These might literally be the basement tapes.
Back when Bob Dylan was a teenager named Robert Zimmerman growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, he and his guitar-playing pal Ric Kangas laid down a few tracks in 1959 using Kangas' reel-to-reel tape recorder.
And Kangas can now consider himself lucky that he didn't toss the tape of their jam sessions, because three songs sung by Dylan and another featuring him on guitar are expected to fetch about $100,000 when the recording is auctioned off early next month in Dallas.
Kangas told Hibbing's Daily Tribune that he kept the music stored in a suitcase and didn't listen to it for years until he found a machine that would play his old-fashioned tape at a garage sale in California. After listening to the Dylan recording, Kangas told a musician friend about it, a guy who happened to know Dylan's business manager, Jeff Rosen.
Although skeptical at first, Rosen eventually listened to the tape and the music ended up being featured in Martin Scorsese's Grammy-winning 2005 Dylan documentary, No Direction Home.
"A lot of people saw the documentary and started asking about it," Kangas, who has since made a more tech-savvy copy of the '50s-era recording, told the Tribune. "I had no idea it was this important. It turns out these songs are some of the earliest songs Bob had recorded on tape."
The original tape will be sold Oct. 6 and 7 via a combined online and floor auction held by Heritage Auction Galleries. Dylan takes lead vocals on the songs "I Got Troubles," "I Got a New Girl" and "The Frog Song," so-called by Kangas because of Dylan's soon-to-be trademark craggy singing style. The "Like a Rolling Stone" purveyor then backs up Kangas on a tune called "I Wish I Knew."
Also up for grabs next month is Kangas' high school yearbook from his senior year, during which Dylan was a sophomore.
Dylan--prolific songwriter, poet, musician and taciturn American icon--declined to comment on either the sale or Kangas' discovery.
"He started to get confidence in himself as a songwriter, singer and performer," said Kangas, who has earned his keep as a musician, Hollywood stuntman and sketch artist. "One thing about Bob was he was always excited about things, particularly music. It was fun to be around someone so upbeat about the things he loved."
Well, we'd be upbeat, too, if we could pen tunes like Dylan. At 65 the singer-songwriter topped the charts for the first time in 30 years with his latest album, Modern Times, which has received smashing reviews, despite a smattering of concern making the rounds that Dylan pilfered some Civil War-era poetry in writing his lyrics.
But Leigh Smith, an English professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, does not see plagiarism when comparing Dylan's words ("In the dark I hear the night birds call; I can hear a lover's breath; I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall; sleep is like temporary death") to the 19th-century work of South Carolina journalist Henry Timrod ("Which, ere they feel a lover's breath; lie in a temporary death").
"Dylan is not stealing," Smith told the university's Stroud Courier newspaper in an article investigating the Dylan-Timrod connection. "He is simply appropriating ideas in a way of expression. From the comparisons that I have seen, he is not using the material in the same context as Timrod."
What Dylan did borrow was the cover art from alt-rock band Luna's 1995 single Hedgehog/23 Minutes in Brussels, with both discs utilizing Ted Croner's 1947 photograph "Taxi, New York at Night." Dylan's graphic artist told Entertainment Weekly, however, that he was not aware of Luna's work when he chose to illustrate Modern Times' sleeve with a blurry cityscape.