Although it appears to the naked eye that Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 contains 138 recordings, it turns out that the sixth disc contains a hidden track with two more songs on it.
Although only 21 tracks are listed for disc six, there are in fact 22.
And track 22 — two minutes and 26 seconds in length — includes part of a raucous rock ‘n’ roll version of “900 Miles From My Home,” the folk song that appears on disc 5, and an alternate take of “Confidential,” the 1956 Sonny Knight hit that Dylan also covers on disc five.
And then you hear Dylan fooling around: “All right ladies and gentleman, thank you thank you. That was Floyd and Lloyd. Right now we have Pete and Sneat. Sneak one in on Pete.”
(Thanks to Pete Read for that last line: “Sneak one in on Pete.”)
Here is Sonny Knights’ version of “Confidential”:
Woody Guthrie’s “900 Miles” with vocal:
Woody Guthrie’s instrumental version of “900 Miles”:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
In early October I was interviewed about my novel, True Love Scars, on this cool punk radio show, Cheap Hooch, that’s broadcast online every Sunday from 4 pm ’til 6 pm.
I talk about some of the themes in the book and more. Plus you’ll get to hear “Hey Bartender,” one of the songs that shows up early in the book, as well as artists referenced in the book including The Stooges and Mott The Hoople. Holly Hooch, the DJ, also plays some great songs by David Bowie, the Flamin’ Groovies and much more.
The show begins with Holly Hooch talking about how she messed up and didn’t get directions to the studio to me in time, but then I end up calling in Holly and her friends in the studio interview me on the phone. It’s a good interview and theres good music too. I’ve become a big fan of Cheap Hooch Radio.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan and band at the Paramount Theater, Oakland, CA.
I’m jazzed that the folks over at bobdylan.com have included a link to my review of Bob Dylan’s recent killer show on October 30, 2014 at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA in the “Hype” area of Dylan’s website.
“Hype” is where they link to articles about Dylan that they like.
You can get directly to the review with this link.
And if you haven’t yet read my new column about The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11,here.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan and The Band The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 (Six-CD set)
Columbia Records
Note: Because the Basement Tapes are, for me, about a time long past, and a place long gone, and the feeling of wonder I still had as a teenager back in 1970 when I first heard some of the Basement songs, I have taken an unconventional approach to this review, mixing fact and fiction, thoughts about the actual music with seemingly unrelated text about young love.
It was time to split the city. The Summer of Love was a bust. They were selling “Love Burgers” on Haight Street. If you’re too young to know, Haight Street in San Francisco was a kind of ground zero for the ‘60s counterculture in 1966. But it wasn’t 1966 anymore, and things had changed. A creepy-crawly vibe would soon turn all the colors black.
***
May of 1970, me and my chick in the back of that Ford pickup with all the camping gear. We’re heading for Big Sur. A bunch of us in five vehicles, maybe six. This was a long time ago. I was 16 and so was Sarah. We make a couple of stops along the way; the last one is to get gas and ‘cause some of us need to use the can. It isn’t a town, isn’t a full block same as you find in a town or a city. It’s some beater houses and a motel and the Texaco. What it is, is a no-name, one of those places you drive through to get from here to there.
Only reason I even get out of that pickup is ‘cause of the Coke machine.
***
The Basement Tapes are a myth. They’re one of those stories that serious music fans, the type of fan that most people would call a collector, and others might call crazy, a nut, get lost in. As the myth has been told and retold since the late ‘60s, Bob Dylan, then one of the greatest, if not the greatest, rock stars in the world, had a motorcycle accident.
After recovering from his accident in the seclusion of an 11-room house in the Byrdcliffe Colony near Woodstock, Dylan called up his band, a handful of musicians who had been known as The Hawks when they backed Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, and they joined him, soon renting houses not far from where Dylan was residing, one of which came to be known as Big Pink.
Over the summer, in the basement of Big Pink, they recorded over 100 tracks, including some new Bob Dylan compositions that remain some of his best. When it was all over, Dylan moved on, heading to Nashville to record John Wesley Harding, an album of all new songs, none of which had been recorded in the basement.
As for what eventually became known as the Basement Tapes, acetates were made of 14 songs and sent out to artists with the hopes they’d be covered. The tapes with the rest of the songs were shelved.
Eventually the bootleggers got their hands on those 14 songs, and soon we, the serious, obsessed Dylan fans, heard them too. And as word spread that there were more recordings, many more recordings, we lusted for them the way collectors of ‘78s lust after original pressings of Skip James records, or those of Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas.
And so, for the serious Dylan fan, for us nuts, those tapes became the Holy Grail.
***
It’s one of those ancient curved-corners all-red Vendo Coke machines. The V-81a. Filled with cool-ass bottles of Coke. Warhol’s “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” kinda cool-ass bottles.
Ever seen that Warhol deal? Homage to Duchamp, Warhol’s bottles. Warhol was heavy into Coke. Said Coke symbolized the egalitarian nature of American consumerism. Said it didn’t matter if you were Liz Taylor or a bum, a Coke was a Coke, and no amount of money could get you a better one than the one the bum on the corner was drinking. ‘Course what Warhol didn’t say was Liz Taylor could afford to get her cavities filled. The bum gonna end up with a mouth full of rotten.
I guess that’s what America’s all about. The phony-ass everyone’s equal trip. Authentic real, there’s a hierarchy. Fortune or fame, enough of either can put you up on your high horse, up on the steeple with all the pretty people. Warhol was wrong, Coke tastes a whole lot different if you’re drinking it out on the veranda of some place in Beverly Hills, than in the fucking gutter.
***
On July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan, who as a kid idolized James Dean, had an accident while riding a 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle on a road near his manager’s house in West Sugerties, not far from Woodstock, New York. Dylan was on break from a grueling world tour during which fans of his folk music booed his new rock ‘n’ roll sound. One of ‘em called him Judas.
“I was on the road for almost five years,” Dylan told Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner during a 1969 interview, looking back to that fateful day, the day of the motorcycle accident. “It wore me down. I was on drugs, a lot of things. A lot of things just to keep going, you know? And I don’t want to live that way anymore. And uh… I’m just waiting for a better time – you know what I mean?
Wenner asks a follow-up question.
“Well,” Dylan says. “I’d like to slow down the pace a little.”
Dylan did slow the pace. “I thought that I was just gonna get up and go back to doing what I was doing before…,” Dylan told Wenner. “But I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Dylan’s crazy schedule of touring and recording – he cut three of the best rock albums ever made, in 15 months! – was over. Instead he holed up with his family at the Byrdcliffe house, known as Hi Lo Ha, having replaced hectic New York with a pastoral scene. Working with filmmaker Howard Alk, Dylan completed a documentary, “Eat The Document,” using footage D. A. Pennebaker shot of the 1966 tour. The film was commissioned for the ABC television series Stage ’66, but was rejected by ABC and has never been officially released, although a bootleg version circulates, and periodically shows up online.
Still in upstate New York, at some point in early 1967 Dylan and some members of The Hawks began a series of informal music sessions in what was referred to as the “Red Room,” a sitting room at Hi Lo Ha that was no longer painted red, if ever it was. The music they made was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder – one that took seven inch reels of quarter-inch tape — by Garth Hudson, one of the musicians who was also participating in the sessions along with Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. Later they would be joined by Levon Helm.
The genesis of the sessions may have been pressure Albert Grossman exerted on Dylan to come up with more songs, songs for other artists to cover. Grossman owned half of Dylan’s publishing, so it was in Grossman’s financial interest to get more songs out of Dylan while he was still a big star.
Dylan told Jann Wenner, “No, they weren’t demos for myself, they were demos of the songs. I was being PUSHED again … into coming up with some songs. You know how those things go.”
Still, whatever the outside pressure, what happened when the tape was rolling was enjoyable, both for the musicians and for Dylan.
“The Basement Tapes refers to the basement there at Big Pink, obviously, but it also refers to a process, a homemade process,” Robbie Robertson was quoted as saying in Sid Griffin’s book about the Basement Tapes, “Million Dollar Bash.” That quote also appears in the liner notes Griffin wrote for The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, the 6-CD set was released on November 4, 2014.
“So some things we recorded at Bob’s house, some things we recorded at Rick’s house…we were here and there, so what it really means is ‘homemade’ as opposed to a single location in a formal studio.”
Talking about the sessions to Jann Wenner, Dylan said just moments after he spoke of being “PUSHED” to demo new songs, “They were just fun to do. That’s all. They were a kick to do. Fact, I’d do it all again. You know, that’s really the way to do a recording—in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in somebody’s basement. With the windows open … and a dog lying on the floor.”
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
James Williamson was the raw powerhouse guitar on The Stooges’ third album, Raw Power. He also played tremendous guitar on the underrated Iggy solo album, New Values.
Check out Williamson’s new album, Re-Licked, which is out now, and which finds Williamson remaking a bunch of Stooges songs that were never released with a bunch of great vocalists: Jello Biafra, Mark Lanegan, Alison Mosshart, Ariel Pink, The Orwell’s Mario Cuomo, The BellRays’ Lisa Kekaula, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, The Icarus Line’s Joe Cardamone and Carolyn Wonderland.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan and his band at the Paramount Theater. Photo by Michael Goldberg.
The clang of an ancient gong announced that Bob Dylan was in the house, and that his first set for the final night of a three-night gig (October 30, 2014) at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, CA, had begun.
Was I excited, yeah baby! Yet I was worried too. How could he compare to the Dylan of old?
“Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now,” he once sang, though not on this night.
And it was good he didn’t. Those lines made sense when he wrote them, when he was in his early 20s.
But Dylan is 73, he’s so much older now.
I last saw him live at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in June of 1986, and it wasn’t the best show. Frankly, it was a shadow of the show I saw in 1974 when Dylan and The Band played the Oakland Coliseum and tore the place up. That was incredible.
Think about it though. 1986. That was nearly 30 years ago. Ancient history. Another lifetime.
Bob Dylan, age 73. What would that be like? I’d seen John Lee Hooker perform at the Sweetwater when he was past 80 and he was fantastic. And I saw Muddy Waters when he was 65, and he was damn good too. There’s a wisdom that sometimes comes with age.
But Dylan? With his ragged frog of a voice. And no guitar, ’cause he doesn’t play guitar anymore. How’s that gonna work?
Whatever my pre-show worries, as soon as the band kicked off with “Things Have Changed” I relaxed.
This was gonna be good.
Dylan came onto the stage, a character out of one of his more surreal songs. The flat-brimmed white hat, something a Spanish Don wore in the ’20s perhaps. And a black frock coat with white trim. Dylan was dressing up for us. He wasn’t showing up in his streetwear — jeans and a hoodie. No way, he was here in a grand old theater and he had dressed the part.
A band leader. A performer. An artist.
Dylan is the master of great looks.
He still has style. And you know what, Dylan dressing up the way he does each night, sends the audience a message before he even sings a note. This isn’t gonna be Chuck Berry doing just another gig. This is special. Bob Dylan got dressed up on this night for this crowd. He cares.
I was there with a long time friend, and later during the show he asked me how this show compared to when I’d seen Dylan in 1974.
Well you can’t compare the Dylan of the past and the Dylan of today, I said. It’s like he’s a different person now. It’s like the folkie protest Dylan was one guy, and the Highway 61 Revisited Dylan was another, and the man who recorded the Basement tapes and John Wesley Harding was someone else again.
The Dylan of 2014 is yet another Dylan.
The show.
First of all, I thought Dylan was in great voice, and having listened to a recording of the show I can say that with even more force. Sure his voice is different. More Tom Waits than Woody Guthrie. But if you give it a chance, it grows on you and pretty soon you find yourself totally digging it. And it’s totally Dylan’s voice. On this night he was a live wire.
Dylan as piano man. He’s always had his own bluesy piano style, and over the years he’s gotten even better. So while I miss Dylan on guitar, his whorehouse piano on numerous songs including the snaky tango, “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” was just right. And while some have derided his harmonica playing since the early days, I’ve always been a huge fan. On this night his harp breaks were dead-on perfect.
He seemed totally in-the-moment and with us as he sang his songs — all but one being his own compositions.
But what knocked me out the most was the set list. Of the 18 songs Dylan sang, 14 were ‘new’ songs, written in the 21st century. Only one, “She Belongs To Me,” was written in the ’60s, and two, “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue,” came from the mid-’70s. The final song of the night was Dylan’s version of a song Frank Sinatra made famous, “Stay With Me.”
That’s gutsy. That’s self-confidence. And you know what? These 21st century Bob Dylan songs are killer.
While Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones go out and play oldie-but-goodie greatest hits shows, Bob Dylan plays material from his most recent albums.
Dylan these days comes across onstage as a working musician. He doesn’t talk to the audience. He’s there to play music.
“He’s a real song and dance man,” my friend said.
Dylan was either at the piano, standing fairly still before the microphone as he sang, or swaying in place as one of his band members took a killer solo.
And speaking of the band, another thought I had as I took in the music was that this current band are as good as The Band.
Dylan has assembled his version of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or Merle Haggard and the Strangers.
What I mean is, this band is like those great country-western bands, musicians who play with soul and really have their chpps down. Now I’ve been cheering the raw, imperfect sound of punk bands since the early days of The Stooges and the MC5, and if I’ve got to choose between soul and spirt, or musician ship, I’ll take soul and spirit every time.
But Dylan’s guys, they are some of the best musicians you’ll ever hear; they’ve got a total feel for Dylan’s music. As used to be said of a great jazz band, they swing.
Bassist Tony Garnier (on upright), drummer George Receli and rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball are a rock solid rhythm section. They ground the songs and let Dylan, lead guitarist Charlie Sexton and mutli-instrumentalist Donnie Herron (pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin) add beautiful texture and solos.
Both Sexton and Herron are simply incredible. I love pedal steel guitar and Herron added hip country riffs to “Things Have Changed,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Duquesne Whistle,” and others.
Meanwhile Sexton added electrifying riffs and solos.
Dylan has become a great band leader. Years on the road, and certainly his perfectionist demands, have turned this band into one of the best.
Highlights? The beautiful ballad “Forgetful Heart” was love on a moonlit night, with rhapsodic violin from Herron, and a mournful harmonica solo from Dylan. “Long And Wasted Years” was a triumph, from that unforgettable opening riff and Dylan’s defiant vocal, to the final lines:
“So much for tears
So much for these long and wasted years.”
There were many other highlights. “Early Roman Kings,” “Simple Twist Of Fait,” “Scarlet Town,” “Pay In Blood,” “High Water (For Charley Patton)” — I could go on.
After nearly two hours of listening to Dylan’s new music, it’s clear that just as Dylan and the Hawks had a very unique sound in the ’60s, so too do Dylan and his current band.
Leaving the Paramount, I said to my friend, the music Bob Dylan now makes is totally its own thing. It has nothing to do with current trends, and it’s not some retro trip either. The only reference point for Dylan’s new music is Dylan. He’s created something unique that works for him in 2014, and his fans love it. Dylan being Dylan, and nothing could be better.
You could call the music Dylan and the band make Americana, an umbrella term that covers blues, rock, rockabilly, jazz, folk, country, western swing and more, but if were going to name Dylan’s sound, I’d want to come up with something more unique. But really, what’s the point.
It’s 2014 Bob Dylan music, a thing all its own.
The musicians:
Bob Dylan — vocal, piano, harmonica
Stu Kimball — rhythm guitar
Donnie Herron — pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin
Charlie Sexton — lead guitar
Tony Garnier — bass guitar
George Receli — drums, percussion
Set List:
Set I
Things Have Changed
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Workingman’s Blues #2
Waiting for You
Duquesne Whistle
Pay in Blood
Tangled Up in Blue
Love Sick
Set II
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Simple Twist of Fate
Early Roman Kings
Forgetful Heart
Spirit on the Water
Scarlet Town
Soon after Midnight
Long and Wasted Years
Encore:
Stay With Me
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan’s next album of new studio recordings will be all covers of songs Frank Sinatra recorded, a source told Billboard.
Two days ago I broke the news that the album, titled Shadows In The Night, would be released during 2015.
Front of insert.
The only other detail yet revealed about the album is that it will include Dylan’s cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1945 hit, “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” A source told that to Rolling Stone back in May of this year, when the album was scheduled for a 2014 release. The release date apparently changed when it was decided to release the Basement Tapes this year.
“Full Moon and Empty Arms”:
Now that we know the entire album will consist of songs associated with Sinatra, it’s near certain that “Stay With Me,” another song associated with Sinatra that Dylan is now using for an encore, will be on the album, although that has not been officially confirmed.
“Stay With Me” as performed at the Dolby Theater, October 26, 2014.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan’s next album will be titled Shadows In The Night, and released in 2015, according to an insert included in Dylan’s new boxed set, The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11.
In May of this year, Bob Dylan released a cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1945 hit “Full Moon and Empty Arms” on his website.
“Full Moon and Empty Arms”:
“Full Moon and Empty Arms” was written by Ted Mossmann and Buddy Kaye and based around Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1901 composition “Piano Concert No. 2 in C Minor.”
The retro nature of “Full Moon And Empty Arms,” sparked speculation that Dylan’s next studio album of new recordings would be a cover album of standards.
”This track [“Full Moon And Empty Arms”] is definitely from a forthcoming album due later on this year,” a spokesperson for the singer who wouldn’t confirm the title told Rolling Stone in May.
A month later a source who has heard the album enthused about it to me. “It really is a great album,” my source said, offering no additional details.
Obviously plans changed, and it was announced earlier this year that most of Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes recordings would be released as Dylan’s next album. The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, a 6-CD set (as well as a 2-CD version of highlights), will be released on Tuesday, November 4.
Now, based on an insert in the box that The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, comes in, I can tell you that the title of Dylan’s next album is Shadows In The Night,, that it will be released in 2015 and that for now at least, the Shadows In The Night image seen on Dylan’s website is the cover (unless of course something changes).
No track listing has been released.
In addition to “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which is still expected to be on the album, Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh’s “Stay With Me,” which was recorded by Frank Sinatra in December 1963 and released a month later, could be included.
Dylan performed “Stay With Me” for the the first time the other night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. So this is speculation. There is no confirmation that “Stay With Me” will be on the album. “Stay With Me” was the main theme of the Otto Preminger film “The Cardinal.”
“Stay With Me” as performed at the Dolby Theater, October 26, 2014.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Some might find this silly, which it is, but it’s kinda funny too. Caricatures of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits on the cartoon, “Family Guy”:
As Bob Dylan tells it, he would let Tom Waits know in advance about the theme of an upcoming “Theme Time Radio Hour” and soon enough a cassette would arrive in the mail from Waits with the eccentric singer offering up some obscure but relevant info. Hear Waits talk about carrier pigeons, sacred body parts in rural China, the roots of the expression “baker’s dozen” and more.
Listen to Dylan and Waits:
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[Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Yesterday the pop culture site PopMatters, posted a terrific review of my novel “True Love Scars.”
PopMatters contributing editor Greg M. Schwartz writes:
…the novel is a whirlwind tale of a young music fanatic’s quest for true love, high times and “the authentic real” (not necessarily in that order).
Teenage protagonist Michael Stein, aka “Writerman”, lives in Marin County and longs to be a musician, or at least a music writer. He’s into almost all of the musical icons of the era, especially Bob Dylan. Writerman is obsessed with finding his “Visions of Johanna” chick, who eventually appears in the form of Sweet Sarah. But conflict is ordained from the start. Chapter One begins with Writerman speaking in a sort of fever dream about how he betrayed and lost Sarah and has been on a quest to redeem his crushed soul ever since.
And later in the review, talking about the narrator’s obsession with Bob Dylan, Schwartz writes:
He can analyze those Dylan lyrics all day. He and a girl who’s charmingly fond of speaking in Dylan lyrics pore over Dylan’s albums in a scene from 1965, going over his evolution as an artist. “First time I heard that Dylan song it saved my life,” Writerman says of “Like a Rolling Stone”. It’s a sentiment that speaks for several generations of rock ‘n’ rollers, from those who came of age in Goldberg’s era to the present. They get deep into Dylanology in the scene as Writerman speaks of how Dylan opened his eyes to “how almost nothing is what it appears to be and I think that’s when I got it in my head I got to figure out the authentic real, see the world for what it is and not the facade of delusional humans erect in front of the truth.”
That’s what great rock ‘n’ roll can do, and True Love Scars is deeply dialed in to rock’s dichotomy of enlightening powers versus stonered party time.
