Musicheads Essential Album: Bob Dylan and the Band, 'The Basement Tapes'
by Jay Gabler
April 29, 2021
In 2014, Bob Dylan released The Basement Tapes Complete as part of his official Bootleg Series. That was only appropriate, since the original Basement Tapes were among the most legendary bootlegs in music history. First officially released in 1975, The Basement Tapes is a Musicheads Essential Album.
The recordings that became known as The Basement Tapes were literally made...yes, in a basement. Specifically, the basement of "Big Pink": the upstate New York house made famous by the Band's 1968 debut album Music from Big Pink.
It was the previous year, 1967, that the Band convened in Woodstock to join Dylan, who was physically and mentally recuperating from a motorcycle accident that forced him to hit reset on his previously hectic career. In the bucolic Catskills, Dylan and the Band started jamming on covers and on a rapidly growing number of eclectic originals that were often written and arranged collaboratively.
The Band's Music from Big Pink grew out of those sessions, but the bulk of the Dylan recordings were shelved when he headed to Nashville to record the album John Wesley Harding. As other artists found success with their versions of "basement" songs like "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)," the original recordings started to circulate far and wide.
Finally, under the supervision of the Band's Robbie Robertson, The Basement Tapes were edited into a double disc that was officially released in 1975. Although fans have long quibbled about everything from the sound to the selection, the music's brilliance was immediately apparent: the New York Times called it "one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music."
Today, The Basement Tapes are recognized as foundational to the genre now known as Americana. It's music that cuts across traditions from folk to country to rhythm and blues, written and performed with wit and integrity — not to mention virtuosity. As Dylan told Rolling Stone, "That's really the way to do a recording — in a peaceful, relaxed setting — in somebody's basement. With the windows open...and a dog lying on the floor."