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

primarily in basic stereo been collapsed into mono if not to give a fake ‘primitive’ patina to the sound? Who thought it clever to add overdubs of drums, keyboards and guitar to several performances on this ‘historic document’? How come one-third of the twenty-four tracks offered were by The Band – who would receive commensurate royalties – when most buyers were interested, first and foremost, in the songwriter of the age? By 14 August,
Rolling Stone
’s gossip column, ‘Random Notes’, was reporting ‘a Columbia insider’ to the effect that Dylan had demanded $1 million for consenting to the album ‘because he wanted to help out The Band, who he reportedly said was [
sic
] having financial problems (denied by a Band spokesman)’. It was soon discovered, in any case, that half of the recordings selected by Robertson to represent his group’s contribution had either not been made in 1967, or had not originated in the improvised studios of Woodstock.
    The original basement tapes ran to between 120 and 130 recordings, depending on how false starts, stoned jokes and a handful of allegedly ‘missing’ titles are calculated. These days, after sterling remastering work by the bootleggers, a compendium with 124 takes is easy enough to obtain. Yet, for the sake of The Band, Dylan’s fans were obliged in 1975 to do without ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘The Mighty Quinn’, ‘I’m Not There’, ‘Sign on the Cross’, ‘Silent Weekend’, ‘All You Have to Do Is Dream’ and even the glorious fun, interruptions and all, of ‘I’m a Fool for You’. That was before anyone mentioned the numerous traditional songs and cover versions attempted in 1967. Dylan’s performances could have filled a couple of fine vinyl double albums easily.
    Despite it all, and in defiance of the approbation granted to the work, he gave no sign that he cared. Subsequently he would fail to disguise his contempt when attempts were made to identify those covert, subterranean recordings as the founding artefacts for an ill-defined musical movement known as Americana. He would have no taste whatever for the grand cultural theories piled around the monuments raised to this phase of his career. Something about the circumstances surrounding the Woodstock recordings, or perhaps just the recordings themselves, had left him dissatisfied and defensive.
    You can easily believe, of course, that the success of
Blood on the Tracks
could have been enough to persuade Dylan finally to countenance an album based on the tapes. The former gave plenty of cover, commercially and creatively, for the latter. Nevertheless, a simple fact is worth repeating: even in the worst of times, paralysed by writer’s block and self-doubt at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, he had refused to exploit the great songs of 1967 seriously.
    His only concession had come in the autumn of 1971, in the depths of his creative drought, when Columbia had proposed the mistitled double-album stopgap
More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits
. Dylan had suggested that one side should contain previously unreleased material, but on this occasion the company had been oblivious to the appeal of ‘the legendary basement tapes’. He had therefore re-recorded three of the 1967 songs in an afternoon and put them on an album that did not contain too many certifiable hits. That had been the limit of his interest.
    Few others would have hesitated in lean times to fortify flimsy albums with ‘Too Much of Nothing’ or ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’. Nevertheless, eight years after the fact, with
Blood
fast becoming established as one of his finest achievements, no one was liable to accuse Dylan of desperate measures, or of recycling his own legend. In any case, the bootleg industry and a host of cover versions had already settled the matter. The reviews for
The Basement Tapes
were preordained, if not already written. The only person who seemed to dissent was Bob Dylan.
    According to Rob