Bob Dylan (24 page)

“For the most part, we did them in the afternoons,” recalls Robbie Robertson. “The idea was just for the Band to have our little clubhouse, where everybody could go every day, hang around, play a little music, work on some songs, without disturbing anybody. We said, ‘God, this place is really starting to feel good,' and so Bob would come over and hang around just like the rest of the guys. Up in the living room, there were a couple of typewriters, and every once in a while, somebody would sit down and hammer something out, just fooling around, having some fun. Somebody would say, ‘I have an idea for this,' and go down in the basement, and pretty soon everybody else would lumber down, and we'd start fooling around on things. And it started to take on a character, almost. We'd record these things and listen back to them, and it would be so funny to us, it would just crack us up! It was such a good-spirited situation, so non-pressured, that it just felt good to be there.”

The sound of the recordings made in the basement was warm and intimate, markedly different from the big, powerful rock sound that Dylan had pumped out in concert with the Hawks. This was partly by design and partly through necessity. “One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room,” explained Robertson. “So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn't hear the singing, you were playing too loud. It just became a completely different approach to that we had been using before.”

The results drew heavily on the folk music that Dylan had studied in his early years in New York—not the self-righteous social protest songs he had mastered and then discarded, but the traditional music from the early decades of the century that he had encountered on compilations like Harry Smith's celebrated six-LP
Anthology Of American Folk Music
. This was a strange, dark kind of music, full of bizarre stories and weird imagery, and riddled with death—and worse. The previous summer, in his interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, Dylan had criticized the folk music “authorities” who wanted him to “keep things simple.”

“Folk music is the only music where it isn't simple,” he contended. “It's never been simple. It's weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I've never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs. They were out of sight… ‘Nottamun Town', that's like a herd of ghosts passing through on the way to Tangiers.”

He expanded upon the same theme to Nat Hentoff: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they're not going to die… traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected… I think its meaninglessness is holy.”

Listening to the songs which make up
The Basement Tapes
, one begins to grasp what he means. These are songs of departure, but rarely arrival; of the search for salvation; and of nonsense as the coin of hidden meaning. They're populated by a typically wide, typically odd range of characters, who seem to inhabit a parallel world to the one we live in. And in the main, the lyrics sound as off-the-cuff and extemporized as those on Dylan's recent albums had been meticulously polished; in several cases, the words sound as if they've been made up on the spot, simply to fill in the spaces between the choruses. And some sound as if they're just attempts to make the other musicians laugh.

“I remember a couple of things that we thought, ‘Well, nobody should hear
these,'
just because of the subject matter, or because they were filthy, y'know?” says Robertson. “It was like, We'd better put these in the furnace! But someday somebody will go in the furnace probably, and they'll be out too, just a little burnt.”

Musically, the songs were completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the pop world, which during the long hot summer of 1967
was celebrating the birth of the hippie movement with a gaudy explosion of “psychedelic” music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos of dubious quality. Drawing on a palette that included traditional instruments such as accordion and mandolin alongside the various drums, guitars and keyboards at their disposal, Dylan and the Band (as they would become known, by default) conjured up a raw and rootsy, joyful, juicy sound in which fear and frolic coexisted in the same notes, a raggedy blanket spun from strands of country, blues and gospel music.

“It wasn't that way necessarily on purpose,” explains Robertson, “it was just that there was such a tremendous freedom in thinking, ‘Nobody's ever going to hear this, we can try anything.'” But of course, people did get to hear them. Dylan was still the most sought-after songwriter in the pop business, and so an acetate of some of the songs was circulated by his publisher among artists keen to cover Dylan material. After an album of songs which—‘Just Like A Woman' aside—few had dared to cover, the sketchy and approachable style of
The Basement Tapes'
songs made this one of his most productive periods, as far as cover versions went: Manfred Mann hit big with ‘The Mighty Quinn' (which was unaccountably left off the official album); Julie Driscoll made a successful cover of ‘This Wheel's On Fire'; The Byrds continued their association with Dylan by recording both ‘Nothing Was Delivered' and ‘This Wheel's On Fire'; Fairport Convention did ‘Million Dollar Bash'; Peter, Paul & Mary had a minor hit with ‘Too Much Of Nothing', reasonable recompense for their loan of the recording equipment; and the Band included versions of ‘I Shall Be Released', ‘Tears Of Rage' and ‘This Wheel's On Fire'—the last two of which they had co-written—on their debut album
Music From Big Pink
the following year.

The original
Basement Tapes
, however, remained officially unreleased until, dusted-down and smartened up, they were issued as a double-album in 1975, in a sleeve featuring Dylan, the Band and a motley crew of characters from the songs posing around a furnace in a basement (actually the basement of the Los Angeles YMCA). Despite its tardiness, it reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic.

The album opens in friendly, welcoming fashion with one of its simpler pleasures, a ramshackle rocker that clocks in at under two minutes, just enough time for three short verse/chorus combinations and the briefest of breaks from
Robbie Robertson prior to the final verse. Yet another complaint of amorous betrayal that could pass as an allegorical reflection on his own position
vis-avis
the media and former fans, the song opens with the singer's careful plan undermined by treachery, continues with him dogged by the treacherous, and concludes with him abdicating his position and advising his tormentor(s) to “get on someone else.” The chorus—“Odds and ends, odds and ends/ Lost time is not found again”—effectively functions as a kind of editorial comment upon the entire
Basement Tapes
recordings themselves, noting their fragmentary form and fleeting pleasure. Richard Manuel takes the drum seat on this one.

Of all the
Basement Tapes
songs, ‘Million Dollar Bash' most gracefully pivots on the urban/rural divide which marks Dylan's shift in attitude following his bike crash. In its ludicrous lyrical style, it's clearly in a straight line of descent from such earlier absurdist narratives as ‘Tombstone Blues' and ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again', but this time Dylan's left the city for the country: instead of the cast of urbanites and outcasts that peopled previous songs, the populace of ‘Million Dollar Bash' consists of hicks like Silly Nelly and Turtle, and instead of the streetwise scenarios of the preceding three albums, the action here has a rustic, barnyard setting.

The pace of the action, too, is much slower—indeed, if life got much slower than this, it would be in reverse gear. In place of Dylan's previous drug-laced flights of paranoid fancy, the mood here is more laid back, as of old geezers sitting around, chewing the fat and putting off doing any work until the last possible moment. Dylan's delivery has a draggy, world-weary, weather-beaten quality, as if he can barely be bothered to relate the song. Which is hardly surprising, since virtually nothing happens: someone spins a yarn, the garbage man empties the trash, and the narrator delivers his potatoes, possibly to a moonshine still. That's what passes for action around these parts, which may be why all the conversation and excitement in the neighborhood centers on the prospect of the fantastically glamorous and ridiculously expensive party of the title, an event akin to a World's Fair (or, indeed, a Millennium Dome Experience) which might redefine these humdrum lives.

It won't, of course: part of the overall “message” of
The Basement Tapes
is that, whatever their tribulations, the roots of such rural lives run far too deep for them to be easily uprooted by flashy superficialities like the ‘Million

Dollar Bash', which was doubtless thought up by a cabal of accountants and advertising executives, and designed by men with ponytails. After all, what could such people have to interest a man who, like Turtle, has “his cheeks in a chunk” and “his cheese in the cash”? Not much, one suspects. But that, of course, doesn't stop Turtle and his chums dreaming: in such communities, anticipation is probably always that much sweeter, whatever the ultimate disillusion. In its own way, ‘Million Dollar Bash' has as much to say about the decline of rural America—and in far less melodramatic terms—than a youthful finger-wagging exercise like ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown'.

As with ‘Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues', in ‘Goin' To Acapulco' Mexico holds out the promise of loose morals and good times. Yet this must be the most mournful of good-time songs, sung as if the prospect of “Goin' to have some fun” contained its own karmic downside, incurring a moral debt to be repaid in full at some unspecified later date. “It's a wicked life, but what the hell,” the narrator muses in the first verse, as he ponders a trip down south to see Rose Marie, a golden-hearted hooker whose favors can be bought with a song.

Given his apparent desolation, it's hardly surprising he keeps being drawn back to her arms; the alternative, as the last verse makes plain in a cheeky masturbation metaphor which likens his flagging libido to a broken-down well, is just to take himself in hand and “go pump on it some.” The intervening verse is all anticipation, concluding with a beautiful couplet that both echoes the weather-sensitivity of ‘Crash On The Levee' and establishes the first of the album's prevailing train images. Like several of the
Basement Tapes
songs, however, there are numerous differences between the song's lyrics as recorded for this album, and the printed version included in Dylan's official
Lyrics 1962–1985
, so it's probably inadvisable to place too specific a meaning on it.

‘Lo And Behold!' continues the theme of movement, with a train journey into the abiding mystery of the American heartland that becomes a search for his own identity. It's a fruitless pursuit of revelation, the narrator seeking
some place—or some event—that might elicit the exclamation of the title, but always winding up in dreary places like Pittsburgh. He, however, gets more extraordinary as the song goes on: the first verse opens in relatively straightforward fashion, with him setting off for San Antonio—presumably, judging by his shame at revealing his identity to the ticket-collector, to escape some unspecified hometown infamy.

Entering Pittsburgh in the second verse, he overhears a testy, disquietingly absurd exchange between two fellow passengers, Moby Dick and Molly, about the latter's “mound”; then suddenly, by verse three, he's buying a herd of moose—the flying variety, of course!—and pondering a trip to Tennessee. His madness seems complete: “Gonna save my money and rip it up!” he exults, establishing himself finally as an outlaw from
American greed and materialism. Is this the “crime” for which he felt such shame a couple of verses earlier? Whatever, by the final verse, he seems much more secure in his identity, slick and powerful and full of tricks, having regained enough of his earlier ebullience to ride into town, he claims, “on a Ferris wheel.”

The whole song reads like a tall tale told by a self-aggrandizing barfly, and Dylan sings it with a wry blend of swagger and nonchalance, as if daring any man in here to deny his story, while mocking them for even giving it the time of day. The rousing chorus harmonies—which prefigure the famous harmonies which would become one of the hallmarks of the Band's music—join in like drinking pals saluting him with foaming beakers, urging the narrator on to ever more ridiculous flights of fancy, rising at the end to leave him no place to go but further into fantasy, the true source of American identity.

‘Clothes Line Saga' was originally recorded as ‘Answer To Ode', the ode in question being Bobbie Gentry's ‘Ode To Billie Joe', one of Summer 1967's most evocative hits, in which a family dispassionately discusses the suicide of Billie Joe MacAllister over dinner. Parodying Gentry's downbeat, offhand narrative style, this is a back-porch gossip over the garden fence, occurring literally while taking in the washing—a reminder of how such basic forms of human contact cement a society together, however empty and pointless they may seem.

Nobody commits suicide in the ‘Clothes Line Saga', although, we learn, the Vice-President did apparently go mad the previous night downtown, a minor interruption to the status quo greeted with all the excitement it deserves—“Hmm, say, that's too bad”, sung as if Bob's attention was already wandering—before folk get back to the important business of checking whether the clothes are dry yet. At the time, the Vice-President was Hubert Humphrey, who incited such paroxysms of apathy in the American people that when he stood as the Democratic presidential candidate at the next election, they preferred to vote for Richard Nixon instead.