Snapshot: Bob Dylan and Levon Helm

Bob Dylan and Levon Helm in the same photograph. The context is the Woodstock period, which means somewhere in the years between 1967 and 1969, when Dylan had retreated from touring after his motorcycle accident and The Band had settled into the Big Pink house in West Saugerties.

The geographic proximity was important. Dylan was at his house in Woodstock. The Band was twenty minutes away. The informal recordings that resulted — the Basement Tapes — were possible because of the proximity.

The Basement Tapes

The Basement Tapes were recorded in the basement of Big Pink and in Dylan's home studio in Woodstock from roughly June through October 1967. The recordings were informal: Dylan had songs he wanted to try out, The Band had been playing together for years, and the sessions were less about producing finished recordings than about exploring material.

The tapes circulated widely among musicians and eventually in the broader bootleg market. An official partial release came in 1975. The full Basement Tapes were officially released in an extensive boxed set in 2014.

Levon Helm's complicated relationship with the period

Helm was not present for all of the Basement Tapes sessions. He had left the original Hawks/Band lineup at the end of the Dylan 1966 world tour, at a period when the audiences booing Dylan's electric set were also directing their hostility at the backing band, and Helm had found the experience intolerable. He returned before the Woodstock recording period began in earnest, but his relationship with what was being recorded and with Robbie Robertson, who would eventually take primary compositional credit for much of The Band's material, was complicated.

He wrote about this at length in his memoir This Wheel's on Fire, published in 1993. The version of events he gives differs from Robertson's, and the distance between those versions was never fully closed.

The photograph

A photograph of Dylan and Helm together in this period is a document of a musical relationship that produced some of the most significant recordings in American roots music. What the photograph carries is the informal quality of the time and place: people making music in a neighborhood, not in a stadium or a television studio.

For more on Dylan: Bob Dylan Goes Twang Part Two and the Artists index. For more on The Band: The Band Goes Twang. Full Snapshots index.