Bob Dylan – music from the basement

Elliott Landy‘s photos helped create a new image for Dylan, marking distinct shift in his sound and lyrical concerns. Bob’s 1965/66 fashion sense (and general demeanour) matched his rock n roll urgency and perfectly reflected his lyrics, which were at once flamboyant and rather aloof and distainful.

The Landy photos show a warmer, domesticated Bob. He’s gained a little weight, had a good night’s sleep and got his hair under control. When he gazes into the camera, some of the old fury remains, but many of the pictures show him as a hands-on family man (it’s very rare that you see Bob in the mid-sixties being warm towards anyone). And, in contrast to the urban pop/art scene he personified a year or two earlier, he’s moved out of the city to upstate New York.

The retreat from cutting edge rock n roll began in 1967, when Dylan began recording with The Band in a basement in upstate New York. The group passed a few months writing new material and revisiting standards from the traditional canon, as well as the country, rockabilly and folk revival songbooks. Plenty has been written already about the sessions – not least by Greil Marcus, whose Invisible Republic book comes with a full Quiet Room endorsement.

Around 100 tracks were recorded. A selection were later released on Dylan’s Basement Tapes album but the complete sessions have been widely bootlegged. One of the many appealing things about the official album is its informal quality – for Marcus’s take on that follow the Basement Tapes link above and scroll down to read the sleevenotes – everything was plainly recorded together and there is a tangible warmth in the playing, and the vocals in particular, which are alive with deadpan jokes and giggling, and missed cues, and off the cuff harmonising.

I’ve been meaning to write about these sessions since I began this blog, and I plan to return to them. This homemade, intimate music, in which ancient common traditions bleed into raw personal visions, is some of the most radical I know.

Here’s a song from the complete session bootleg – a version of Pete Seeger’s Bells of Rhymney, which was based on a righteous if slightly clumsy protest poem about labour relations in the south Welsh mining industry.

Electric guitarists will instantly recognise the explosion noise at the start – the sound of an amplifier with a spring reverb being moved or dropped. Bob is strangely absent from his own vocal. Unlike his confrontational 1966 era singing, in which he taunts you with his own genius at high volume, in this performance he allows the song speak through him. Sticking to the hill and vale contours of melody, he sounds simultaneously young and ancient. As he does on all his greatest recordings.

Some readers will know this song from the majestic version on The Byrds’ debut album. (Alert: Not Small Music)

Their reading suffers from a fairly brutal edit, which removed some of the strongest and most resonant lines (“throw the vandals in court”… “even God is uneasy”). Dylan kept them all, and delivered them with haunting composure.