Even while John Jacob Niles was earnestly transforming Merton’s three poems into songs, Bob Dylan, at his home in Woodstock, New York, was trying out chord progressions on his piano, just as he had done since high school. His intensely engaged demeanor belied the sparkling, Fellini-esque words, sounds, and images flashing through his mind. Like Niles, he too was busy composing. Though Dylan’s output was not as meticulously wrought as Niles’s, it was considerably larger. During that summer and fall of 1967, Dylan wrote more than sixty songs, as well as at least two dozen handwritten lyrics for which he never wrote tunes. It was the culmination of an astonishing six-year run of creativity, one of the most phenomenal spurts of songwriting in the history of popular music, not just in terms of volume but in terms of originality and influence.
For true fans of sixties culture, 1967 wasn’t just the year of the Summer of Love and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, it was the year of the Basement Tapes.
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Hi Lo Ha was Bob Dylan’s home and, in a sense, his hermitage.
In July 1965, he and Sara, his wife-to-be, had purchased the eleven-room house in the scraggy hills just north of Woodstock at the suggestion of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, though Dylan spent little time there due to his heavy recording and touring schedules. That is, until the accident. As a place to recuperate, decompress, and chill with family and friends, Hi Lo Ha was ideal, being only two hours from New York City and just ten minutes from Grossman’s house.
One of the first projects Dylan tackled after the accident was the editing of D. A. Pennebaker’s footage of the European tour, which was scheduled to air on the ABC Stage 67 television series that fall, though Dylan’s vision for the film was considerably different from Pennebaker’s—and ABC’s, for that matter. Dylan’s concept for the film, which he called Eat the Document, was closer in spirit to Tarantula than to Dont Look Back. He spliced and diced Pennebaker’s footage with oddly jerky cuts and a sometimes perverse randomness.
ABC was not amused, and Eat the Document was never aired, though pirated copies still circulate on the bootleg video market. The title presumably alludes to Cold War spies who, when captured—in old movies, at least—eat the pieces of paper in their pockets containing top-secret information.
As with Tarantula, Dylan seemed to be reaching for a kind of artistic freedom that few famous artists, short of a Picasso or a Stravinsky, ever achieve. Dylan had told Grossman to put everything on hold—the fans, the tour, the new album, the book—so that he could simplify life, find space, and create.
Although neither Tarantula nor Eat the Document were unqualified successes, they cleared the creative channels for masterworks to follow. By jumbling together enough ideas and images, Dylan was able to achieve something almost superhumanly beyond the limits of normal creativity. You don’t drive down Highway 61 without passing through Tarantula, and you don’t produce the best of the Basement Tapes (or the worst of them either, for that matter), without Eat the Document. The poet, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, is “constantly risking absurdity / and death” to reach “that still higher perch / where Beauty stands and waits”1—or, as Merton put it, “There has to be clean water in the mind for the spirit to drink.”2
Of course, total artistic freedom is usually illusory, if not counterproductive. So, in late 1966, Grossman, ever eyeing the bottom line, made a proposal. To keep the royalties flowing, Dylan wouldn’t have to tour or record an album. Instead, the two of them could form a jointly owned music company so that Dylan could write songs at his own pace, commit rough versions to tape as demos, and then have Grossman find other musicians to record them. Voilà! New Dylan songs without the stress of studio time, producers, or paid musicians! It would all be icing on the cake. And so Dwarf Music was formed.
In spring 1967, Dylan and the members of his 1966 touring band, the Hawks, set up a makeshift recording studio in Hi Lo Ha—in what was called the Red Room. Grossman contributed a two-track tape recorder and borrowed some microphones from Peter, Paul and Mary. Hawks keyboardist Garth Hudson became the de facto recording engineer, and within weeks they had committed about four dozen songs, mostly rough jams, to tape. Their process was simple. It was one that Dylan has used repeatedly throughout his career, that is, “learning to go forward by turning back the clock”3—and go back they did. At these initial sessions, they played old country-western standards, folk and blues chestnuts, and pop tunes of bygone days—with a few Dylan originals mixed in.
The sessions in the Red Room were productive but noisy. Since Sara was pregnant once again, and since Jesse was a year old, the musicians agreed to find less disruptive quarters. In nearby West Saugerties, Hawks bassist Rick Danko, keyboardist Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson shared a house that the locals called “Big Pink” due to its exterior paint job; and guitarist Robbie Robertson lived close by. Big Pink had a walk-out basement-garage on the south side that could easily accommodate the six musicians, their recording equipment, their many instruments, and an old dog to lie on the floor.
And so, the legendary Basement Tapes were born. From May to October, the group turned out scores of songs, including many of Dylan’s most memorable; they were committed to tape, sometimes in multiple takes, and not without a fair amount of stimulant-induced silliness interspersed.
As planned, Grossman farmed out copies of fourteen of the best songs, known as the Big Ben Demos, to other artists. Peter, Paul and Mary, whom Grossman also managed, had a minor hit with Dylan’s “Too Much of Nothing,” and folk duo Ian and Sylvia recorded “Tears of Rage” and two others. Baez put three on her all-Dylan Any Day Now album.
The first to score a number-one hit with a Basement song was Manfred Mann in early 1968 with his version of “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” and Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger and the Trinity reached number five on the UK charts with a scorching version of “This Wheel’s on Fire.” The Byrds, who still relished doing Dylan covers, recorded “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered” for their influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo, an album regarded as the granddaddy of country rock.
One year after the Basement sessions, the Hawks, now renamed the Band (as in the band who had backed Bob Dylan), released their own debut album, Music from Big Pink, on which their versions of “I Shall Be Released,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” and “Tears of Rage” appeared. Roger Waters of the group Pink Floyd ranked the Band’s record as the second “most influential album in the history of rock ’n’ roll,” after only the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.4
Other Basement Tapes songs include the loopy “Million Dollar Bash”; “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)”; “Tiny Montgomery,” “Clothesline Sage,” which is a sendup of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”; an impassioned south-of-the-border ballad called “Goin’ to Acapulco”; “Sign on the Cross,” which is a brilliantly macabre sendup of revival hymns; and the darkly stunning, half-mumbled “I’m Not There (1956),” which inspired Todd Haynes’s 2007 Dylan biopic, I’m Not There.
But Dylan wasn’t done. He made three trips to Nashville in October and November to record a new studio album—without the Band and without including any of the songs recorded at Big Pink. In a time of psychedelic overkill, elaborate overproduction, and concept albums, the new record was a starkly stripped-down affair. It was the anti-Sgt. Pepper’s. With none of the provocative anarchy of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, Dylan’s twelve ethereal songs were a nod to some of his earlier symbolist lyrics, with swatches of religious imagery and mysticism overlaid. The album, released just after Christmas 1967, was called John Wesley Harding.
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Among fans, the album aroused alarm. Why were none of the Basement songs, which other artists were recording, included? What happened to Dylan’s versions? Had fans been cheated? One recently launched and soon-to-be-influential magazine, called Rolling Stone (so named, in part, as a tribute to Dylan), in their twelfth issue, featured an article that boldly declared, “Dylan’s Basement Tape Should Be Released.”5 The zeal with which fans demanded the release was intense.
An answer of sorts appeared in the summer of 1969 in the form of an unauthorized double album, the first rock bootleg. It was available in head shops in major cities and by mail from various underground radio stations that were popping up on the relatively new FM frequency. The album, the cover of which was blank except for the words Great White Wonder crudely stamped in purple, contained seven of the fourteen Big Ben demos, along with more than a dozen other rare Dylan tracks. It was a cultural phenomenon, though it only served to whet fans’ appetite for more. They would have to wait until 1975 for sixteen Basement songs to appear on the first official Basement Tapes album, and they would wait until 2014 before all 139 tracks were released on the 6-CD Bootleg Series, Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete—more than six and a half hours of music. A critic for one major magazine described the set as “some of the most daring, creative and truly beautiful music ever recorded.”6
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The accident, the escape to upstate New York, and the mysterious subterranean recordings all fueled the myth of Dylan as a recluse, “the hermit of Woodstock.”7 Of course, no more a recluse than any celebrity forced to dodge meddlesome fans and far from being a hermit, Dylan was leading what most people would regard as a reasonably normal life. He was spending time puttering around his property, entertaining friends, and working on projects he was passionate about. Most of all, he spent time with his wife and his kids (he and Sara added another child to their family in 1968) and did the things that most dads do. One woman recalls attending a parent-teacher meeting at her child’s elementary school in Woodstock, and there, sitting next to her in one of those undersized desks, was local parent Bob Dylan.
But the idyllic days at Hi Lo Ha were numbered. The place was becoming a porous kind of retreat, and again, the adulators, the wild-eyed devotees, despoiled paradise. They routinely sneaked onto the property, peered in the windows, and broke into the house, looking for souvenirs or clues to Dylan’s mystifying charisma. As Dylan later wrote,
What I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. . . . That was my deepest dream. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back. Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos.8
This explains why Dylan opted not to perform at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. Although the event was actually located more than an hour’s drive from the village of Woodstock, it was still too close for comfort. Anticipating the arrival of hundreds of thousands of music fans, Dylan did the only rational thing: he got out of town. Two weeks later, he and the Band performed at the Isle of Wight Festival in England, only his third public appearance since the accident three years earlier.
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Around that time (coincidentally, on the last day of the Woodstock Festival), Bob Dylan’s contract with his manager expired, and a new era in their relationship began.
With a heaping dollop of understatement, Bob Dylan once wrote that Albert Grossman “was no hayseed.” Grossman was one of the scrappiest, most aggressive music entrepreneurs of the 1960s. According to Dylan, Grossman carried a .45 pistol, had a voice “like war drums [and] didn’t talk so much as growl.”9 A rabidly unapologetic capitalist, Grossman was despised by the more idealistic members of the folk community, but he made sure that he and his clients—people like Peter, Paul and Mary, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, the Band, and Janis Joplin—received top dollar for their talents.
Early on, Grossman had essentially built Dylan’s career from the ground up, negotiating contracts, scheduling concerts and recording sessions, and keeping close tabs on the finances. According to Pennebaker, Grossman “was kind of a father” to Dylan.10 The two were a formidable pair, a confluence of powerful tidal currents. Both had talent, savvy, persuasive though difficult personalities, and ambition.
When it came time to renew their contract in 1969, Dylan sensed something was wrong. Over the years, through a series of complicated contractual maneuvers, a sort of legal shell game, Grossman had managed to assign to himself far more of Dylan’s songwriting royalties than Dylan had been aware of. Dylan also discovered that some of Grossman’s recently established companies were being secretly collateralized against older, jointly held companies.11 The machinations resulted in Dylan firing Grossman. The two parted unamicably, and the complicated legal and financial wrangling would continue even after Grossman’s death in 1986.
The fact is, Dylan no longer needed Grossman. How does one become more famous than famous? Rather than depending on someone else to develop his career, Dylan reclaimed his independence and the freedom to explore new directions—for instance, his foray into country music with his next album, Nashville Skyline (1969), and his first major acting role in Sam Peckinpah’s western film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), in which Dylan played a character named, ironically, Alias.
Had it not been for his so-called hermit years, during which he was raising his own children, Dylan might never have realized that he himself no longer needed a father figure. He was on his own.
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So, Dylan was not a hermit in the way that Thomas Merton was.
And yet . . . in the summer of 1967, it would have been hard to tell which of them was the more unhermitlike.
A prisoner in solitary confinement experiences solitude. A monk in a mountain cave with the rope pulled up after him is a hermit by anyone’s definition. But neither Thomas Merton nor Bob Dylan were solitaries at this point, despite the myths surrounding them. They were eminently sociable artists who depended almost entirely on others; they were creative thinkers with wide circles of stimulating friends and acquaintances to feed their creativity and help produce their work; and they had acquired huge audiences. They spent time alone, but no more nor less than most artists who carve out time to think and create. Otherwise, a steady stream of friends and visitors flowed through their lives.
Both were beset, however, with too many visitors of the unwanted kind. Dylan had to deal with the hippie invaders, while Merton had to cope with the unending parade of visiting priests and dignitaries.
Both were profiled in glossy magazines, interviewed by earnest journalists, their works reviewed in various publications; both had deadlines to meet and, to some degree, the business end of creativity to deal with.
Both were controversial and had acquired enemies, and both had to cope with the occasional hostility of their former fans.
Both had meddling father figures whom they struggled with and ultimately had to overcome, and Merton even addressed his as “Father.”
Unlike Dylan, Merton had no family—though in another sense he did. It is not for nothing that monks are called brothers. For much of his time in the hermitage, Merton walked to the abbey every day for a meal and to attend Mass, he taught the novices on most Sundays despite no longer being their official novice master, and he personally counseled many of the monks, especially those considering leaving the monastery.
Merton would have resonated with Dylan’s observation that “Privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.”
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Of course, on another level, “all men are solitary,” wrote Merton. “Only most of them are so averse to being alone, or to feeling alone, that they do everything they can do to forget their solitude.”12 In one of his most beautiful Basement Tapes songs, “I Shall Be Released,” Dylan refers to a man, perhaps a prisoner, standing by himself “in this lonely crowd” and plaintively longing to “be released.”13 As artists, Merton and Dylan had learned the trick of inhabiting that inner solitude even when surrounded by others. As spiritual thinkers, they accepted their basic existential aloneness before God. “This inner ‘I,’” Merton wrote, “who is always alone, meets the solitude of every other man and the solitude of God. . . . This ‘I’ is Christ himself living in us: and we, in Him, living in the Father.”14
In 1975, Bob Dylan, a year after returning to the concert stage, told an interviewer for People magazine,
I don’t think of my life as a reclusive life. I’m not a hermit. Exclusive, maybe, but not reclusive. I didn’t consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth. It was given to me—by God. Inspiration is what we’re looking for. You just have to be receptive to it. . . . There is a voice inside us all that talks only to us. We have to be able to hear that voice.15
Thomas Merton would have known exactly what Dylan meant, though to describe that voice, he would have used another term: prophetic.