I SHALL BE RELEASED
“I Shall Be Released” is a 1967 song written by Bob Dylan. The Band recorded the first officially released version of the song for their 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. Dylan recorded two primary versions. The first recording was made in collaboration with the Band during the “basement tapes” sessions in 1967, and eventually released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 in 1991. Dylan recorded the song a second time (with a significantly different arrangement and altered lyrics, and accompanied by Happy Traum) in 1971, releasing this new version on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II. (More from Wikipedia)
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me. To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain't Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them.
What attracted the most attention on Great White Wonder were seven songs recorded by Bob Dylan with the Band, probably at a house called Big Pink that is referenced in the name of the debut album released by the Band, Music from Big Pink (1968). They are clustered mostly on Side 4 and also include the last two songs on Side 2; in order (as listed on the Great White Wonder labels), they are “Mighty Quinn”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Richard!”, “Too Much of Nothing”, “Nothing Was Delivered”, and “Tears of Rage”. All great songs, no question; but this was barely a quarter of the music, and many people seem to think that the earlier acoustical songs that I loved equally well didn’t matter. I have never felt that way myself; Great White Wonder is great from one end to the other to these ears.
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Finally, I dare say that anyone buying The Basement Tapes would have expected, at a minimum, to hear those seven basement-tape songs from Great White Wonder; but the album came up short in that regard also. Only five of them are on The Basement Tapes, amazingly; “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” and “I Shall Be Released” are omitted from the 1975 album. To be sure, they both had previously been included in the 1971 Bob Dylan retrospective album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II.
(September 2017)
