Ain’t goin’ nowhere? Why not cover ‘The Basement Tapes’?
“Too much of nothing, can make a man ill at ease,” Bob Dylan sang on one of the beloved tracks on “The Basement Tapes,” the collection of rootsy songs he recorded with The Band in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1967.
Dylan, in the wake of his 1966 motorcycle spill, was doing his own little quarantine, retreating from fame and “spokesman of a generation” role he had quickly grown weary of as the ’60s became more psychedelic.
The songs “Too Much of Nothing,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Odds and Ends,” which has Dylan declaring, “Lost time is not found again,” resonated with Pittsburgh rocker Chet Vincent, who found a connection between our 2020 pandemic lockdown and Dylan’s offbeat classic. He began messing around with the songs, starting with an iPhone version of “Going to Acapulco.”
Vincent sent it to bassist and Big Bend bandmate Madison Stubblefield, who added some instrumentation on GarageBand. One thing led to another, and the result is “Goin’ Nowhere: The Basement Tapes Recorded in Quarantine,” a 26-song album by Famous Horses. That’s Vincent’s side project with Stubblefield, singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Rob Collier of Milwaukee and New York-based drummer Jason Bemis Lawrence. They’re joined by special guests Read Connolly on pedal steel and dobro and Ryan Booth on sax.
“In the middle of April, we kind of realized we had a bunch of these songs done and the quarantine kept going, and it became apparent that wasn’t gonna stop,” Vincent says. “So we said, ‘Hey, why don’t we kind of do this home recording project, like for real, and see if we can do them all?’ It was just a chance to keep the creative juices flowing and have fun.”
Vincent says he never really had an “aha moment” with “The Basement Tapes.” He grew to appreciate the album’s relaxed, lo-fi weirdness and was inspired by the Jim James/Calexico cover of “Going to Acapulco” from the Dylan biopic “I’m Not There.”
Like James, Vincent brings a different vibe to the songs, with a high lonesome tenor well suited to Neil Young covers. Collier finds more of a middle ground between Dylan and, say, Levon Helm. Stubblefield steps in to narrate “Clothes Line Saga,” the funniest song on the album, and Lawrence applies a melodic touch to “Ruben Remus” and “Katie’s Been Gone,” giving them a range of vocal sounds fitting for “The Basement Tapes.”
“Goin’ Nowhere” flows seamlessly with the proper carnival feel and a few unique touches, like the eerie Nick Cave vibe Vincent reached for on the heavily covered “This Wheel’s on Fire” and the Velvet Underground psych-rock flavor of “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread.” “Long Distance Operator,” done in “Highway 61” style, is also a departure, but it’s one they found Dylan himself taking in a rare 1965 live bootleg version.
It was Manfred Mann that made “Quinn The Eskimo (Mighty Quinn)” famous, but here it sounds more like the Byrds doing it, and J.J. Cale’s easy blues was an inspiration for “Yazoo Street Scandal.”
For the most part, they resisted the urge to fall into Dylan imitations.
“I don’t know that that was a conscious decision,” Vincent says. “But it’s like kind of just singing them as if they’re our songs. The fact that the songs have such an unfinished feel lends itself to doing something different.”
The album was recorded with Famous Horses 100% socially distanced. Lawrence, working in a New York apartment with a baby in tow, did his drum parts in separate pieces rather than playing the full kit. Vincent’s setup was with a field recorder, a couple of microphones and GarageBand — appropriately, in his basement.