“Mixing Up the Medicine: Bob Dylan’s Basement Carnival and Homosocial Masculinity”
By Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College
After returning from his grueling eighteen-month world tour in 1966, Bob Dylan used his motorcycle accident as an opportunity for a self-imposed hiatus from many of his professional responsibilities. In fact, in 1984, Dylan told Kurt Loder, “Then I had that motorcycle accident, which put me outta commission. Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just workin’ for all these leeches. And I didn’t want to do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids.” Dylan’s use of the word “leeches” does a lot of work here. It reveals that he felt both burnt out by the demands of fame and the conventions of the recording industry and that he perceived the people in it as parasitic. Prior to the motorcycle accident, Dylan’s workload and productivity underscored a masculine identity characterized by mid-century industrial capitalism.
However, the period between the motorcycle accident and Dylan recording John Wesley Harding in Nashville signals a break from that performance of this wage earner identity. Paul Williams argues, “The first year of silence was the most dramatic, because it followed a period of fecundity” and that “the motorcycle accident was certainly more than an excuse. It was a turning point” (220). Because Dylan was adjusting to his new role as father and head of a growing family, being “put out of commission” allowed for an evolution of his gender performance. With a new wife and two young children, Dylan redirected his focus from the public sphere to the domestic sphere at his home in Bearsville, near Woodstock. While there, Dylan enjoyed the simplicity of fatherhood and domestic life and, in sequestration, seemed freed from what Greil Marcus called the “prison of his own career” (xv). However, to fulfill his lingering professional obligations, Dylan worked closely with members of the Band in a carnivalesque atmosphere in which they recorded The Basement Tapes. The homosocial bonds Dylan developed with Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson helped spark Dylan’s creative growth during this period. This fraternity and Dylan’s liberty are borne out sonically and lyrically on the bootlegs and, ultimately, the released album. More so, the time he spent convalescing and writing and recording with the Band was regenerative. It allowed him the time, space, and companionship he needed to reconnect with American roots music to redefine and renew his commitment to his recording career.
Prior to retreating to Woodstock for a brief respite before embarking on his fall 1966 tour, Dylan’s gender performance could best be understood through the framework of industrial capitalist masculinity. Introduced by Ǿ. G. Holter in his chapter “Family Theory Reconsidered” from Labour of Love: Beyond the Self-Evidence of Everyday Life, this categorization of masculinity creates “an expression of the whole relationship between production and reproduction. Industrial capitalism itself ‘engendered’ its opposite, the world of domesticity as against the world of wage work, and women as the other of men” (102). R. W. Connell further explains, “Holter’s ‘social forms analysis’ gives an account of gender, masculinity and femininity, as historically specific features of social life in modernity. They arise not from a timeless dichotomy of bodies but from the specific course of development of the large-scale structures of society” (22). Because mid-twentieth century America was arranged in a patriarchal gender schema, the binary of masculine associated with industry and wages and feminine with domesticity was the status quo. Under contract with Columbia Records, Dylan earned “wages” based on sales of his albums, ticket sales for live performances, or licensing his songs to other artists to record. From the time he arrived in New York City in January of 1961 through the accident in July of 1966, Dylan recorded seven albums, performed nearly two-hundred concerts, and sat for countless interviews and press conferences. This is the “period of fecundity” Williams refers to (220). Regardless of the shifts in performed identity Dylan engendered during the early stages of his career, he maintained a close connection to the creative process and modes of production of his work – composing, recording, and touring.
Early in his marriage to Sara, Dylan maintained his impressive workload and continued to perform within this schema. In July 1965, Dylan and Sara purchased their home in Bearsville. They moved into it in the late summer where Sara nested as Dylan continued to work. Prior to their November 22, 1965, wedding, Dylan played 51 shows, including one on November 21, and released Bringing It All Back Home in March and Highway 61 Revisited in August. Continuing this pace, Dylan returned to the studio in October to begin recording his seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde. After taking only five days off, one of which was his wedding day, Dylan headed back out on the road. He then played thirteen shows from November 26 through December 19. In January 1966, Dylan took a brief break during which Sara gave birth to Jesse and he finalized Blonde on Blonde. He embarked on a world tour that began on February 4 in Louisville, Kentucky, traveled westward across the United States, around the world to Australia and New Zealand before ending in London on May 27, 1966. In this way, the Dylans performed traditional patriarchal gender roles: Sara tended to the children and the home, while Dylan went to work to provide financial support for the family.
After the accident, however, Dylan’s hiatus from recording and touring alienated him from the labor process of creating and producing his work. Rather than actively recording new music and touring, Dylan was exclusively living off royalties for the first time in his career. Though he still provided the primary financial support for his family, he began to blur lines between work and what Holter recognized as the world of domesticity or the feminine in opposition to the world of work or the masculine (102). This is the period in which Dylan fully assimilated to his paternal role: meeting Maria at the school bus stop, going to parties, and attending to the children. Of that time, Dylan wrote,
My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in between … For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life, I got to do the things I loved best and that was all that mattered – the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing … I was living on record royalties. (Dylan 123)
Domestic life with Sara and the children provided Dylan a break from the unrealistic pace and demands of his early career, but his contractual obligations required that he regularly submit new compositions.
As a result of Dylan’s break from the recording studio, the year during which he wrote and recorded songs with the Band at Big Pink created a second life or Bakhtinian carnival separate from his previous work. This period of Dylan’s career created a “temporary suspension,” resulting in what Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued as, “[t]his temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life” (687). The first significant change or inversion occurred when Dylan began living off royalties of sales from his previous work and from publishing rights. This came after the “period of fecundity” noted above which alienated Dylan from the modes of production of his creative work (Williams 220). The second inversion occurred in the freedom Dylan experienced in this period in his day-to-day life, his approach to work, and the relationships he formed with his family and friends. In Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus recalls Robbie Robertson telling him, “We went in with a sense of humor … It was all a goof. We were playing with absolute freedom” (xiv). The levity and ease with which Dylan and the Band approached the sessions translated to them capturing an unexpected sound and new pathway forward in their respective careers.
The sound they created – the simultaneous dissolving and expanding of musical genres – could only be realized through the six men’s trust in and love for one another. The members of the Band shared a history and relationships that predated their association with Dylan. However, being on tour with each other from September 1965 through May 1966 laid the foundation for Dylan’s and the members of the Band’s fellowship and collaboration in Big Pink. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Sedgwick argues intimate homosocial male relationships promote the interests of men and support heteronormative gender schemas. Williams puts forth that working with the Band helped Dylan “rediscover[…] the joys of music – old songs, improvised songs, crafted songs, they all provided him with evident satisfaction and pleasure as he performed them” (225). Through these sessions, Dylan recovered from his injuries and from his professional and creative burn out. Renewing his “satisfaction” and pleasure” of writing, playing, and performing brought Dylan closer to returning to the studio or actively working as a “wage earner.”
However, Sedgwick’s theory also contends that it’s challenging to understand Dylan’s relationships with the members of the Band without considering his domestic relationship with Sara and how his identity is a product of it and in resistance to it (25). As much as we see a shift in Dylan’s performance of his masculine identity, his relationship with Sara and her role in their heterosexual patriarchal marriage is key to fully understanding Dylan’s progress. Sedgwick contends, “Heidi Hartman’s definition of patriarchy in terms of ‘relationships between men … , in making power relationships between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships between men and men, suggests large-scale social structures are congruent with male-male-female erotic triangles … ’” (25). She continues, “We can go a step further than that to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence” (Sedgwick 25). Initially, Sara created the domestic sphere and a family for Dylan where he could retreat and convalesce while he provided financial stability for her. In terms of reproduction, Sara giving birth to four children in four years mirrored the creative fertility of Dylan’s early career. This maintained a traditional heteronormative patriarchal schema. However, Dylan recognized the toll domestic life took on his creative life. In Chronicles, he writes,
My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing, a bit more humdrum. It’s hard to live like this. It takes all your effort. The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that’s dear to you. Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice. Creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed. (Dylan 121)
For Dylan, his home represented the space he had to escape when he went to the masculine or homosocial environment of Big Pink. While Sara was essential in this arrangement, it was also Sara and domestic life that he had to push back against to renew his connection to his creative work.
While Dylan was healing from his injuries, his contract with Columbia expired but he was still obligated to submit demos to music publisher Witmark through his manager Albert Grossman. To comply, he composed and recorded demos with the Band. Initially, they recorded in the Red Room of Dylan’s Bearsville home, but by late spring, they removed themselves from Dylan’s house and permanently moved to Big Pink in West Saugerties. In a 2014 article for Rolling Stone, interviewer David Browne spoke to Garth Hudson about the Basement Tapes. Brown writes, “But soon it became clear that they needed a place apart from Dylan’s wife and children: “It was his house,” Hudson says…It was only natural they gravitated to the cellar in Big Pink, where Dylan availed himself of the Hawks’ gear.” Calling the house, Big Pink, a “bachelor palace,” Robbie Robertson is quoted in Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, saying: “So Dylan would just come over, and it was like the clubhouse. Rick and Richard and Garth and later Levon all lived there. At one time, that is. Garth, Rick, and Richard moved into Big Pink but I moved to a different place because I had a girlfriend – and I didn’t want her to see what happens” (69). The all-boys “clubhouse” in the basement at Big Pink provided a physical space for Dylan to escape domestic life. It is also where he developed intimate fraternal bonds with the members of the Band. The trust built through these kinship relationships provided a foundation for the men’s creative growth and experimentation. Commenting on this, Sid Griffin writes, “These five – Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson – become not Dylan’s backup but his musical allies, his partners in crime” (79). Their collaboration led to one of the most productive writing and recording periods in Dylan’s career, laying down nearly 150 songs, the majority of which were originals, and the rest covers of Dylan’s favorite American roots music.
As a result of recording together, Dylan and the Band created something that transcended collaboration. Williams noted, “The Sound of the Basement Tapes songs is the sound of the unconscious (musical, verbal) mind brought forward into the world of conscious, touchable reality in a very calm, aware, marvelously unselfconscious fashion with more than a touch of the collective unconscious – the group mind – thrown in to sweeten the sauce” (Williams 223). That sound, “the group mind,” was the tangible, audible manifestation of the fraternal bonds the six men developed as they spent time, composed, played, and recorded together day in and day out. Not only were they “killing time” during the sessions, Robertson also notes Dylan gave them an education on traditional folk music (Marcus xiv). As a result of the collaboration born out of that mentorship Dylan and the Band discovered a “new idiom which to perform” (Griffin 82). Dylan would write the lyrics and then they’d all go down into the basement and compose the music together.
The unstructured and freewheeling sessions delineated a break from traditional or formal recording practices resulting in the carnivalesque sonic and lyrical atmosphere of the tracks. Of these sessions, Sid Griffin writes in Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, “The informality of recording at Big Pink proved to be an antidote to the tense scheduling, the required formality, and the constant clock watching that came with recording at a major studio” (129). Free from schedules, budgets, and corporate demands, Dylan, Robertson, Helm, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson were free to experiment with roots music and innovate expressions of it through their play. The casual environment also shifted power dynamics within the group. The Band, who were on Dylan’s payroll, were his employees. However, homosocial bonds of fraternal love transcended that. This forced Dylan out of the dominant position as boss. Everything flattened and equalized in the basement. Williams argues that one of Dylan’s ambitions in the Basement Tapes was to “amuse and impress and be accepted by his new companions” (225). Dylan’s vulnerability while they recorded The Basement Tapes sessions allowed him to learn from the band as much as they learned from him. In this environment Dylan experienced a sense of liberation from the corporate vices of the record industry and, in his basement hootenanny, created what Clinton Heylin describes as “perhaps his greatest collection of songs” (273).
What makes this collection of songs so “great” is precisely the aspect of carnival that separates it from everyday life and Dylan’s studio work and affords Dylan a sense of liberation in his creative process. Of the sessions, Williams explains, “Dylan apparently would come over in the afternoon – every afternoon, week after week – and he and the Band would sit around making music together, and when the spirit moved them they’d record some of what they were doing” (222). Later in his analysis, Williams remarks, “The open-endedness of the Basement Tapes songs, this sense that Dylan isn’t necessarily singing to anyone but the people he’s performing with … , so there’s a purposefulness and freedom from purpose in his communication somewhat different than anything he’d done before” (229). This speaks to the experience of carnival which Bakhtin argues was, “opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense and immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, and undefined forms” (687). The Basement Tapes – free-form writing and collaborations, visions and revisions of the lyrics and music, both traditional songs and new compositions, and the camaraderie Dylan experienced with the members of the Band – allows Dylan to find his voice again. Further, the music Dylan and The Band played was a celebration of the abject, a representation of American culture. Dylan called them “[s]ongs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children … , floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers” (Chronicles 35) and Marcus presented them as “deep, fluid, perverse, and conflicted” (Trager 35). In this folk tradition, the carnival of Dylan’s environment translates to the lyrics and music, most specifically with a focus on corporal elements of excess, laughter, and rebirth. The characters are fat-gutted, pus-filled, and sleep-deprived. They are lost, drunk, and violent, but they are generally having fun. The characters’ celebration of the abject does not simply degrade or destroy. It signals a renewal or rebirth within and beyond the space of that “second life.”
Bakhtinian carnival is also associated with a renewed or reinvented marketplace that created free and direct interaction and communication between Dylan or Dylan’s music and the people who listen to it. The Basement Tapes achieves this in several ways. The first was the marketplace of ideas shared between Dylan and the Band. A new marketplace was also created through what the liner notes to Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Volume 11 called “the first bootleg of the modern rock’n’roll age” (Griffin). Lastly, not only did the sessions produce the first bootleg, they also created an entire “underground industry” that subverted conventions of record sales. In Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, Sid Griffin notes, “no one knew until the bootleg tapes of the Great White Wonder LP bootleg hit the shops of Los Angeles that Dylan was going through this creative purple patch. But the Basement Tapes Era will probably go down as Dylan’s most powerful period of sustained songwriting greatness” (64). The underground bootleg industry, though frustrating to Dylan and the Band, bypassed traditional distribution, allowing for direct distribution of the bootlegs or direct communication between the music and the people. When Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding in Nashville in October 1967, he renewed his previous performance of masculinity. Griffin calls John Wesley Harding Dylan’s “belated return to the marketplace,” language that reinforces Dylan as a wage earner (217).
Dylan’s early career was fueled by ambition and a working-class work ethic aligned with patriarchal industrial capitalist masculinity. His self-imposed hiatus after his motorcycle accident through the recording of John Wesley Harding created a Bakhtinian “second life” or an “extraterritorial space” in his career. This shifted him out of his previous gender performance and into a more passive, domestic role. Through intimate homosocial bonds with members of the Band and the process of writing and recording The Basement Tapes, Dylan renewed his connection to his performance of patriarchal industrial capitalist masculinity. He returned to the recording studio and, eventually, returned to touring. The Bakhtinian extraterritorial space in Dylan’s career enabled him to redefine his gender identity performance. He did so through an assertion of agency and power over the processes and modes of production and performance of his work. The legacy of The Basement Tapes sessions exists in Dylan’s commitment to the folk idiom of preserving and renewing American roots music and history through the albums he’s released from John Wesley Harding through Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s also evident in the bootleg series of outtakes and unreleased music Dylan periodically issues, self-produced Jack Frost albums, and his seemingly never-ending touring. Ultimately, the motorcycle accident and Dylan’s withdrawal from public life after it allowed him the circumstances to redefine his gender identity performance that has guided the remainder of his career.
Works Cited
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Holter, Ǿ. G. “Family Theory Reconsidered.” Labour of Love: Beyond the Self-Evidence of Everyday Life. eds. T. Borchgrevink and Ǿ. G Holter. Avebury Ashgate Publishing, 1995.
Loder, Kurt. “The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan.” Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-rolling-stone-interview-bob-dylan-43446/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2023.
Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabalais and His World.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second ed., Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004, pp. 686–692.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 2016.
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