Bob Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes has arrived and includes a staggering 117 unreleased tracks.

This is a four minute trailer describing the experience, giving us an overview of the history, letting us know what the fuss is all about. Of course Dylan fans have been excavating songs from these sessions since the sixties and there was the official Basement Tapes double album with overdubs and non-Dylan involved tracks recorded by The Band and released in the seventies.

But this is something else – a box set that has six cd’s of 138 of Dylan wonders recorded with The Band in Woodstock in the late sixties, many tracks unheard till now. (A shortened cd version and a vinyl version are also being released). I have started the quest to listen from beginning to end, it’s the musical equivalent of reading Don Quixote (possibly my favourite book) so let’s hope that it’s not only long but as enjoyable as Cervantes’ masterpiece.

With sleep gnawing at the base of my skull – a passage from Don Quixote:

“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basement_Tapes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote