Expecting Rain

Two interesting things about The Basement Tapes, both of which have been pointed out before: many songs use the future tense, and many with an additional sense of warning. This gives the music an ominous, almost Biblical tone that can contain prophecies such as "this wheel shall explode" and "best notify your next of kin", but also glorious puns such as "gonna save my money and rip it up"; and my personal favourite, which you'll find underlining every one of my posts. To anyone that plays poker, "one must always flush out his house if he don't expect to be housing flushes" makes perfect sense. It merely sounds cryptic; but, like much of The Basement Tapes, makes perfect sense whilst seeming to be about nothing and everything.

Which brings me to the second point. Nothing was delivered. Too much of nothing. You ain't goin' nowhere. There is a glorious kind of Beckettian but life affirming sort of nihilism running through these songs. That may seem to some like a contradiction; but it is possible to have resigned oneself to the fact that there may be nothing out there, in which case let's have a party! True optimism isn't blind naivety. It's optimism in the face of, or having gone through, deep cynicism. Only once the world has been examined in all its bleak detail can we reach pure optimism. Dylan had just been through 1965 and 1966, remember. The Basement Tapes constantly straddles itself across the light and the dark side of life. So much so, that in a song like Goin' To Acapulco - as pointed out by the master on this music, Greil Marcus - the words "gonna have some fun" could quite reasonably be translated as "gonna crawl into a hole and die".

And is there a more perfect pun in all of this than "gonna save my money and rip it up"?

oops...

Any bootlegs of Clothes Line Saga?
One of my favorites from Basement Tapes.
I'd gratefully appreciate it!!!

The only other version I'm aware of is just the longer take on A Tree With Roots. I'm so grateful to Garth Hudson for only turning on the tape recorder when it was really required. Anyone heard any Let It Be outtakes recently?

Any mp3 version i can download?

Hopefully I've uploaded the right one...they're both called the same thing in my iTunes library.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2if9iw

'Grasp and let go in a heavenly way' Dylan writes in the liner notes to Desire and if there was any moment he did that big time must have been when he withdrew his public persona in '66.

Phil Ochs once reflected that Dylan at the time had the power and position to write ten timeless singles and rule the music world by decree - I think he compared with Elvis' Sun singles.

Now, of course, his absence may have not only saved him but also increased his stature but it's fun to speculate what a Dylan album post-Blonde on blonde, pre-John Wesley Harding may have sounded like.

While I think Ochs was referring to Dylan songs with a melodic flair such as Just like a woman, I want you and One of us must know there's nothing like that on the Basement Tapes acetate, delightful though that those songs are too, that reportedly were meant for other singers to cover.

The ones that I think comes closest to be a continuation of that melodic quality are Goin' to Acapulco, I'm not there, All you have to do is dream, I'm a fool for you - the core of a could-have-been little bluesless 'soul' album, maybe.

THANKS!!

sid griffin was a guest on the mark radcliffe radio show last night.he mentioned he was writing a book about the basement tapes

Brilliant!

Imagine another 14 discs full of fragments and 3,117 people desparately trying to get all of them!

Mackthefinger, i downloaded the file - and it was m4a instead of mp3 - at first i changed it to mp3. It didn't work , then i changed it back to m4a - and downloaded it. Still won't play.

There is a recently released live album of songs from The Basement Tapes Sessions...by the Howard Fishman Band. Greil Marcus seems very high on it and wrote
I purchased it directly from http://www.howardfishman.com. I also found it at Amazon and cdbaby http://cdbaby.com/cd/hfishman4. You can actually listen to samples of the 13 songs at http://cdbaby.com/cd/hfishman4. I particularly love I'm Not There (1956), Down In the Flood (Crash On The Levee)....which is a stunningly appropriate re-interpretation, and One Man's Loss. Incredible stuff! These recordings are part of an ongoing project that Fishman just performed at a sold out Lincoln Center in NYC. The next stop of this tour is the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago on March 2 http://www.steppenwolf.org/boxoffice/productions/index.aspx?id=404. Here's a list of the 13 songs (selected from a total of about 90 Basement Tapes songs performed and recorded in NYC last May).
1. Yea! Heavy and a Bottle Of Bread
2. Santa Fe
3. Open The Door Homer
4. I'm Not There (1956)
5. Kickin' My Dog Around
6. Down In The Flood
7. I Don't Hurt Anymore
8. Nothing Was Delivered
9. This Wheel's On Fire
10. I Shall Be Released
11. One Man's Loss
12. Pretty Polly
13. Tears Of Rage

Does anyone know if any other band has produced an album of Basement Tapes material? This is the first one I've seen. I'm hoping Fishman will eventually release a follow-up with more songs from last May's marathon performance!

Hey Sub, I think m4a only plays on ipods (I don't have apple or an ipod so I am just guessing) so you need to convert the file using a utility program, you can't just simply "rename" it. If you use windows you can google m4a to mp3 to see what choices there are. Good luck!

iTunes plays m4a files.

Can't you just download a Quicktime player since they're in cahoots with Apple?

God, sorry. What a mess. No iPod needed to play it. iTunes is a free download and easily available. I don't know how to convert it, sorry...

m4a are AAC files which can be played by iTunes. just download iTunes, it's free.

iTunes can convert any file type it can play, btw.

yes, americana, existentialism, the absurd, I'm glad someone was able to say something substantial about these cellar tapes.

Some people find the lyrics to be mostly tossed off silliness, but I think these represent the height of his lyrical writing powers. Especially since most of these lyrics consist of just writing the first thing that popped in his head, with no revisions. the wordplay is sublime, the nonsense is transcendent. It's amazing how he can paint a vivid picture with words that were never meant to go together.

Scratch your dad
Do that bird
Suck that pig
And bring it on home
Pick that drip
And bake that dough
Tell 'em all
That Tiny says hello

Now grease that pig
And sing praise
Go on out
And gas that dog
Trick on in
Honk that stink
Take it on down
And watch it grow
Play it low
And pick it up
Take it on in
In a plucking cup
Three-legged man
And a hot-lipped hoe
Tell 'em all
Montgomery says hello

And on the 1975 version, most of it is okay, but for some songs, I have no idea what they did to them. Listen to how different Tiny Montgomery sounds on the official version compared to Tree with Roots. The acoustic guitar strumming is almost completely drowned out on the official release.

I used to have it on vinyl but lost it and I don't remember it good
enough to comment. Now, from reading this thread, you people
have inspired me to order it! On CD! (But not inspired enough to
pay extra for quick delivery. )

So what is generally considered the better bootleg, Tree With Roots or Genuine Basement Tapes? If the info in the original post is correct, the Genuine tapes are complete. Tree With Roots is culled from this and has remastered sound, correct? Is the sound much improved?

I confess the only material I've heard from this liaison between Dylan and The Band is from the official Basement Tapes release.

The sound is noticeably better on A Tree with Roots.

And the four-disc Tree With Roots actually has a few more tracks than the five-disc Genuine tapes. No question, Tree With Roots is the one to get.

And yet there are a couple of Hawks tracks not on A Tree With Roots...

Yes, but they are on Crossing The Great Divide.

Actually, I'm not sure that the fragment "Big Dog" (or whatever it's called) is on Tree With Roots. But, really, you're not missing much.

I think it's there, but isn't given separate track status. And you're right: this is a Bob Dylan album. The Hawks/Band tracks can be found where they should be - on other collections.