This will sound very strange to anyone not familiar with the history of “The Basement Tapes”, but what we have here is a disappointing replica of the most popular bootleg recording of all time.

The original bootleg was also one of the first of its kind. In 1967, Dylan pulled away from the public, and it’s easy to understand why. He had spent the previous year touring Great Britain and the United States, getting booed, heckled and even threatened by “loyal” fans who saw his turn to electrification as traitorous to their cause of righteous folk music. The alleged ‘voice of a generation’ definitely did not want to speak for these people, so some quiet time in upstate New York fit the bill nicely. He stayed active, meeting with his bandmates from the ‘hell tour’ to play and sing spontaneously creative bits and pieces that were not meant to be heard by the public, but when Dylan’s manager sent the rough recordings out to publishing houses to see if anybody would want to record a genuine ‘Bob Dylan tune’, you can bet that there were a LOT of takers. Manfred Mann had a #1 hit with one of them, and maybe a dozen others have songs that are now a part of that band’s identity (The Byrds version of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is but one example).

The most obvious effect of distributing the basement recordings was that everybody else wanted to hear them as well, so bootleggers made copies and distributed the tunes around the globe. The most popular version was a blank white-sleeve double LP (like “The White Album”) except with a rubber stamp reading “The Great White Wonder”. The ridiculous title notwithstanding, the songs represented a complete about face in popular culture. The rococo sounds of psychedelic music was all the rage in 1967, but Dylan’s songs exuded the spirit of an ‘old, weird America’, representing the early beginnings of Americana. 

Eight years later, Dylan’s record label finally decided to fight back against the bootleggers by releasing an ‘official’ version of the album…except they didn’t. For reasons both illogical and thoughtless, they removed one third of the songs and replaced them with eight early studio recordings made by Dylan’s band (recording without Dylan) before they released their debut album. So, Dylan is more or less irrelevant in places, but remarkably, this doesn’t spoil the party. It is still one of the most influential, spontaneously fun and emotionally deep albums ever recorded.

Featured tracks include:

Odds and Ends

Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)

Million Dollar Bash

Yazoo Street Scandal

Goin' to Acapulco

Katie's Been Gone

Lo and Behold!

Bessie Smith

Clothes Line Saga

Apple Suckling Tree

Please, Mrs. Henry

Tears of Rage

June 1975 - Billboard Charted #7