Music from Big Pink

With Dylan, The Band, plus The Byrds, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou, John Hiatt, Sheryl Crow.

Just saw that the legendary, iconic, Big Pink is now available for short or longer-term stays via VRBO. Sleep amid the whispering pines in the rooms once occupied by Rick, Richard, Garth and Levon back in ‘67 and ‘68. Make a pot of coffee in the kitchen just like Dylan did every morning on his visits! Here’s an article about the rental from this week about it. I knew that a couple has lived there for quite some time and that the guy’s band has rehearsed in the fabled basement. Below, after a couple of cartoons, I offer just a few of the many, many, tunes (some not surfacing until very recently) that came out of the basement, or upstairs where Dylan wrote in longhand or on a typewriter. Enjoy, then subscribe, it’s still free.

Down in the Basement

First, a photo from one of my visits to the holy site, from a slightly different perspective than the famous cover photo for Music from Big Pink. I should note that it is the setting for my (as yet unpublished) first novel.

We have to start with the song that kicked off Big Pink, co-written by Richard Manuel and Dylan, with Richard in his prime singing at Woodstock 1969 (and remember, The Band was cut out of the Woodstock documentary while Ten Years After made it). This song, and album, helped change much of the rock ‘n roll musical landscape for years.

While that song and others penned by Dylan at time were not officially released—but arrived via the first major “bootleg” ever—most of the many dozens of tunes captured by Garth’s funky tape recorder and microphone setup in the basement were covers of folk, country and rock songs beloved by Bob (he was essentially introducing the Canadians to Americana). Here is a minor but swell Elvis ditty that surfaced on later bootlegs, and then finally on Dylan’s major Basement package a few years back.

Another Big Pink highlight, The Band again live at Woodstock, “We Can Talk.”

The most famous and mysterious (and one of greatest) Dylan-penned song that did not surface for decades out of the basement, with “lyrics” made up as he went along, was “I’m Not There,” later the title of the laughable Todd Haynes film.

Here’s The Band performing “This Wheel’s On Fire,” shot at The Last Waltz by Scorcese’s black and white cameras down on the floor.

A fun obscurity here, as The Byrds, with Gram and Hillman gone but the great Clarence White now on guitar, doing “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark in 1968 (I was probably watching in my living room at midnight).

Fantastic Richard Manuel “Orange Juice Blues,” which was cut from the Big Pink album. Here is the original with just Richard on piano. Robbie later added a full band version for the 1975 Basement Tapes package, but here is Richard in his full solo glory.

The other long-buried Dylan song from the basement that finally emerged was the wild “Sign on the Cross.”

Yes, Bob dusted off “The Mighty Quinn” in a rocking live version in 2003. (Quinn, by the way, was actor Anthony.)

As I’ve said, a lot of goofing around down the stairs, perhaps most notably with this cover of “(Every Time I Go to Town The Boys) Keep Kickin’ My Dog Around.”

Fairport (with Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny taking verses) were first to do a fun “Million Dollar Bash” around 1969.

There are dozens of great covers to choose from but we’ll close now with a Levon post-mortem tribute: “The Weight” with Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou, Brittany Howard, John Hiatt, and Richard Thompson, among others.