Dylan and Band emerge from the basement

It's the most famous room in the annals of pop music, its history equal parts legend and truth. In the decades since its use as a rehearsal space, this subterranean refuge has become known as the birthplace of some of America's most examined (non-Paris-Hilton-sex, non-Watergate) tapes.

The Basement Tapes. Many of a certain generation know the basics: in and around Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan and his then-backing band, the Hawks, converged to create stripped-down, defiantly un-psychedelic artistic magic. As the story goes, while recuperating from a motorcycle crash and starting his life as a husband and father of two, Dylan and his compadres, who soon rechristened themselves the Band, crafted a mysterious vessel on more than 40 reels of tape that have since become sacred texts of sorts.

The most famous of these works are well known: This Wheel's on Fire, I Shall be Released, Tears of Rage, Sign on the Cross, I'm Not There, Lo and Behold. Many were traded on the underground circuit through the decades: as whispers on poorly mastered bootleg albums starting with Great White Wonder from 1969, on hissy cassettes, duped CDs and voluminous megabytes.

But until a few weeks ago, the full set has never been officially issued. But now, nearly 50 years after Band keyboardist Garth Hudson started setting up recording gear, Columbia/Legacy's new six-CD set The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol11 gathers everything the group recorded from February through December 1967, more than 100 songs or fragments. A two-CD volume collects highlights.

Taken as a single seven-hour-plus narrative told in music, the recordings bear witness to the birth of a new Dylan, one for whom songs are restless creations that gain strength with each new interpretation. At the same time, the set time-stamps the moment when the most important American musician of the 1960s vanished from New York City to a place a train ride away in the Catskills.