(NOTE: for a song by song description, refer to my review of the Genuine Basement Tapes)

These recordings represent the finest body of work ever recorded by Dylan, although I'm sure there will be much disagreement, and could stand as the peak of Dylan's career as a singer of unusual new songs. Not only did he seemingly rattle off new and ingenious songs with incredible ease, but he also had the good fortune to do it with some of the greatest rock musicians of all time, and he was also able to benefit from their collaborative efforts with some of the richest song structures of his entire career.

Listening to these songs now it's obvious to me how this material can be seen as a bridge between the excessive surrealism of Blonde On Blonde and the quiet mysticism of John Wesley Harding. Although less focused than either of those two albums, I find all of this material much more rewarding, and I think this has to do with the way these songs were recorded: friends getting together each day to blow off a little steam and just have a good time doing what they like to do best. But I think there's a little more to it, though, because the whole project has "contractual obligation" written all over it. You see, [according to Robert Shelton's book No Direction Home] Dylan's contract with CBS was getting ready to expire and he was all set to sign with MGM, but he still owed CBS an additional 14 songs under the terms of the contract. Well, by an amazing coincidence there were exactly 14 songs on the acetate which was distributed to various artists requesting demos of the new Dylan songs. My guess as to why these 14 songs were used as publishing demos rather than as an album by CBS is due to the fact that the MGM deal fell through and Dylan signed with CBS for another term, and by the time he had done that he already had the 14 songs ready to go and CBS didn't want to use them. So, the Basement Tapes session existed as a means of getting those 14 songs out of the way and delivered to CBS, and also as a deliberate slap in the face - low-tech home recordings of mostly nonsense songs; and CBS was expected to make use of it? This whole episode could have been the inspiration for Dear Landlord.

The 14 songs on the acetate were:

Million Dollar Bash
Please Mrs. Henry
Lo and Behold
Yea, Heavy, and a Bottle of Bread
The Mighty Quinn
I Shall Be Released
Down in the Flood
Nothing Was Delivered
Too Much of Nothing
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
Tiny Montgomery
Wheel's On Fire
Tears of Rage
Open the Door, Homer

Everytime I listen to the Basement Tapes I always get the feeling that I'm hearing the lost and sadly neglected recordings of an unknown artist who died as an early age and is just now becoming known through a recent discovery of a cache of obscure recordings. This is similar to the feeling I get when I see a James Dean movie or hear a Buddy Holly song - "what a tragic loss". This is odd because I know that nothing of the kind happened with Dylan. Still, these recordings have a timeless quality not unlike those recorded by Robert Johnson in a makeshift hotel room recording studio or early Hank Williams demos. Some of these tracks are just heartbreaking, for reasons mentioned above, and this is the only Dylan tape that affects me in this way. I would be interested to know if others feel the same way.

My favorites of the unreleased tracks? One for the Road, Rock Salt and Nails, I'm Alright (unfortunatly incomplete), All You Have To Do Is Dream, Baby Ain't That Fine, Song For Canada, Long Time A-Growin', One Man's Loss, and Sign on the Cross. Sign on the Cross in particular has been singled out by most as possibly the best thing in this collection, and at first I wasn't all that impressed but now I'm almost inclined to agree. This recording alone demonstrates what the Basement Tapes were all about, and it has that timeless tragic quality that is evident in each and every song on this collection of tapes.

CDs:

• The Basement Tapes (official album)
• Biograph (official album - contains Mighty Quinn)
• The Bootleg Series(official album - contains I Shall Be Released and Santa-Fe))
• Genuine Basement Tapes (Scorpio - 5 volumes)
• A Tree With Roots (Scorpio & White Bear - sonic upgrades - 4 CDs)
• After the Crash (2 volumes, duplicates 3 & 4 of above)
• Lost Basement Tapes

LPs:

• The Basement Tapes (official album)
• The Great White Wonder (the first bootleg! Contains the core songs - I Shall Be Released, Tears of Rage, Wheel's On Fire, Mighty Quinn, etc.)
• Troubled Troubador (the complete 14 song acetate - some versions of this album feature additional songs)
• Stealin' (alternate version. Contains the rest of the acetate - Lo and Behold, Million Dollar Bash, Tiny Montgomery, etc.)
• VD Waltz (Odds and Ends, Get Your Rocks Off, others)
• Waters of Oblivion (the "acetate", supposedly in really good quality. I've never seen or heard it.)
• Blind Boy Grunt and the Hawks (Two 2-record sets containing the recently discovered basement tracks. In stereo, although of a crude unmixed sort.)
• many other duplications of the above albums no doubt exist.