67
somewhere. Danko chimed in, “It was sure nice to have that
time where we weren’t under the pressures of the public, to
be able to afford the time and place to do our homework, to
reflect and push forward. It was a great time in life. It was just
us getting together every day and playing homemade music.”
“It was relaxed and low-key, which was something we
hadn’t enjoyed since we were children,” said Hudson. “We
could wander off into the woods with Hamlet”—the big dogthat the Hawks shared with Dylan—“the woods were right
outside our door.”
In the spring of ’67, Dylan and his four friends, who still
saw themselves as the Hawks but considered their band
very much on hiatus (Levon Helm hadn’t even shown up
yet), started informal recording sessions at Dylan’s house,
Hi Lo Ha. But there was the baby there, Jesse, who needed his
naps, and so the gang relocated to the basement of Danko’s
digs, nicknamed Big Pink. Hudson cobbled together the
recording equipment—a tape recorder and mixers borrowed
from Grossman, microphones borrowed from Peter, Paul
and Mary—and what would become known as The Basement
Tapes began. “That’s really the way to do a recording,” Dylan
later told Jann Wenner, “in a peaceful, relaxed setting—in
somebody’s basement. With the windows open... and a dog
lying on the floor.”
In keeping with that ethos, Dylan brought to the proceed-
ings sheaves of old-to-ancient material: traditional songs,
folk songs, murder ballads. “It wasn’t the train we came in
on,” said Robertson, who added that the first several weeks
were spent just “killing time.” But then the sound that had
been achieved on tour, imbued now with this Americana,
started to become its own thing, and Dylan began writing,
often in collaboration with the others. “I Shall Be Released”
came forth, as did “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Quinn the Eskimo
(The Mighty Quinn)” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.”
Richard Manuel, who would succumb to addictions and
died in a suicide in 1986, once remembered how casual and
giddy and fantastically productive the creative process was
at Big Pink: Dylan “came down to the basement with a piece
of typewritten paper... and he said, ‘Have you got any music
for this?’... I had a couple of musical movements that fit...
so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyr-
ics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, What’s this mean,
Bob? ‘Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse.’ ”
Dylan/Band aficionados have already registered: The song
became “Tears of Rage.”
Dylan recorded more than 100 songs and perhaps 30 new
compositions in the basement, with himself and the others
huddled near their mikes and playing temperately so that
the sound wouldn’t distort off the cement walls and so that
the vocals could be heard. Helm showed up finally, and the
Band, sans their master but having learned valuable les-
sons in songwriting, recorded early versions of the songs
that would anchor their classic first album, Music from Big
Pink. Elsewhere in this approximate period—the heady
mid-1960s—in far more luxe environs, the Beatles and Beach
Boys were finishing work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band and Pet Sounds: great, intricately produced albums.
This material from Big Pink was music of another sort, and it
wasn’t at all clear that it would ever make it up from the cel-
lar. The bootleg history of these sessions and their eventual
authorized release as The Basement Tapes is hardly worth
recounting; some of the lore and legend has been beaten to
a place beyond death. The larger point is: In the mid-1960s,
giants of the decade—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Brian60-79 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Retreat.indd 67 FINAL 1/13/20 4:27 PM