The Basement Tapes - Legacy

Legacy

While removed from the public's gaze, Dylan and the Band made music very different from the recordings of other major artists. Andy Gill writes, "Musically, the songs were completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the pop world, which during the long hot summer of 1967 was celebrating the birth of the hippie movement with a gaudy explosion of 'psychedelic' music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos." Patrick Humphries itemizes the ways in which Dylan's songs dissented from the dominant ethos of rock culture: "While the rock world vented its spleen on parents and leaders, Dylan was singing privately about parental fidelity. While George Harrison was testifying that life went on within and without you, Dylan was taking his potatoes down to be mashed. While Mick Jagger was 2,000 light years from home, Dylan was strapping himself to a tree with roots."

This aspect of the basement recordings became obvious when Dylan chose to record his next album, John Wesley Harding, in Nashville in late 1967. The songs on that record, according to Howard Sounes, revealed the influence of Dylan's daily reading of both the Bible and the Hank Williams songbook. And its sound came as a shock to other rock musicians. As producer Bob Johnston recalled, "Every artist in the world was in the studio trying to make the biggest-sounding record they possibly could. So what does do? He comes to Nashville and tells me he wants to record with a bass, drum and guitar." Dylan summed up the gap: "At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads."

When the Band began work on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in a New York studio in January 1968, they employed a recording technique similar to the one they had become familiar with during the Basement Tapes sessions. As Robertson described it, "We used the same kind of mike on everything. A bit of an anti-studio approach. And we realized what was comfortable to us was turning wherever we were into a studio. Like the Big Pink technique." That technique influenced groups including the Beatles, writes Griffin, who calls their Twickenham Get Back sessions in early 1969 an effort to record "in the honest, live, no frills, no overdubs, down home way that the Hawks/Band did for the Basement Tapes".

"Listening to The Basement Tapes now, it seems to be the beginning of what is called Americana or alt.country," wrote Billy Bragg. "The thing about alt.country which makes it 'alt' is that it is not polished. It is not rehearsed or slick. Neither are The Basement Tapes. Remember that The Basement Tapes holds a certain cultural weight which is timeless—and the best Americana does that as well." The songs' influence has been detected by critics in many subsequent acts. Stuart Bailie wrote, "If rock'n'roll is the sound of a party in session, the Basement Tapes were the morning after: bleary, and a bit rueful but dashed with emotional potency. Countless acts—Mercury Rev, Cowboy Junkies, Wilco, The Waterboys—have since tried to get back to that place."

For Elvis Costello, The Basement Tapes "sound like they were made in a cardboard box. I think was trying to write songs that sounded like he'd just found them under a stone. As if they sound like real folk songs—because if you go back into the folk tradition, you will find songs as dark and as deep as these."

In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked The Basement Tapes number 291 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In a special issue devoted to Dylan's work, Q magazine awarded the record five stars, its highest rating, commenting that "Dylan's work is by turns haunting, hilarious and puzzling—and all of it taps into centuries of American song".