The American

In the case of Bob Dylan, it turns out you can get away with charging £120 for six CDs of 47-year-old material and still be congratulated for staging one of the cultural events of the year. You can get away with asking your big ticket price even when you know that dedicated fans acquired 80% of the 138 tracks long ago, sometimes, if illicitly, for absolutely nothing.

You can sit high in Amazon's top 100 music list with this 120-quid box of song, meanwhile, knowing that some of what you're selling would get the average busker hosed off the streets, that some of it would make an audiophile gibber, and that this isn't your first attempt - technically, it's the third - to release what other people long ago decided to call The Basement Tapes.

Those are not the usual criteria for a cultural event. Since nothing involving Dylan is uncomplicated, however, you could throw in the fact that for almost 47 years he has been airily or irritably dismissive of the tracks which appear as The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol 11. (A two-CD version at a normal price has also been made ­available, presumably for the faint-hearted.)

Asked about the cache by Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, Dylan said: "I don't even remember it. People have told me they think it's very Americana and all that. I don't even know what they're talking about."

They're talking again. Americana, a vague term for anything rooted in the country's musical origins, is one word being bandied around. Dylan is being given credit for having invented another of those "movements" beloved of critics and despised by the artist himself. The idea is that in those 138 tracks, as the Dylan observer Greil Marcus once put it, "certain bedrock strains of American cultural language were retrieved and reinvented".

That might be one aspect of the event. What has Dylan been if not a series of inventions and reinventions, personal and artistic? He has "retrieved" America's music time and again, whether in folk and political song, in rock, in country, in blues. Along the way, he has given us the phenomenon of the singer-songwriter. And one small matter: he has reinvented the art of song.

The Basement Tapes Complete might be the central cultural event of 2014, then, because the septuagenarian seems to encompass all. He seems to echo Mark Twain, who found himself wondering about his national identity while stuck in Europe in the 1890s. "Are you an American?" Twain asked himself. "No," came the faintly magnificent reply, "I am not an American. I am the American." To be both original and representative: it has been the ambition and curse of artists in Dylan's land from the start.

He doesn't make those claims, of course. He accepts medals, prizes and citations like a kid in a candy store; he is not - let's say - without vanity. He has had as much praise as any human has ever received. But he talks, when he does talk, as though the mystery of his art is best left alone. A ­technical discussion of this or that songwriter might engage his attention. The puzzle of Bob Dylan, he leaves to others.

It might be one reason - the small matter of genius aside - why he endures. His ability to survive for so long in a business built on transience and one-hit wonders might, meanwhile, explain why a collection of old songs has become an event. It is as though still another generation has realised, with a touch of awe, that this stuff, this pop music, really can last. It has become, as the critics might say, canonical.

Still there is no sign that Dylan much cares. Come to that, he didn't seem to care when making home recordings with the musicians who were to become The Band between March and October (or there-abouts) in 1967. If he dismissed the tracks afterwards, that might have been because he had paid little attention to their making while carousing and playing in two properties in Woodstock, New York State, in those months. Even with the benefits of 21st-century restoration, some of The Basement Tapes Complete remains pretty crude.

Dylan had completed a punishing world tour early in 1966. At the end of that July he had contrived to injure his neck badly after parting company with his motorbike. He had discovered that his manager, Albert Grossman, was making at least as much out of Bob Dylan as anyone. He was exhausted, probably shaking off drug abuse, and in no mood to resume his role as music's messiah. He certainly had no intention of making another album in a hurry.

His previous effort had been a little thing entitled Blonde On Blonde. Typically, it had been a revolutionary piece of work. Just as typically, the songs made "in the basement" bore few obvious resemblances to their predecessors. In one sense they formed a bridge between Blonde and the ascetic John Wesley Harding; in another, for all their roots in American tradition, they were like nothing Dylan had done before or would do again. That might be why he spent decades trying to ignore the episode.

That was a waste of time. Dylan, famously, has been bootlegged more often than any other artist. A few of the tracks recorded in 1967 launched that entire illicit industry in 1969. By 2001, those who cared enough could lay hands on a four-disc, 108-track, lavishly packaged "remastered" version of the basement sessions entitled A Tree With Roots. The only surprise is that Dylan and his record company waited so long to catch up.

But let's be honest. Official or contraband, many of the basement tracks are ramshackle, knockabout nonsense. A good number are cover versions of variable if sometimes fascinating quality. Dylan's own offerings are not always complete songs. There are misfires, alternative takes and mere sketches. If the artist had been forced to sit down and create a Bob Dylan release in 1967, the result would have been a double album, albeit one as good as anything he ever made.

That's not why The Basement Tapes Complete has entranced so many and become an event all these years later. That this is the entire, messy, unedited collection is the whole (in every sense) point. This, warts and all, was never intended for an audience. It was achieved unself-consciously, as though by inebriated magic. And Marcus was right: in there somewhere, amid the mistakes, larking around and old standards, is something of the essence of an America that America itself has forgotten.

By no coincidence, you strike that essence most often when the song is a Dylan song. I Shall Be Released, Tears Of Rage, Nothing Was Delivered, I'm Not There, This Wheel's On Fire, Too Much of Nothing: you can only wonder if such works will ever cease to be cultural events.