A recent graphic from satirical publication The Onion parodied a magazine cover proclaiming a story on the subject of “Musicians Named Bob Dylan from the 1960s to Today.” This is a valid commentary on the evolution of Dylan’s work throughout the last half-century: because one of the few consistencies in Dylan’s discography is his desire and ability to reinvent himself after every couple of records, one could argue that it’s not even the same musician on the different albums. This is the feeling that prompts many to study Dylan’s work in the contexts of pivotal moments and transitional periods. There is perhaps no greater or more mysterious watershed of Dylan’s career than the 1966 motorcycle crash. Following the accident, Dylan stopped touring, disappeared from the public eye, and relocated to Woodstock, New York. There, Dylan spent time with his family, had frequent music sessions with The Band, and reassessed the direction he was going with his career and his life. In the 2006 documentary Bob Dylan: 1966-1978 - After the Crash, Clinton Heylin, who has written extensively on Dylan’s work, considers the year 1967 to be both the “great lost year of Dylan’s career” and as well as the “most creative year of his career.” Heylin goes even further to claim that Dylan created “more great material in 1967 than in any year of his life.” Upon listening to the 1975 album The Basement Tapes, it is easy to see why it was so critically acclaimed. The Basement Tapes is a masterful display of Dylan’s ever-changing nature with exuberant, nonsensical songs juxtaposed with more serious, darker ones. It creates a sense of timelessness by drawing deeply from folk legends of the past and by creating a sound that will remain influential in the decades to come.
Journalist Al Aronowitz, who frequently visited Dylan and The Band at the basement of Big Pink during 1967, describes in After the Crash the relaxed, yet spontaneously creative atmosphere of the sessions: “They were just having fun…They were going around singing a song, and saying ‘This song reminds me of this song, and this song reminds me of another song.’” From analysis of the lyrics, it is evident to many critics, such as Mike Marqusee, that Dylan adopted a “relaxed attitude toward the grotesque, the bizarre, the inexplicable” during this time that hinted he “found it a relief not to have to be serious about anything at all” (216). This is especially apparent in tracks like “Million Dollar Bash.” With characters like “that big dumb blonde with her wheel gorged” and “Turtle, that friend of theirs with his checks all forged,” the song is as fun and chaotic as any crazy party (2, 4). Absurdity even turns to chaos and violence near the end of the song: “I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist / Punched myself in the face with my fist” (47). In all of its apparent spontaneity, the song is still very carefully crafted. “Checks all forged,” “cheeks in a chunk,” and “cheese in the cash” repeat the “ch” sound much like pocketsful coins clinking and jingling as partygoers dance around in the Million Dollar Bash (5, 6, 7). Author Michael Gray, in his compendium of Dylan’s life and works, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, considers the incongruities in “Million Dollar Bash” to have great artistic merit and finds a “Robert Browning-like alliterative lunacy much in evidence” in the song’s “needlework of Noodledom” (94).
The absurdity continues in songs like “Please Mrs. Henry,” in which the narrator makes bold, inebriated claims that he can “drink like a fish,” “crawl like a snake,” and “bite like a turkey” (14, 17). Its memorable, nonsensical lines, such as “I’m a sweet bourbon daddy” and “I’m a generous bomb / I’m T-boned and punctured,” make Marcus think this song is a “detailed explanation addressed to a landlady or madam of just what it means to be too drunk to move, if not complain” (40, 255). Equally ridiculous is “Tiny Montgomery,” in which the speaker shouts out imperatives and non-sequiturs in a style reminiscent of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Though commands to “scratch your dad,” “do that bird,” “grease that pig and sing praise” appear seemingly pointless, they serve a greater purpose as expressions of spontaneity and fun (21, 22, 30).
Although the spontaneity of The Basement Tapes makes it obvious that Dylan and The Band were living in the present moment, the lyrics themselves transcend time. According to Robert Shelton in No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, an alternative title of this album could have been “Roots” because it is a “massive catalog of chanteys, old blues, early rock, and truck-driver, hoedown, gospel, and folk songs” (266). These influences from the past are present in even the fun-filled nonsensical songs. “Tiny Montgomery” is a great example of this: its calls to “tell everybody down in ol’ Frisco” and, later, to "have a party down in ol’ Frisco” invoke a sense of travel to a place where “birds,” “buzzard,” and “crows” fly free (1, 15, 27). It is place where outrageously named characters like “T-Bone Frank” and “Skinny Moo” are just as common as any regular “Lester” or “Lou” (8, 17). As the song goes on, it gets closer and closer to ol’ Frisco and the sense of merriment and joy increases, though in all parts of the song a mysterious, legend-like “king of drunks,” Tiny Montgomery, continues to greet everyone (15). Greil Marcus argues in his novel-length analysis of Dylan’s Basement Tapes-era music, Invisible Republic, that these themes are more than just fanciful musings of the idyllic life. He says that, “in the basement, you could believe in the future only if you believe in the past…you could believe in the past only if you could reenact it” (71). This quest for timelessness is an echo of the “perfectly, absolutely metaphorical America” explored by Harry Smith in his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music compilation: “An arena of rights and obligations, freedom and restraints, crime and punishment, love and death, humor and tragedy, speech and silence…” (213). The past is not just pages in history books. It is a realm that can be found, experienced, and channeled in the present. It is the “old, weird, America.”
Not all songs digging to find their folk roots are as jubilant as “Tiny Montgomery,” however. In Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art, Mike Marqusee says The Basement Tapes are “filled with the sound of young men singing like old men […] young men who had prematurely acquired a ruminative sense of a lost past” (215). The album is equally tinged with darker songs of loss and sorrow. “Tears of Rage” laments the deterioration of humanity in modern times and the betrayal by a society the speaker thought could change for better. No matter how much he devoted himself to progress by carrying it in his “arms” on “Independence Day,” it just “threw us all aside and put us on our way” (1,2). He feels as if he nurtured it like his own “daughter ‘neath the sun,” but was only met with “tears of rage” and “tears of grief” and being accused of being a “thief” (8, 9). Marqusee sees this song “haunted” by the knowledge that “patriotic solidarity, national identity, intergenerational bonds” have all been dissolved” (215). Though Dylan succeeds in finding his old weird America, he is still disillusioned and alienated in modern society. On “This Wheel’s On Fire,” Dylan’s lyrics exemplify the extent of the disillusionment in its pitches and peaks of unspeakable drama and intensity. Though the speaker promises that “you know that we shall meet again if your mem’ry serves you well,” he also warns that “no man alive will come to you with another tale to tell” (8, 7). There is no turning back from this prophecy of doom because the “wheel’s on fire / rolling down the road” and nothing left to do besides “notify my next of kin” (9, 10). Like the wheel of fire, this song spins in a circular, explosive motion in everything from its theme to its repeated verse structures. The past never leaves us, even when it is seemingly destroyed. The image of a wheel on fire also disturbingly brings to mind Dylan’s own motorcycle crash that resulted in his retreat from the spotlight. Yet it was this incident that resulted in his reassessment of his life and his newfound quest for salvation.
Of course, Dylan is not merely satisfied with tracing his roots to the folk legends--he reaches back to the past for Biblical allusions, internalizes them during the basement sessions, and projects them into future albums. He digs even deeper and evokes grave, serious spirituality with Biblical allusions and imagery to reflect a knowledge of mortality and a search for salvation. “This Wheel’s On Fire” exemplifies how the most noticeably dramatic and intense songs are fueled by these religious sentiments. Even the title brings to mind the Daniel’s vision of the Day of Judgment in the book of Daniel 7:9-10: “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit […] His throne was like the fiery flame, and His wheels are burning fire.” The already apocalyptic themes of the songs now carry even greater weight. They take on eschatological connotations. Michael Gray notes how influential this particular imagery is on future records. Eleven years after the major Basement Tapes song “This Wheel’s on Fire’ (1967) comes Street Legal, on which, in the opening song, the wonderful “Changing of the Guards,” Dylan sings: ‘Peace will come / With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire’” (47, 48). Though album following Street Legal, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, is widely regarded as the first of Dylan’s “Christian Trilogy,” it is apparent that Dylan began exploring the faith he’d adopt a decade later was discovered during The Basement Tapes era.
Songs like “Tears of Rage” and “Too Much of Nothing” interestingly appear to allude to Ecclesiastes. When the speaker in “Tears of Rage” admits that “[w]e’re so alone / and life is brief,” he accepts the mortality and brevity of human life and the futility in getting too attached to it (12, 13). Gray connects Dylan’s contemplation to the “first preoccupation of Ecclesiastes, the shortness of the human lifespan and the impossibility of leaving anything that lasts” because it states that “[n]o one can keep himself from dying or put off the day of his death” and that “[t]here is no remembrance of former things” (205). “Too Much of Nothing” picks up Ecclesiastes’ theme of advising against arrogant, ignorant speech when the speaker warns that “[t]oo much of nothing can make a man abuse king” and that “he can walk the streets and boast, but he wouldn’t know a thing” (13, 16). Gray paraphrases Ecclesiastes’ warning: “As long as you obey the king’s commands, you are safe, and a wise man knows how and when to do it. There is a right time and a right way to do everything, but we know so little” (205). When Dylan claims in the song that “[i]t’s all been done before, it’s all been written in the book,” it’s very easy to hear “which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (16, Ecclesiastes 1:9). At first glance, it may appear that Dylan isn’t doing anything different. He had been using Biblical imagery since his earliest records. However, these lyrics differ by appearing to express sincere convictions, as opposed to simply using the scriptures as a literary reference.
Apparently there really was something new under the sun. Aside from his spirituality, Dylan also began to devote his songs to minimalism and simplicity in the sessions in the basement at Big Pink. In his book Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin quotes the poet Allen Ginsberg responding to this new change in Dylan’s writing by admitting that “[t]here was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath. All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental” (287). The most impressive thing about Dylan’s mastery of simplicity is how it was accomplished while also creating a record like The Basement Tapes. Though The Basement Tapes may seem to be just a mixture that bridges what Gray calls the “blocked confusion and turmoil” of Blonde on Blonde and the “highly serious, precarious quest for a personal and universal salvation” of John Wesley Harding, it can stand on its own. The pivotal album’s songs juxtaposed exuberance and sorrow as seamlessly as it drew influence from roots of the past and projected them into the future. The legacy and lasting effects of The Basement Tapes are innumerable. Aside from being the source from which John Wesley Harding draws its stark, austere sound and its Biblical imagery, The Basement Tapes inspired an entire subgenre of modern Americana and folk music of the late ‘90s that would known as "the New Weird America." Echoes of the basement sound can be heard in the lo-fi sound of early Mountain Goats, the harp plucking of Joanna Newsom, and even the psychedelic pop of Elephant 6 artists The Olivia Tremor Control. There is no better example of the ever-searching, ever-evolving, and forever-influencing quality of Dylan’s work than The Basement Tapes.
Works Cited
Bob Dylan: 1966-1978 - After the Crash . Dir. C Johnstone. Perf. Bob Dylan. Chrome Dreams, 2006. DVD.
Dylan, Bob. Lyrics: 1962 – 2001. New York. Simon & Schuster. 2004
Gray, Michael. The Bob Dylan encyclopedia. New York: Continuum, 2006. Print.
Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: behind the shades revisited. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2001. Print.
Marcus, Greil. Invisible republic: Bob Dylan's basement tapes. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1997. Print.
Marcus, Greil. “Excerpt from The Old Weird America.” Hedin 116 – 121
Hedin, Benjamin. Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. New York: W. W. Norton & Company 2004. Print.
Marqusee, Mike. Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art. New York: New Press, 2003. Print.
"Musicians Named Bob Dylan From The 1960s To Today | The Onion - America's Finest News Source." <http://www.theonion.com/articles/musicians-named-bob-dylan-from the-1960s-to-today >.
Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: the Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986. Print.