While Dylan was out of the public's eye during an extended period of recovery in 1967, he and the members of the Hawks recorded more than 100 tracks together, incorporating original compositions, contemporary covers, and traditional material.

For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music in the late sixties.

Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan's best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.

[4] From September 1965 to May 1966, Dylan embarked on an extensive tour across the US, Australia and Europe backed by the Hawks, a band that had formerly worked with rock and roll musician Ronnie Hawkins.

Dismayed by the negative reception, Helm quit the Hawks in November 1965 and drifted around the South, at one point working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

"[14] Rick Danko recalled that he, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson joined Robbie Robertson in West Saugerties, a few miles from Woodstock, in February 1967.

Biographer Barney Hoskyns observed that both the seclusion of Woodstock and the discipline and sense of tradition in the Hawks' musicianship were just what Dylan needed after the "globe-trotting psychosis" of the 1965–66 tour.

[38] Both Heylin and biographer Sid Griffin suggest that recording had to move from Dylan's home to Big Pink when it became clear that the sessions were getting in the way of family life.

[43] The same month, drummer Levon Helm rejoined his former bandmates in Woodstock, after he received a phone call from Danko informing him that they were getting ready to record as a group.

[44][a 3] In his autobiography, Helm recalled how he listened to the recordings the Hawks had made with Dylan and remembered that he "could tell that hanging out with the boys had helped Bob to find a connection with things we were interested in: blues, rockabilly, R&B.

"[46] In October 1967, a fourteen-song demo tape was copyrighted and the compositions were registered with Dwarf Music, a publishing company jointly owned by Dylan and Grossman.

[58] In January 1975, Dylan unexpectedly gave permission for the release of a selection of the basement recordings, perhaps because he and Grossman had resolved their legal dispute over the Dwarf Music copyrights on his songs.

According to Fraboni, four new songs by the Band were also recorded in preparation for the album's official release, one of which, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Going Back to Memphis", did not end up being included.

It poses Dylan and the Band alongside characters suggested by the songs: a woman in a Mrs. Henry T-shirt, an Eskimo, a circus strongman and a dwarf who has been identified as Angelo Rossitto.

[86] The review in The Washington Post declared, "He may perplex, irritate, and disappoint, but Dylan has to rank as the single greatest artist modern American pop music has produced.

[87] Robert Christgau, the poll's creator and supervisor, said the recordings sounded richer and stranger in 1975 than when they were made and concluded, "We don't have to bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975.

"[66] Barney Hoskyns describes "Heylin's objections [as] the academic ones of a touchy Dylanologist: The Basement Tapes still contained some of the greatest music either Dylan or the Band ever recorded.

[60] Although The Basement Tapes reached the public in an unorthodox manner, officially released eight years after the songs were recorded, critics have assigned them an important place in Dylan's development.

In place of that album's strangled urgency, Dylan adopts a laconic humor, a deadpan tone that speaks of resignation and self-preservation in the face of absurdity and betrayal.

[100] In his sleeve notes for the 1975 release of The Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus wrote, "What was taking place as Dylan and the Band fiddled with the tunes, was less a style than a spirit—a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention."

He compared the songs to fabled works of American music: "The Basement Tapes are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory ... they are no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train' or Robert Johnson's 'Love In Vain.

'"[69] In 1997, after listening to more than 100 basement recordings issued on various bootlegs, Marcus extended these insights into a book-length study, Invisible Republic (reissued in 2001 under the title The Old, Weird America).

Andy Gill writes, "Musically, the songs were completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the pop world, which during the long, hot summer of 1967 was celebrating the birth of the hippie movement with a gaudy explosion of 'psychedelic' music—mostly facile paeans to universal love draped in interminable guitar solos.

"[106] When the Band began work on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, in a New York studio in January 1968,[107] they employed a recording technique similar to the one they had become familiar with during The Basement Tapes sessions.

"[108] That technique influenced groups including the Beatles, writes Griffin, who calls their Twickenham Get Back sessions in early 1969 an effort to record "in the honest, live, no frills, no overdubs, down home way that the Hawks/Band did for The Basement Tapes".

Stuart Bailie wrote, "If rock'n'roll is the sound of a party in session, The Basement Tapes were the morning after: bleary, and a bit rueful but dashed with emotional potency.

[114] Hip hop group Public Enemy referenced the album in their 2007 Dylan tribute song "Long and Whining Road": "From basement tapes, beyond them dollars and cents / Changing of the guards spent, now where the hell the majors went?

[64] In 1968, the Band re-recorded "This Wheel's on Fire", "Tears of Rage", "I Shall Be Released" and "Caledonia Mission" in studios in New York and Los Angeles for Music From Big Pink.

[123] On March 31, 2009, Legacy Records issued a remastered version of the original 1975 Basement Tapes double album, which critics praised for its improved sound quality.

[79][129] According to reviewer Scott Hreha, there was "something about the remastering that makes it feel more like an official album—the earlier CD version's weak fidelity unfairly emphasized the 'basement' nature of the recordings, where it now possesses a clarity that belies its humble and informal origins.