The Top 10 Greatest Chuck Berry Covers.

As I wrote in my Last Thoughts On Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry's songbook is the rock & roll songbook. Only Bob Dylan is more covered than he is, but with 10 years on him, Chuck Berry's covers have the wider scope.

While I'm now listening to a lot of Chuck Berry, & a greatest list of his own best recordings is to come, I thought there was no finer tribute to his life & influence than the ways in which others have breathed life into his art. Hence this list, which attempts to fight through the countless Chuck Berry covers out there to make a definitive Top 10 list.

I tried to go by the quality of the recording (or in the case of The Sex Pistols, lack thereof), not who was doing it. I was very tempted by Bob Dylan's version of "Nadine," David Bowie's version of "Round & Round," & Jerry Lee Lewis's "Little Queenie," but ultimately left them all off because it would have been more about including those artists on the list, as opposed to their versions of Chuck Berry's songs.

Some of these songs were major career-defining hits, others were shelved outtakes or rough demos; some appeared at the dawn of an artist's career, others in the twilight. What they all have in common is a love for Chuck Berry--which is to say, a love for rock & roll itself.

10. The Sex Pistols: "Johnny B. Goode," Demo, c. 1975.

By the time The Sex Pistols emerged in the mid-'70s, the once-raw genre of rock & roll that Chuck Berry helped usher into the world had become lifeless & bloated. The Pistols helped to rebuild the genre by tearing it down to its studs, & here in a classic early demo later released on The Great Rock & Roll Swindle soundtrack, they take on Rock Version 1.0, wherein they attempt to play "Johnny B. Goode," the greatest rock song of all. SPOILER: THEY CAN'T. But if they sound like a bunch of no-talent snotty kids banging around in the garage that's the point. & even though they had yet to release their first single, singer Johnny Rotten's venom is already fully-intact, bluffing his way through the words like they were caustic nails. It was this same hellfire that helped to reignite rock for the next 35 years & counting.

9. The Band: "Back To Memphis," Studio Outtake, 1973.

As if anyone needed evidence of the range of Chuck Berry's appeal, look no further to one of the least-talented rock bands (above), followed by one of the most-talented ones here. Initially recorded for their 1973 album of classic rock covers, Moondog Matinee, this Berry super deep-cut was shelved in favor of a solid-but-unremarkable version "Promised Land." By the late 1980s, however, the reissue powers-that-be were reissuing this song on Band compilations everywhere, after dubbing in fake crowd fanfare to pass it off as a live performance. Here is the undoubted original studio recording, which shows why no one questioned the authenticity of the fanfare--it's the rare Band studio recordings that capture their contagious onstage energy.

8. Johnny Rivers: "Memphis," At The Whiskey A Go Go, 1964; #2 US.

This could be a sequel to "Back To Memphis" if it wasn't recorded nearly a decade earlier. It is also probably the most classic Chuck Berry song that no one realized was originally a Chuck Berry song. A down-home country ballad of a man pleading with a long-distance operator, it was remade into a minor rock classic with Johnny Rivers' live version here (it also interestingly inverts The Band's recording above in that instead of featuring a fake crowd on a studio recording, this is a real live recording that sounds like a fake one). & for those wondering how Johnny Rivers made a list with greater rock idols, perhaps he is a secret weapon of rock covers--when pressed for his favorite cover of one of his songs, Bob Dylan famously said Johnny Rivers version of "Positively 4th Street." So maybe his presence here isn't so strange after all.

7. The Beatles: "Roll Over Beethoven," With The Beatles, 1963; #68 US.

To modern ears, Chuck Berry's original versions can sometimes drag a bit, even when the singing & playing are top-notch ("Johnny B. Goode," of course, is an exception to this). Often, when you name a classic like "Roll Over Beethoven," people are actually thinking of The Beatles cover of it, not because it is necessarily better, but simply tighter, faster, & more modern. In one of George Harrison's earliest vocals, he tries his hand at this classic & announces the arrival of a second generation of rock & rollers. Within a few years, albums like Revolver & Sgt. Pepper would be hailed as artistic achievements that actually would rival Beethoven in a very real way. But here, they're still having fun in a track that was strong enough to kick off their second American album & even be a minor hit on this side of the pond.

WARNING: THIS IS NOT THE ORIGINAL STUDIO VERSION OF THE SONG, BUT THE LIVE BBC VERSION. IT IS VERY CLOSE TO THE ORIGINAL, BUT THE ORIGINAL VERSION SHOULD BE SOUGHT OUT. IT IS BEST HEARD ON WITH THE BEATLES OR ON THE OLD 1970s DOUBLE-LP BEATLES COMPILATION ROCK & ROLL MUSIC.

6. The Rolling Stones: "Bye Bye Johnny," The Rolling Stones [EP], 1964.

It's not easy picking an early Rolling Stones cover of a Chuck Berry song; there were simply so many. "Carol" was strong enough to be released as a Top 10 hit in France, while "Around & Around" was a fine tribute recorded at Berry's own Chess Records. But their cover of Berry's little-known sequel record to "Johnny B. Goode" is the best to my ears, released on their first EP in 1963. It documents The Stones as raw & hungry, at once near-amateurish compared to the production values of their rival Beatles, yet able to provide a dense onslaught of sound that already full of toughness & swagger. Plus, lead guitarist Keith Richards already establishes himself as Berry's spiritual eager kid brother. They would record bigger & more popular Berry covers in the years to come, but the sheer sound of this one leaves the others in the dust.


5. The Yardbirds: "Too Much Monkey Business," Five Live Yardbirds, 1964.

Long before the likes of Cream, Derek & The Dominoes, & a sprawling solo career, Eric Clapton was a scrawny guitar hero in The Yardbirds. He was nicknamed "Slowhand" because he played his guitar so fast that he'd break strings & have to change them to the sound of a slow handclap; within months, "Clapton is God" graffiti began appearing in the London subway halls (much to Clapton's embarrassment). Before he left The Yardbirds for more greener (or rather, blues-ier) pastures, he left this searing document, taken from their sets at the Marquee Club. This song was their opener & they all but blow the roof off the top of it in the performance. While everything revolves around Clapton, I'm always most tickled by Keith Relf's vocals, solidly singing the words in verse, shouting them in another, & then dutifully reciting them in a detached sense of boredom that cuts to the teenage blues at the heart of the song. Before getting obliterated once again by those guitar solos.


4. The Million Dollar Quartet: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," Studio Jam, 1956.

Long before the likes of Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry was rock & roll's premiere wordsmith. Compared to contemporaries like Elvis or Fats Domino, Berry's songs were epics where the others' were merely three-stanza poems. Berry was a man who truly loved words & putting them together in memorable ways. One realizes this when listening to the famous Million Dollar Quartet jam session where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, & Johnny Cash turned to Berry's "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man." For several takes, you can hear them collectively honing in on the song, different people remembering different parts of different verses, until it all comes together here. If one needs any further evidence of strongly Berry was on the rock founders' minds, look no further than the fact that aside from "Don't Be Cruel," this is the only rock song sung by The Million Dollar Quartet for the nearly 80-minute session.

3. Buddy Holly: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," Reminiscing, c. 1956; #113 US, #3 UK.

An opposite take on "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by no less of a founding rock god. Precise where The Million Dollar Quartet was loose, & rocking where they were almost folksy, Buddy Holly's version of the song reshapes it into a driving rockabilly masterpiece (with a seeming tip of the hat to The Champs' "Tequila," although Berry himself loved a good Latin groove as well). & when the snare drum hits to emulate the high-fly being hit into the stands, it is a subtle use of sound effects that presages songs like "Penny Lane" by a decade. Although not originally released during Holly's lifetime, it saw the light of day just before The Beatles invaded America, even making the Top 5 in the Holly-loving UK.


2. Elvis Presley: "Promised Land," Promised Land, 1974; #14 US.

Elvis's last truly classic recording was also his first great cover of a Chuck Berry song. He had tried in overeager readings of "Maybellene" at the Louisiana Hayride & later in listless recitations of "Johnny B. Goode" in Las Vegas, but only his mid-'60s country take on "Too Much Monkey Business" was close to interesting, & only then because it was the only Elvis recording to feature the word "Vietnam." But in 1974, Elvis showed he still had something left to prove when he attacked Berry's "Promised Land." Perhaps it was because the song contained an idea as big as Elvis--THE Promised Land--that he was up for the challenge, but its rock star travelogue version of The American Dream never sounded better than in Elvis's telling. Cut at Stax Records, it provided Elvis with the last Top 15 pop hit of his lifetime, although it deserved to go all the way to #1.


1. The Beatles: "Rock & Roll Music," The Beatles For Sale, 1964.

The Beatles' cover of Chuck Berry's "Rock & Roll Music" is easily the greatest Berry cover of all time. It encompasses all of the key elements that can be found in the other songs listed above--a sense of rawness, of quality, of reinvention, of tightness, of fun, & of simple, irreverent joy. Like they already had with "Roll Over Beethoven" the year before, The Beatles took Chuck Berry's original & tightened it up, locking it together in a way that the original version merely suggested. The words were never the problem in Berry's original--it was that the music never matched their promise. The Beatles fixed all of that. With Lennon shouting his finest vocal this side of "Twist & Shout," the group shows that even in the wistful, post-A Hard Day's Night period of late 1964, they could still rock out with the best of them.

& in doing so, more than hold their own against none other than their idol, Chuck Berry.

WARNING: THIS IS NOT THE ORIGINAL STUDIO VERSION OF THE SONG BUT A CRAPPY LIVE VERSION. (THANKS, BEATLE LAWYERS!) THE ORIGINAL VERSION MUST BE SOUGHT OUT. IT IS BEST HEARD ON THE ORIGINAL BEATLES FOR SALE LP OR THE OLD 1970s DOUBLE-LP BEATLES COMPILATION ROCK & ROLL MUSIC THAT BARES ITS NAME.

The Top 10 Band Songs.

The Band--guitarist Robbie Robertson, drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and organist Garth Hudson (all of whom sang except for Hudson)--remain one of the most influential bands of all-time, pioneering what has since become known as Americana; ironic since they are 4/5ths Canadian. But then again, it was their outsider status that made them see America as those within never could.

With about a half-dozen "Best Of"s lists out there for The Band, I figured I'd add my own. I could add another 20 songs, but 10 keeps it more manageable; regardless, honorable mentions go to "Yazoo Street Scandal," the stripped-down version of "Twilight," & the lovely "It Makes No Difference," the latter of which makes nearly every other list (& even tops one), but is left off because its alto-sax-&-guitar coda is endless & hasn't aged very well.

With that out of the way, let's get to the list.

10. "Bessie Smith," The Basement Tapes, 1975 (Album Track).

A beautiful ballad that is striking in its seeming desire to be taken literally: When the singer sings that they are going down the road to meet Bessie Smith, you believe him, even if he too has no idea what he'll do once he gets there; meanwhile, Hudson's sense of atmosphere--always The Band's secret weapon--has never been on better display.



9. "Stage Fright," Stage Fright, 1970 (Album Track).

From the seclusion of their beloved Big Pink home to the audience they never quite knew how to face, this is the closest thing The Band ever came to an autobiography, sung by Danko in his most earnest performance at the microphone.



8. "We Can Talk," Music From Big Pink, 1968 (Album Track).

As with rock & roll itself, gospel had always been a secret engine driving The Band, & here it comes to full fruition in the piano-&-organ testimony found here, filled with overlapping vocals & call-&-response; it also features Robertson's sharpest set of vocals, a panorama of milking cows in Sunday suits, flames turning to chalk, and whips buried in the grave.



7. "Ophelia," Northern Lights -- Southern Cross, 1975 (#62 US).

Perhaps the most haunting mystery of Hamlet is whether Ophelia commits suicide, & this song not only runs with it--with the great line "Ashes of laughter/The ghost is clear," it seems to answer it; also features their best use of the ubiquitous horns that appear in the latter part of their career, driving home an icon of Shakespearean tragedy into a joyous funeral band march of the Dixieland South.



6. "The Shape I'm In," Stage Fright, 1970 (#121 US).

The Band always treated this song like it was the hit that it never really was (hence it's the second song in both The Last Waltz & their classic Best Of LP), but no matter--it kicks like the man sprung free from jail it portrays, & features the tragic Richard Manuel singing the most eerily foreshadowing lines Robertson ever wrote him: "Out of nine lives, I spent seven/Now how in the world do you get to Heaven?"



5. "Ain't No More Cain," The Basement Tapes, 1975 (Album Track).

An old chain-gang spiritual with all four vocalists trading verses (the order is: Helm, Robertson, Danko, & Manuel) while Hudson plays some down-home accordion; this is The Band at their most relaxed, natural, demographic, & effortlessly American--which is to say, their most Band-iest.

WARNING: THE VIDEO ABOVE IS NOT THE RIGHT VERSION OF THIS SONG. PLEASE SEEK OUT THE CLASSIC VERSION FIRST RELEASED ON DYLAN & THE BAND'S BASEMENT TAPES ALBUM, & NOW ALSO AVAILABLE ON THE BAND'S MUSICAL HISTORY BOXED SET & "BEST OF A MUSICAL HISTORY" ONE-DISC SAMPLER.



4. "Don't Do It," Rock Of Ages, 1972 (#34 US, #11 CA).

Their finest performance (& second-biggest hit), which remakes a minor Marvin Gaye song into a rock & roll history lesson: With The Bo Diddley Beat at its base, they add shouted vocals, funky guitar riffs, bluesy piano triplets, & country harmonies, all topped with New Orleans-styles horn charts from none other than the late, great Allen Toussaint.



3. "Up On Cripple Creek," The Band, 1969 (#25 US; #10 CA).

The Band's biggest hit & funkiest track, chockfull of accurate geography, horse races, Spike Jones records, and adultery.

2. "The Weight," Music From Big Pink, 1968 (#63 US; #35 CA).

The Band's most famous song; a quasi-religious pilgrimage through America about the burden of sin & the price of obligation, featuring the Devil, Miss Moses, & Crazy Chester's Dog.

1. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," The Band, 1969 (B-Side Of "Up On Cripple Creek).

The finest rock song about The Civil War ever written--all the more impressive that it was written by a Canadian (Robertson), albeit based on the stories of his Arkansas bandmate (Helm). Like all classic American Civil War epics--The Birth Of A Nation, The General, & Gone With The Wind--it told its tale from the Southern perspective, heightening the "brother against brother" narrative that we love to tell ourselves when the real narrative--SLAVERY--gets too ugly & disturbing. Of the many celebrated lines, such as Virgil Cane seeing Robert E. Lee or the bells ringing in the refrain, the one that always does it for me is "In the winter of '65/We were hungry, just barely alive." A casual listener would assume that this was 1965 (as the song was only recorded four years later), but in fact it is 1865.

& therein lies the magic of The Band: Their utter timelessness; & no song shows it better than this one, which could have been sung in 1965--or 1865.

The Band: King Harvest.

Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected President, part of me has been numb. I joked on my Twitter feed that I was going through the stages of Trump grief--denial, anger, depression, acceptance--but in truth, I have yet to get past denial. His election represents an America I do not know, an America that I can only fear from a distance.

I need an America that I could hold close, a refuge, a place that felt like home, an America I could crawl into. Punk rock was too harsh and the best of the political stuff was British. Bob Dylan was too omnipresent in my life, he was more like a constant than a place to which I could retreat. Elvis was too big; bands of people I knew personally were too small. So I went to the most American place I knew in rock music: The Band's self-titled second album. I have long considered it "The Great American Novel" of rock and roll.

I've been listening to The Band ever since. Technically, they are only 1/5th American--drummer Levon Helm is from Arkansas, while guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and organist Garth Hudson are all from The Great White North--but it doesn't matter; more than any other band, The Band has been able to define that quintessentially American sound, that quintessentially American idea, better than anyone else this side of Bob Dylan, who was their early collaborator and, one imagines, American spiritual mentor.

As an outfit, The Band is both classic yet distinct--no other group in popular music can nail the way the way in which they could sound so simultaneously loose and tight. Helm is one of rock's finest and most thoughtful drummers; Danko's bass had a lilting, slippery sound that was the sonic equivalent of a paintbrush swishing its way across a canvas; Manuel's piano could be a Saturday night honky-tonk or a Sunday morning church service, pounding straightforward chords or adding lovely embellishments; Robertson's guitar often darted around the other instruments, sometimes blending back with chords and sometimes taking a brief spotlight with a stinging solo; Hudson was everywhere at once, his organ (and/or horns, accordion, keyboards, etc.) textures hanging like tapestries in the background, coloring the songs in ways that could only be felt.

No wonder they got away with calling themselves The Band.

* * *

The Band's music is a sweep that takes in the whole of rock and roll music. They began as the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins, a minor rockabilly singer who figured out that while he may be one in a million in America, in Canada, he was the only game in town. He went up with drummer Helm and, as his fellow Arkansas musicians drifted back down South, he replaced them with The Band That Would Be The Band. Eventually, The Band struck out on their own as The Hawks and earned a reputation as one of the hardest and toughest blues-and-R&B-based rock bands of the pre-Beatles era, playing an endless string of one-night stands up and down the coasts. When Bob Dylan was looking for a band to back him on his first electric tour, he reached out to them, and a legend was born.

Although they only played on one Dylan studio release--the minor hit "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"--they accompanied him for his infamous world tour of 1966 (minus Helm, who didn't enjoy being booed), where they all but invented the modern rock sound; they also stuck with Dylan after the tour when they all moved to Woodstock (with Helm back in the fold) and dabbled in the bottomless still water pool of American folk music in the basement of their ugly pink house, lovingly called Big Pink. The recordings made there have long since been known as "The Basement Tapes," while around this same time, The Band became known officially as The Band.

Picked up by Dylan's manager, The Band was signed by Capitol Records in 1968, leading to their first album, Music From Big Pink, in July of that year. The record has gone down as one of the most influential rock albums of all-time. Like The Velvet Underground & Nico, it probably helps if you were there, but the lack of pretense, the slowness, the sense that this was a group of people listening to each other, blending instruments and voices, made it unlike anything else going on. There were no guitar solos, just winding songs that filled the American landscape with quasi-religious folk parables and wanderers, in a sound that was at once timeless yet new. A cover of Dylan's "Tears Of Rage" set the stage for an America that was lost within itself, but it was The Band's own "The Weight" that would deservedly become their most famous song. Although neither the song nor the album it appeared on was a big hit (stalling at #63 and #30, respectively), they stayed on the charts and the radio for months and months, serving as an essential midpoint between Dylan's John Wesley Harding and The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet as the way out of psychedelic rock.

The following year, The Band followed Music From Big Pink with The Band. It was their finest album and one of rock's true masterpieces. The 12 songs seemed to touch upon every side of American popular music--rock, country, blues, and folk; love songs, badman ballads, sea shanties, and work songs; songs sung from the perspective of married men, old-timers, children, and thieves on the lam; there were drums, fiddles, horns, and what sounded like a radioactive Jew harp; one can hear crooning, harmonizing, shouting, and yodeling. "Up On Cripple Creek" was the closet they got to a hit--#25 in the U.S. pop charts, but it got them on The Ed Sullivan Show and the cover of TIME--while "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," the finest pop song ever written about The Civil War, was their contribution to The Great American Historical Songbook. More than any other rock music I've ever heard, there was a stamp of timelessness that marked the music; it was as though you could put these songs into any era of American life and they would sound organic, they would ring true, whether on the prairie or the plains, East Coast or West Coast, on the 19th century frontier, in the turn of the century city, or through a modern-day computer. It was magic music that was Americana the way few have touched before or since.

And yet, up through when The Band was recorded, The Band themselves had not appeared on stage. Ever the single unit, they deferred live engagements after Danko was injured in a car wreck and wasn't able to perform. When they did finally emerge from the depths of Big Pink and their recording studios, it would alter their course forever. The conventional wisdom is that facing their audience--that is, the real America, after spending their creative time holed up in their own America--was startling, and led them to see the land for something closer to what it was, as opposed to how they imagined it. While this may seem a bit extreme, there is a definite shift in The Band's career from The Band to everything that followed, and the harbinger was the title of their third album, Stage Fright.

While Stage Fright is an excellent, underrated album--and technically, a slightly bigger chart hit than The Band--it is not nearly as rich as the two albums that preceded it. In Helm's autobiography, much is made about Robertson getting sole songwriting credit for nearly everything on The Band (Helm holds the songs were written collaboratively), but on Stage Fright, the songs are written entirely by Robertson himself. Oddly, Helm has since disavowed large parts of his autobiography, including his feud with Robertson, but again, there is a tangible shift in material, regardless of the source. The singing feels less organic, the lyrics try harder, the music sounds slick as opposed to off-handed. There are still great songs--"The Shape I'm In" would become a Band standard for the rest of their career, and the title track "Stage Fright" was quite effective--but there were just as many near-missed or attempts. A naturalness was gone from their music.

Still, The Band soldiered on. It is said that Robertson took over The Band in order to save it, and their fourth album, Cahoots, seems to confirm it. Again, nearly all of the songs are by Robertson but the vignettes and character sketches now sound strange; for the first time, the album was not a hit, influentially or commercially. Tellingly, only one song from Cahoots--"Life Is A Carnival"--was included in their following live album, Rock Of Ages, a double-LP that found The Band remaking their catalog with a horn section to a rousing success. Though largely forgotten today, it was chosen by Rolling Stone as Album Of The Year, and contained their second--and to date, last--Top 40 hit, their masterful remake of Marvin Gaye's "Don't Do It," which made it to #34. "Don't Do It" is the rare rock and roll recording to tell the history of the music--built around the Bo Diddley Beat, stopping for funky breakdowns, and containing doo-wop-esque longing harmonies, this was a four-and-a-half minute history lesson posing as state of the art rock and roll. It kicked off Rock Of Ages in true style, the rest of which was largely comprised of cuts from their first three albums. The album's closer, a cover of Chuck Willis' "(I Don't Want To Hang Up My) Rock And Roll Shoes," was selected as a follow-up single; it bottomed out at #113.

As implied by "Don't Do It" and "Rock And Roll Shoes," it seemed The Band's most exciting way forward was to go backwards. 1973 brought Moondog Matinee, a cover album of old rock and R&B tunes The Band played while cutting their teeth with and without Ronnie Hawkins. A version of Helm singing "Ain't Got No Home," originally by Clarence "Frogman" Henry (who, like Ronnie Hawkins, is still alive, by the way) was a minor hit at #73, but far better was Manuel's take on Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Share Your Love With Me," which could only be heard within the grooves of the album. Much like Music From Big Pink tapped into a larger turn away from non-psychedelic rock, Moondog Matinee can perhaps best be heard alongside contemporary nostalgia albums like David Bowie's Pin-Ups and John Lennon's Rock And Roll.

And then, just as they were reaching the end of their rope playing rock covers as Levon & The Hawks, The Band once again teamed up with Bob Dylan and revitalized themselves. They backed Dylan on his first(!) #1 album, 1973's Planet Waves, and then backed him on a split Dylan/Band tour in 1974, summed up on the live Before The Flood. They regrouped the following year to record their last great album, Northern Lights--Southern Cross, definitely their finest work since Stage Fright and possibly since The Band. Although they recorded it as continuing creative outfit, hindsight has proven it to be a worthy studio farewell.

The following year, Robertson decided it was time to retire The Band from the road, and so for the bicentennial Thanksgiving, they staged The Last Waltz, a grand concert featuring The Band, a horn section, and their famous friends from along the way (Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and a bunch of others), which was filmed as a documentary by Martin Scorsese and released as a triple-LP live album by Warner Brothers. Once again, the vast majority of music by The Band was at least half a decade old, and while the performances were solid, they were nothing compared to the Rock Of Ages double album from only four years before. Among the finest new interpretations though was a version of "The Weight" with The Staples, who brought out the gospel leanings implied in the song all along.

Oddly, The Last Waltz wasn't intended to be the retirement of The Band as a working band, only as a touring one. And so, the following year, The Band released what was to be the last studio album of the classic lineup, the disappointing Islands. It sounded like the roundup of leftovers that it was, most of it being recorded before The Last Waltz project began. Not long after, Robertson left the group, leaving Helm, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson to continue on through Manuel's death in 1986--even releasing a few albums with a new guitarist and keyboardist in the '90s--and end with Danko's death in 1999. Helm continued performing Band songs until his death a few years ago in 2012; only Robertson and Hudson now remain of the classic lineup.

* * *

The Band is one of those groups that should be easy to anthologize, but in reality prove to be much trickier. The main problem is that they are primarily an album band, as opposed to a singles one. Couple that with the fact that their first two albums far exceed all of their other work, and you've got problems of balance and representation. And with only two bonafide Top 40 hits, non-single "standards" in the context of the group regularly appear on compilations, which were either fan favorites or concert staples, such as "Chest Fever" and "King Harvest (Is Sure To Come)."

In 1976, The Best Of The Band appeared, which contained most of the songs you'd expect along with the non-LP non-hit single "Twilight." To this day, it is the only single-disc collection you can get that actually contains their two Top 40 hits. Two years later saw the double-album Anthology, which filled the story out and added a few cuts from Islands, the dismal "Right As Rain" and the wonderful "Livin' In A Dream." It also omitted both the non-hit "Twilight" as well as the hit "Don't Don't Do It" from The Rock Of Ages album, but began the long tradition of putting "Acadian Driftwood" from Northern Lights into The Band canon.

Both The Best Of The Band and Anthology were issued on CD; they were soon joined by others. In 1989, The Band received their first compilation of the CD era with the two-CD To Kingdom Come: The Definitive Collection (long out of print, though it can still be found on iTunes). Aside from a previously unreleased version of Chuck Berry's "Back To Memphis," it contained almost all of the usual suspects, plus a few rarities: The unreleased studio cut of "Endless Highway" and the studio version of "Get Up Jake," which had only been released as a live recording on Rock Of Ages. It also contained their lovely Christmas song, "Christmas Must Be Tonight."

And then The CD Box Set Era came. By the mid-1990s, very major artist needed one, and just in time for the 1994 Christmas Season there came Across The Great Divide, a three-disc retrospective in a big box with a big booklet. This was the collection that broke the mold. The first two discs were the standard run-through of their hits and classics, but the third contained rarities, including some of their much-talked about but at-that-point-impossible-to-find Levon & The Hawks material. The disc played like an alternate history of The Band, and did so marvelously--some Basement Tapes material, live tracks including a cut from The Woodstock Festival, the non-hit "Twilight" single, and highlights from The Last Waltz. If hindsight has shown that some material was AWOL (the much-maligned "Time To Kill," which was a minor hit at #77, as well as the other non-hit, non-LP single, "Georgia On My Mind," which has yet to appear on an American compilation), it was one of those rare collections that felt like the whole story, even if it wasn't.

With the new millennium--or, more tellingly, The Beatles' 1--every major rock artist needed to put out their single-disc CD of essentials, and The Band was no exception. Somehow, a Band album called "Greatest Hits" had eluded them up to this point, and so, The Band's Greatest Hits was born. (OK, The Band's Greatest Hits came out only 13 days after The Beatles' 1, so it was probably already in the works; either way, I bet Captiol was kicking themselves for letting a quarter century go by since their last official single-disc best-of.) It remains the default best-of to buy with all of the major classics ("The Weight," "Up On Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"), many of the minor hits ("The Shape I'm In," "Life Is A Carnival," "Ain't Got No Home," and FINALLY, "Time To Kill"), as well as those fan-favorite standards-in-the-world-of-The-Band ("Chest Fever," "King Harvest," "Acadian Driftwood"). And yet. For an album called Greatest Hits, it leaves off half of their Top 40 hits, which is to say, "Don't Do It," from Rock Of Ages. This is truly mind-boggling when one considers that they did include "The Saga Of Pepote Rouge," a perfectly-fine song, sure, but is clearly there if only to represent Islands. Any review of this album you read should be docked one star for this inexcusable error.

By 2005, Across The Great Divide was long out-of-print and the good people of Capitol Records simply did not know what to do. So for some reason or another (The 40th Anniversary of The Band teaming up with Dylan? The 30th Anniversary of "Ophelia" scraping the charts?) they released A Musical History, a deluxe five-CD, 1-DVD boxed set that featured 102 sound recordings, 9 live videos, and one hard-cover book. It sought to be the final word on The Band, and it essentially was. For the first time, their entire story was told from The Hawks to Dylan's backing band to The Band, with over 30 rare or previously unreleased recordings. For the diehard Band fan (and what other kind of fan is there, really?), it was amazing; for anyone else who was less interested (or less financially padded) there was a single-disc best-of CD that mixed hits and rarities to tell an abridged version of the story. The latter picked out most of the larger set's essential rarities, the twin victories being Robertson's solo run-through of "Twilight" (which sounds like a demo, even though it was apparently was recorded after the single version) and Danko's lovely "Home Cookin'," a casual team effort with a natural sound that so often eluded the group after Rock Of Ages.

Now, as with any major band attempting to make a definitive boxed set, there are some issues. The main one for me is that hard-to-strike balance between too much and too little, especially in the case of an act like The Band, whose first two albums are near flawless (and have all but one song represented in some form or another on A Musical History between them--sorry, "Jawbone"). It's always great to hear undeniably outstanding music, but as a document, it staggers the flow of the listening experience. There is also the case of length. I love The Band, but 5 full discs can get a bit unwieldy even for someone like me. I'm happy to have it, but it's hard to get through as a front-to-back listening experience. Furthermore, since then, there have been more recent one-disc overviews Opus and Icon, which fall somewhere between a "best of" and a "finest songs" collection; of course, both contain "Up On Cripple Creek" but not "Don't Do It."

So what's a Band fan to do?

* * *

I spent weeks trying to come up with a definitive Band collection, which I have termed my "King Harvest" project. It has resulted in three different Band collections: A one-disc, two-disc, and three-disc version, in the spirit of Greatest Hits, To Kingdom Come, and Across The Great Divide, respectively. The goal was to find a line between quality and history, with an eye on listenability.

To guide my approach, I took an inventory of all the above-mentioned compilations, plus an additional dozen of the international vinyl, cassette, and CD era. Many were European, Japanese or Australian. My only condition was that the album had to contain the original studio versions of "The Weight," "Up On Cripple Creek," and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"--so long as these original recordings were included, any collection was game. I see those as the bedrock of any decent Band collection.

So of the 20 Band compilations I surveyed, there are 20 songs that appear on 7 albums or more:

1. The Weight [20]
2. Up On Cripple Creek [20]
3. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down [20]
4. The Shape I'm In [19]
5. Stage Fright [19]
6. Life Is A Carnival [18]
7. Ophelia [17]
8. It Makes No Difference [15]
9. I Shall Be Released [15]
10. Rag Mama Rag [14]
11. Tears Of Rage [13]
12. Chest Fever [13]
13. Don't Do It [Live] [12]
14. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) [11]
15. When I Paint My Masterpiece [10]
16. Acadian Driftwood [9]
17. Time To Kill [8]
18. Across The Great Divide [7]
19. Ain't Got No Home [7]
20. Mystery Train [7]

As it so happens, all 20 songs do not fit on a single album. The Top 17 do fit on one album, with one to spare--I keep going back and forth between giving the 18th spot to "Ain't Got No Home" (which is one of their eight Top 100 hits) or "Across The Great Divide" (which is the better song); thankfully, the overrated "Mystery Train" is too long to fit as an 18th spot with these other songs. For the moment, I'm favoring history over quality. I call this...

The Real Greatest Hits, One-Disc Edition:

1. The Weight
2. I Shall Be Released
3. Tears Of Rage
4. Chest Fever
5. Up On Cripple Creek
6. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
7. Rag Mama Rag
8. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
9. Time To Kill
10. The Shape I'm In
11. Stage Fright
12. Life Is A Carnival
13. When I Paint My Masterpiece
14. Don't Do It [Live]
15. Ain't Got No Home
16. Ophelia
17. Acadian Driftwood
18. It Makes No Difference

But as lovely as the idea of a "Greatest Hits" album is for The Band, their lack of hits and rich history make them a unique candidate for a Beatles' Anthology-style mix of hits and history. This is what makes A Musical History so compelling; it is also what makes The Best Of A Musical History another near-miss like the Greatest Hits album. 

I consider those 9 songs that make 15 Band compilations or more the center of The Band Canon--"The Weight," "I Shall Be Released," "Up On Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "The Shape I'm In," "Stage Fright," "Life Is A Carnival," "Ophelia," and "It Makes No Difference"--along with the live version of "Don't Do It," as the 10th, as it comprises one half of their Top 40 hits. With this in mind, the one-disc version of the King Harvest project is built around those 10 songs, with key other songs, live performances, and outtakes added around them to comprise a full portrait of both hits and history. Determining the scope was a bit more of a challenge. I initially intended to take things back to Ronnie Hawkins, then see it through Levon & The Hawks and Bob Dylan before reaching the "modern" Band, but while that is historically instructive, the essence of The Band lies in the decade that covers their 1967 Basement Tapes recordings through their final 1977 studio recordings for The Last Waltz. In this one-disc overview, only The Band is represented with 3 songs; all other studio albums are represented with 2, with the exception of Moondog Matinee and Islands, which have a single song apiece.

King Harvest, One-Disc Edition:

1. Ain't No More Cane
2. Katie's Been Gone
3. The Weight
4. I Shall Be Released
5. Tears Of Rage
6. Up On Cripple Creek
7. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
8. Rag Mama Rag
9. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
10. The Shape I'm In
11. Stage Fright
12. Slippin' & Slidin' [Live]
13. Life Is A Carnival
14. Endless Highway
15. Don't Do It [Live]
16. Share Your Love With Me
17. Ophelia
18. It Makes No Difference
19. Twilight [Song Sketch]
20. Livin' In A Dream



In many ways, the 2-disc version is the crown jewel of this project. Is it any wonder that Across The Great Divide is long out-of-print while To Kingdom Come is still available on iTunes? 40 songs allows for a very strong sampling of The Band's catalog; there are 6 songs from The Band, 5 songs each from Music From Big Pink and The Basement Tapes, 4 songs each from Stage Fright, Cahoots, and Rock Of Ages, 3 songs from Northern Lights--Southern Cross, and 2 songs each from Moondog Matinee and Islands, plus a small lion's share of rarities that derive from A Musical History. "Mystery Train" was originally slated to make the final cut, but its length and funkier sound broke up the flow of the pure Band Americana to my ears. I also feel like 2 songs is more than enough to cover Moondog Matinee, and the best songs to do it is the Top 100 hit "Ain't Got No Home" and the finest song on the album, "Share Your Love." Band purists may balk, but that's how I hear it. After much deliberation, these 40 songs capture the essence of The Band.



King Harvest, Two-Disc Edition:

Disc 1:

1. Ain't No More Cane
2. Katie's Been Gone
3. The Weight
4. I Shall Be Released
5. Tears Of Rage
6. To Kingdom Come
7. Chest Fever
8. Yazoo Street Scandal
9. Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)
10. Bessie Smith
11. Up On Cripple Creek
12. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
13. Across The Great Divide
14. Rag Mama Rag
15. Whispering Pines
16. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
17. Time To Kill
18. The Shape I'm In
19. Strawberry Wine
20. Stage Fright
21. Slippin' & Slidin' [Live]


Disc 2:

1. Life Is A Carnival
2. When I Paint My Masterpiece
3. 4% Pantomime
4. The River Hymn
5. Endless Highway
6. Don't Do It [Live]
7. Caledonia Mission [Live]
8. Get Up Jake [Live]
9. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show [Live]
10. Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever) [Live]
11. Ain't Got No Home
12. Share Your Love With Me
13. Ophelia
14. Acadian Driftwood
15. It Makes No Difference
16. Twilight [Song Sketch]
17. Home Cookin'
18. The Saga Of Pepote Rouge
19. Livin' In A Dream


And last but not least, here's King Harvest, Three-Disc Edition.

This is the true harvest of King Harvest, with 7 songs from Music From Big Pink, 8 from The Band, 5 apiece from Stage Fright, Cahoots, and Rock Of Ages, plus revealing alternate takes, outtakes, and demos that fill out the story. After all, in its own way, the studio version of "Don't Do It" is just as marvelous as the more familiar live version, while songs like "Endless Highway" and "Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever)" have become virtual Band standards, even though they were never released while The Band was a functioning unit. King Harvest has it all, with the 21 tracks from the crucial 1967-1969 period in "To Kingdom Come"; 20 tracks covering the solid 1970-1972 period in "Stage Fright", and 19 tracks covering the underrated 1973-1977 period in "Twilight", for a total of 60 tracks in all. No Ronnie Hawkins, no Bob Dylan, only The Band, in a much more digestible compilation than the wonderful but overwrought A Musical History. Hear them step onto the center stage as one of the most influential bands of all-time in "To Kingdom Come," retreat back from the spotlight in "Stage Fright," and then search for a way home in "Twilight." It is an epoch contained in a band, or rather, The Band.

* * *

The Band: King Harvest [1967-1977]

Disc 1: To Kingdom Come [1967-1969]

1. Ain't No More Cane On The Brazos
2. Katie's Been Gone
3. Ruben Remus
4. The Weight
5. I Shall Be Released
6. Tears Of Rage
7. To Kingdom Come
8. In A Station
9. Long Black Veil
10. Chest Fever
11. Yahoo Street Scandal
12. Orange Juice Blues (Orange Juice For Breakfast)
13. Bessie Smith
14. Up On Cripple Creek
15. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
16. Across The Great Divide
17. Rag Mama Rag
18. Whispering Pines
19. Rockin' Chair
20. The Unfaithful Servant
21. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)


Disc 2: Stage Fright [1970-1972]

1. Time To Kill
2. The Shape I'm In
3. All La Glory [Early Version]
4. Strawberry Wine
5. Daniel & The Sacred Harp
6. Stage Fright
7. Slippin' & Slidin' [Live]
8. Don't Do It [Studio Version]
9. Life Is A Carnival
10. When Paint My Masterpiece
11. 4% Pantomime
12. The Moon Struck One
13. The Rhythm Hymn
14. Endless Highway
15. Don't Do It [Live]
16. Caledonia Mission [Live]
17. Get Up Jake [Live]
18. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show [Live]
19. (I Don't Want To Hang Up My) Rock & Roll Shoes [Live]
20. Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever) [Live]

Disc 3: Twilight [1973-1977]

1. Ain't Got No Home

2. Share Your Love With Me

3. Mystery Train

4. Going Back To Memphis
5. Ophelia

6. Hobo Jungle
7. Acadian Driftwood

8. It Makes No Difference

9. Twilight [Single Version]

10. Georgia On My Mind

11. Christmas Must Be Tonight

12. The Saga Of Pepote Rouge

13. Livin' In A Dream

14. Forbidden Fruit [Live]
15. Twilight [Song Sketch]
16. Home Cookin'

17. Out Of The Blue
18. Evangeline -- w/ Emmylou Harris

19. The Weight -- w/ The Staples

The Best Of 2014.

Best Film: Boyhood.

In a world where films are always striving to be unlike any other ever made, it's rare that a film actually follows through on such a promise. It's even rarer that the said film is actually great. Boyhood is one of the very few films of my lifetime that manages such a feat. Filmed over 12 years using the same cast, director Richard Linklater looks at the world through the eyes of Mason Evans, Jr. (a stellar Ellar Coltrane), as he grows from a kindergartener into a college freshman before our eyes. It is an episodic film of small moments that feels much closer to long-time-spanning documentaries like the 7 Up series & Hoop Dreams than what it really is--an motion picture epic, crafted from the small shards of everyday life into a stained-glass window of cinematic beauty.

Best Movie: The LEGO Movie.

The most visually-delicious film I've seen in years, which creates a world in which the atom is replaced by the LEGO brick. Like a well-built LEGO building, it clicks together multiple levels of humor & reality, held together by charming characters & hilarious dialogue. When I was a kid, I would imagine that my LEGO town would continue in their own world while I was away; The LEGO Movie puts me smack in the center of it. & it does so beautifully--on every brick-filled level.

Best TV Show: Orange Is The New Black.

[SPOILERS ALERT] Last year introduced us to the inmates of the Litchfield women's federal prison, this year took everything we thought we knew about them & turned it on its head. The Piper-centered story arc shifted aside while more minor characters came out of the woodwork: Who knew that the wedding-planning romantic Morello was a sick stalker whose visions of matrimony are confined to her head? Or that Sister Jane has been excommunicated? Or what really lurks beyond the sad eyes of Miss Rosa? While some of the tangled subplots were more compelling than others, no other show had me rushing back for more.

Best TV Episode: "Beach House," Girls.

In the middle of an uneven season, Girls delivered its best episode yet. When Hannah crashes Marnie's over-planned beach house girls weekend with her ex-boyfriend/now-gay BFF (& his group of gay guy friends), we see the intricacies of the characters rub up against each other & react in hilarious & insightful ways. At the center, the girls do a choreographed routine to Harry Nilsson's "You're Breaking My Heart," before everything melts down into an epic 4-way fight that has been brewing for years, flames stoked by an uncharacteristically drunk-&-blunt Shoshanna: "You treat me like I'm a fucking cab driver." Don't think they'll ever make that mistake again.

Best Album: The Basement Tapes Complete by Bob Dylan & The Band.

The Old, Weird America that was only available in bootlegs has finally been unleashed in the digital age. To keep with tradition (& avoid the $139 price tag), I ripped mine off of a friend. My thoughts about the contents within can be seen from my earlier review here. Lo & behold! 


Best Song: "Word Crimes" by "Weird Al" Yankovic.

It's been an epic year for "Weird Al" Yankovic. After some 35 years in the music business, his 14th studio album, Mandatory Fun, was his first to hit #1 on the Billboard Album chart. & with "Word Crimes" hitting #39 on the pop charts, Yankovic is now one of the few artists to score 4 Top 40 hits in 4 different decades (Michael Jackson & Madonna are 2 others). Yankovic uses Robin Thicke's catchy (if seemingly unfinished) song about sexual boundaries ("Blurred Lines") & turns it into a lesson in social media writing etiquette. & not only does it work, but it finally taught me what an Oxford comma is.

Best Book: The History Of Rock 'N' Roll In Ten Songs by Greil Marcus.

Popular music's (hell, popular culture's) finest critic takes on the assignment of a lifetime: Narrowing down the entire history of rock music to 10 songs. This would be fascinating for anyone to tackle, but Marcus, who's always eschewed the sacred cows of rock music (he once made an essential rock discography that left off Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, & What's Going On), wrote a history of the music on his terms, ignoring anything close to a chronology & gleefully omitting such artists as Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, & Led Zeppelin. Instead we find mesmerizing chapters about The 5 Satins' "In The Still Of The Nite" & Cyndi Lauper's "Money Changes Everything," among others. It is unlike any other rock history you will ever read--which is precisely the point.


Best Reissue: Nashville.

Robert Altman's sprawling country (& cinematic) masterpiece gets the Criterion treatment. I've been putting off watching it for about 20 years now. Now that I own it in its beautiful new box, I am definitely going to sit down & watch it. Maybe even by 2016.


Best Comeback: Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas.

In the middle of April, there came a story that was wholly unexpected from The New York Times Magazine. A music journalist (John Jeremiah Sullivan) & research assistant (Caitlin Love) had unearthed new information about Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas, who seemingly came from nowhere to record 6 of the most coveted, haunting sides in country blues history--including Wiley's "Last Kind Word Blues" & Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues"--& then seemed to return to the nowhere from which they came. Through the archive of legendary blues scholar Robert "Mack" McCormick, Sullivan & Love followed a trail that has to be read to be believed: Check it out here.

Lost Time Is Now Found Again: The Basement Tapes.

Bob Dylan contemplates the best way for you to prove your loyalty by spending $120.00.

Part 1: A Background.

It's taken some 47 years, but I can now write 4 simple words that have eluded nearly a half-century of rock scholars before me: The Basement Tapes exist.

This is no small feat. After taking the world by storm in 1966 with the loudest, greatest, & most controversial rock music anyone had ever heard (live, anyway), Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle in upstate New York & hid out for the better part of a year, playing the family man while his backing group--then called The Hawks, now better known as The Band--began to join him. Together, they spent the middle part of 1967 into early 1968 jamming & recording, first in the Red Room at Dylan's house & then in the basement of a house rented by several members of The Band known as the Big Pink for the tacky color of its aluminum siding.

The music was a retreat from the groundbreaking rock & roll they had pioneered, exploring their rock, country, folk, & blues roots in a barrage of often spur-of-the-moment covers, & then on a series of strange & timeless originals. These were initially circulated as demos for other artists to record, but in time, Dylan & The Band's versions began leaking out, all but single-handedly creating rock music's bootleg industry (&, as some like to tell it, the alt-country & Americana genres).

In 1975, Dylan & The Band (or rather, Columbia Records) released The Basement Tapes, a double-album which attempted to put the whole thing to rest. It didn't. While it was extremely well-received & a big hit, hindsight has proven it to be a compromised product: Many of the most famous Basement Tapes songs were missing, such as "Quinn The Eskimo" & "I Shall Be Released," & the songs that were released featured overdubs & edits that over-polished the integrity of the originals. But most jarringly, among the 24 songs included were 8 recordings by The Band, which were passed off as part of the sessions. While The Band's music on the album is excellent, it would have been better heard on a compilation album by The Band, as it has a different sound, feel, & focus from the Dylan material.

Over the years, an additional 4 (undubbed) Basement Tapes recordings were released on various Dylan compilations, but the CD age brought several top-notch multi-disc bootlegs of material, first in 1989's 5-disc The Genuine Basement Tapes, & then 2001's 4-disc A Tree With Roots. While the former may have a bit more material, I've always preferred the latter since the sound was (mostly) remastered at a much clearer level.

But with Columbia releasing The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Complete Basement Tapes earlier this month, all such bootlegs are instantly rendered moot. Since Dylan's "Bootleg Series" began over 20 years ago, I was shocked that they hadn't ever done a definitive Basement Tapes until now--& was beginning to think that perhaps they never would. Perhaps it was too unwieldy, or required too many legal rights?

Well now, some 40 years after Columbia first released the original Basement Tapes double-LP, they have issued a deluxe 6-disc anthology that purports to contain every extant song & fragment of Basement Tapes material, housed in two small hardcover coffee-table books in a slipcase. The whole thing is a bit humbling--& like the Basement Tapes themselves, more than just a little surreal.

All that said, it is not a flawless set. Instead of trying to make educated guesses on who plays what, the producers of the set have opted to instead say that Dylan sings lead on everything, & as for the backing vocals & instrumentation, no one can be positive since The Band were all multi-instrumentalists. OK, I get it, but still a cop-out. Process of elimination & logic should've filled in the gaps, even if it contained numerous parenthetical question marks. After all, how many people in The Band ever regularly played bass on anything? (I count one: Rick Danko.)

Also frustrating is that, despite all of the photographs & reproductions of tape boxes & reels, there is nowhere that simply lists all of the numbered tapes in order & the material that each contains. We just have to take their word that it's roughly chronological, but with the 6th disc being made up of material with poor sound quality, the whole thing is intrinsically set up with gaps in the narrative. Again, I get it, but why not put an ordered list so that we can reconstruct the complete running order ourselves if we so choose?

Finally, I am not convinced that every shred of recording is in fact accounted for. I say this only because of one thing that I know is missing: The beginning of "See You Later, Allen Ginsberg," in which the person doing the answer call (I hear Rick Danko, but others could argue for Richard Manuel or Robbie Robertson), first pops in the words "Allen Ginsberg" for "Alligator." Dylan is caught off-guard, laughs hysterically, & relaunches the song as a surreal novelty. The new official version leaves out this early piece of the song, implying that it is Dylan who had considered this as part of the song from the start. Did Dylan not want to give away that it was another person's punchline? Or is it a scrap of tape that actually has been lost? Or something else entirely?

Given the sheer volume & ranging quality of this material, it's no surprise that the set has divided the critics somewhat into various camps. If you want to see the believers' side, check out David Fricke's over-zealous 5-star review in Rolling Stone; if you want the non-believer's side, check out Sasha Frere-Jones' misguided take in The New Yorker.

In truth, neither are correct--The Basement Tapes are not a masterpiece nor a joke shop of follies, but both & neither, & more, & less. Trying to paint them as all good or all bad defeats the purpose of their very construction & existence as a cultural artifact--they instead are just that, a cultural artifact, something that is at once artistic & accomplished, yet primitive & incomplete.

* * *

Part 2: A Review.

Disc 1: The Beginning.

The new Basement Tapes set begins with nothing less than Dylan & The Band going back to Sun Records where it all began, around 1955, & remaking rock & roll music from the beginning. Only instead of focusing on Elvis, Johnny Cash is their man. (Indeed, the sole Elvis song that makes the cut on these initial Basement Tapes excursions is "I Forgot To Remember To Forget," one of only 2 songs to be recorded by both Elvis & Cash during their respective times at Sun.) Various country tunes make their stream-of-conscious hit parade--an off-the-cuff take on Hank Williams' "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It," a lovely version of Cowboy Copas' more obscure "Waltzing With Sin"--but it's the Sun-era Cash who they keep going back to: His Old Testament prophecy of "Belshazzar," a driving "Folsom Prison Blues," & a wonderful reinvention of "Big River" across 2 takes that open the song up into a funky groove, with Dylan's words dragging things out like the winding river he follows. At 10 songs in, The Basement Tapes have already reached its first stunner.

Dylan & The Band conjure a Sun Records with no Carl Perkins songs, only his lead guitar work that can be applied everywhere (& was, thanks to The Beatles catalog). Even a force of nature like Jerry Lee Lewis is reduced to a ghost; he can only be heard through his own Hank Williams cover of "You Win Again," yet in the Basement Tapes, they remember the words to the second bridge ("You have no heart...") that Lewis himself forgets. It is a country & western swap-meet, with Johnny Cash standing over the proceedings--& what they lack in deep baritone, they make up for in sheer willpower.

The remainder of the first disc finds their way from country into folk, including a stark reading of "Bells Of Rhymney" at arm's length that sets the stage for the silly wordplay to come (even if every word is true to the Pete Seeger original) & a sweeping "Ol' Roison The Beau," which is the basis of pretty much every drinking song of the 19th century. Most lovely is a version of "On The Banks Of The Royal Canal," here called "The Auld Triangle," which becomes a song about how prison can transform into purgatory. In this way, it is the flipside of their earlier version of "Folsom Prison Blues," which took a grim prison ballad & turned it into a weekend getaway. In "The Auld Triangle," every word & note is measured carefully, the best verse coming towards the end, when the singer imagines the female prison with 70 women (which, as a modern listener, I can't resist by filling in with the extended cast of Orange Is The New Black). "& it's with them, where I'd like to dwell..." daydreams the singer. His prison life is so complete that even when he pictures himself with women, they too are in prison.

One of the first originals of the set is "Under Control," which I mention for the sole reason that it sounds so remarkably like The Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane" (minus The Eagles' cheeky refrain & guitar lick), I can't help but wonder if Don Henley didn't somehow get a version of this Basement Tape on his hand & subconsciously turn it into his own rocker. Stranger things have happened in rock, such as, for example, the remaining 5 discs of this set.

Disc 2: The Weird.

This is where the strangeness sets in. Greil Marcus has famously described The Basement Tapes as tapping into "The Old, Weird America" of Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music, & it is here where this "Old, Weird"-ness is fully heard. After a rollicking version of the Liverpool ballad "Johnny Todd" that is built on the same chord changes as half a dozen garage rock standards, Dylan sets his sights on John Lee Hooker's "The Big Flood," & in Marcus's perfect words, "turns a dank, still blues about death & ruin into a spelling bee." Dylan also renames the song after the place where it all went down--"Tupelo"--about a half-dozen years before Elvis Presley was born in the same streets.

There's "Kickin' My Dog Around," which is as complete & self-contained a statement as one can find in the Basement Tapes--"Every time I go to town, the boys keep kickin' my dog around/Don't know why I go to town, don't know why they kick my dog around"--to The Band's backing vocals that turn the proceedings into a dada version of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm." One can find "See You Later, Allen Ginsberg" (but NOT the earlier part of the tape where the joke is first created--only its silly aftermath, which strips it of its punch), which finds Bill Haley rubbing shoulders with the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical...especially when they say the word "crock-a-gator."

"Tiny Montgomery" is the first original Basement Tapes standard to appear: Train-wreck words ("3-legged man in a hot tent-pole...") filling in the spaces between its deceptively simple message ("...tell 'em all Montgomery says hello"). This disc also first unleashed the joys of "I'm Your Teenage Prayer" for me, a profoundly weird (yet well-structured & performed) '50s-style doo-wop send-up, with the lead & backing singers competing for the listener: "Take a look at me, baby," sings one, "Take a look over here, baby," answers another right after. Such an obvious & simple idea--with all the shtick to be found in 50s records, how had no one thought to put the backing vocalists competing with the singer? It's almost enough to make you miss that the tagline--"I am a teenage prayer" sounds a few words short of a coherent statement.

The remainder of the disc is divided between music that is either lovely (the protest ballad "Joshua Gone Barbados," which Dylan sings with all of the passions as, well, Dylan singing it in 1963; the either entirely stupid or entirely brilliant "Baby, Won't You Be My Baby") or tedious ("Rock, Salt, & Nails," which seems to only be worth singing through to get to its wonderful closing couplet; "Try Me Little Girl," which Dylan uses to try a screeching falsetto). & then spread throughout is the material originally recorded by Ian & Sylvia, which is at once lovely ("Four Strong Winds" & "Song For Canada") & tedious (both takes of "The French Girl").

Disc 3: The Classic, Pt. 1.

After 3 of the finest folk covers of The Basement Tapes--a tender "Young But Daily Growing," a determined "Bonnie Ship The Diamond," & a weary "The Hills Of Mexico"--Dylan & The Band spend most of the disc getting into the most classic music of The Basement Tapes project.

There's "Million Dollar Bash," the closest the Basement Tapes have to a national anthem; "Yea! Heavy & A Bottle Of Bread," pure dada written by a man who simply loves words; "I'm Not There," an unfinished, unclear, unforgettable tale of love & devotion that is the most legendary Basement Tapes song of all; "Please Mrs. Henry," a drunkard's sing-a-long plea for acceptance into a boarding house; "Crash On The Levee," a blues about a universal flood & the personal toll it can take; "Lo & Behold!," a version of The Lady Vanishes, where the lady stays put & logic vanishes instead; "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," a perfect 3-chord proto-country rock standard featuring mail-order brides, easy chairs, & a tree with roots; "I Shall Be Released," perhaps the most famous of the Basement Tapes songs, well-known enough to have Elvis sing through a refrain in 1971; "This Wheel's On Fire," for my money, the best Basement Tapes song, period; "Too Much Of Nothing," with the perfect answering line, "can make a man ill at ease."

If you've made it this far into this article, chances are you already know all about these songs & have heard them a million times (& happily have never gotten any closer to their depths). But to hear them here is a small revelation, with no overdubs but a high-quality sound. Even if you can never imagine improving on your copy of A Tree With Roots, you should get this set if only because you can simply hear everything better. When "I'm Not There" (for many, the quintessential Basement Tapes song) was first released on the film soundtrack of the same name, I was disappointed at how low it was mixed, despite the fact it was now the 21st century. Someone must've gotten the memo because "I'm Not There" starts so loudly it becomes an entirely different, completely fuller, listening experience. Song-for-song, this may be the finest disc of the set (if not Dylan's entire career--yeah, I said it), in no small part because it is now that much greater to listen to.

& for me, the riddle at the center of "This Wheel's On Fire"--"& you know that we shall meet again, if your mem'ry serves you well," which impossibly places an unknown future into a known past--may just be the perfect Dylan line of them all, even if it may have been written by Rick Danko.

Disc 4: The Classic, Pt 2.

Picks up in the same classic territory as the previous disc left off: "Tears Of Rage," a funeral for a country that has forgotten Independence Day; "Quinn The Eskimo," the most unlikely UK #1 hit single (thanks to Manfred Mann) to use the phrase "it ain't my cup of meat"; "Open The Door Homer," reaching back to Jack McVea's 1946 vaudeville-inspired rhythm & blues hit "Open The Door, Richard" (the first song to have a fade-out) to spin advice about memories & toilet-flushing; "Nothing Was Delivered," the fallout of a faulty bill of sale, in which the victims still wish good health for the seller. All were released in various versions over the years (although "Henry" was in a version by The Band), & all deserved to be.

But after 3 takes of "Nothing Was Delivered" with varying success, the entire disc (if not Basement Tapes project) pivots on one transition: The one between "All American Boy" & "Sign On The Cross." As the earlier bootleg sets attested to, these songs were apparently recorded back-to-back, one beside the other on their respective Basement Tapes reel. To my ears, they provide the Basement Tapes' greatest one-two punch.

"All American Boy" is a goof on Bill Parsons' 1958 talking blues about getting a guitar, learning hot licks, getting hooked up with a manager with a big cigar, & becoming a star until you get drafted into the Army--in other words, it was a song about Elvis Presley. Dylan draws a line around the song so that the bottom falls out, the guitarist becomes a drummer, & everything goes from strange to stranger in a drunkard's reverie: "Clean your hand & come up tight, roll smoke & down at night/Hold on a train on a whiskey jar--settle it down, there you are!"

Dylan was comfortable with the talking blues form, as he had learned it from Woody Guthrie & then perfected the form himself in songs like "Talking New York Blues" & "Talking World War III Blues." Each of those songs had a point, but here any larger messages are lost. What we have instead is the sound of someone making up a song as they go along, to amuse his bandmates, to amuse himself. & yet, the careless, casual randomness of the words create a distinctively Basement Tapes feel--a secret America where reason go out the window in favor of a land where anything can happen--or, as the case may be, nothing can happen. A lot. It is a strange, timeless sound & it is this element that connects so well with the early folk & blues records of The Anthology Of American Folk Music.

& then, at one of the throwaway answer parts of the song, sung in a goon's voice that sounds like Richard Manuel (even if Garth Hudson confirms it is Robbie Robertson), he free-associates with Uncle Sam coming in from the original song's version: "Uncle Sam," he begins, followed by, "In this land." & then he adds 4 more words--"Ripping up draft cards"--& everything, the song, the Basement Tapes, goes from a timeless America to one that is decidedly 1967. Dylan comes in & interrupts him, as though to save the song from any modern interjections, & finishes it out with a return to the strangeness that has defined it thus far; the fact that Dylan can successfully return to this level is not only lucky, but remarkable. "You'd be a fine drummer," he drawls at the end. "Picker man's a-commer. Dog hummer." It is at once timeless, strange, & kinda dumb.

The next sound we hear is a reaching guitar winding together the instruments of "Sign On The Cross," & suddenly, everything is completely different. The irreverence has given way to reverence, all balanced on a stately gospel progression, the soft thunder of the drums rumbling underneath. It is a song of subtle, small gestures & extreme focus, & contains what is probably the most beautiful vocal that Bob Dylan will ever record.

"Sign On The Cross" is a song about religion & devotion, but more in the way that it is sung & played than any lyrics in & of themselves. Like the best Basement Tapes music, the words are obscure & sometimes nearly unintelligible, but are carried by the emotion. In this regard, it is a sort of answer record to that other long, mysterious, & legendary Basement Tapes song, "I'm Not There," only where that song finds extreme isolation, "Sign Of The Cross" finds community. By both implying & eluding proper organized religion, it serves as a powerful reminder as to why we have organized religion in the first place; as a religious song, it is Dylan's finest, with the possible exception of "Every Grain Of Sand."

But then, about halfway through, Dylan steps on the mood, pulling himself out of the song by breaking into a weird spoken break about the sign of the cross, delivered in a smiling African-American dialect that turns the song from a serious deliverance into a silly performance. You can't tell if he's celebrating the sound of an old southern preacher or mocking it, & in truth, it's probably both. It is a distancing method between the singer & the song, holding this sacred performance at arm's length as though it may all just be a joke after all--it looks into the Sign On The Cross & finds an All-American Boy.

& then just as effortlessly as Dylan slips out of his serious persona, he slips back into it, returning to the reverence in a bridge about the prisons & penitentiaries too that drives the whole thing home (literally, as it brings the song back to the root chord for a final verse). Yes, you can hear him giving muffled chord changes to his bandmates here & there & even a near-flubbed note or two, but "Sign On The Cross" sounds like one of the more rehearsed numbers on the Basement Tapes recordings. For almost any songwriter, it would go on to be a centerpiece of their career, but for Dylan, it would be recorded one time & largely forgotten, not even properly released until a few weeks ago.

After "All American-Boy" & "Sign One The Cross," we get more weird classics: The rocking "Odds & Ends" that is so perfect, it led off the official Basement Tapes release, while summing up the project in 6 words or less ("Lost time is not found again"); "Get Your Rocks Off," which is at once lazy, filthy, unsettling, & hilarious; "Clothesline Saga," which inverted Bobbie Gentry's then-contemporary #1 hit "Ode To Billy Joe" into a song that Christopher Ricks uses to illustrate "Sloth" in his mad, beautiful Dylan's Visions Of Sin; you can hear "Apple Suckling Tree" converge over 2 takes until it's one of the homespun-yet-funky moments in the entire project; a cut-off "Don't Ya Tell Henry" with some awful/amazing horns; & finally, a version of "Bourbon Street" that takes the horns of the previous song & drives them into the ground like a steamroller in a graveyard.

If the Basement Tapes ended there, no one would blame Dylan & The Band--& in a way, they do.

Disc 5: The Homecoming.

The first half of the 5th disc begins with never-before-bootlegged material from early 1968, with Levon Helm back in the group & the proceedings more organized. For the first time, the songs sound less like a bunch of guys rummaging through a garage sale & more like a singer & his band going over songs for a setlist.

3 of the first 4 songs reinvent Dylan standards in profound ways: There's a "Blowin' In The Wind" that must be heard to be believed--running for 6-&-a-half minutes over a funky bar groove, it takes the endlessly-covered song to places where no one else has had the vision to take it, setting the words out like a test, & watching them bounce off the music & each other until everything rolls along into the next line; they do a version of "One Too Many Mornings" that plays like a subdued version of "The Royal Albert Hall" concert, it's got all of the vigor of the loud-&-electric stage version, but washed in a lazy Sunday afternoon--Richard Manuel does a stunning job taking the first verse & makes you wish that more verse-trading had happened over the sessions; & finally, Dylan leads an "It Ain't Me, Babe" that sounds like a dry-run for The Rolling Thunder Review. Appropriately, the one non-Dylan song in the string is called "Satisfied Mind."

Dylan then leads the group through 2 takes "Ain't No More Cane," which is being rightfully lauded as one of the finest "new" moments of the box set, & then on to "Santa-Fe," one of my very favorites of the classic Basement Tapes songs, unfinished yet natural, & then onto songs that feel more contained & organized. Even the one that isn't, "My Woman She's A-Leavin'," is tightened up a few songs later as "Silent Weekend," which takes the blueprint of Charlie Rich's "Lonely Weekends" & applies it to a Wilson Pickett demo, only with internal rhymes that are as funky as the groove. Perhaps most odd is a version of "900 Miles From My Home" that takes the shell of a traditional folk song & welds it into the melody of Dylan's then-recent composition "John Wesley Harding." We can feel the curtains being closed & the floor being swept on the Basement Tapes.

But there's one last stretch of the Basement Tapes sound with Levon Helm in toe, as the parlor-ballad-turned-folksong "Wildwood Flower" is turned back into a half-forgotten slurred parlor tune & the 6 white horses of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" make their way into the 6 white horses of "She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain." The Old, Weird America lives.

One final Basement Tapes classic can be heard, "Goin' To Acapulco"--its late appearance in the chronology informing Helm's quoting it in his autobiography, This Wheel's On Fire ("It's a wicked life/But what the hell/Everybody's got to eat")--looking beyond the border of America to fuel one last journey.

The set ends where it should, with the 2 takes of "All You Have To Do Is Dream," which lifts the title of an Everly Brothers song & turns it into a paean to confusion & floorbirds.

Disc 6: The Rough Stuff.

As mentioned before, the material with the worst fidelity was taken out of order & put into a final disc, which concludes the set. Song-for-song, it is easily the junkiest volume of the box, but that's not to say it doesn't reveal its odd charm. Weird hooks like the bounce of "2 Dollars & 99 Cents" & the nonsense syllables of "Jelly Bean" take us back to repetitive almost non-songs like "Old Lady & The Devil" & "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O" of The Anthology Of American Folk Music, in both fidelity & feel. There's a lot of Dylan instructing, or putting out ideas & riffs, & in some cases, like "Hallelujah, I've Just Been Moved," it pays off, while in others, like the long & listless "That's The Breaks," it doesn't. & then there's stuff like the 19th century-sounding waltz of "Pretty Mary" that I bet most people would hate, even if I dig it.

From the previously released bootlegs, one can find the unfinished & elusive "King Of France," which I've always associated with The Band's own poor-fidelity version of "Ferdinand The Imposter"--both rough but well-worth a listen. "Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad" finally unleashes the presence of Woody Guthrie that has been felt all along--the wandering mind, the talking blues, the ability to try & accept anything that comes your way, especially if it originates from your own mind--& does it justice. & a version of The Rays' 1957 hit "Silhouettes" is quadrupled from a fragment to a nearly 2-minute clip where you can hear the doo-wop sound that Dylan & The Band are constantly returning to, played like "Heart & Soul" by a 7-year-old piano student.

Thrown in at the end is the 2 takes of "The Spanish Song," which for my money is the worst thing on the Basement Tapes, & probably not a coincidence that it's listed as the final music on the set. Thankfully, one final secret track revives a completely different "900 Miles From My Home" from the previous disc, turning it into an exploding fiddle piece that in sound & spirit matches only Robertson, Manuel, & Danko singing "Old Time Religion" in The Last Waltz, before ending on a take of "Confidential," another trip back to another half-forgotten early rock & roll song, ending things where it probably should, on a doo-wop cover, where Dylan & each member of the Band probably began their own musical journey over a decade earlier.

* * *

Part 3: A Conclusion.

As one reviewer has suggested, the 139 tracks from the recent Basement Tapes box set can be seen as an invitation from which you can make your own collection (just like The Beastie Boys actually did with their trailblazing Sounds Of Science anthology in 1999, but I digress). Although a smaller, 2-disc Basement Tapes Raw has been released alongside the deluxe box, I believe there's room for one more product that would bring it all home: A disc that collects the original versions of all of the Dylan songs from the 1975 Basement Tapes release in their most familiar versions, along with 8 more of the most classic originals. & like the original 1975 set, all 24 songs fit on a single disc. I call it:

The Basement Tapes "Masters"

1. Tiny Montgomery

2. Million Dollar Bash [Take 2]

3. Yea! Heavy & A Bottle Of Bread [Take 2]

4. I'm Not There

5. Please Mrs. Henry

6. Crash On The Levee [Take 2]

7. Lo & Behold! [Take 2]

8. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere [Take 2]

9. I Shall Be Released [Take 2]

10. This Wheel's On Fire

11. Too Much Of Nothing [Take 1]

12. Tears Of Rage [Take 1]

13. Quinn The Eskimo [Take 2]

14. Open The Door Homer [Take 1]

15. Nothing Was Delivered [Take 1]

16. Sign On The Cross

17. Odds & Ends [Take 2]

18. Get Your Rocks Off

19. Clothes Line Saga

20. Apple Suckling Tree [Take 2]

21. Don't Ya Tell Henry

22. Santa-Fe

23. Silent Weekend

24. Goin' To Acapulco

& there you have it. Running at 1:19:37, it nearly covers the entirety of a single compact disc. I of course would've loved to include "All-American Boy," but ultimately did not because it is not credited to Dylan.

& besides, it wouldn't be the Basement Tapes if it weren't missing a few odds & ends.