Sid Griffin

I've had this one on the self for several years and never read it. Since we're going to get an official release of this marvelous music, I've been listening to A Tree With Roots a lot, and sat down with this book. It does an excellent job of telling the story of the music's recording, and as many details as were available when it was written. It's fun to go through these songs one at a time, and Griffin is really detailed in his descriptions. It'll be interesting to see how the music changes show more when it's released, properly produced. Good reading, and I hope it gets more attention when the music is released. show less

This book was quite different from what I normally read, and quite fascinating. Dylan, having in many ways spearheaded the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960's took a step back, long before the rest of the country did. The Basement Tapes music and this book show his attraction to domesticity, his American roots and the roots of American music. He teemed together with mostly Canadian musicians and retreated from the electric music and psychodelia then popular with most of the show more audience. Other forward-looking musicians such as Eric Clapton admired and joined this move.

The book will have an appeal mostly to Band or Dylan cognocenti. I read it both as a lover of those groups and a history buff. show less

I read this because I splurged and bought myself The complete Basement Tapes and wanted to read along as I listened. Nergasmic. The prose is woolly, though sometimes very very funny but the individual song entries are interesting and I liked Griffin's ideas about the impact the tapes made on other artists.

His heart is definitely in the right place.

Interesting. Worth reading if one is a Dylan fan or serious student of art. Or perhaps even a child of the seventies who wants to return, briefly, back to revisit that important time.