by design and partly through necessity. “One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room,” explained Robertson. “So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn’t hear the singing, you were playing too loud. It just became a completely different approach to that we had been using before.”
The results drew heavily on the folk music that Dylan had studied in his early years in New York—not the self-righteous social protest songs he had mastered and then discarded, but the traditional music from the early decades of the century that he had encountered on compilations like Harry Smith’s celebrated six-LP Anthology Of American Folk Music. This was a strange, dark kind of music, full of bizarre stories and weird imagery, and riddled with death—and worse. The previous summer, in his interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, Dylan had criticized the folk music “authorities” who wanted him to “keep things simple.”
“Folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple,” he contended. “It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight… ‘Nottamun Town’, that’s like a herd of ghosts passing through on the way to Tangiers.”
He expanded upon the same theme to Nat Hentoff: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die… traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be protected… I think its meaninglessness is holy.”
Listening to the songs which make up The Basement Tapes, one begins to grasp what he means. These are songs of departure, but rarely arrival; of the search for salvation; and of nonsense as the coin of hidden meaning. They’re populated by a typically wide, typically odd range of characters, who seem to inhabit a parallel world to the one we live in. And in the main, the lyrics sound as off-the-cuff and extemporized as those on Dylan’s recent albums had been meticulously polished; in several cases, the words sound as if they’ve been made up on the spot, simply to fill in the spaces between the choruses. And some sound as if they’re just attempts to make the other musicians laugh.
“I remember a couple of things that we thought, ‘Well, nobody should hear these,’ just because of the subject matter, or because they were filthy, y’know?” says Robertson. “It was like, We’d better put these in the furnace! But someday somebody will go in the furnace probably, and they’ll be out too, just a little burnt.”
Musically, the songs were completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the pop world, which during the long hot summer of 1967 was celebrating the birth of the hippie movement with a gaudy explosion of “psychedelic” music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos of dubious quality. Drawing on a palette that included traditional instruments such as accordion and mandolin alongside the various drums, guitars and keyboards at their disposal, Dylan and the Band (as they would become known, by default) conjured up a raw and rootsy, joyful, juicy sound in which fear and frolic coexisted in the same notes, a raggedy blanket spun from strands of country, blues and gospel music.
“It wasn’t that way necessarily on purpose,” explains Robertson, “it was just that there was such a tremendous freedom in thinking, ‘Nobody’s ever going to hear this, we can try anything.’” But of course, people did get to hear them. Dylan was still the most sought-after songwriter in the pop business, and so an acetate of some of the songs was circulated by his publisher among artists keen to cover Dylan material. After an album of songs which—‘Just Like A Woman’ aside—few had dared to cover, the sketchy and approachable style of The Basement Tapes’ songs made this one of his most productive periods, as far as cover versions went: Manfred Mann hit big with ‘The Mighty Quinn’ (which was unaccountably left off the official album); Julie Driscoll made a successful cover of ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’; The Byrds continued their association with Dylan by recording both ‘Nothing Was Delivered’ and ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’; Fairport Convention did ‘Million Dollar Bash’; Peter, Paul & Mary had a minor hit with ‘Too Much Of Nothing’, reasonable recompense for their loan of the recording equipment; and the Band included versions of ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Tears Of Rage’ and ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’—the last two of which they had co-written—on their debut album Music From Big Pink the following year.
The original Basement Tapes, however, remained officially unreleased until, dusted-down and smartened up, they were issued as a double-album in 1975, in a sleeve featuring Dylan, the Band and a motley crew of characters from the songs posing around a furnace in a basement (actually the basement of the Los Angeles YMCA). Despite its tardiness, it reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic.
The album opens in friendly, welcoming fashion with one of its simpler pleasures, a ramshackle rocker that clocks in at under two minutes, just enough time for three short verse/chorus combinations and the briefest of breaks from Robbie Robertson prior to the final verse. Yet another complaint of amorous betrayal that could pass as an allegorical reflection on his own position vis-avis the media and former fans, the song opens with the singer’s careful plan undermined by treachery, continues with him dogged by the treacherous, and concludes with him abdicating his position and advising his tormentor(s) to “get on someone else.” The chorus—“Odds and ends, odds and ends/ Lost time is not found again”—effectively functions as a kind of editorial comment upon the entire Basement Tapes recordings themselves, noting their fragmentary form and fleeting pleasure. Richard Manuel takes the drum seat on this one.
Of all the Basement Tapes songs, ‘Million Dollar Bash’ most gracefully pivots on the urban/rural divide which marks Dylan’s shift in attitude following his bike crash. In its ludicrous lyrical style, it’s clearly in a straight line of descent from such earlier absurdist narratives as ‘Tombstone Blues’ and ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’, but this time Dylan’s left the city for the country: instead of the cast of urbanites and outcasts that peopled previous songs, the populace of ‘Million Dollar Bash’ consists of hicks like Silly Nelly and Turtle, and instead of the streetwise scenarios of the preceding three albums, the action here has a rustic, barnyard setting.
The pace of the action, too, is much slower—indeed, if life got much slower than this, it would be in reverse gear. In place of Dylan’s previous drug-laced flights of paranoid fancy, the mood here is more laid back, as of old geezers sitting around, chewing the fat and putting off doing any work until the last possible moment. Dylan’s delivery has a draggy, world-weary, weather-beaten quality, as if he can barely be bothered to relate the song. Which is hardly surprising, since virtually nothing happens: someone spins a yarn, the garbage man empties the trash, and the narrator delivers his potatoes, possibly to a moonshine still. That’s what passes for action around these parts, which may be why all the conversation and excitement in the neighborhood centers on the prospect of the fantastically glamorous and ridiculously expensive party of the title, an event akin to a World’s Fair (or, indeed, a Millennium Dome Experience) which might redefine these humdrum lives.
It won’t, of course: part of the overall “message” of The Basement Tapes is that, whatever their tribulations, the roots of such rural lives run far too deep for them to be easily uprooted by flashy superficialities like the ‘Million
Dollar Bash’, which was doubtless thought up by a cabal of accountants and advertising executives, and designed by men with ponytails. After all, what could such people have to interest a man who, like Turtle, has “his cheeks in a chunk” and “his cheese in the cash”? Not much, one suspects. But that, of course, doesn’t stop Turtle and his chums dreaming: in such communities, anticipation is probably always that much sweeter, whatever the ultimate disillusion. In its own way, ‘Million Dollar Bash’ has as much to say about the decline of rural America—and in far less melodramatic terms—than a youthful finger-wagging exercise like ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’.
As with ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’, in ‘Goin’ To Acapulco’ Mexico holds out the promise of loose morals and good times. Yet this must be the most mournful of good-time songs, sung as if the prospect of “Goin’ to have some fun” contained its own karmic downside, incurring a moral debt to be repaid in full at some unspecified later date. “It’s a wicked life, but what the hell,” the narrator muses in the first verse, as he ponders a trip down south to see Rose Marie, a golden-hearted hooker whose favors can be bought with a song.
Given his apparent desolation, it’s hardly surprising he keeps being drawn back to her arms; the alternative, as the last verse makes plain in a cheeky masturbation metaphor which likens his flagging libido to a broken-down well, is just to take himself in hand and “go pump on it some.” The intervening verse is all anticipation, concluding with a beautiful couplet that both echoes the weather-sensitivity of ‘Crash On The Levee’ and establishes the first of the album’s prevailing train images. Like several of the Basement Tapes songs, however, there are numerous differences between the song’s lyrics as recorded for this album, and the printed version included in Dylan’s official Lyrics 1962–1985, so it’s probably inadvisable to place too specific a meaning on it.
‘Lo And Behold!’ continues the theme of movement, with a train journey into the abiding mystery of the American heartland that becomes a search for his own identity. It’s a fruitless pursuit of revelation, the narrator seeking some place—or some event—that might elicit the exclamation of the title, but always winding up in dreary places like Pittsburgh. He, however, gets more extraordinary as the song goes on: the first verse opens in relatively straightforward fashion, with him setting off for San Antonio—presumably, judging by his shame at revealing his identity to the ticket-collector, to escape some unspecified hometown infamy.
Entering Pittsburgh in the second verse, he overhears a testy, disquietingly absurd exchange between two fellow passengers, Moby Dick and Molly, about the latter’s “mound”; then suddenly, by verse three, he’s buying a herd of moose—the flying variety, of course!—and pondering a trip to Tennessee. His madness seems complete: “Gonna save my money and rip it up!” he exults, establishing himself finally as an outlaw from American greed and materialism. Is this the “crime” for which he felt such shame a couple of verses earlier? Whatever, by the final verse, he seems much more secure in his identity, slick and powerful and full of tricks, having regained enough of his earlier ebullience to ride into town, he claims, “on a Ferris wheel.”
The whole song reads like a tall tale told by a self-aggrandizing barfly, and Dylan sings it with a wry blend of swagger and nonchalance, as if daring any man in here to deny his story, while mocking them for even giving it the time of day. The rousing chorus harmonies—which prefigure the famous harmonies which would become one of the hallmarks of the Band’s music—join in like drinking pals saluting him with foaming beakers, urging the narrator on to ever more ridiculous flights of fancy, rising at the end to leave him no place to go but further into fantasy, the true source of American identity.
‘Clothes Line Saga’ was originally recorded as ‘Answer To Ode’, the ode in question being Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, one of Summer 1967’s most evocative hits, in which a family dispassionately discusses the suicide of Billie Joe MacAllister over dinner. Parodying Gentry’s downbeat, offhand narrative style, this is a back-porch gossip over the garden fence, occurring literally while taking in the washing—a reminder of how such basic forms of human contact cement a society together, however empty and pointless they may seem.
Nobody commits suicide in the ‘Clothes Line Saga’, although, we learn, the Vice-President did apparently go mad the previous night downtown, a minor interruption to the status quo greeted with all the excitement it deserves—“Hmm, say, that’s too bad”, sung as if Bob’s attention was already wandering—before folk get back to the important business of checking whether the clothes are dry yet. At the time, the Vice-President was Hubert Humphrey, who incited such paroxysms of apathy in the American people that when he stood as the Democratic presidential candidate at the next election, they preferred to vote for Richard Nixon instead.
The song’s essence is contained in its second line, “Nobody said very much”; indeed, ‘Clothes Line Saga’ could be read as Dylan celebrating his release from significance, enjoying the opportunity just to write songs without having to have them mean something. A few months earlier at the Royal Albert Hall concert, he had revealed how tired he was of having to explain his work when he lectured the audience from the stage. “What you’re hearing is just songs,” he fretted tetchily. “You’re not hearing anything else but words and sounds. You can take it or leave it. If there is something you disagree with, that’s great. I’m sick of people asking: ‘What does it mean?’ It means nothing!”
Built on the melody of ‘Froggy Went A-Courting’, the nursery rhyme Dylan would cover on his 1992 Good As I Been To You album, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’ opens with the composer’s tentative piano figure, feeling its way into the song, before the bass, drums and organ join in, with tambourine lending a touch of gospel revival-tent syncopation. The song’s galumphing feel is due to Robbie Robertson’s inexpert hand at the drum kit, one of the frequent occasions on which the musicians switched instruments.
“Everybody would play different instruments,” confirms Robertson. “I’d come down and somebody else would be playing guitar, so I’d pick up the bass or play the drums, something like that—somebody would pick up a horn or a fiddle 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 to happen.” Since Levon Helm had not yet rejoined after quitting the Hawks before the 1966 World Tour, the drum seat was the one most in need of filling—usually by pianist Richard Manuel, since with both Garth Hudson and Dylan on hand, there was not such a shortage of keyboard operators as there was of drummers.
Another song whose recorded version bears scant relation to the lyrics as printed in Dylan’s Lyrics 1962–1985, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’ would seem to be a quickly extemporized, oddly light-hearted meditation upon mortality, the singer anticipating that time when it will be “just you and me” buried beneath the tree in question.
“A lot of them were made up as we went along,” agrees Robertson, “a lot were made up a few minutes before laying them down, just writing down an idea and trying it out to see if it’s going anywhere. Once you’d got it down, you’d say, ‘Okay, that’s an idea,’ and move on to something else. It was a very un-precious attitude.” The result here is one of the album’s most un-precious songs, poised in the shadows between celebration and admonition like a good-time ghost.
A drinking song of authentic tipsiness, ‘Please, Mrs. Henry’ features a drunkard’s confused invocations to a barmaid, moving with intemperate randomness through an alcoholic fog of desires. First he thinks he’s had enough to drink and wants to be taken to his room; then as he wavers in the hallway, lustfulness overtakes him and he propositions her with a fanciful string of animal metaphors; rejected, he becomes sullen and truculent, waving her away; finally, poised for a piss, he’s trying to catch her eye again for another round of drinks, his penniless state notwithstanding. Rolling along on the back of bar-room piano and tiddly organ, it’s one of the more simple and good-natured songs in Dylan’s entire canon, buoyed with a light-heartedness that finds the singer corpsing into a chuckle as the final chorus begins.
(Dylan/Manuel)
One of the three or four most complete—and intriguing—Basement Tapes songs, ‘Tears Of Rage’ is Dylan’s equivalent of the blind king’s wasteland soliloquy in King Lear, applied to his own nation. Wracked with bitterness and regret, its narrator reflects upon promises broken and truths ignored, on how greed has poisoned the well of best intentions, and how even daughters can deny their father’s wishes.
In its narrowest and most contemporaneous interpretation, the song could be the first to register the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam War veterans, who found their patriotic efforts, carried out with neither question nor compromise, squandered by a country that simply got fed up with caring about the conflict. As the national mood shifted, these men found their dead friends had effectively laid down their lives for nothing, denied even the dignity of dying for a righteous cause, so tainted had the war in question become. In trying to commemorate their comrades, they were routinely treated as if they were asking for something they didn’t deserve; the nation’s embarrassment over the matter made them unworthy claimants upon its compassion, always made to feel like thieves.
Certainly, from no other song of that era does one glean the sense of a nation split against itself. In a wider interpretation of ‘Tears Of Rage’, this song harks back to what anti-war protesters and critics of American materialism in general felt was a more fundamental betrayal of the spirit of the American Declaration Of Independence and the Bill Of Rights. Having, as one of its founding fathers, helped define the country, the song’s narrator watches sadly as his ideals are diluted and cast aside by succeeding generations, who treat them as “nothing more/Than a place for you to stand.” In place of idealism is rampant materialism, with a price placed upon even one’s emotions by a society that has come to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
With Dylan’s weeping delivery matched by the high, keening harmonies of Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and shaded by the stately tread of Garth Hudson’s wistful organ, ‘Tears Of Rage’ is the most affecting of the Basement Tapes performances. Richard Manuel wrote the music for it, having been handed a typewritten sheet of the lyrics by Dylan one day in the basement. Though he later admitted not fully understanding the song, Manuel instinctively settled upon the highly evocative melody which provides the perfect atmosphere of enduring, irrevocable lamentation. The next year, he would sing lead on the Band’s own version of the song—included on their Music From Big Pink debut—a reading made even more harrowingly funereal by the addition of Garth Hudson’s mournful horns.
Ponderous and declamatory in the verses, frail and haunting in the choruses, this offers the earliest indication, with its references to “the day of confession” and everything having “been written in the book,” of the biblical slant which was creeping into Dylan’s songs, and which would cast a great shadow over his next album, John Wesley Harding.
During his retreat up in Woodstock, Dylan was reported to keep a Bible open at a lectern in his study. Its grim parables and sense of moral absolutism deeply inform ‘Too Much Of Nothing’, which serves as both lamentation of spiritual emptiness and warning of its dire consequences. As the melody rises through the latter half of each verse, one can visualize an evangelist berating his congregation, with the high chorus harmonies of Rick Danko and Richard Manuel representing the angelic salvation which the preacher extends as the alternative to a life of sinful pleasure. Deriding the modern world as spiritually bereft, Dylan warns of the societal breakdown and ruthlessness that are bound to follow (which became a familiar theme through his recordings of subsequent decades), and advises seeking redemption through giving away one’s money (which, oddly, did not).
Perhaps the most bizarrely inconsequential of the Basement Tapes recordings, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” is pure nonsense, its lines knocked together from offhand, random phrases with an instinct for the enigmatic that rescues the song from being forgettable. Dylan’s delivery is deceptively conversational, adding to the illusion of common sense, and though there’s something tentative and spontaneous about the recurrent little piano phrase that adds a soupçon of character to the song, the other musicians join in lustily enough on the choruses to dispel suspicions about its ultimate destination (though not, perhaps, in the case of the baritone harmony on the final “bread,” which fluctuates drunkenly before settling on its proper note). Ticking along blithely, as if it knows exactly where it’s going, ‘Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread’ winds up as one of the most engaging of the album’s songs, its appeal accentuated, if anything, by the fact that its meaning is unfathomable.
(Down In The Flood)
Initially called ‘Crash On The Levee’, but retitled ‘Down In The Flood’ in Dylan’s official Lyrics 1962–1985, this, of all the Basement Tapes songs, is the one which best carries the authentic spark of real history: a cohesive meld of mood, theme and delivery, it could easily have been written by some wary inhabitant of the Mississippi flood-plain, warning of the impending disaster in apocalyptic terms reminiscent of that earlier biblical flood survived by Noah.
This is due in part to the air of familiarity lent by specific geographical reference (to Williams Point), and in part to the antique mystery of lines like “Well it’s sugar for sugar/And salt for salt,” which in this case is indeed authentically antique, the line being adapted from Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s 1927 song ‘James Alley Blues’, a warning about one of New Orleans’ more dangerous thoroughfares, in which he sings “I’ll match you sugar for sugar, I’ll match you salt for salt.” (The song would be familiar to Dylan through its inclusion in Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music.)
Another trifle with more character than meaning, ‘Tiny Montgomery’ has an engaging boozy bonhomie, its eponymous subject sending out greetings to an impressive cast of characters that includes Skinny Moo, Half-track Frank, Lester, Lou, some monks and the entire CIO union organization. Tricked out in short, imponderable phrases—“Honk that stink/Take it on down/And watch it grow”—chosen more for sound than sense, it has the weird, hermetic logic of a private language, the kind of thing that members of cults or secret organizations use to communicate with each other.
Given the shady nature of the characters whom Montgomery hails, and the fact that he refers to San Francisco as “ol’ Frisco,” a term nobody—certainly not the town’s residents—has used for many a year, I suspect that Tiny has languished long in one of America’s jails, and is bidding farewell to a cellmate about to be released, asking him to send regards to his chums back in his old stamping ground.
When The Byrds included ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ on their pioneering country-rock album Sweetheart Of The Rodeo in the summer of 1968, it provided confirmation of sorts that the country sound revealed at the end of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding earlier that year was more than just a passing phase, that there was more to his new rural outlook than just ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. With ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’, it seemed that following his years as the quintessential urban hipster, Dylan had followed his own instruction and strapped himself to a tree with roots.
On Dylan’s original version, however, the country flavor is somewhat less pronounced, present more as an undercurrent, though there’s an irresistible pull in that direction via the lilting chorus melody. Judging by an earlier, unreleased version—a bootleg version, as it were—whose verses are filled up with off-the-cuff nonsense about having to feed the cat, it seems likely that the chorus was the first part of the song devised, with the verses being filled in later.
Mind you, the completed song as it stands makes little more sense than its feline predecessor: while the brisk meteorological details—the frozen railings, rain and clouds—lend the first verse a stark rural cohesion, subsequent stanzas drift further away from logic until the final verse twists off into a non sequitur concerning Genghis Khan’s inability to keep his kings supplied with sleep. Not for the first time in the basement, the chorus is what gives drives the song forward, regardless of what’s happening in the verses. Robbie Robertson is the drummer.
More rustic shenanigans, with a lady love and a whole barnyard menagerie keen on keeping some secret from the eponymous Henry. Their recurrent rejoinder “Apple’s got your fly” sounds like nothing so much as a line from a children’s skip-rope rhyme, but the song as a whole plays as cowboy farce.
With Levon Helm taking lead vocals with characteristic Southern brio, ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’ could be viewed almost as a prototype for the sound the Band would reveal over the next two years on their own highly regarded albums.
Like the other tracks recorded solely by the Hawks without Dylan, ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’ is more polished than most of the Basement Tapes performances, with an arrangement that plays Robbie Robertson’s guitar off against Helm’s mandolin, while Garth Hudson plays rippling bar-room piano over a rhythm punched along by the dry snap of Richard Manuel’s drums.
By the time Levon Helm joined the rest of the group up in Big Pink, he was shocked—and a little worried—to find out how good a drummer Manuel had become. “Richard was an incredible drummer,” Helm acknowledged in his autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire. “He played loosey-goosey, a little behind the beat, and it really swung… Without any training, he’d do these hard left-handed moves and piano-wise licks, priceless shit—very unusual… I just realized that my mandolin playing was going to have to improve if I was to have anything to do onstage while Richard played drums.”
Roughly based on Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’, this is a pedestrian, mournful blues pushed along by Richard Manuel’s piano triplets (there are no drums on the track). Dylan’s vocal and Robbie Robertson’s guitar are of a piece, dramatic but intimate, as if sharing confidences about the flunked deal covered in the song. It’s one of the most direct stories on the entire Basement Tapes album, with somebody being held to account for non-delivery; but it’s flexible enough to accommodate a number of interpretations, from a simple drug-deal gone wrong to more serious political deceit.
Whichever it is, the tone is more sad than angry, as if the betrayal hurts the singer’s sense of honor more than his pocket. “Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest,” he advises the reneger, an ambivalent salutation that’s part threat and part solicitous farewell.
Though the title and the version of the song included in Lyrics 1962–1985 address the instruction to Homer, the song as sung refers to Richard. It makes a little more sense when you learn that Richard Manuel’s nickname among the group was “Homer,” and that the invocation “Open the door, Richard” was a staple routine used by comics at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of weekly running joke–the various confusions between the characters stuck on opposite sides of the door never being resolved by the door being opened, of course. In 1947, Jack McVea and Dan Howell wrote music to accompany burlesque duo “Dusty” Fletcher and John Mason’s comedy routine, the quartet enjoying a postwar novelty hit with the result.
Poised between irony and self-assurance, the song lopes along jauntily, tendering obscure bits of baffling advice, some commonsense, others with the cryptic power of folk remedies: value your memories properly, they won’t come again; flush out your house if you don’t want to be housing flushes; swim a certain way if you want to live off the fat of the land; and forgive the sick before you try to heal them. The sensible ones lend a sort of bogus credence to the less sensible, while the sheer conviction of the chorus vouches for the advisor’s bona fides: it’s good advice he’s offering, and not before time too, because, as the singer acknowledges, “I ain’t gonna hear it said no more”—so seemingly impenetrable are such folk remedies, old wives’ tales and rural wisdoms becoming, that we’re losing the ability to even understand them, let alone question their efficacy.
A funky blues extension (no pun intended) of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’ in the Chicago blues style, with Robbie Robertson’s strangulated guitar fills piercing the song’s fabric like arrows through the heart. Richard Manuel takes lead vocals, yearning to hear his baby’s voice down the wire, and wailing awhile on harmonica.
Simple and strident, ‘Long Distance Operator’ is half an idea fleshed out to a riff, but none the worse for that.
(Dylan/Danko)
Closing the album at a peak of sinister mystery, ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ finds Dylan straining to hit the highest notes, as if emotionally wracked by his experience. Given suitably enigmatic melody by Rick Danko, Dylan’s lyric draws again on Shakespeare’s King Lear (“Thou art a soul in bliss/But I am bound/Upon a wheel of fire”)—itself inspired by the biblical visions of Ezekiel, possibly the Old Testament’s nuttiest prophet—to offer what seems like a mea culpa for past transgressions, a moment of self-revelation in which the singer realizes that in order to get to this, it was necessary for him to go through that. The road down which the flaming wheel rolls is, of course, the road of excess which, Rimbaud claimed, leads to the palace of wisdom.
In his Lyrics 1962–1985, Dylan illustrates ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ with a badly-drawn cartoon depicting three people exclaiming “Look out!”, “Yikes!” and “Holy cow!” as they leap out of the way of a (non-blazing) runaway cartwheel, but this seems a cavalier deprecation of a serious work. The mood of the song itself is far more portentous, capturing a soul suspended on the cusp of torment and deliverance, unable to arrest its headlong drive toward destruction, yet aware of the tasks which have yet to be completed. It is virtually impossible not to see the locked wheel of Dylan’s Triumph 500 in the title, the very wheel upon which his own accelerating pursuit of disaster was borne so swiftly, and then arrested so abruptly. The verses brim with unfinished business, anchored by the certainty that “we shall meet again.”
In the UK, Julie Driscoll had an April 1968 Top 5 hit with the song, backed by Brian Auger & The Trinity; it was also covered by the Byrds, and re-recorded for the Band’s Music From Big Pink. A quarter of a century later, it provided the perfect theme music for the 1990s British TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, where it brilliantly evoked the high-octane burn-out of the show’s hippie-hangover characters.