Million Dollar Bash

Tells for the first time the whole story of the Basement Tapes, recorded in summer 1967, when Bob Dylan's career was at a crossroads. Dylan gathered together a few musician friends in Woodstock, New York, and informally recorded a bunch of songs intended to be heard by no one but themselves. Instead, they change music forever.

It's 1967, the Summer of Love, and Bob Dylan is holed up in Woodstock with a group of musicians once known as The Hawks, laying down a set of recordings that will soon turn the music world on its head. These recordings - the Basement Tapes - would not be released commercially by Dylan at first, but would emerge in the form of cover versions by acts such as The Byrds, Manfred Mann, and Peter Paul & Mary. Together, they would inspire a homespun, back-to-basics approach in the work of The Beatles, the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and many others, while also kick-starting the entire Americana genre. It's 2014, the summer of the ice-bucket challenge, and author and musician Sid Griffin is holed up in the Dylan office in New York City, where he has been invited to listen to hours of never-before-heard Basement Tapes recordings. The result is this fully revised and expanded edition of Million Dollar Bash - published to coincide with the release of dozens of those recordings as part of the Bootleg Series, for which the author contributed liner notes, plus Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, a major new documentary about the period, and the new T Bone Burnett–produced Lost On The River album - in which Griffin shines even greater light on this pivotal yet often misunderstood moment in popular music history.

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This book itemizes Bob Dylan's copyright registrations and copyright-related documents from his first copyrighted work ("Talkin' John Birch Blues" in February 1962), to his first registration ("Song to Woody"), up to "Keep It With Mine" in the movie "I'm Not There." Also included are works he never registered (e.g. "Liverpool Gal" and "Church With No Upstairs") and his registered cover versions of other composers' songs. Annotated entries concern subjects such as recording dates, co-writers, and Dylan's companies. Its appearance is meant to mimic the printed Catalog of Copyright Entries.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A beautiful, comprehensive volume of Dylan’s lyrics, from the beginning of his career through the present day—with the songwriter’s edits to dozens of songs, appearing here for the first time. Bob Dylan is one of the most important songwriters of our time, responsible for modern classics such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” The Lyrics is a comprehensive and definitive collection of Dylan’s most recent writing as well as the early works that are such an essential part of the canon. Well known for changing the lyrics to even his best-loved songs, Dylan has edited dozens of songs for this volume, making The Lyrics a must-read for everyone from fanatics to casual fans.

This study of Dylan's mission-driven music reveals a functional approach to art that not only sustained his 60-year career but forever changed an art form. The second edition of Writing Dylan: The Songs of a Lonesome Traveler examines Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan's historic career, yielding unique insights into a distinctively American artist's creative world. The book opens with a short biography and description of Dylan's artistic method before diving into the seven missions of his life's work. Chapters are supported by song lyrics, of which the author's license agreement with Bob Dylan Music enables a definitive presentation. Since the release of the first edition in 2005, the laureate has produced three albums of original material as well as three widely praised albums of American standards. Columbia Records has issued multiple boxed sets chronicling specific periods of Dylan's career, and several films have been made about him. Dylan himself has also given numerous speeches and interviews, often while accepting prestigious awards. This second edition not only features these new materials but draws on them to recast the first edition, presenting Dylan's music as an indelible art form.

Basement Tales goes through and analyzes, in chronological order, the publication on disk of the songs recorded by Bob Dylan & The Band in numerous sessions in Woodstock between the months of March and October of 1967. These songs, better known as The Basement Tapes, were not originally intended for the making of a Bob Dylan's album but for cover versions by various artists of the time. The importance of the author and his simultaneous momentary absence from the recording market initially aroused interest from the underground market, which started the publication of the first bootlegs in the history of rock, and subsequently also those of the official record company. The publication of the songs taken from the Basement Tapes begins in 1969 with seven songs present in the bootleg Great White Wonder and ends with the creation, in 2014, of a voluminous box of 140 songs by Columbia Records, which was The Bootleg Series Vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. In this long period of time the two markets, the underground and the official one, have alternated with various record publications which are analyzed in detail in the book.