The Band: 50 Years of Music From Big Pink (2018)

There is also no doubt that during the time on tour in ’65 and ’66 and the time they worked together in Woodstock in ’67 that Robertson was playing close attention to how Dylan wrote songs.

I guess it was sometime in early June, 1968, when I heard a disc jockey, most likely one on WNEW FM in New York City say that Bob Dylan’s band was about to put out a record. The year had started with Dylan’s return to recording, John Wesley Harding, after an 18 month wait. The album did not pick up where Blonde On Blonde left off. Instead it was a back to basics album with Dylan mostly playing acoustic guitar (piano on two tracks) and harmonica, backed only by bass and drums, with Pete Drake providing pedal steel on the two songs that closed the album. The songs were tightly written ballads that with two exceptions had three verses and no chorus. The songs were deceptively simple and cloaked in mystery and absolutely nothing like the music his contemporaries were making at the time which was mired for better or worse in psychedelia. All through the first part of 1968, (actually it started in December 1967 when Peter, Paul & Mary released a single of “Too Much Of Nothing”) new Dylan songs kept appearing recorded by all manner of artists, from Flatt & Scruggs to Manfred Mann, who had a hit with “Quinn The Eskimo.” I didn’t even know the latter was a Dylan song until one day when my brother asked me, “Do you know ‘The Mighty Quinn’ is a Dylan song? At this point in time, no one except the musicians who received them knew anything about what would eventually be called The Basement Tapes, until later in the summer when a new San Francisco based magazine called Rolling Stone would write about them.