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In October 1967, The Band's keyboardist Garth Hudson put together a fourteen-song acetate of new songs he, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko had been recording with Bob Dylan at the basement of Big Pink, a house in 2188 Stoll Road, Saugerties, NY. He had been instructed to do so the previous August by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, as Dylan had gone more than a year without entering the recording studio and he wanted to shop his artists' compositions around for other artists to record. These lo-fi recordings were made spontaneously and without any intent of ever being released to the public, but in their goofing around, they had recorded much more than an album's worth of fantastic new compositions, something Grossman wanted to take advantage of. With the fourteen songs at hand, Dylan's publishing company Dwarf Music gave them away to artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Byrds, Manfred Mann, and many others, scoring a few hits and giving the public their first taste of post-motorcycle crash Bob. The Band themselves, who had secured a deal with Capitol Records, recorded three of the Basement songs to great success. Eventually, the acetate leaked and became one of the very first bootlegs, and for a while, it was thought that those fourteen songs were the entire content of the sessions. However, by the time 1975 rolled around and the officially released double album came, songs such as "Goin' to Acapulco" made fans wonder just how much material was still sitting in the vault.
So, our objective today is to take the best of the rest of the Basement Tapes, and put together a 14-song part two to the Dwarf Music acetate, collecting all the other worthwhile compositions from this wildly creative period for Dylan. However, we will have to parse through upwards of two hundred recordings to create such an album, and to do so we will need some rules. No covers will be considered, as this is meant to highlight the unloved originals from the period, and this already clears off more than half of the Big Pink recordings. Some great recordings such as "Big River" will be lost, but maybe they deserve their own reconstruction further up the road. No songs that are only performed by The Band and don't feature Bob, for obvious reasons, and no post-1968 recordings are allowed either, even though a couple made the double LP. To further whittle down the contenders, songs have to either have been considered by Robertson and Fraboni for inclusion in 1975, or submitted for copyright earlier in 1969 or 1971. That way, we'll know if those involved with the recordings themselves consider them worthy. Also, as "I'm Not There" is already in my Basement Tapes reconstruction and "Tiny Montgomery" is in most versions of the album, neither of them is eligible, to save the spotlight for other songs. We'll still filter our song pool so that only the most finished-sounding of the bunch make it, while still allowing something like "Bourbon Street", which is wonky on purpose, to be included. Here's what the album looks like:
Get Your Rocks Off (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Clothes Line Saga (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Apple Suckling Tree (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Wild Wolf (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)Goin' to Acapulco (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
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Minstrel Boy (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Santa Fe (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Santa Fe (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Bourbon Street (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Don't Ya Tell Henry (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Silent Weekend (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Dress it Up, Better Have it All (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Dress it Up, Better Have it All (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
Sign on the Cross (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11)
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| Dylan and the Band performing at a Woody Guthrie tribute, January 1968. |
Now, let's have a look at what made our compilation. "Odds and Ends", "Clothes Line Saga", "Apple Suckling Tree", "Goin' to Acapulco" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" were all issued in the original double LP from 1975. That tells us these songs were considered good enough for release, allowing us to earmark them for inclusion here. "All I Have to Do is Dream", "Get Your Rocks Off", "Bourbon Street", "Sign on the Cross", "Santa Fe" and "Silent Weekend" were part of a comp reel created by Robbie Robertson and producer Rob Fraboni in early 1975, telling us that they at the very least made the shortlist of what would be included on The Basement Tapes album later in the year. Based on that, we'll consider them worthy of our reconstruction. Finally, "Minstrel Boy", "Wild Wolf" and "Dress it Up, Better Have it All" were not in the running for the 1975 record, but were the best three songs copyrighted in 1971 from the sessions. The fact they were copyrighted tells us that they meant to do something with the songs, but we're still not sure why they ended up not using them. Either way, they're good enough to fill out our album and give us another fourteen songs of high-quality Basement noise. All that's left to do is to sequence so that the stronger material starts and ends the sides, with rockers such as "Odds and Ends" as openers and ballads such as "Sign on the Cross" as closers, and taking cues from the original double LP for the rest of the work, and we have ourselves a pretty good album.
The contents of this reconstruction were mostly taken from Reels 12, 13, and 16 of the Basement Tapes, which were recorded after the fourteen acetate songs but before the John Wesley Harding sessions began. They are obviously not as good as the original fourteen, but they're a lot of fun, featuring some surprisingly strong moments such as "Santa Fe", "Sign on the Cross" and "Goin' to Acapulco", and feel like the logical next step from songs such as "Lo and Behold!" or "Too Much of Nothing". The album is titled 2188 Stoll Road in reference to the address of the Big Pink house where its contents were recorded, in a nod to Highway 61 Revisited. In a better world, where the original Basement Tapes Acetate was released in 1968, this is what would've come out in 1975 instead of what we got, hence the prominent co-billing of the Band and the picture of the house I used for the cover. It had been six years since any of them lived there, so sharing its address wouldn't have been a problem. The 7+ minutes of "Sign on the Cross" push the album into the 48-minute area. But since we're dealing with recordings that were already lo-fi to begin with, very little would be lost in terms of sound quality. With that, we have ourselves a worthy successor to what could probably be described as Bob's strongest collection of songs, recorded at leisure and never meant to be heard by anyone but the friends he recorded them with, while the rest of the world was going in the opposite direction.
Sources:
- Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete
Thanks for the share!
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