From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
Back in the Holy Days of 1967, while Brian Wilson was finding himself unable to finish his SMILE project, Bob Dylan and the Band were making a deliciously incomplete clutch of recordings that became known as The Basement Tapes. These began to appear in Britain a couple of years later on white label, white sleeved LPs known as ‘bootlegs’ - as they weren’t legal releases through CBS, Dylan’s record company. For us Dylan fanatics, bootlegs became the new Holy Grail once we realised that many of them contained better material than his current ‘official’ releases.

“Waters Of Oblivion” was a 12-song compilation of songs that Dylan had apparently written in 1967, right before his official album “John Wesley Harding”. When I found it in Kensington Market in early 1971 I bought it swiftly and greedily. The stylus of my maroon plastic portable record player crackled through a curtain of muffled tape hiss to reveal a nest of, er…well: I could best describe these songs by singing them, or sitting you down to listen to them, which you probably did ages ago. They’re dreams with catchy choruses - portentous, vivid and surreal; yet all of them ring true. They’re playful, soulful, sometimes drunken; much more fun to my 17-year-old ears than the CBS albums Dylan had unleashed since 1966.

There were no recording details; Dylan had recorded them with the Band, apparently - the Tapes seemed to come out of a mist and vanish into a cloud. They went in deep with many, myself included. Over years I’ve occasionally attempted to create ‘accidental’ albums in the same way; mixing up covers and old songs of mine with new creations. It’s not a bad M.O., though the new songs tend to win through because nobody’s heard them before.

These recordings of two Bob Dylan songs “Open The Door, Homer” and “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” date from the early part of this century, 40 years or so after they first appeared among The Basement Tapes. “Open The Door…” struck a deep chord with me; the sense of resignation and world-weariness - not what you’re expected to feel at 17 - nonetheless felt like wise counsel for navigating the grown-up world I was supposed to be entering. The last verse is infused with that desolate wisdom that nobody can conjure like Bob Dylan.

“Yea! Heavy…” could almost be a Velvet Underground outtake from the “Ferryboat Bill” era; they would have had fun with that mechanical two-chord riff. I’ve been singing these songs to myself and with friends at parties for decades. These two takes hail from one of those gatherings; Scott McCaughey is on bass and harmonies, and Bill Reiflin plays drums. And I think Nick Lowe was around.

Scattered beyond the grasp of memory there are recordings of my friends and I singing many songs off the Basement Tapes. But finding them now all is another matter…