Basement Noise - Deluxe Edition
Bob Dylan & The Band
Young But Daily Growin' (Traditional)
Silent Weekend (Dylan)
Rock Salt and Nails (Utah Phillips)
Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash)
Bonnie Ship the Diamond (Traditional)
Get Your Rocks Off (Dylan)
Banks of the Royal Canal (Brendan Behan)
Don't Ya Tell Henry (Dylan)
A Fool Such As I (Bill Trader)
Nothing Was Delivered (Dylan)
All-American Boy (Bill Parsons, Orville Lunsford)
Spanish Is the Loving Tongue (Charles Badger Clark)
I Don't Hurt Anymore (Don Robertson, Jack Rollins)
People Get Ready (Curtis Mayfield)
Johnny Todd (Traditional)
Still in Town, Still Around (Hank Cochran, Harlan Howard)
Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov, Dylan)
All You Have To Do Is Dream (Dylan)
You Ain't Going Nowhere (Dylan)
Belchezaar (Johnny Cash)
Ol' Roison the Beau (Traditional)
Sign on the Cross (Dylan)
The Basement Tapes are an open secret: this music is a goldmine, and remains surprisingly unreleased. Bob Dylan and The Band took some time in New York to record many traditional and new songs in the summer and fall of 1967. The best and most complete sent of recordings is the Tree with Roots 4-CD collection, from which this collection is drawn. They are frequently mixed to isolate the voice to one of the two channels, which does not sit well in my ears; I should say, many do appreciate this aspect of the set. I remixed them from the FLAC files to suit my tastes, and perhaps yours. I've been working on this one for quite some time, and I hope that it comes across well.
These songs comprised, in my opinion, the best of the set that was not fragmentary, noisy, or fairly close to the released set. Some are traditional, some are country songs, some are gospel-influenced, some are folk songs, some are American, some are not, and some come only from the mind of Bob Dylan and The Band.
Young But Daily Growing is especially haunting, and Don't Ya Tell Henry is especially raucous. The rest of the songs fall somewhere in between. Personal favorites include Ol' Roison The Beau (whatever that means), the Flight of the Bumblebee, and You Ain't Goin' Nowhere. The idiosyncratic lyrics of this last one really elevate the madness of the song - it stands as representative of the seemingly absurdist lyrical streak that characterised these sessions.
Please enjoy!