Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes - where we're currently at (Part 3)

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by stereoptic, Sep 13, 2014.

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  1. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    Thanks for posting that link -- I love hearing these songs the way the public first heard them way back when. Very cool.
     
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  2. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Given the subject matter of the song, "I shake my face" makes more sense.
     
  3. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    re: Big Dog (from the upcoming box set)

    "...I got Hamlet the dog from Bob Dylan. Hamlet was as big as a bear. Big dog...He slept on the carpet by the stove through most of the basement tapes music and most of the Big Pink rehearsals as well. That dog heard a lot of music."
    - Rick Danko, quoted in the book This Wheel's On Fire by Levon Helm (2000)
     
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  4. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    "When we'd gotten comfortable, we cleaned out the basement of Big Pink, and Garth put together a couple of microphones and connected them to a little two-track reel-to-reel recorder, and that was our studio. For ten months, March to December 1967, we all met down in the basement and played for two or three hours a day, six days a week. That was it, man. We wrote a lot of songs in that basement. It was incredible!" - Rick Danko, quoted in This Wheel's On Fire by Levon Helm (2000)

    (As Levon arrives at Big Pink for the first time)
    "Garth had set up a music room downstairs in the cinder-block basement, with an upright piano, a stand-up bass, a drum kit, amplifiers, and some microphones connected to a Revox tape recorder through an Altec Lansing mixer, so they could record in stereo. Garth had positioned one of the microphones on top of the hot-water heater. I think there was also an oil furnace in the room..." from This Wheel's On Fire by Levon Helm (2000)

    Can anyone tell which Dylan/Band basement recordings may have featured stand-up bass? I've always taken it for granted that only an electric bass was ever used.
     
    Last edited: Sep 15, 2014
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  5. Moth

    Moth fluttering by

    Location:
    UCI
    I don't know, his sporadically using his country voice doesn't seem that odd to me.

    For one thing, it shows up in a few places on John Wesley Harding, not just the last two tracks. I think the vocal styling is the most obvious on those last two tracks because the music and voice complement each other so well. However, for most of the album, his voice slides all over the place. Sometimes, you get Bob just being Bob, sometimes you get him crooning, and and other times he's somewhere in between. I actually couldn't believe it was Bob singing the first time I heard the title song. Anyway, he never really seems to settle in to one style completely at that point in time. He finally settles into his crooner self for Nashville Skyline, but then on Self Portrait, like Bootleg Series 10 has showed us very well, he's all over the place again.

    All that said, his experimenting with a different voice for the Basement Tapes doesn't seem that strange to me. Even in those recordings, (though they definitely seem to mesh) you can hear him using different voices/styles. For example, you can see similarities in his singing for "Million Dollar Bash" and "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread", and his singing for "Goin' to Alcapulco" and "Tears of Rage". I think, like Another Self Portrait, he was just trying stuff out. Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. So, the fact that he tried out another of his many vocal deliveries amongst the 100+ songs doesn't seem unrealistic to me.
     
    Last edited: Sep 15, 2014
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  6. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    It's strange, but you can hear the deep croon occasionally emerging during the BT/JWH era (circa late '67) and then slowly disappearing for good during the early Self Portrait sessions (March 1970). Don't know the whys or wherefores, but I've always thought it would be cool if he suddenly broke into that vocal style again once in awhile. (Imagine Pay In Blood sung with those dulcet tones.)
     
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  7. Moth

    Moth fluttering by

    Location:
    UCI
    Yeah, it's definitely strange that he seemed to use it occasionally, entirely indulge in it, and then leave it behind forever. Although, I guess that it's not that strange considering who we're talking about. I wonder if he can even do it nowadays... For the life of me, I can't picture what it would sound like.
    As an aside, I haven't heard "Pay in Blood" in a while, so I started to play it to try imagining his country voice on the song and then burst out laughing when he actually started singing. He has certainly left it behind. Great song, though.
     
    Last edited: Sep 15, 2014
  8. John DeAngelis

    John DeAngelis Senior Member

    Location:
    New York, NY
    No acoustic bass that I know of on any officially released tracks.
     
  9. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    That's my impression, as well. And would they have even had enough elbow room down there for a stand-up instrument? I wonder.
     
  10. Koabac

    Koabac Self-Titled

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Yeah, it's kinda strange, in general, the idea of him having more than one different singing voice at all when you think about it. I mean, the two main ones - the stereotypical (and oft mocked by civilians) Dylan Whine Talk-Sing and the Dylan Country Croon- are very different singing styles. When one opens their mouths and start singing a sound comes out that is their natural, normal singing voice. To make a different sound, one would have to affect a different style on purpose - like Tom Waits, who uses a range of different vocal affectations to create different feels.

    I've heard that the Country Croon was Dylan's "real" voice, or, at least, what people who knew him pre-1960 claimed his singing voice sounded more like, but it seems so strange that he would be "affecting" the Whine voice for most of his life. I mean, who has TWO (or more) almost completely different singing voices? Can anyone think of another artist where it's simply accepted they have more than one "different" singing voices, none of which are considered a real affectation? Is it me or is that odd?
     
  11. Moth

    Moth fluttering by

    Location:
    UCI
    What's strange to me is that he chose his "throat cancer patient" style over his "actually singing" style.
     
  12. voles

    voles Forum Lurker

    Location:
    UK
    What about 'The Boxer' on SP where the two 'voices' duet with one another? I personally think that he has gone through loads of voices getting his exercises in breath control as he wanted them - though the 'Nashville Skyline' voice change was a bit radical I admit.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
  13. Didn't Bob say his country crooner voice appeared because he gave up smoking?
    It's also been said he had a raspy voice on New Morning because he had a cold during the week of recording.
     
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  14. And can we really keep this thread going for another 40 something days?
     
  15. slane

    slane Forum Resident

    Location:
    Merrie England
    Great analysis! I think there may be overdubbed drums on 'This Wheel's On Fire' though.

    'I Pity The Poor Immigrant' gets more croon-like as it progresses, sounding most like Nashville Skyline, IMO.
     
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  16. Steve E.

    Steve E. Doc Wurly and Chief Lathe Troll

    Location:
    Brooklyn, NY, USA
    I had that thought until I compared them back to back. It appears to be the same exact track, just placed very differently in the mix. The overdubs certainly fix a lot of the roughness and sloppiness of the one original take, but at a cost.
     
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  17. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    About :55 seconds into this Dylan parody/imitation, Christopher Guest breaks into his version of the"Skyline croon"
    http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=National Lampoon Positively Wall Street (Bob Dylan parody)

    EDIT: And Bob told Jann Wenner his voice changed when he quit smoking, but that's unlikely.

    Oops, posted the wrong link, fixed now.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
  18. Dark Horse 77

    Dark Horse 77 A Parliafunkadelicment Thang

    40 Years I hope!
     
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  19. HominyRhodes

    HominyRhodes Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    Long Distance Operator

    Categorized as a Basement Tapes song in the 1973 Writings & Drawings book, and performed live by Dylan & The Hawks back in 1965, this straight blues number was apparently never recorded in the studio or the basement with a Dylan vocal, unless there was a basement version that has since been lost. (The track on the '75 BT album is by The Band). The only known tape of Dylan singing the song himself was made by Allen Ginsberg, at concert in Berkeley, CA on December 4, 1965. It's not terrible quality, but maybe someday a better soundboard version from '65 will surface.
     
  20. For me, what's striking about Dylan's vocal approach on the basements is that for the first time in his career, he's largely not filtering his voice through any kind of "Bob Dylan persona". Paul Williams (as usual) astutely makes this point in Performing Artist:

    "...there's a shift in Dylan's intent that is audible in these performances. Maybe this shows up in Dylan's voice. Maybe it doesn't show up anywhere that can be pointed to. But the difference is there.
    We can hear a difference in his voice in some of the performances of other people's songs: Dylan's trademark accent, the ever-shifting but always present matrix through which all his past singing had been done (since 1960 or so) is missing, and at first it's hard to recognize the singer as Dylan. There is an accent in the voice, a projected identity and texture, but the "Dylan" accent is absent - for example, "Don't You Try Me Now" has thick country blues textures in the vocal, and "Young But Daily Growing" projects an appropriate ballad-singer persona, but there's no indentifiable "Bob Dylan" persona or texture underneath, as there had been in almost all his earlier performances, even of other people's material. The effect is startling, and a little scary..."
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
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  21. davenav

    davenav High Plains Grifter

    Location:
    Louisville, KY USA
    I'd call it more of a duel, than duet.

    Oh, to hear that with just one of the two vocal tracks. Either one, as they don't sound to me as if they are actually meant to go together. Just two vocal takes playing simultaneously.
     
  22. Wow - very cool find. The earlier parts of that epic '65-'66 world tour are so poorly documented - which is a shame since the standard set list played later in Australia and Europe hadn't become so etched in stone at that point, still allowing for some surprises. Not half bad quality for an "audience" tape either; something that could probably at least be worked with.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
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  23. JL6161

    JL6161 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan, USA
    I'd be shaking my face too if I had punched myself in it with my fist. Just sayin'.
     
  24. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Especially if you had a nose full of pus when you did it. Shake your face to get that pus off. :)
     
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  25. Sean Murdock

    Sean Murdock Forum Intruder

    Location:
    Bergenfield, NJ
    There's also the possibility of a face-full of smelly pie...
     
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