IT IS 1967 and the Beatles have just released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which critics are hailing as the best pop album ever, the ultimate achievement in rock and roll. Bob Dylan is in the hospital recovering from his near fatal motorcycle accident. Someone has brought along a tape of the record for Dylan to listen to. Dylan listens for about 5 minutes, then snaps, "Turn that shit off."

He was right of course. Sergeant Pepper's was a product. Rock and roll had been carried away by technology, gimmicks, and easy immature sentiment. It had ceased to come from the heart and instead had evolved into a battle of who could outweird whom. (You may remember that Sergeant Pepper's was followed by Satanic Majesties Request, replete with 3-D cover, undoubtedly the nadir of the Stones' career.)

Dylan, in traction for six months, staring at the ceiling of his hospital room, must have wrestled with quite a few personal devils. When he had recuperated, he got together with his friends Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko, and headed down to the basement of their Big Pink home in Wood-stock, N.Y. where the tracks for The Basement Tapes were laid down.

These tapes have been circulated in various bootlegged packages for eight years. Why Dylan chose to release them now is not clear. Depending on which rumors you listen to, the Band was badly in debt, or Dylan decided that if the songs were coming out anyway, he could at least control the quality by releasing the songs himself. Another theory is that Dylan has relaxed, is less afraid of his public now, more willing to present a side of himself experimenting, having fun.

And that's what these tapes are all about. The opening cut, "Odds and Ends" is a good natured rocker, as Dylan acts the part of the abused homosexual lover:

Well I stand in the hall and I shake my face

You break your promise all over the place

You promised to love me but what do I see

Just you comin' here and spillin' juice over me...

The faithless lover is warned that "lost time is not found again," and that from now on he can "keep that juice to yourself."

The real treat of the album, however, for Dylan aficionados is the heretofore unrumored, un-bootlegged "Goin' to Acapulco." It is the lament of a somewhat aging rock star who can't get it up the way he used to, but that's o.k., he says, because Rosemary, his faithful groupie-girlfriend, will always be there to take care of him. "She puts it to me/Plain as day/And gives it to me for a song," he brags.

THE SONG IS a tour-de-force, a masterpiece of phrasing, word play, and narrative. When the singer claims in the chorus that he's "Going to Acapulco/Gonna have some fun," we no more believe him than we believed the narrator of "Idiot Wind" on Blood on the Tracks when he insisted that he'd been "double-crossed now/For the very last time/And now I'm finally free!" In each case, Dylan enunciates a single word so as to give us exactly the opposite impression from what the word actually means. The singer's not gonna have any fun at all in Acapulco, it's just an idea of a vacation that he's garnered from looking through too many magazines and watching T.V. commercials in too many motel rooms.

This same feeling of staleness, of mechanical existence, is conveyed in the phrasing of the opening lines of the third verse:

Now whenever I Get up and Can't find what I need...

He holds on to that single "I" for two beats, gives a long pause, continues, pauses again, and finally delivers with what's really bothering him. The key is in the pauses; it's the disconnectedness of the line that gives it its emotional body.