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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45 years ago, in 1969, The Band released their classic sophmore album and changed rock ‘n’ roll forever. But, how did a group of nearly-all Canadians seem to absorb the entire history of American music from folk, to blues, to country to jazz and recreate it in their own inimitable way?

While the band received a thorough education in American rhythm and blues during their tenure backing Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks, the poetic magic of their second album required a PhD in American roots music that might have seemed impossible given the youthful faces that appeared on the record’s iconic cover. The Band’s Music from Big Pink debut hinted at their greatness, but few expected this masterpiece from the group.

Here’s the Wiki…

The album includes many of The Band’s best-known and critically acclaimed songs, including “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, which Rolling Stone named the 245th greatest song of all time (in the updated version,[7] it was the 249th greatest song of all time). In 2003, the album was ranked number 45 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1998 Q magazine readers voted The Band the 76th greatest album of all time. TIME magazine included it in their unranked 2006 list of the 100 greatest albums. Robert Christgau, having been disappointed with their debut, had expected to dislike the record and even planned a column for The Village Voice to castigate their followup. Upon hearing the record, however, he declared it better than Abbey Road, which had been released four days following, writing that The Band’s LP is an “A-plus record if I’ve ever rated one.”[2] He ranked it as the fourth best album of the year in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine’s annual critics poll.[8]

By the time of their second record, The Band had toured the world with Bob Dylan and created a collection of music with him in Woodstock, New York that would later be released as The Basement Tapes. The lessons they learned during their time in their rustic retreat, sharing songs with Dylan finally came to fruition on the classic 1969 release.

Here’s a documentary that tells the story of that time, and helps to illuminate The Band’s evolution into one of the most important groups in the history of rock…

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This past weekend we celebrated the 45th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The event was a legendary happening that’s been illuminated from so many angles, it’s hard to shed any new light on the subject. That said, it is — and always will be — a milestone in the establishment of the American counterculture after World War II, the atom bomb, the Beatniks, the 1960′s anti-war movement, the dawn of the sexual revolution and the rise of psychedelic culture.

While all of the socio-political implications of the event will always reverberate on such occasions, it’s important to remember that Woodstock was ultimately about the music.

Here are some of my favorite moments from the fest…

Crosby, Stills & Nash performed their second gig at the festival. It starts out rough with their famously out of tune guitars and vocals, but eventually settles into a legendary performance of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” from their hit debut album.

When I think of Woodstock, I think of Richie Havens. His nearly-three-hour performance opened the festival with the frantic energy of Havens’ rhythm guitar playing, poetic lyrics and emotive vocals, but it’s his closing tune that made him a legend and created his career. Here’s the Wiki…

Havens as a live performer earned widespread notice. His Woodstock appearance in 1969 catapulted him into stardom and was a major turning point in his career.[2] As the festival’s first performer, he held the crowd for nearly three hours. In part, Havens was told to continue playing, because many artists scheduled to perform after him were delayed in reaching the festival location with highways at a virtual standstill. He was called back for several encores. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual Motherless Child that became Freedom. The subsequent Woodstock movie release helped Havens reach a worldwide audience. He also appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival in late August 1969.

The Band didn’t make the cut in the feature film of the concert, but their inexorable legacy and this footage of their performance of “Tears of Rage” says that they deserve a spotlight in a remembrance such as this…

The Who played a medley of their rock opera songs at the fest before leaning into this incendiary, deconstruction of their iconic hit, “My Generation.” Pete Townsend apologizes before the band kicks off the obligatory performance, but he definitely didn’t need to…

We can’t talk about Woodstock without talking about Sly & The Family Stone. Here’s Ultimate Classic Rock‘s take on their iconic performance…

Sly & the Family Stone were already stars when they took the stage at 3:30 Sunday morning. But they had recently released their first classic album, ‘Stand!,’ and were at the tightest point in their career. Their early-morning show is a bit sloppy, but the blurry-eyed delivery digs into the dirty, nasty pull of the music. Their entire 50-minute set is pretty remarkable, but the stumbling-toward-ecstasy drive of ‘I Want to Take You Higher’ is the highlight.

Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” has been heard in every capturing of the event, but it remains the bullseye document of the festival’s flashpoint marriage of politics, rock, sex, drugs and what it meant to be a young American at the close of the 1960′s. May we all be patriotic enough to live up to this outrageous call for liberty, love and freedom.

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How does it feel?

With Bob Dylan, Greil Marcus offers up insights and criticisms, notions and associations about pop music’s greatest singer/songwriter. Perhaps no writer is as closely associated with a musical artist as Marcus is with Dylan and this new volume covers nearly half-a-century of Marcus’ – and Dylan’s – greatest hits.

In the book’s introduction, Marcus states  “I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them.” A great critic can be also be an inspired creator and Marcus found a muse when he discovered Dylan’s music as an 18-year-old when he attended a Joan Baez concert. While Marcus’ freewheeling, associative analysis can be too much for some readers, it’s writing worthy of the subject. After all, many people find Dylan’s poetry impenetrable as well. In truth, Marcus possesses the adroitness of thinking, the linguistic facility and the stylistic audacity necessary to take in Dylan’s timeless music on its own terms before shaping it to his inspired purposes.

Describing that first Dylan show Marcus writes, “…I was confused… something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn’t do it.”  Of course the joke here is that this could very well be a reader’s first reaction to one of Marcus’ takes on a particular Dylan album or lyric. In fact, Marcus’ angle on Dylan is an important touchstone for anyone interested in diving deeper into Dylan’s catalog. This volume traces an arc from 1968 to the present day, and it’s the critic’s writings on this most recent Dylan – since 1992′s Good as I Been to You – that hold the most surprises.

If all we had were Marcus’ writings on Dylan’s music with The Band, we’d count ourselves lucky. Having a commentator with the insight and skills necessary to put Dylan’s oeuvre in a critical context for more than four decades has been an unlikely blessing for all of us infidels. And having the entirety of  Marcus’ commentary gathered in one volume reminds me of that handful of rain Dylan sang about in “Visions of Johanna”: It cannot be defied.

Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
PublicAffairs
October 19, 2010

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"You lookin' at me?"

Although The Band is known for their American roots music, only drummer Levon Helm was born in the ‘States. Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson all hail from Canada.

After meeting up as “The Hawks” – the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins – the band came to prominence supporting Bob Dylan on his legendary, first, electrified rock tour.

Having secured a recording contract of their own, The Band released their classic debut – Music from Big Pink – in 1968. One year later the group released their eponymous follow-up-and-acknowledged-masterpiece The Band.

This 1997 VH1 episode of their “Classic Albums” series features interviews with band members and studio engineers as well as great footage at the soundboard, exploring the record’s mixes in-depth.

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Now that the blog is finally back I wanted to give away a little something to you, my faithful, sleepless readers:

I’ve added the songs from my newly-remixed debut album to the player at the bottom of this post. It’s now available for digital download at all major music sites like Amazon, iTunes etc.  I’ve also made the title songs of the 2 discs – Blue Turns Black and Plain Jane – available for free download! Check out the player and click on the glowing download button when you play to the title tunes.

Enjoy and leave comment!

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Joe Nolan <3