The Impressions: People Get Ready
(recorded in Chicago, 1964)
Bob Dylan & the Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded Summer, 1967)
The Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded January 1968)
There was a lot of bumpkin fun happening in the basement of Big Pink in the summer of 1967, but what Bob Dylan and the Band wanted more than anything was to write songs as good as Curtis Mayfield’s. None came closer than “I Shall Be Released,” which borrows its minor chord changes and tragic candor from Impressions songs like “I Made A Mistake” and “See the Real Me.” Of course, “People Get Ready” provided the singular blueprint. Dylan had heaps of wild poetry, but Mayfield wrote songs like prayers. Bob wanted one like that.
Like “People Get Ready,” “I Shall Be Released” consists of three epigrammatic verses, and a declarative refrain. Though it pays tribute to Curtis Mayfield the song feels out the common ground between Dylan’s two favorite poets, Smokey Robinson and Doug Sahm. The weary tune is country-and-western, but its open wound is straight soul music.
In late 1967 the original 14-song acetate of The Basement Tapes was shelved when the clean, quiet John Wesley Harding was submitted as Columbia’s official follow-up to Blonde On Blonde. Still, Albert “The Greasy Bear” Grossman wasn’t about to forsake the profit potential of 14 unreleased Bob Dylan songs and he immediately started shopping the acetate around. Naturally, Grossman’s clients got first crack. Joan Baez celebrated the windfall with Any Day Now, an entire album’s worth of unreleased Dylan that showcased several Basement songs and borrowed the refrain from “I Shall Be Released” for its title. But it was The Band who crystallized the Basement commotion with Music From Big Pink. The group’s blissful and measured take on “I Shall Be Released” became the model for every subsequent rendition. Richard Manuel’s falsetto is a career performance, but The Band’s cosmic doo-wop is disturbingly pristine. In the Basement the song had an earthly aroma, but The Band's version is strangely odorless.
