Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes" are as legendary as any recording in the history of rock 'n' roll. The music, recorded with the Band in Woodstock in 1967, while Dylan was thought to be inactive, reportedly recovering from a motorcycle accident, is both remarkable and eerie, dispatches from a forgotten America that changed the course of popular music. Alt-country before it had a name.

The recordings also single-handedly sparked the modern bootleg market with the underground release Great White Wonder. As a Beatles-obsessed kid growing up in the late-'70s, I was given an original copy of Great White Wonder by a neighbor. Housed in a plain white jacket, it looked like a battered copy of the Beatles' White Album. But what I heard when I put it on my turntable was a revelation. It changed my outlook on music, and subsequently songwriting, forever. I wasn't alone.

"To me the Basement Tapes are the collision between the psychedelic, intellectual culture, pioneered by Dylan, the Beats, and other '60s luminaries, and the roots of old American, Scottish, English, and Irish music," Waterboys frontman Mike Scott says. "I've spent much of my life exploring this beautiful collision, and the Basement Tapes stand as a mighty totem."

While the sound quality of the recordings that have leaked out over the years is poor, and the performances hardly perfect, the songs are extraordinary. Even the 1975 official release The Basement Tapes, which spiffed things up for a wider audience, suffered from after-the-fact overdubs and impossibly high expectations in the wake of Dylan and the Band's landmark 1974 tour.

Now The Basement Tapes are getting a definitive box set edition, with all-new songs, available in 2-CD, 3-LP vinyl, and "complete" 6-CD versions, which will be released by Sony/Legacy on November 4. Esquire is pleased to present an exclusive premiere from the set, Bob Dylan and the Band playing the never-before-heard rockabilly sendup "Dress It Up, Better Have It All":

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"I think we listened harder because the quality was so rough," says Sid Griffin, author of Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes, who also wrote the liner notes for . "Maybe these songs weren't properly recorded, but the vibe of the sessions really caught lightning in a jar. And to have 'This Wheel's on Fire,' 'Tears of Rage,' 'Nothing Is Delivered,' 'You Ain't Going Nowhere,' and 'Wild Wolf' in one batch of songs—songs that any other artist would include as greatest-hit set-closers in any concert—is astonishing."

"The way we played in the basement had nothing to do with the way we played with Bob on tour, and it had nothing to do with the way we'd played as the Hawks or with Ronnie Hawkins," recalls the Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson in the liner notes to the new album. "It was a whole new persona. Subtleties came into the music. It had this kind of timeless spirit."

At the start of what we think of as the Basement Tapes sessions, no one was in a basement. Instead, the sessions started in the front room of Dylan's house—his "Red Room"—on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock. Pete Townshend, Buddy Holly, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and others were home-demo aficionados, but these were recordings of a singer and five-piece band in an informal setting, loose and having fun, rather than in an expensive, often intense and rigid studio setting. The technique would soon become an industry standard, with everyone from the Beatles and the Stones to Jackson Browne and U2 embracing it. But in 1967, it was revolutionary.

"'The Basement Tapes' refers to the basement there at Big Pink, obviously," Robertson recalls in Griffin's book, referring to the Band's home-cum-headquarters not far from Dylan's Woodstock residence, where the group later recorded in a makeshift basement studio. "But it also refers to a process, a homemade process. So some things we recorded at Bob's house, some things we recorded at Rick [Manuel]'s house. We were here and there, so what it really means is 'homemade' as opposed to just a single location in a formal studio."

Initially Dylan and the Band played old songs to warm up and test the primitive equipment. But the sessions quickly evolved into making recordings of the avalanche of new Dylan compositions. The tapes that make up the new release, long traded on the bootleg market in near-complete form, if relatively poor quality, have been taken from the source, and cleaned up with remarkable care. We now get to hear nearly every note recorded in stunning quality, considering the circumstances.

"This release was digitized from the original analog reels," says Griffin, who was invited by Dylan's office to come to New York to hear the complete tapes earlier this year. "A lot of credit goes to [the Band's keyboardist] Garth Hudson, who engineered these. They're nothing like the bootlegs that have circulated over the years. He was learning on the job how to record a rock band, but these recordings really sound great. It's nice that they're releasing the complete tapes for the hardcore collector, but I think the 2-CD set is maybe more digestible and a truly great listen for even a casual fan."

For any longtime fan of Dylan, it's hard not to recall the first time you heard the Basement Tapes each time you listen to one of the songs. But now, the songs, a remarkable body of work for any artist, can be appreciated, alongside Dylan's conventional canon, by anyone and for the ages.

Elliott Landy

Jeff Slate Jeff Slate is a New York City-based songwriter and journalist who has contributed music and culture articles to Esquire since 2013.

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