The great, lost ‘60s’ album wasn’t “Smile” – it was Bob Dylan's "Bottle of Bread"

Today saw (yet another) release of highlights from The Basement Tapes, the recordings Dylan made with his old backing group, the Hawks, in Woodstock in 1967, when he'd dropped out of sight following a motorbike accident (at least, that was his story - his disappearance may simply have been the result of cumulative drug-induced frazzlement). I first heard some of the songs in, I think, 1969 when a friend who loved Dylan but didn't seem to enjoy or understand any other music bought the grand-daddy of all bootleg recordings, Great White Wonder. I wasn’t hugely impressed, but, then, it’s usually taken my ears a while to attune themselves to Bob Dylan’s stuff.

At that time, I’d only just got into Blonde on Blonde, from 1966, and had been immersed in Dylan’s late 1967 stripped-down countrified masterpiece John Wesley Harding (which was actually recorded after The Basement Tapes) for well over a year, as well as The Band’s glorious eponymous second album (they, of course, were The Hawks), and The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, plus a few (to my ears far superior) hit cover versions of some of the sloppily-performed and badly-recorded numbers on the Dylan bootleg (which, to be fair, were never meant to be released). It wasn’t until the first official release of The Basement Tapes in 1975 that I began to grasp the seismic effect those sessions had had on popular music.

I won’t be buying the new release (but you can, for a mere £16.99, here - or if you're an obsessive Dylanist, or mentally ill, you can buy the complete set for £126.93, here). I’ve listened to snippets of the songs on Amazon and I'm not sure the technical improvements would justify the outlay – or, indeed, that they'd ameliorate the lingering sense of annoyance that Dylan and The Band (for my money, the best American group of all time) didn’t follow up their protracted bucolic rehearsals with a properly-recorded album (well, as properly-recorded as Dylan generally managed back then) featuring the best numbers. The track listing of that great lost album pretty much picks itself:

You Ain’t Going Nowhere
This Wheel’s On Fire
Open the Door Homer
Million Dollar Bash
Lo and Behold
Quinn the Eskimo
Going to Acapulco
I’m Alright
Tears of Rage
Nothing Was Delivered
Yeah Heavy and a Bottle of Bread
Crash on the Levee
Please Mrs Henry
I Shall Be Released

I can just imagine that nestling between Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding. As for a title, I'd have gone with Bottle of Bread or Million Dollar Bash.

An old friend - a regular commenter on this blog (oh, the hell with it - ex-KCS) - recently remarked that he invariably preferred covers of Bob Dylan songs to the original versions (or something along those lines). Contrariwise, I almost invariably prefer Dylan doing his own stuff – but, for the reasons outlined above, I make an exception for covers of songs from The Basement Tapes. I’ll leave you with five of the very best: