Million Dollar Bash

Sid Griffin

Description

It’s 1967, the Summer of Love, and Bob Dylan is holed up in Woodstock with a group of musicians once known as The Hawks, laying down a set of recordings that will soon turn the music world on its head. These recordings – the Basement Tapes – would not be released commercially by Dylan at first, but would emerge in the form of cover versions by acts such as The Byrds, Manfred Mann, and Peter Paul & Mary. Together, they would inspire a homespun, back-to-basics approach in the work of The Beatles, the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and many others, while also kick-starting the entire Americana genre.

In this fully revised and updated edition – published to coincide with the release of dozens of previously unreleased Basement Tapes recordings, a major new documentary about the period, and the T Bone Burnett-produced Lost On The River album – author and musician Sid Griffin is given unique access to a cache of more than 40 never-before-heard Basement Tapes recordings, allowing him to shine even greater light on this pivotal yet often misunderstood moment in popular music history.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 12 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279712
• Langue: English

Extrait

Million Dollar Bash
Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Basement Tapes
Sid Griffin

A Jawbone ebook
Second edition 2014
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2014 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Sid Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The beginning of the beginning
Chapter 2: Backbeat
Chapter 3: Rolling down the road
Chapter 4: You are what you eat the document
Chapter 5: The summer of family love
Chapter 6: Clouds so swift
Chapter 7: Now you must provide some answers
Chapter 8: Lost time is not found again
Chapter 9: Building big ships and boats
Chapter 10: Tiny Montgomery says hello
Chapter 11: Another best friend, somehow
Chapter 12: Giving back all of what you owe
Chapter 13: Go down, Miss Moses
Chapter 14: That million dollar bash
Chapter 15: Deep in number and heavy in toil
Chapter 16: Lost on the river: the new Basement Tapes
Chapter 17: And life is brief
A–Z list of Basement Tapes songs
The Basement Tapes cover versions
Acknowledgements

A map of Woodstock, showing key locations used by Dylan and The Band during the recording of the Basement Tapes.
Introduction
“Nothing is worth analysing – you learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past.” – Bob Dylan 1

The above quote leapt from the pages of Bob Dylan’s rather James Joyce-styled novel, Tarantula , minutes before I sat down to write this introduction. As Million Dollar Bash is full of my analysing of Dylan’s music – an art form that this book shows time and again to be a conglomeration of American music’s incredible past – the quote struck me as appropriate and foreboding. Certainly foreboding.
This book is the updated edition of an identically titled work now over seven years old. With 13,000 new words in place, and featuring entries on 45 recently discovered Basement Tapes performances by Bob Dylan – plus additional commentary on the Dylan songs from the initial T Bone Burnett release of “new” Basement Tapes tunes – this era of Dylan’s career now has more light shone on it than ever before. And I sincerely hope whatever light I shine will warm every bit as much as it illuminates.
Dylan and his talented Canadian friends recorded at least 122 songs in three locations. Each song and each location is discussed and dissected in this second edition of the book. (I do not count the brief fragments of songs on Garth Hudson’s library of seven-inch reels.) In addition, 40 previously forgotten Basement Tapes-era Dylan lyrics were discovered recently, hence Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes , a project helmed by T Bone Burnett. With a major Sony reissue program underway – and a new documentary film about the Basement Tapes sessions held at Big Pink (directed by Sam Jones and featuring the author of this book among its talking heads) due for imminent release – it looks like much of the mystery and aura surrounding Bob Dylan’s activities in 1967 will finally be stripped away. I am glad this book plays a part in these revelations.
How ironic that in one of modern popular music’s most eventful years, 1967, it seemed to so many for so long that the great Bob Dylan did so little. No concerts, no new material, no promised ABC-TV special, no promised novel, no rumoured film … only his first Greatest Hits package kept him in public view. Yet 1967 was his most prolific year as a songwriter and as a recording artist.
As I wrote in the first edition of this book, “In no other calendar year would Bob Dylan write more songs. In no other calendar year would he record as much or be in the studio longer (if we allow such places as a recreation room in one house and a basement in another to be referred to as studios). And in no other calendar year would Dylan’s pen turn out more classics, more undeniably great music.”
I still stand by those words. In 1967, many cutting-edge American musicians were on the West Coast, as the rock music industry had shifted its base westward, while their British peers were acting like lords and ladies in hip London clubs like the Scotch of St James and the Bag O’ Nails. Bob Dylan spent a fair portion of this memorable year in a Woodstock recreation room, in a nearby basement, and finally in the living room of a third local house, drinking his legendarily strong coffee all the while. Artistically speaking, Bob Dylan spent 1967 in three private homes in rural New York State, 100 miles north of New York City, recording classic after classic. And without a thought of releasing any of this material himself.
While his musical friends, peers, and rivals pushed ever onward, Dylan and his Hawks pushed ever backward, looking to the past for inspiration so they might move into the present renewed and refreshed. Which is exactly what happened.
Much of this epoch is now forgotten – some of it sadly forgotten, some of it best forgotten. Time has truly shown who was the wiser. Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Basement Tapes are still being discussed, still being written about, still being analysed. The music they recorded in Woodstock in 1967 stands the test of time because it sounded timeless then – as it sounds timeless now. There is nothing in the music or the lyrics that ties it to an era or a specific sound. Yet there is everything in these Dylan songs that logically continues to speak to us almost a half-century later: passion, belief, youth, experience, home truths, history, and even mythology.
As the pride of Hibbing once wrote, “Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.” 2 Dylan was always true to himself, and it shows in his art, be he cowboy or bandleader, cowpuncher or Pied Piper. It may well be why we will never know him, but it’s also why we will always admire him.

Sid Griffin
London, England
Summer 2014
CHAPTER 1
The beginning of the beginning
Nothing can grow in a vacuum. The quality of a planting season is dependent upon outside influences such as soil quality, the amount of sunshine, the frequency of rain. Art too does not grow in a vacuum.
In 1967 Bob Dylan created some of his greatest music, wrote some of his most dynamic songs, and ably captured much of it on tape. In great part this was due to his situation, with his family nearby in a small-town atmosphere. It enabled Dylan and his musical brothers to stop the clock and allow themselves and the songs the time to breathe peacefully. But how did he end up in Woodstock, and how did it influence him?

In early September 1609 a small, clumsy, high-pooped craft manned by a score of Dutch and English veteran seamen, adventurers, and grim explorers came to the mouth of a grand, lonely river flowing silently out of the heart of an unknown continent. The Half Moon had been restlessly darting along the eastern coast of North America in a futile search for a water route leading to India.
The boat was commanded by an Englishman and his search was paid for by the Dutch, who called him Hendrik Hudson. It was a typical arrangement of the time. Hardy seamen and their captains were frequently British and Dutch: those nations had two of the strongest navies and two of the strongest sailing traditions. It was a period when the bravest – and those with the least to lose – would eagerly sail under any flag that promised glory and profit, when the greatest nautical statements were made by rough sons of the cutlass and brave students of the compass.

Right there. Stop. Doesn’t this sound like the scenario of one of those old folk songs that so inspired the adolescent Bob Dylan? All we need to know is that Henry Hudson anchored in what today is New York harbor and soon discovered he was by the mouth of a river. He spent the next three weeks exploring and eventually started his homeward journey in October. Back in Holland, merchants were keen to hear and learn more about the furs that Hudson and his men had seen on the natives and in their encampments along the river. Furs were as valuable to Europeans as silks or ivory, and soon companies were sending more ships to the newly discovered river, sailing northward again and again to further document the country. That area today consists of the counties of Green, Orange, Ulster, Delaware, and Sullivan.
Woodstock, New York, was formed on April 11, 1787, its name inspired by the town of Woodstock in England, although it was first settled – if the descendants of the Native Americans there can forgive us for using that term – by the Dutch and then other Europeans. The Delaware & Hudson Canal was finished in 1828 and this waterway led to a leap in communication within the county. Late in the 19th century the area was becoming known for its proximity to New York City, which could be reached relatively quickly on the train that headed north to the state capital of Albany, but it was rural enough to remain a semi-sophisticated pleasure.
By 1900, Woodstock was a fully formed small rural village, as unlike Albany or New York City as a Dordogne farm is to Paris. Yet its reputation as an artist’s haven was already established. In fact America’s first homegrown, coherent, and noted group of landscape artists of any prominence began in the area some 50 years before the start of the 20th century, when a group now known as the Hudson River painters put the Woodstock area on the artistic map.
At exactly the point when this school of landscape portraiture reached the height of its influence, an Englishman began a search across the United States for a location for a colony of artists to live and work together in rural splend