Bob Dylan wraps rock’s first bootleg

Two years after his history-making 1965 electric performance, Bob Dylan holed himself up in a basement in upstate New York and played what became some of the most famous recordings never released.
The prolific singer and songwriter, who had emerged as a defining voice of the 1960s, suffered a motorcycle accident that forced him to take a break from the road. The involuntary convalescence ended up producing some of the most critically acclaimed work of his career.
The 1967 recordings became what is considered rock history’s first bootleg record: “Great White Wonder,” a title that was simply a name for the vinyl’s plain white packaging but occasionally became a moniker for Dylan himself.
Nearly a half-century later, Dylan is releasing the entirety of the collection. The six-CD boxed-set, “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series, Volume 11,” goes on sale Monday in Europe and Tuesday in North America.
An official release announcing the exhaustive boxed-set described it as “a Holy Grail for Dylanologists.”
The boxed-set comprises all known recordings, including several recent discoveries that have eluded Dylan’s devoted fan base, from the summer sessions at the house dubbed Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York. The collection includes multiple versions of numerous songs performed in the basement by Dylan with his touring ensemble, The Band, with some equipment borrowed from Peter, Paul and Mary.
The Dylan boxed-set shows the evolution of numerous Dylan classics, as well as his takes on songs by folk icons Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash.
Dylan had stunned the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 by going electric, helping usher in rock’s dominance. The Big Pink sessions showed a further experimentation with form as Dylan became more eclectic.
The boxed-set shows Dylan and The Band, who sometimes recorded multiple songs a day, refining the musical form and playing with how to match the lyrics.
“I Shall Be Released,” Dylan’s song of redemption, appears even truer to its Gospel roots in the first take with an organ driving the tune. The song’s first line — “They say everything can be replaced / Yet every distance is not near” — appears in the demo as a second verse and starts, “Everything is not misplaced.” Some tracks, however, may interest only the most avid Dylan connoisseurs.