The Basement Tapes is a studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and the Band, released on June 26, 1975 by Columbia Records. It is Dylan's sixteenth studio album. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at houses in and around Woodstock, New York, where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release.

During his world tour of 1965–66, Dylan was backed by a five-member rock group, the Hawks, who would subsequently become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, four members of the Hawks gravitated to the vicinity of Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was concealed from the public's gaze during an extended period of convalescence in 1967, they recorded more than 100 tracks together, comprising original compositions, contemporary covers and traditional material. Dylan's new style of writing moved away from the urban sensibility and extended narratives that had characterized his most recent albums, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, toward songs that were more intimate and which drew on many styles of traditional American music. While some of the basement songs are humorous, others dwell on nothingness, betrayal and a quest for salvation. In general, they possess a rootsy quality anticipating the Americana genre. For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music in the late sixties. The cover photograph for the 1975 album was taken by designer and photographer Reid Miles in the basement of a Los Angeles YMCA. It poses Dylan and the Band alongside characters suggested by the songs: a woman in a Mrs. Henry T-shirt, an Eskimo, a circus strongman and a dwarf who has been identified as Angelo Rossitto. Robertson wears a blue Mao-style suit, and Manuel wears a U.S. Air Force uniform.  Michael Gray has identified musicians David Blue and Neil Young in the photo.  Others have claimed that Young was not in the photo.

Track Listing [320k MP3]

    "Odds and Ends" – 1:47
    "Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)" (Richard Manuel) – 3:39
    "Million Dollar Bash" – 2:32
    "Yazoo Street Scandal" (Robbie Robertson) – 3:29
    "Goin' to Acapulco" – 5:27
    "Katie's Been Gone" (Manuel, Robertson) – 2:46
    "Lo and Behold" – 2:46
    "Bessie Smith" (Rick Danko, Robertson) – 4:18
    "Clothes Line Saga" – 2:58
    "Apple Suckling Tree" – 2:48
    "Please, Mrs. Henry" – 2:33
    "Tears of Rage" (Dylan, Manuel) – 4:15
    "Too Much of Nothing" – 3:04
    "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" – 2:15
    "Ain't No More Cane" (Traditional) – 3:58
    "Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)" – 2:04
    "Ruben Remus" (Manuel, Robertson) – 3:16
    "Tiny Montgomery" – 2:47
    "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" – 2:42
    "Don't Ya Tell Henry" – 3:13
    "Nothing Was Delivered" – 4:23
    "Open the Door, Homer" – 2:49
    "Long Distance Operator" – 3:39
    "This Wheel's on Fire" (Danko, Dylan) – 3:52