Subterranean blues

The voluminous reviews occasioned by the release of Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 (Legacy) have reconfirmed the status of its music as among the most influential in rock ’n’ roll.

The story by now is well-known. In 1967, Dylan, weary from constant writing, recording, touring, and shouldering messianic expectations, got together with Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm (the group soon to achieve fame as The Band) in the acoustically challenged basement of a secluded pink house in West Saugerties, N.Y. The official purpose was for Dylan to write songs that other artists could record during his self-imposed exile, thus allowing Columbia Records to keep profiting from his name.

The unofficial purpose was for Dylan to reconnect with the roots that had inspired him to leave Hibbing, Minn., for New York City in search of stardom just six years earlier. He’d gotten what he wanted but lost what he had and come down with a case of literally subterranean homesick blues.

One of the songs emerging from the basement, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” fulfilled its purpose almost immediately when Manfred Mann’s version topped the charts in 1968. Several others, most notably “I Shall Be Released,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and “This Wheel’s on Fire,” became staples of the folk-rock repertoire.

But the “basement tapes” themselves might never have developed a reputation if copies of the shopped-around demos hadn’t leaked and become part of rock’s first important bootleg, Great White Wonder. Mysteriously appearing in 1969, it alerted the world to what Dylan and The Band had been up to. It eventually prompted Columbia’s release of the album titled The Basement Tapes in 1975. Even now, despite revelations that Robertson (its overseer) “improved” the performances with overdubs and added anachronistic Band recordings, The Basement Tapes occupies a revered place in Dylan’s body of work.

Then, in 2001, there appeared another, much longer basement-tapes bootleg called A Tree with Roots. It went viral. And, like Great White Wonder before it, its discovery forced Columbia’s (now Sony’s) hand. Hence the even longer, six-disc, sonically upgraded Bootleg Series Vol. 11.

Depending on one’s perspective, the set’s chronologically sequenced 139 tracks are either a tedious chronicle of informally jocular (and often sloppy) musicianly activities not intended for public consumption, or a fascinating chronicle of merry minstrels in search of a Promised Land or at least a stream of consciousness.

The first 2½ discs find Dylan and The Band seeking a groove and establishing a mood, playing through country and folk standards and sometimes just plain goofing off. Even when the now-famous songs start emerging, sometimes in multiple takes, they’re interspersed with tomfoolery that will try the patience of busier listeners. It’s for them that Sony has thoughtfully provided the two-disc, 38-track version titled The Basement Tapes Raw.

But the unedited 6½ hours of the complete box do document more than intermittently inspired woodshedding. And they’re not without at least one revelation: Whether singing the line in “Open the Door Homer” about forgiving the sick before healing them, or running through Johnny Cash’s “Belshazzar,” Jack Rhodes’ “A Satisfied Mind” (which, rerecorded, would later reappear on 1980’s Saved), or his own rambling “Sign on the Cross,” Dylan was, years before Slow Train Coming, feeling the breath of the Hound of Heaven.