Dylan's Best Cellar

IT IS 1967 and the Beatles have just released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which critics are hailing as the best pop album ever, the ultimate achievement in rock and roll. Bob Dylan is in the hospital recovering from his near fatal motorcycle accident. Someone has brought along a tape of the record for Dylan to listen to. Dylan listens for about 5 minutes, then snaps, "Turn that shit off."

He was right of course. Sergeant Pepper's was a product. Rock and roll had been carried away by technology, gimmicks, and easy immature sentiment. It had ceased to come from the heart and instead had evolved into a battle of who could outweird whom. (You may remember that Sergeant Pepper's was followed by Satanic Majesties Request, replete with 3-D cover, undoubtedly the nadir of the Stones' career.)

Dylan, in traction for six months, staring at the ceiling of his hospital room, must have wrestled with quite a few personal devils. When he had recuperated, he got together with his friends Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko, and headed down to the basement of their Big Pink home in Wood-stock, N.Y. where the tracks for The Basement Tapes were laid down.

These tapes have been circulated in various bootlegged packages for eight years. Why Dylan chose to release them now is not clear. Depending on which rumors you listen to, the Band was badly in debt, or Dylan decided that if the songs were coming out anyway, he could at least control the quality by releasing the songs himself. Another theory is that Dylan has relaxed, is less afraid of his public now, more willing to present a side of himself experimenting, having fun.

And that's what these tapes are all about. The opening cut, "Odds and Ends" is a good natured rocker, as Dylan acts the part of the abused homosexual lover:

Well I stand in the hall and I shake my face

You break your promise all over the place

You promised to love me but what do I see

Just you comin' here and spillin' juice over me...

The faithless lover is warned that "lost time is not found again," and that from now on he can "keep that juice to yourself."

The real treat of the album, however, for Dylan aficionados is the heretofore unrumored, un-bootlegged "Goin' to Acapulco." It is the lament of a somewhat aging rock star who can't get it up the way he used to, but that's o.k., he says, because Rosemary, his faithful groupie-girlfriend, will always be there to take care of him. "She puts it to me/Plain as day/And gives it to me for a song," he brags.

THE SONG IS a tour-de-force, a masterpiece of phrasing, word play, and narrative. When the singer claims in the chorus that he's "Going to Acapulco/Gonna have some fun," we no more believe him than we believed the narrator of "Idiot Wind" on Blood on the Tracks when he insisted that he'd been "double-crossed now/For the very last time/And now I'm finally free!" In each case, Dylan enunciates a single word so as to give us exactly the opposite impression from what the word actually means. The singer's not gonna have any fun at all in Acapulco, it's just an idea of a vacation that he's garnered from looking through too many magazines and watching T.V. commercials in too many motel rooms.

This same feeling of staleness, of mechanical existence, is conveyed in the phrasing of the opening lines of the third verse:

Now whenever I Get up and Can't find what I need...

He holds on to that single "I" for two beats, gives a long pause, continues, pauses again, and finally delivers with what's really bothering him. The key is in the pauses; it's the disconnectedness of the line that gives it its emotional body.

The song is deeply moving, and yet not depressing, The singer is adept at finding earthy expressions of his sexual appetites, as when he refers to "getting something quick to eat/I'm just the same as anyone else/When it comes to scratching for my meat..." or later when he wryly informs us that

Well everytime you know when the well breaks down

I just go pump on it some

Rosemary, she likes to go big places

And just sit there and wait for me to come...

"Tears of Rage" is a song with a much broader scope; certainly it is the most effective rock and roll song to deal with the problem of parents estranged from their children. At a time when the Beatles were singing the baual "She's Leaving Home," the point of which was that parents have to give more than money to their children, Dylan was penning the rock equivalent of King Lear:

Oh what dear daughter 'neath the sun

Would treat a father so

To wait upon him hand and foot, yet always answer no...

Again, as in "Goin' to Acapulco," Dylan is acting a part, and there is no actor anywhere better than Bob Dylan. When he asks rhetorically "Why am I always the one who must be the thief?" his voice seeps with the bitterness of a father cast as a villain when all he ever intended was love.

The father's faults shine through despite himself. He is manipulative, self-righteous and overbearing. But it is Dylan's genius that we can understand, even sympathize with, the father's obviously genuine suffering.

"Clothes Line Saga" is an interesting idea that doesn't work very well. A typical day at a rural residence frames a report by a neighbor that "the vice-president's gone mad." Vice president of what we never find out, which is the point. No one shows real interest in the news. Mama sighs "I guess there's nothing we can do about it," and resumes doing her laundry. The song ends nicely with the narrator saying, "and I shut all the doors" but it goes on too long and becomes boring instead of conveying the boredom of rural life.

Several different recordings of "Too Much of Nothing" were made at these sessions, but there are others available on bootlegs better than the one Dylan chose to release on this album. Dylan is most effective when he sings against the grain of the instrumentation, as in "I Want You" from Blonde on Blonde where he rarely hits the same notes as the melody line. (This partly explains why nobody sings Dylan songs like Dylan; Joan Baez, for instance, seems obsessed with proving to us that she can hit every note when she's supposed to, not understanding, as does Dylan, that one's voice can be played off the melody in counterpoint). But on this version, the power of his voice is absorbed by The Band's crescendo on the last two lines of each verse. It seems like a bad choice of takes.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOOD of The Basement Tapes falls somewhere between the existential anguish of Blonde on Blonde and its moral resolution on John Wesley Harding. Dylan has gone beyond those visions of Johanna which kept him up past dawn.

There are all these songs on the tapes about "nothing," as if, in those months, lying on the hospital bed, Dylan had pursued his quest for Johanna, and, not finding her, had meditated upon the results of his failed search--was he worse off or better off than before?

"Nothing Was Delivered" is a tantalizingly open song that permits the insertion of any number of meanings. Is this a junkie talking to his pusher? Or is it just possibly Dylan talking to his God?

Nothing was delivered

And I tell this truth to you

Not out of spite nor anger

But simply because it's true

Now I hope you don't object to giving

Giving back all of what you owe

The sooner you come up with this

That's as soon as you can go...

Again in this vein, "Too Much of Nothing" is a meditation upon the danger of despair:

Too much of nothing

Can make a man feel ill at ease

One man's temper rises where

Another man's temper might freeze

Now in that day of the Confession

We cannot mark the soul

'Cause when's there's too much of nothing

No one has control

Dylan has this concept of "the flood," akin to Hunter S. Thompson's "Edge:" one must sever all connections with artificial identities, reject everything that is taught, believe only what experience has shown you to be true. The danger of course is madness and despair, and Dylan has flirted with both of these (listen to "Dirge" on Planet Waves: "I went out all along Broadway/And I felt that place within/That hollow place where martyrs weep/And angels play with sin"). In this light, all these songs about "nothing" constitute a portrait of Dylan confronting his dread in a number of ways--defying it, cajoling it, and finally, in "Down the Flood" taking the bravest step of all, that is, assuming responsibility for it, because it's

Sugar for sugar

And it's salt for salt

If you go down in the flood

It's gonna be your fault...

He chooses to walk that slender line that separates him from insanity, because on the other side is dishonesty, which, for Dylan "surely would be death."

THERE'S A LOT of humor on this album, a humor closer to the playful spirit of John Wesley Harding than the cruel mockery of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" ("You may think he loves you for your money/But I know what he really loves you for/It's your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat") from Blonde on Blonde. Irreverence ("Gonna save my money/And rip it up"), ribald allusions ("That big dumb blonde with her wheel gorged") and word play ("One must always flush out one's house/If he doesn't expect to be housing flushes") combine to create a feeling of goodwill about the whole album; you get the feeling that Dylan enjoys writing songs, enjoys playing with The Band, that Dylan he is not as paranoid as he used to be--no longer the kid from the Midwest who made it bigger than Guthrie. He's brought it all back home.

If you expect the typically slick rock production--where some big rock superstar lays down one track, then overlays a track so he can accompany himself on the kazoo, throws in a moog synthesizer because the moog is oh so hip--look elsewhere. The music here is all recorded on a home tape recorder with one to three mikes. Dylan dislikes recording any song more than a couple of times, which is why you can sometimes here him laugh in the middle of a take, or talk to a member of The Band. What is lost in neatness is more than made up for in spontaneity and feeling. The difference between Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Basement Tapes is the difference between production and creation.