SvenErik The Basement Tapes (1975)

1. Odds and Ends
2. Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)
3. Million Dollar Bash
4. Yazoo Street Scandal
5. Goin' to Acapulco
6. Katie's Been Gone
7. Lo and Behold
8. Bessie Smith
9. Clothes Line Saga
10. Apple Suckling Tree
11. Please, Mrs. Henry
12. Tears of Rage
13. Too Much of Nothing
14. Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Brew
15. Ain't No More Cane
16. Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)
17. Ruben Remus
18. Tiny Montgomery
19. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
20. Don't Ya Tell Henry
21. Nothing Was Delivered
22. Open the Door, Homer
23. Long Distance Operator
24. This Wheel's on Fire

Notes and Reviews

The musicians: Bob Dylan (acoustic guitar, piano, vocals), Robbie Robertson (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, vocals), Richard Manual (piano, drums, harmonica, vocals), Rick Danko (electric bass, mandolin, vocals), Garth Hudson (organ, clavinette, accordion, tenor sax, piano), Levon Helm (drums, mandolin, electric bass, vocals).

Trivia: Recorded in the basement of Big Pink, West Saugerties, New York, near Dylan's then Woodstock home.


Reviews:

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:


"Basement Tapes, The [1975] This 17th album, a double-LP, marked the first official release of a
version of the world’s most bootlegged bootleg: material cut by Dylan and the Crackers / THE
BAND up near Woodstock in 1967 during the long silence between Blonde on Blonde (and Dylan’s motorcycle
crash) in 1966 and John Wesley Harding in 1968. The core Dylan songs from these sessions
actually do form a clear link between these two utterly different albums. They evince the same
highly serious, precarious quest for a personal and universal salvation which marked out the John
Wesley Harding collection—yet they are soaked in the same blocked confusion and turmoil as Blonde
on Blonde. ‘Tears of Rage’, for example, is a halfway house between, say, ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or
Later)’ and ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’. There is also a unique, radical corpus of spacey yet exuberant
music here, as on ‘Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)’, ‘Please Mrs. Henry’ and ‘Million
Dollar Bash’. Essential stuff, badly compiled. The interspersed tracks by The Band alone disrupt
the unity of Dylan material, much more of which should have been here. Indeed The Band’s
tracks are thoroughly dodgy, even including one, ‘Bessie Smith’, which wasn’t recorded in this period
at all but was an outtake from four years later, from their 1971 album Cahoots.
The authentic 1967 sessions had also included a wealth of traditional material revisited, the existence
of which was far less known at the time of this release than became apparent in the 1990s,
when it was widely circulated and became the main subject of GREIL MARCUS’ book Invisible Republic,
1997. Key Dylan-composed items missing include ‘I Shall Be Released’ and ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’.
And having kept all these 1967 recordings unreleased all through the aeons from 1967 to the mid-1970s,
this album was then issued curiously swiftly after the release of Blood on the Tracks. There was also
something disquieting about the specially posed cover photos (by Reid Miles, in the basement of
the YMCA in LA), which seemed to reduce jostling figures of myth and imagination to a callow amdram
tableau—a suggestion here that Dylan was at once packaging and repackaging his own myth. As
well as Dylan, The Band and people dressed as song ‘characters’, others on camera include NEIL
YOUNG and DAVID BLUE. The double-album received fine reviews; John
Rockwell in the New York Times declared it ‘The greatest album in the history of popular American
music.’ But it wasn’t, and for all the riches within it, all of which are presented out of context, it was
a shamefully poor representation of an astonishingly creative, important period in this great artist’s
working life."

From Folkrockman --
"I’m surprised that, as a Dylan fan, I waited so long to listen to this album! It’s totally amazing! The recording quality is amazing given it was recorded at home in the “Big Pink” house in 1967. The variety on the disc is amazing and the collaboration of Dylan and The Band is top notch. The album has a very strong rock and roll/blues overtone. It has ballads and, as always, Dylan’s fantastic lyrics. What’s not to like here? If you like The Band and you like Bob Dylan, you’ll LOVE “The Basement Tapes”. “Odds and Ends” seems to me like a bunch of friends getting together and playing some rock and roll on a Saturday night. I’m surprised that some of these numbers have never been done again in the studio. The harmony on “Tears of Rage” is beautiful. Dylan’s voice displays the whole range of his many styles. Take “Too Much of Nothing” for example. I know it in it’s Peter, Paul and Mary version. This one is totally different and reminds me of Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” vocal. Then the chorus comes in with The Band and you know this is a different kind of record. Is “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” fun or what? I really like this album!"

Best Song:
"Clothes Line Saga"
According to Alias

There are lots of great songs on this album and the variety is quite wide. I can't disagree with Alias on this one though. "Clothes Line Saga" is fantastic and it's one of those songs here I think should have been in the studio later. -- Folkrockman

While "Clothesline Saga" is certainly the funniest song on this strange collection, I don't think Dylan ever topped "Goin' To Acapulco." His delivery is exquisitely soulful, the lyric delightfully nuanced, the whole performance superb. -- SvenErik

Favorite Lyric:
"Ev'rybody wants to make a long-distance call
But you know they're just gonna have to wait"
According to Alias