Artist	Song
Bob Dylan & The Band	All You Have To Do Is Dream (4:06)
Bob Dylan & The Band	You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (2:49)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Joshua Gone Barbados (2:50)
Bob Dylan & The Band	The Auld Triangle (Banks Of The Royal Canal) (5:47)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Santa Fe (2:10)
Bob Dylan & The Band	I'm Not There (5:15)
Tiny Tim & The Band	Sonny Boy (3:43)
Bob Dylan & The Band	On A Rainy Afternoon (2:52)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Bonnie Ship The Diamond (3:41)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Apple Suckling Tree (2:48)
Bob Dylan & The Band	See Ya Later, Allen Ginsberg! (1:39)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Big River (3:26)
Bob Dylan & The Band	One Single River (Song For Canada) 4:31
Bob Dylan & The Band	Next Time On The Highway (2:20)
Bob Dylan & The Band	The Big Flood (2:24)
Tiny Tim & The Band	Be By Baby (6:30)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Sign On The Cross (7:24)
Bob Dylan & The Band	I Shall Be Released (3:56)
Bob Dylan & The Band	Four Strong Winds (3:46)
Bob Dylan & The Band	All American Boy (4:07)
Bob Dylan & The Band	All You Have To Do Is Dream (Reprise) (3:38)

Comment:

In 1967, in a lazy pink house in West Saugerties, NY, the most legendary recording sessions in rock history took place: The Basement Tapes. Eight years afterwards, the Basement Tapes album was finally released - only there was something that no one at the time really knew: The least commercial, most off-the-wall Bob Dylan album ever was still considerably cleaned up.The songs that appeared (of the 20 out of 24 that even came from the Basement Tapes sessions at all, that is) were mostly ones that had already been covered, were written most with an audience in mind. The 16 featuring Dylan were all Dylan originals, two in collaboration with a Band member - and all of them, musically, graspable, bitesize. Great songs, great album; but it's been up to bootlegs to explore the wild, woolly, totally uncommercial, cosmically soulful Basement Tapes universe.And yet the bootlegs haven't really done the job either: they're comprehensive, yes; they've made a committed effort to present the material as extensively as it can be. The one I own is a four-disc set called "Blind Boy Grunt And The Hawks: The Basement Tapes"; it's probably best known as a nicely-packaged set called A Tree With Roots, which includes the takes that ended up on the official album, but doesn't include the Tiny Tim "summit meeting" (not actually Basement Tapes sessions) from which tracks 7 and 16 here are taken. In any case, along with the hidden gems come fragments and shadows; tracks consisting of the same part of a song sung over and over again, or nonsense lyrics that never achieve the beautiful absurdity of, say, "Apple Suckling Tree".This compilation, then, I hope can plug in many of the most essential gaps in the original 1975 album. All songs are drawn from "Blind Boy Grunt..." except for tracks 5 and 18, from the same sessions but available on The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 in somewhat better sound quality (actually, the great "Santa Fe" didn't make it onto "Blind Boy Grunt..." at all). "Apple Suckling Tree" and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" are alternate takes from the ones that appear on the Basement Tapes album, in both cases with wildly divergent lyrics, in both cases even more ridiculous. "Sign On The Cross" and "I'm Not There" are the Basement Tapes epics, two incredible scarves unraveled out of Dylan's mind, that have never ever been officially released by Dylan; though a group called Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, and Flint, so I hear, once covered "Sign On The Cross".Tracks 4, 13, and 19 are all covers of Ian & Sylvia (of "Early Morning Rain", which Bob would later cover very sweetly on "Self Portrait", fame), and Dylan seems more committed to getting these songs done *right* than just about anything else in these Basement Tapes sessions; each one of these, as well as "Bonnie Ship The Diamond", would've been a folk classic had it been released at the time. "All American Boy" takes the opposite tack; it's officially a cover, but Dylan, and his partner in crime Rick Danko, distort the lyrics beyond all recognition, until it becomes perhaps the funniest song Dylan's ever recorded (I cut several seconds of silence off the end of this one... there would have been quite the ridiculous gap after it.)Finally, witness "All You Have To Do Is Dream", nothing to do with the much more famous (and less deserving) "All *I* Have To Do Is Dream": recorded in two versions, both marvelous, both included; Dylan was as committed to this song as he was to the Ian & Sylvia covers, which is to say, far more than he was to "Sign On The Cross" or "I'm Not There", whose lyrics are at times incomprehensible. Too silly for John Wesley Harding, too complex for Nashville Skyline, too much of an important statement for Self Portrait, too country by that time for New Morning - "All You Have To Do Is Dream" is the perfect Basement Tapes song. Had it had its moment, it'd be as universally known as "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere". Is it too late to give it its moment now??

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