Search - Bob Dylan & The Band :: The Basement Tapes

GENIUS CHOPPED, CHECKED, & GLOSSED: A PROOF DAMNING THE RECO

Jason Lynn | Corona del Mar, CA United States | 09/10/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"MUSIC: 5 stars, Production: .5



Over 100 songs in bootleg-form ARRIVED from these epic 1967 sessions, songs which caused Eric Clapton to "change his life," and change his band, songs which served to memorialize the first pure demand & awing purity of the music-living-public of the late 1960s, songs which They The People named as the "Great White Wonder," for the plain white cover of this bootlegged LP showing up in hundreds of little record stores across America. That bright white cover became a metaphor for people taking music as seriously as life and death, shelving careers and the so-called real world, and staying up all night and partying in parking lots & on sidewalks while awaiting a rock-concert or a new record-release; They The People were sexing-it-up, dancing, doping, traveling, above all, living fully and wildly.



It was not so much a COUNTER-CULTURE, as a Euphoria-Culture, and as well, a COUNTER-Enslavement-Culture; bootlegs like the Basement Tapes were not merely its soundtrack but its basis, as music meant more to more people than ever before.



This culture has been bartered dead, frittered away by pettiness, by sickly greed, hysterics, spite of matronly moralizers, and of these 100 or 130 songs, some half-dead businessman, or eunuch/"person," (as equal opportunity numbness reigns) smugly decided we get "24 songs." Good going record labels. Learn to sell records & get at least greed right.



After 40 years the philistines serving us music have still left most this masterpiece to be bootlegged: so the FBI can hunt down bootleggers reacting to pure market-demand, a thing doomed in this monopoly of idiocy. The Great White Washout, The Great White Hope/lessness, The Great White Wonder of Wasn't.



What songs are here are great. Everyone needs to know, for example, that multiple versions exist even legally released between albums The Band's BIG PINK, and this legal edition of the BASEMENT TAPES: Bob Dylan sings "Tears of Rage" here, but on Big Pink, it's apparently The Band's Danko singing the song. This anarchic method of creation makes the sessions great: members recorded different versions & takes of the same song, with differing singers, guitar-treatments, melodic push/pull. These are the speciations forming great art. Upto 13 cds of the Dylan/Band sessions--some people claim more--have been printed on bootleg record-labels. These indomitable, unstoppable, lively bootlegs represent the still-not-attenuated assertion of liberty, a mortal, last-minute left-hook thrown hard by a people still convinced they have a right to their joy & celebrations, and that the Blob-Bushes, the rabid-Ralph Reeds, & all Ahmet Erteguns are just plain wrong & black-mamba vile.



The real, bootleg'd Basement Tapes are de facto works of genius: these mere 2 cds could never show so: the many versions of "TOO MUCH OF NOTHING," each beautifully unique & on varied bootlegs, do NOT appear on this collection. You get just one. Alas, TOO much of nothing. Perhaps Robbie-Rob might Remedy this lacking.



This legal collection DOES have excellent sound quality. Given the sources, that's quite a commendable result.



But boys it's been 40 years: put out the whole thing. It's late. People are dying. Many don't have health-care: at least let them die in sublimity-song. While you're at it, box-set ALL THE STONES TOURS for especially 1969, & 66-77. As well, no-one would ever know from existing CDs that Mr. Clapton & his CREAM rivaled Jimi, esp. in years 66, 67; the bootleg soundboard of CREAM Detroit 10-15-67 justifies the graffiti titling him "GOD." NSU goes an epic 20 minutes. The petty amount of CREAM material we have is so sickeningly small it proves Marx wrong & De Sade right (at least via Karl Abraham's retentive sadism). Back to Mr. Dylan/Band: where are all the tapes/films from 1974, then 1975-6 Rolling Thunder Review tours? The live albums? One cd set is "too much of nothing"... THE TAPES ARE JUST ROTTING: IF YOU CAN'T DECIDE HOW TO SELL THEM, GIVE THEM AWAY, you puffy puerile scrooges. PEACE. (ps: when I phoned ABKO records & told A & R that the 2010 GET YER YAYAS was STILL cut in the epic Sympathy for the Devil, she said "really? I didn't know that..what do you mean") Write your local record CEO.

"

What can I say it was 1969 I was 14 and Dylan was jamming wi

G. Lawdermilt | Indiana | 01/30/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"What can I say but "Bob you have never let me down". Anyone who enjoys Dylan for his talent for his lyrics and his style should own this recording."

Clear crisp classic

rain boxer | NJ | 02/08/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Classic, but not often played, these tunes represent the most playful period of Dylan's work."