The song is deeply moving, and yet not depressing, The singer is adept at finding earthy expressions of his sexual appetites, as when he refers to "getting something quick to eat/I'm just the same as anyone else/When it comes to scratching for my meat..." or later when he wryly informs us that

Well everytime you know when the well breaks down

I just go pump on it some

Rosemary, she likes to go big places

And just sit there and wait for me to come...

"Tears of Rage" is a song with a much broader scope; certainly it is the most effective rock and roll song to deal with the problem of parents estranged from their children. At a time when the Beatles were singing the baual "She's Leaving Home," the point of which was that parents have to give more than money to their children, Dylan was penning the rock equivalent of King Lear:

Oh what dear daughter 'neath the sun

Would treat a father so

To wait upon him hand and foot, yet always answer no...

Again, as in "Goin' to Acapulco," Dylan is acting a part, and there is no actor anywhere better than Bob Dylan. When he asks rhetorically "Why am I always the one who must be the thief?" his voice seeps with the bitterness of a father cast as a villain when all he ever intended was love.

The father's faults shine through despite himself. He is manipulative, self-righteous and overbearing. But it is Dylan's genius that we can understand, even sympathize with, the father's obviously genuine suffering.

"Clothes Line Saga" is an interesting idea that doesn't work very well. A typical day at a rural residence frames a report by a neighbor that "the vice-president's gone mad." Vice president of what we never find out, which is the point. No one shows real interest in the news. Mama sighs "I guess there's nothing we can do about it," and resumes doing her laundry. The song ends nicely with the narrator saying, "and I shut all the doors" but it goes on too long and becomes boring instead of conveying the boredom of rural life.

Several different recordings of "Too Much of Nothing" were made at these sessions, but there are others available on bootlegs better than the one Dylan chose to release on this album. Dylan is most effective when he sings against the grain of the instrumentation, as in "I Want You" from Blonde on Blonde where he rarely hits the same notes as the melody line. (This partly explains why nobody sings Dylan songs like Dylan; Joan Baez, for instance, seems obsessed with proving to us that she can hit every note when she's supposed to, not understanding, as does Dylan, that one's voice can be played off the melody in counterpoint). But on this version, the power of his voice is absorbed by The Band's crescendo on the last two lines of each verse. It seems like a bad choice of takes.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL MOOD of The Basement Tapes falls somewhere between the existential anguish of Blonde on Blonde and its moral resolution on John Wesley Harding. Dylan has gone beyond those visions of Johanna which kept him up past dawn.

There are all these songs on the tapes about "nothing," as if, in those months, lying on the hospital bed, Dylan had pursued his quest for Johanna, and, not finding her, had meditated upon the results of his failed search--was he worse off or better off than before?