Doubleshot Tuesday: The Basement Tapes/ Public Domain

[Today: A dip into popular music's deep, dark past...]

“The old weird America” coined by Greil Marcus is colorfully reflected in both The Basement Tapes and Public Domain. Bob Dylan and Dave Alvin have each successfully burrowed into the past – Alvin using songs that had fallen out of copyright control, Dylan creating his own past out of the whole cloth of his imagination.

Released in 1975, The Basement Tapes features songs recorded during the summer of 1967, while Dylan was recuperating from a nearly fatal motorcycle accident. He was joined in the basement of his Woodstock, NY home by members of The Band, and the music they made is ragged, hazy, and brilliant. Dylan’s characters inhabit a world of half-formed melodies, non-sequitars, one-liners, biblical prophecy, and dream imagery. These were original tunes recorded to sound like they were generations old, but they have always sounded new and strange. When Dylan sort of half sings the lines “I went back in the house and Mama met me/And then I shut all the doors” he sums up the sadness and struggle of the American frontier.

If The Basement Tapes is a murky snapshot of a subconscious musical history, then Public Domain is the real deal – primitive folk songs from the past, lovingly rendered and brought back to life. Living in a world of natural disaster, murder, and insanity, the characters here are every bit as troubled, witty, and courageous as those in The Basement Tapes. The tunes paint vivid pictures of their times, and tell stories set on farms, battlefields, oceans, graveyards, railroads. These people have blood on their hands, but they live with honor and maintain their dignity. As Alvin wrote in his brief liner notes for the album, “A lot of what is good, and bad, about us is in these songs.”

Listen: Clothes Line Saga [Bob Dylan & The Band]

Listen: What Did The Deep Sea Say [Dave Alvin]

Tags: Bob Dylan, Dave Alvin, Greil Marcus, Public Domain, The Band, The Basement Tapes