History / The Basement Tapes (1967)

The Basement Tapes (1967)

Garth Hudson recorded some of the most bootlegged music in rock history on equipment he had to borrow. Two stereo mixers and a tape recorder came from Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. The microphones came from the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, on loan. None of it was built for what was about to happen in that basement, and none of it was ever meant to be heard outside the room.

Dylan was still recovering from his motorcycle accident and living in Woodstock with his family. Danko, Hudson, and Manuel had rented a house five miles away in West Saugerties, moving in that February, a newly built place with pink siding that the locals started calling Big Pink before the Band ever did. Robertson lived nearby too, with a French-Canadian woman he'd met on the Paris stop of the 1966 tour. The sessions started small that spring, in a den at Dylan's house that everyone called the Red Room, then moved that June into Big Pink's basement, where Hudson's borrowed gear was waiting.

What happened down there for the rest of the summer wasn't really recording sessions in any normal sense. Dylan showed up most days with something new, sometimes a finished song, sometimes just a fragment, and the group worked through it however it came out, no planning, no second-guessing. They covered traditional folk tunes, blues standards, rockabilly songs nobody had thought about in years, alongside dozens of originals, some of which never got past a verse and a chorus before everyone moved on to the next thing. By the time it wound down that October, they'd filled nine reels of tape with something like a hundred songs.

Two of Dylan's best basement originals came out of direct collaboration with band members rather than Dylan working alone. "Tears of Rage" was co-written with Manuel, who ended up singing it. "This Wheel's on Fire" was co-written with Danko, same arrangement. Nobody involved treated any of this as a big moment at the time. They were just amusing themselves in a basement, waiting to find out what Dylan planned to do next.

Levon Helm came back into the fold that October, lured out of his self-imposed exile by the promise of a record deal Grossman was shopping around. The group needed a name for the contract, and their first instinct was to give the record label something deliberately unusable: they told Grossman to list them as the Crackers, a self-mocking dig at their own Southern-inflected sound, and privately joked about calling themselves the Honkies. It wasn't until Helm rejoined and the lineup was whole again that they settled on the far simpler name that stuck: the Band.

None of the summer's work was intended for release, but it got out into the world anyway, and fast. Dylan's publishing company, Dwarf Music, put together a fourteen-song demo tape in October 1967 and circulated it to other artists looking for material. Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, and the Trinity had a UK top-five hit with "This Wheel's on Fire" within months. The Byrds cut "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" as a single and put it, along with "Nothing Was Delivered," on Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Peter, Paul and Mary reached the Billboard Top 40 with "Too Much of Nothing" before the year was out. Songs recorded in a basement for nobody in particular were charting on the radio before the people who wrote most of them had even finished their own debut album.

The tapes themselves stayed unreleased and increasingly legendary for years, passed around on acetates and rumor, until the summer of 1969, when a mysterious double album called Great White Wonder started turning up in record shops, mixing some of the basement recordings with earlier Dylan material nobody had authorized for release either. It's generally regarded as the first real bootleg in rock history, the record that invented an entire underground industry built on tape nobody was supposed to have.

Columbia finally issued an official version in 1975, sixteen songs from the sessions reworked with new overdubs, plus eight new Band recordings without Dylan tacked on to round out the album. Robertson and engineer Rob Fraboni led the production, collapsing Hudson's original wide-open stereo mixes down and adding bass, drums, and backing vocals that hadn't existed in the room in 1967. Purists have argued for decades that the cleanup compromised what made the tapes worth hearing in the first place. It took until 2014, and a six-disc box set called The Basement Tapes Complete, for all 138 surviving tracks to finally reach the public close to the way Hudson actually captured them, on borrowed gear, in a basement, for an audience of nobody.