While the Dylan-osphere continues to reverberate with revelations from his former road manager’s new book, a quick search for “Bob Dylan” tonight didn’t yield one post about his just announced next release in his Bootleg Series of unheard recordings. Why is that a big deal? Because the box set that’s coming out in November is likely considered second only to Dylan releasing the music from his Blood on the Tracks period – which also gets mentioned in this article from The Guardian. Here’s the skinny…

Bob Dylan is sharing the rest of his Basement Tapes. Four decades after the singer released 24 songs under that title – cuts he recorded with the Band in upstate New York – his label have agreed to unveil 114 more tracks from the same 1967 sessions.

“Some of this stuff is mind-boggling,” Sid Griffin, author of the set’s liner notes, told Rolling Stone. Packaged under the title The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, the six-CD set incorporates alternate versions of Blowin’ In The Wind and It Ain’t Me Babe, covers of tunes by Johnny Cash and Curtis Mayfield, and at least 30 tracks that Rolling Stone claims “even fanatical Dylan fans never knew existed”…

Almost all of this material was harvested from reel-to-reel tape: 20 tapes in all, which the Band’s Garth Hudson kept stored in his Woodstock home. Jan Haust, a Toronto-based collector, acquired the archive about 10 years ago; he worked with Dylan’s reps to find a way to put them out…“We usually curate these packages more, but we knew the fans would be disappointed if we didn’t put out absolutely everything,” an unnamed Dylan source told Rolling Stone.

Fans of The Basement Tapes have always known that there was unreleased material…“The stuff that people haven’t heard justifies, in every way, shape and form, all the hype, hubris and myth that surrounds these tapes,” Griffin promised.

Moving forward, Dylan’s archivists are hoping to assemble unused material from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks sessions. “The unheard stuff from there is crazy,” said Rolling Stone’s source. “You can hear the first day of recordings before they put all that echo on.” According to a report in January, Dylan’s camp is also preparing a documentary about the Rolling Thunder Revue, a caravan concert tour from 1975, where Dylan played alongside Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, a 20-something T Bone Burnett, and guest stars like Allen Ginsberg and Harry Dean Stanton.

Yep. And my Christmas-list-making-season starts…now!

Here’s Robbie Robertson on The Basement Tapes…

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