That was recorded in ‘66, ‘67 up in Woodstock, you know, before Woodstock, before the big Woodstock Festival, before Woodstock was discovered, exploited, I don’t know. We were just all up there sort of drying out.
[Mary Travers: You and the Band?]
Yeah. The members of the Band and various other people, up there making music and planting gardens and just watching time go by. So in the meantime we made this record, made this – actually it wasn’t a record, it was just songs which we’d come, you know, to, er, this basement and record; out in the woods. That’s basically it really. Uh, the records have been exposed throughout the years so somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in it’s entirety and know just exactly what we were doing up there in those years and it’ll be out shortly.
~Bob Dylan (Mary Travers interview, April 1975)
People have told me they think it’s very Americana and all that. I don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.
~Bob Dylan (Kurt Loder interview, March 1984)
..Because the Dylan is all work tape, the music is certifiably unpremeditated, lazy as a river and rarely relentless or precise–laid back without complacency or slickness. The writerly “serious” songs like “Tears of Rage” are all the richer for the company of his greatest novelties–if “Going to Acapulco” is a dirge about having fun, “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” is a ditty about separation from self, and both modes are enriched by the Band’s more conventional (“realistic”) approach to lyrics. We needn’t bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967 too. And it’s sure to sound great in 1983. A+
~Robert Christgau (album review in 1975)
..John Rockwell in the New York Times declared it “The greatest album in the history of popular American music.” But it wasn”t, and for all the riches within it, all of which are presented out of context, it was a shamefully poor representation of an astonishingly creative, important period in this great artist”s working life.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
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“Odds & Ends” @ spotify:
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