Two months before he went to Nashville to record John Wesley Harding, Bob Dylan spent some time in the basement of his upstate New York home. There he made a rough but very listenable tape with thirteen songs.

There is enough material — most all of it very good — to make an entirely new Bob Dylan record, a record with a distinct style of its own. Although it is highly unlikely that Dylan would want to go into the studio to record material that is now seven or eight months old, nonetheless these tapes could easily be re-mastered and made into a record. The concept of a cohesive record is already present.

Whatever the original intention of the session, what happened was that Dylan and his band made a demo, a collection of songs vaguely arranged and fitted to instrumentals, for other artists to audition to see if they would like to record any of the material. One of the songs on the tape — "Quinn the Eskimo" or "The Mighty Quinn" — reached the top position on radio surveys in a version by the English group Manfred Mann. Another of them, and one of the best — "This Wheel's On Fire" — has just been released in England in a version by British vocalist Julie Driscoll and organist Brian Auger. Their version is supposed to be quite good and will probably be released shortly in the United States.

The group backing Dylan on this tape is called the Crackers. Formerly they were the Hawks. The band, which lives with Dylan at his home, consists of Levon Helm on drums, Rick Danko on bass and Robbie Robertson on guitar. They accompanied him at Carnegie Hall for the recent Woody Guthrie Memorial program. Robbie Robertson has been working with Dylan for the past three years.