Bob Dylan And The Band - The Basement Tapes - 2CD - Remastered (2009) FLAC

Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he
pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional
singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness
narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notion that a singer must have
a conventionally good voice in order to perform, thereby redefining the
vocalist's role in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres
of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock.

And that's just the tip of his achievements. Dylan's force was evident
enough during his height of popularity in the 1960s - The Beatles' shift
toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened
without him - but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent
generations, as many of his songs became popular standards and his best
albums became undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon.

The official release of "The Basement Tapes" - which were first heard on a
1968 bootleg called "The Great White Wonder" - plays with history somewhat,
as Robbie Robertson overemphasizes the Band's status in the sessions,
making them out to be equally active to Dylan, adding in demos not cut at
the sessions and overdubbing their recordings to flesh them out. As many
bootlegs (most notably the complete five-disc series) reveal, this isn't
entirely true and The Band were nowhere near as active as Dylan, but that
ultimately is a bit like nitpicking, since the music here (including the
Band's) is astonishingly good.

The party line on "The Basement Tapes" is that it is Americana, as Dylan
and The Band pick up the weirdness inherent in old folk, country, and blues
tunes, but it transcends mere historical arcana through its lively,
humorous, full-bodied performances. Dylan never sounded as loose, nor was
he ever as funny as he is here, and this positively revels in its weird,
wild character. For all the apparent antecedents - and the allusions are
sly and obvious in equal measure - this is truly Dylan's show, as he
majestically evokes old myths and creates new ones, resulting in a crazy
quilt of blues, humor, folk, tall tales, inside jokes, and rock.

The Band pretty much pick up where Dylan left off, even singing a couple of
his tunes, but they play it a little straight, on both their rockers and
ballads. Not a bad thing at all, since this actually winds up providing
context for the wild, mercurial brilliance of Dylan's work - and, taken
together, the results (especially in this judiciously compiled form with
its expert song selection, even if there's a bit too much Band) rank among
the greatest American music ever made.