Dylan es poco amigos de firmar autógrafos, pero tampoco es que le entusiasmen las entrevistas. Con motivo de la publicación de las Basement Tapes de Woodstock, New York, grabandas entre 1966-1967, titulada The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 que recopilaba 138 grabaciones de Dylan y The Band, con 30 canciones inéditas, así como Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes con letras perdidas de Dylan y música del supergrupo formado por Jim James de My Morning Jacket, Marcus Mumford de Mumford and Sons, Elvis Costello, Taylor Goldsmith de Dawes y más gente, se acompañó de un documental de Showtime que incluía la primera entrevista en audio de Dylan en 10 años.
En ella habla de los dos discos; en el caso de Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes comenta sobre las letras perdidas: «No puedes grabar todo lo que escribes, por lo que es comprensible que un montón de estas cosas se queden en el camino o … no sé ni cómo ni dónde se han guardado durante todos estos años, umm … Nunca había visto estas letras desde el día en que fueron [escritas]. Nunca.» (…)»Siempre es interesante cuando alguien toma una canción tuya y la vuelve a grabar. Estas canciones no fueron hechas a la medida de nadie. Simplemente las iba escribiendo conforme las sentía».
En el caso de las grabaciones de Woodstock, grabadas junto a la banda de Robbie Robertson, comenta que «Tenía un sótano, sótano típico lleno de tubos y un piso con lavadora,secadora … Nos sentábamos alrededor para escribir y bajábamos al sótano para ponerlas en la cinta … Woodstock en un lugar donde se podía ir y transmitir tus pensamientos. Era una colonia de artistas. Había un montón de pintores que vivían en esa área, muy pocos músicos, sabíamos plenamente que había poca gente allí tocando música. Más tarde sí, pero cuando estabamos allí, a mediados de los años 60, estábamos prácticamente sólo nosotros.
Los acontecimientos de cada día parecían suceder a un millón de millas de distancia. No estábamos participando realmente en nada de eso, así que era el verano del amor, pero … no estábamos allí, así que hacíamos lo nuestro, donde escribimos Million Dollar Bash, ya sabes, ir al verano del Amor. No teníamos nada más que hacer, así que empezamos a escribir un montón de canciones. (…) ¿Cómo hicimos para escribir? No iba a escribir algo sobre mí, no tengo nada que decir sobre mí, y me imagino que nadie estaría interesado de todos modos. Empiezas a buscar ideas en la TV [??] o algo así y cualquier cosa que podía dar comienzo una canción: los nombres de las páginas telefónicas y esas cosas. Cuando China hizo estallar esa bomba de hidrógeno, que sólo brilló en los titulares de los periódicos, entramos y escribimos Tears Of Rage. Pasaban cosas, hubo disturbios en la calle, disturbios en Rochester en Nueva York, que no estaba tan lejos, así que escribimos Too Much Of Nuthin. Y una cosa llevó a la otra. El corazón humano, la primera vez que alguien había oído que un corazón humano podía ser trasplantado, era increíble…»
«We had a place pretty much on our own. Whatever was on top the pile, somebody grabbed it and said, this, let’s do that for a while….
It was a kind of music that made you feel that you were a part of something very, very special and nobody else was a part of it, and back then it was hard to get to…
You can’t record everything you wrote, so it’s understandable that a lot of this stuff just, hmm, fall by the wayside or… I don’t even know how or where it was kept all these years, umm… I’d never seen these lyrics since the day they were [written]. Never seen ‘em.
How did I wind up in Woodstock? Uhh… I don’t know!
How did the songs on the Basement Tapes come about? Oh… y’know, beside this, kind of was gonna stay up in Woodstock for a while, so… my band from the touring we had done together, those guys just came on up there, they liked it too. And Robbie called me up one day and said, “What’s happenin’?” you know, “What’s happenin’?” and I said, “Nuthin’.” He said, well he was in the mood for some nuthin’ too.
And it had a basement, typical basement full of pipes and a concrete floor, washer, dryer … We’d just kind of sit around and call out the songs and before we went down into the basement to put it on tape … Woodstock was a place were you could kinda go and get your thoughts together. It was an artist colony. There were plenty of painters who lived in that area, but very few musicians, who we certainly knew of nobody up there playing any music. Later there were, but when we were up there, middle of the ’60s, we were pretty much by ourselves.
The events of the day, they were just happening, they seemed to be a million miles away. We weren’t really participating in any of that stuff, well it was the Summer of Love, but… we weren’t there, so we did our thing where we wrote ‘Million Dollar Bash’, you know, go along with the Summer of Love. We had nothing else to do, so I started writing a bunch of songs.
I’d write them in longhand and I’d write ‘em on the typewriter and whatever was handy. Pencil, pen, typewriter…
How do we go about writing our songs? I’d know I wasn’t gonna write anything about myself, I didn’t have nothin’ to say about myself that I’d figure anybody else would be interested in anyway. You kind of look for ideas on TV [??] or somethin’ and just any ol’ thing would create the beginning to a song: names out of phone books and things. When China first exploded that hydrogen bomb, it just flashed across the headlines in newspapers, so, you know, we just go in and write ‘Tears Of Rage’. Things were just happening, there was riots in the street, they were rioting in Rochester in New York , it wasn’t that far away, so we write ‘Too Much Of Nuthin’. And just one thing lead to another, you know. The human heart, the first time that anybody every heard of a human heart being transplanted, that was incredible. That was a real breakthrough, so we came up with a song, and then when we got the lyrics down, we took the song to the basement. I don’t when I became aware of these songs being bootlegged. I had no attention [?] about, I don’t even… I won’t know how to get that record, I guess they were selling them in record stores.
It’s always interesting when someone takes a song of yours and re-records it. But these songs weren’t tailor-made for anybody. I just wrote what I felt like writing.” (Transcripción vía Expecting Rain).
