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The Basement Tapes

Recorded in 1967 in West Saugerties, New York, with Bob Dylan; officially released as a double album on June 26, 1975, on Columbia Records, seven years after the fact and eight years after the sessions themselves. The full recording story is covered in The Basement Tapes (1967); this page covers the 1975 release and the recordings behind it.

The 1975 release

Sixteen of the album's twenty-four tracks came from the actual 1967 sessions with Dylan; the other eight were newer Band recordings without him, added to round the album out. Robbie Robertson and engineer Rob Fraboni produced the release, converting Garth Hudson's original wide, open-mono 1967 recordings and adding new overdubs, bass, drums, and backing vocals that hadn't existed in the room at the time. The approach was controversial from the start: purists have argued for decades that the cleanup compromised the loose, accidental quality that made the tapes worth hearing.

Selected tracks (1967 sessions with Dylan)

"I Shall Be Released" and "Tears of Rage" also appear, in different form, on the Band's own debut, Music from Big Pink.

Bootleg history

None of the summer's recordings were made for release. Dylan's publishing company, Dwarf Music, circulated a fourteen-song demo in October 1967 to interest other artists in covering the material, and it worked immediately: Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, and the Trinity had a UK top-five hit with "This Wheel's on Fire" within months, the Byrds cut "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," and Peter, Paul and Mary reached the Top 40 with "Too Much of Nothing," all before the year was out. The tapes themselves circulated on acetate and rumor for two more years until the summer of 1969, when a double album called Great White Wonder appeared mysteriously in Los Angeles record shops, generally considered the first bootleg in rock history.

The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete (2014)

A six-disc box set released in November 2014, restoring all 138 surviving tracks, 117 of them never officially released before, sequenced close to Garth Hudson's own numbering system from 1967. A two-disc highlights edition, The Basement Tapes Raw, was released alongside it. Unlike the 1975 album, the 2014 set presents the recordings close to how they actually sounded on tape, without added overdubs.

Personnel