The Basement Tapes released: July 1, 1975

In the summer and fall of 1967, Bob Dylan took time off, recuperating from his motorcycle accident and taking stock of his life as well. However Dylan regularly got together for informal sessions with the members of his 1966 backing group, who would come to be known as The Band. The repertoire they played at those sessions was eclectic to say the least – traditional folk songs and doo-wop tunes, bluegrass and country and hard blues. Among this extraordinary flowering of material could be found nonsense ballads, giddy humor, dead-pan doubletalk, and some genuinely beautiful songs of love and grief. The musicians left a tape recorder running much of the time, luckily for everyone. The tapes, originally circulated by his music publishing company, fell into the hands of collectors and were widely circulated and bootlegged, In 1975, Columbia Records officially assembled twenty-four of the performances on a two-disc set known as The Basement Tapes. Odds and Ends | listen | Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast) | listen | Million Dollar Bash | listen | Yazoo Street Scandal | listen | Goin' to Acapulco | listen | Katie's Been Gone | listen | Lo and Behold! | listen | Bessie Smith | listen | Clothes Line | listen | Apple Suckling Tree | listen | Please, Mrs. Henry | listen | Tears of Rage | listen | Too Much of Nothing | listen | Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread | listen | Ain't No More Cane | listen | Down in the Flood | listen | Ruben Remus | listen | Tiny Montgomery | listen | You Ain't Goin' Nowhere | listen | Don't Ya Tell Henry | listen | Nothing was Delivered | listen | Open the Door, Homer | listen | Long-Distance Operator | listen | This Wheel's on Fire | listen |