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55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost time is not found again, July 22, 1999
The Basement Tapes revealed that Bob Dylan, the visionary voice of a generation, the man who changed the world with a guitar, a harmonica and a hound-dog voice, was also a funny guy. These legendary Saugerties, NY "Big Pink" sessions with the Band show Dylan, recovering from a mysterious motorcycle accident and raising young kids, kicking back and having some fun with his pals and some music. The tunes are great, and many of them are completely non-sensical which is quite a departure for the composer of "Chimes of Freedom," etc. If you've never heard songs like "Tiny Montgomery," "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" or "This Wheel's on Fire" (which is quite possible since radio doesn't play anything but "like a rolling stone") you may be surprised. It's a sound that isn't really comprable to anything else in his catalogue, perhaps because he never intended to release them. This is the closest you could ever come to being a fly on the wall at a Dylan recording session. My only regret is that they have never released more from the sessions; over 100 songs were recorded in this period, many of them covers like "Folsom Prison Blues," others original, like the hypnotic "I'm Not There (1956)" and majestic "Sign on the Cross." They are available if you know where to look. A "Complete Basement Tapes" would be my vote for the next volumes of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series.
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234 of 263 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
5 star music, 2 deducted for deceptive presentation, July 1, 2001
A few thoughts on the official Columbia Records Basement Tapes album:
The informal sessions recorded during the summer of 1967 mostly at Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, are one of the essential bodies of work in the history of American music, as rich in their manner as the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens, Robert Johnson's 1936 - 37 recordings, or Hank Williams' MGM recordings. Their beauty is such that even this dodgily compiled and inferior sounding official release from 1975 cannot diminish their importance and their influence on an entire generation of musicians.
As a few reviewers have noted on this page and elsewhere, the album as released is a bit of sleight-of-hand. The vast majority of tracks by The Band included here were not in fact recorded at the same time, or even in the same place (the legendary "Big Pink") as the Dylan tracks here. Partly, this is attributable to Robbie Robertson's disturbing tendency to obfuscate his own role i!n the formation of The Band's signature sound, and his de-emphasis of the collaborative nature of this wonderful group. In 1975, Robertson and Rob Fraboni compiled the official Basements album, and Robertson included a group of Band tracks on the official album, presumably to allege that he was writing songs along with Dylan at Big Pink. Unfortunately, there's little evidence to support this inference. The Band's earliest self-penned songs often came from Richard Manuel, who unfortunately is not alive to attest to his role in the Band's early years. Rick Danko is also no longer with us, while Garth Hudson and Levon Helm are generally disinclined to speak about the matter, leaving Robertson to parlay his falsehoods unchecked. In the wake of the Capitol reissues, most of The Band recordings supposedly from the Basement sessions have now been restored to their rightful chronology, and with mostly correct recording information, and much-improved sound quality. "Yazoo Street Scanda!l" (recorded January 10th, 1968), "Orange Juice Blues," "Katie's Been Gone" (both likely recorded in September 1967), "Long Distance Operator" (written by Dylan, recorded in Los Angeles, February 21st, 1968), and "Bessie Smith" (recorded sometime between 1969 and 71) all postdate the actual Big Pink sessions. All of these tracks were subjected to manipulations in the studio, most likely in 1975, to make them more 'lo-fi' and to make them better fit in with the true Big Pink recordings of summer 1967. For the lowdown on this, see also Dave Hopkins' article "The Band Remasters," on The Band's website, and Barney Hoskyns' rejected (by Robertson, for reasons that become clear once the two sets of liner notes are compared) liner notes to the first four Band reissues.
It seems that Robertson was introduced to the practice of taking credit for things he did not do quite early on: Several of the tracks recorded with Ronnie Hawkins in the early 1960's bore writing credits that !listed Robertson as writer or co-writer of songs he definitely did not write. Roulette Records label boss Morris Levy seems to have left an impression on Robertson in this respect, assigning writing credits to his girlfriend and Robertson, as well as Levon Helm, presumably for the purposes of personal gain. The disturbing aspect of this is that it underscores what has been, for Robertson, a career-long tendency to obscure the facts surrounding his recorded output.
Recently, bootleg albums of the proper Big Pink material have featured much better sound quality than even the legendary 5 CD bootleg The Genuine Basement Tapes. Whether these new, official release quality mixes of these recordings were prepared by bootleggers or by Columbia/Sony in preparation for a future and much needed official release of the complete Basement Tapes (possibly as further volumes of the Bootleg Series) is open to debate. What is important at this point in time is the knowledge that the ster!eo recordings made at Big Pink, given proper treatment, can be released in excellent stereo sound quality, almost on par with recordings made in a 'proper' recording studio. When will the world at large be able to easily obtain recordings of important Dylan works such as "The All American Boy," "Sign on the Cross," "I'm Not There," the superior alternate take of "Too Much of Nothing," the hilarious and entirely different alternate of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," plus fine alternates of "Nothing Was Delivered," "Odds and Ends" and much more? What of the many, many wonderful cover songs recorded during the Big Pink Sessions: "Bonnie Ship the Diamond," "The Banks of the Royal Canal," "Four Strong Winds," "(Now and Then) There's a Fool Such as I," and many, many more? How about the wonderful-sounding undubbed stereo versions of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" "This Wheel's On Fire"? Columbia Records, when are these recordings going to available to those who don't care to wander through th!e numerous and varying bootlegs of this material?
An interesting if highly conjectural account of these recordings and their role in American Culture can be found in Greil Marcus' sometimes-brilliant, sometimes-aggravating book-length study, Invisible Republic. A more concise, fact oriented and sometimes-vitriolic account of the official album's deceptive nature can be found in Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin's book Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, pages 54 - 68.
I do recommend this album as an inexpensive and readily available introduction to the still mostly hidden glories of the Basements. Until Sony/Columbia or Dylan decides to grace this world with an official proper release of this material, The Basement Tapes double album will have to suffice. It's a great listen, really. Nothing at all like Blonde on Blonde, which preceded it, or John Wesley Harding, which followed it. The Basement music is timeless, deathless, often beautiful, sometimes humorously beaut!iful, sometimes poignant, and occasionally absolutely ravishing in its' exploration of what lies at the heart of what Greil Marcus termed the "weird, old America." Robertson's terse, economical guitar solo at the end of "Goin' to Acapulco" is a gem all by itself. Don't miss it.
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
We need a bootleg series edition, July 27, 2006
I know, I know . . . it seems inevitable perhaps that one will be produced someday. But as Columbia (and Dylan himself) have made major errors in reading the public's desires (see Infidels and the upcoming Bootleg Series addition) when and if in fact this will happen is anyone's guess. So I propose that anyone who would like to see a re-mastered authoritative edition (and not another "best-of" watered down compilation of live or alternate versions of Dylan tunes that, while wonderful, have been packaged and re-packaged in some form or another over and over again - - how many live versions of "Blowin' In the Wind" do we need anyway?) of some of the finest material Dylan ever produced ("Sign On the Cross" and "I'm Not There (1956)" (the latter of which has provided the title for a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE for God's sake) as well as covers of "Four Strong Winds" and "A Fool Such As I" and alternate tracks of great, if lesser known, tunes too numerous to list here) please take the advantage of this forum and simply respond to this review as helpful. Perhaps then Columbia will get the message. And hopefully they'll have the wherewithal to hire someone like Greil Marcus or Paul Williams (and not Jeff Rosen, who should have been fired from the Bootleg Series long ago) to oversee the project and make sure this music is finally given the treatment it deserves. "Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff."
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