This week, Columbia Records released The Basement Tapes Complete, six CDs of music made by Bob Dylan and The Band at the house they lived in - the legendary Big Pink - in West Saugerties, New York, during the summer of 1967.
Although The Band, and Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan and The Band, are among my favourite musical artists in the world - and although I love The Basement Tapes (a double-album from 1975) - I greet this announcement with only mild interest. I'll be excited to hear any actual new material, but different versions of already-recorded songs are never that interesting to me.
My lack of interest baffles my bootleg-loving partner, who is over the moon about this release. For more information about The Basement Tapes Complete, you might see Allan's non-baseball blog, currently called Sharp Pencil.
I did, however, love this video from Rolling Stone, documenting Garth Hudson's return to Big Pink for the first time in almost 50 years.
Not only does that house represent some of my most favourite music in the world, it is situated in an area filled with so many important memories for me. This is the Catskills region of New York State - "upstate," in local parlance. We never had a cottage or even a summer rental, but we went upstate with our dogs every summer - first a long weekend in a motel, then a week in a cabin, and eventually a rented house. The whole area is flush with memories for me, including some that are poignant, such as scattering some of the ashes of our beloved dogs Gypsy and Clyde, before we left for Canada. Somehow seeing the video of the drive to that house brought back a flood of memories.
A long time ago, when this blog was just getting going - back when I used one-word titles for every post - I wrote about our experiences upstate, just to preserve it in writing somewhere.
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