Free Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan by Ian Bell

tapes to see the light of day. Not once would he manage a convincing explanation for this remarkable change of heart. He had long dismissed the great songs recorded casually in the vicinity of Woodstock in upper New York State during the summer and autumn of 1967 as being of no account. In late 1969 he had told
Rolling Stone
that the tracks were merely demos, that he had been ‘pushed into coming up with songs’. Even when afflicted by writer’s block in the first years of the decade, when partial bootlegs of the tapes were becoming commonplace, he had declined, with a single near-pointless exception, to draw on a catalogue that included ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’.
    Talking in April of ’75 to Mary Travers (she of Peter, Paul and Mary) on KNX-FM Los Angeles for his first radio interview since 1966, Dylan was less than illuminating. A couple of months before Columbia’s
The Basement Tapes
received its release, he said:
    The records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.
    Given that he had taken charge of the project, the ‘somebody’ was almost certainly Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitar player. Dylan had played no real part in the archaeological effort to collect and restore the old tapes. It seems likely, in fact, that he had no clear memory of exactly what the reels of disdained recordings contained. Hence the entirely misleading claim that record-buyers would hear the Woodstock work ‘in its entirety’.
Blood on the Tracks
, an international hit, had just spent a fortnight at the top of the
Billboard
album chart: Dylan had no need of product to satisfy the record company, no requirement for further acclaim. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the 1967 recordings was curious, as it would remain.
    Robertson, for his part, sounded disingenuous when he got around to attempting to explain how
The Basement Tapes
came to be released. He failed even to offer a convincing explanation for his own motives. Interviewed by
Crawdaddy
magazine for its March 1976 edition, the guitarist was certain only that the legal version of the basement recordings had not been produced to ‘combat’ the tenacious bootleggers. Robertson said:
    All of a sudden it seemed like a good idea. I can’t tell you why or anything. It just popped up one day. We thought we’d see what we had. I started going through the stuff and sorting it out, trying to make it stand up for a record that wasn’t recorded professionally. I also tried to include some things that people haven’t heard before, if possible … I just wanted to document a period rather than let them rot away on the shelves somewhere. It was an unusual time which caused all those songs to be written and it was better it be put on disc some way than be lost in an attic.
    It was one thing to refuse to look back, but Dylan had a large blind spot where this part of his work was concerned. Several of the songs had provided hits for other artists. A good number had been praised to the skies by the usual critics. Who writes ‘I Shall Be Released’ and acts as though it’s a bagatelle to be rearranged and added, almost as an afterthought, to a makeshift greatest-hits package? In April of 1975, nevertheless, Dylan was still telling Travers that the basement songs were ‘written like in five, ten minutes, you know’ while he and his musicians were ‘drying out’ in their rural retreat. No big deal, then.
    If he had been paying more attention, Dylan might have thought twice about some of the choices made by Robertson. After a wave of approbation for
The Basement Tapes
from critics primed for genuflection – the
New York Times
burst a corset and called the set ‘one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music’ – questions were asked. Why had tracks recorded