A period of Bob Dylan's illustrious career has been revisited recently with two releases. Dylan put out The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 and a supergroup comprised of Marcus Mumford, Jim James, Elvis Costello and others released Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. The former is centered around Dylan's 1966 sessions in Woodstock, New York, with The Band while the latter is made up of unfinished Dylan lyrics. In a recent Showtime documentary, the songwriter discussed the Basement Tapes in his first audio interview in 10 years, Consequence of Sound noted.
Dylan says in the interview below that the Basement Tapes were a result of just hanging out with other musical minds.
"Oh ... y'know, beside this, kind of was gonna stay up in Woodstock for a while, so ... my band from the touring we had done together, those guys just came on up there, they liked it, too. And Robbie [Roberston] called me up one day and said, 'What's happenin'?' you know, 'What's happenin'?' and I said, 'Nuthin'.' He said, well he was in the mood for some nuthin' too."
The songwriter gathered up 138 recordings for his new compilation, 30 of which were previously unreleased. He talked about the space that spawned those recordings, too.
"And it had a basement, typical basement full of pipes and a concrete floor, washer, dryer ... We'd just kind of sit around and call out the songs and before we went down into the basement to put it on tape," he said. "Woodstock was a place where you could kinda go and get your thoughts together ... It was an artist colony. There were plenty of painters who lived in that area, but very few musicians, who we certainly knew of nobody up there playing any music. Later there were, but when we were up there, middle of the '60s, we were pretty much by ourselves."
The full transcript is available at Expecting Rain.
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