"The Basement Tapes Complete" To Be Released November 4

Next Tuesday, Columbia will release the 11th volume of its Bob Dylan Bootleg Series: The Basement Tapes Complete. Six CDs - 139 songs! - of music from Dylan and The Band at Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, during the summer of 1967, presented in as close to chronological order as is known. (A two-CD set of 38 songs will also be available.)

The Basement Tapes, a double album of songs released in 1975, purported to be from those informal sessions, but many of the songs featured overdubs added years later, and there were eight songs recorded at a later date by The Band without Dylan.

There have been collections of these songs available as bootlegs for decades, most notably on the superb A Tree With Roots. However, this new 6-CD set includes thirty uncirculating tracks.

A number of songs have been posted online as pre-release teasers. Here they are:

Odds And Ends (Alternate Version)

Dress It Up, Better Have It All

Don't Ya Tell Henry

Lo and Behold (Take 1)

Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread

Tupelo

Ain't No More Cane (Take 2)

900 Miles From My Home

I Shall Be Released

NPR is streaming 12 tracks:

Edge Of The Ocean (Disc 1, Track 1)
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Take 1) (Disc 3, Track 17)
I Shall Be Released (Take 1) (Disc 3, Track 19)
Quinn The Eskimo (Take 1) (Disc 4, Track 4)
This Wheel's On Fire (Disc 3, Track 21)
Johnny Todd (Disc 2, Track 1)
Don't Ya Tell Henry (Disc 4, Track 21)
I Don't Hurt Anymore (Disc 2, Track 19)
Silent Weekend (Disc 5, Track 12)
Crash On The Levee (Take 1) (Disc 3, Track 10)
One Too Many Mornings (Disc 5, Track 2)
I'm Your Teenage Prayer (Disc 2, Track 8)

And, finally, Pono has 30-second samples of all the songs on the six discs.

For more on the Basement tapes, check out Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old, Weird America) and Sid Griffin's Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Basement Tapes. Griffin wrote the liner notes to the upcoming Columbia box.