The Basement Tapes
| Bob Dylan
The Basement Tapes
The Basement Tapes is an album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and The Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records and is Dylan's 16th studio album. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at Big Pink and other houses in and around Woodstock, New York, where Dylan and The Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, The Basement Tapes marked the songs' first official release.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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All Music
The party line on The Basement Tapes is that it is Americana, as Dylan and the Band pick up the weirdness inherent in old folk, country, and blues tunes, but it transcends mere historical arcana through its lively, humorous, full-bodied performances. Dylan never sounded as loose, nor was he ever as funny as he is here, and this positively revels in its weird, wild character.
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The Guardian
October 30, 2014. Rickety, strange and utterly timeless
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Rolling Stone
September 11, 1975. The songs on The Basement Tapes are the hardest, toughest, sweetest, saddest, funniest, wisest songs I know, yet I don’t know what they’re about. Friendship, sex, death, heroism, learning from others. . . . . As far as I’m concerned The Basement Tapes are the stuff of dreams, brass-lined maybe. I like them like that.
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Wisconsin Public Radio
November 4, 2014. "The Basement Tapes" might be more than a bite-sized portion for many listeners, but it will be one they will find a rewarding examination of American traditional music.
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MoFi
Indeed, The Basement Tapes appear to emanate from an indefinable chasm between modern and ancient, self-evident and mysterious, shapeless and fully formed, abstract and concrete, histories unwritten and chronicled. But every note chimes with freeness – a liberating fun, humble simplicity, and bond-creating camaraderie felt in every hoot, holler, laugh, and false start.
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Robert Christgau
The basement tapes were the original laid-back rock, early investigations of a mode that would eventually come to pervade the whole music. Not that they suggested any of the complacent slickness now associated with the term--just that they were lazy as a river and rarely relentless or precise.
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Bored and Dangerous
September 15, 2015. There are some Dylen-esque moments that I really liked, but mostly, it just reiterated the things I already knew I liked or disliked about him. The upside is, it also completely reiterated everything I love about The Band. And that’s more than enough reason to dive into this double record behemoth
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Sid Griffin
January 6, 2015. The Basement Tapes as an album is a kind of touchstone in the big picture of Bob Dylan’s career. . . . . it’s an album that signaled a shift in Dylan’s music, and it’s become kinda legendary to boot.
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BOL
A number of The Basement Tapes had previously been released on Great White Wonder and White Bear's A Tree with Roots, but in 1975 The Basement Tapes were released on the album of the same name. And with success, critics were enthusiastic and the album was in seventh place on the Billboard 200.
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The Absolute Sound
October 1, 2012. The tracks evoke what Dylan biographer Greil Marcus has called “that weird old America” and are a window into one of the most productive collaborations in pop-music history.
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The Countdown Kid
June 14, 2013. These mythic recordings had been bootlegged for years, but the official release confirmed that the music that Dylan and The Band made in Woodstock in 1967 sounded timeless and ahead of its time all at once, summing up everything good about American music in the 20th century.
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Entertainment
March 29, 1991. After his motorcycle accident, Dylan and the Band camped out in Woodstock and made earthy, funny, back-to-basics music. Terrific, but horribly recorded.
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Pop Matters
June 25, 2009. Working with four-fifths of the Band (then still known as the Hawks) at its home ("Big Pink") near Woodstock, New York, Dylan began a period of prolific recording that resulted in 30 or so new compositions -- many of which appear on the official version of The Basement Tapes released in 1975. Even before then it had become one of Dylan's most celebrated works, and for good reason: Its reputation has spawned extensive bootlegging, full-length books (Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic) and magazine cover stories demanding its release.
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