The actual recordings, however, remained commercially unavailable until 1975, when Columbia Records released a scant 16 of them on The Basement Tapes album (that album also included eight new songs by The Band, without Dylan).Ī critical and popular success, The Basement Tapes went Top 10 in the US and UK. With each passing year, more and more fans sought out this rare contraband, desperate to hear this new music from the legendary Bob Dylan. In 1969, an album mysteriously titled Great White Wonder began showing up in record shops around the country, and Dylan's music from the summer of 1967 began seeping into the fabric of popular culture, penetrating the souls of music lovers everywhere. When rumors and rare acetates of some of these recordings began surfacing, it created a curiosity strong enough to fuel an entirely new segment of the music business: the bootleg record. This collective recorded more than a hundred songs over the next several months including traditional covers, wry and humorous ditties, off-the cuff performances and, most important, dozens of newly-written Bob Dylan songs, including future classics "I Shall Be Released," "The Mighty Quinn," "This Wheel's On Fire" and "You Ain't Going Nowhere." Recovering from his injuries and away from the public eye for the first time in years, Dylan ensconced himself, along with Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and, later, Levon Helm, in the basement of a small house, dubbed "Big Pink" by the group, in West Saugerties, New York. Dylan's mercurial rise and prodigious utpouring of work during that decade came to an abrupt halt in July 1966 when he was reported to have been in a serious motorcycle accident. Having transformed music and culture during the early 1960s, Dylan reached unparalleled heights across 19 through the release of three historic albums, the groundbreaking watershed single "Like A Rolling Stone," a controversial and legendary 'electric' performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and wildly polarizing tours of the United States, Europe and the UK.
Other available versions of the material on The Basement Tapes Complete, released in November 2014, constitutes Vol.11 in the Bob Dylanīootleg Series.
The tracks on The Basement Tapes Complete run in mostly chronological order based on Garth Hudson's numbering system. Originally recorded and sounded back in the summer of 1967. The performances are presented close to the way they were (who is the man behind the Levon and The Hawks box set projectįrom Bacon Fat to Judgement Day) have restored deteriorating tapes to pristine sound, with much of the music preserved digitally for the first time. The Band's Garth Hudson and Canadian music archivist and producer Jan Haust Includes recently discovered songs recorded in the "Red Room" of Dylan's home outside Woodstock.
Bob dylan discography chronological order series#
Bob Dylan and The Band: The Basement Tapes Completeīob Dylan and The Band: The Basement Tapes Complete The Bootleg Series Vol.11Ħ-CD 138-track box set with the "definitive chronicle" of the legendary 1967 recording sessions with Bob Dylan and The Band, containing "every salvageable recording" from the tapes.