Autumn of the Band Part III: Music From Big Pink

Now we are finally at the albums by The Band proper. Music From Big Pink is less a record than a talisman or symbol, far larger than the sum of its parts, which are pretty great to begin with. According to the legends, hearing this music prompted Eric Clapton to break up Cream and form the rootsier Derek and the Dominoes. George Harrison met The Band and had a similar road to Damascus moment, leading The Beatles to "get back" to simpler music. Beyond those verified legends, the Stones also took a rooty direction with Beggar's Banquet after the flower power of Their Satanic Majesties Request. Fairport Convention drew deeper from the well of the English folk tradition with Liege and Lief. Dylan himself, who had been there in the pink house too, went country with Nashville Skyline. Big Pink hit the late-60s rock scene upside the head by favoring murder ballads and downhome harmoies over the phased drums and hippy-dippy love songs of the reigning psychedelia. Much as punk banished prog rock to the margins and grunge killed hair metal, Big Pink spoke to an inchoate desire for less affected, more authentic music. 

Music From Big Pink stands as one of the most important and influential albums ever. It's also pretty damn good. While it often gets credit as the origin of "roots rock" I realized on this listening that it just doesn't sound like anything else, much less old timey American music. Much of this is down to Hudson's organ, which is the true MVP of this album. The most virtuosic of The Band's members was also the most experimental, and what he plays does not sound like psychedelia, soul, country, or jazz, but like a singular genre no one else can play. "This Wheel's On Fire" gets a creepy, otherwordly feel from these sounds, for example. "In A Station"'s shimmering keyboards are hypnotizing. The electro riff Hudson puts on "The Long Black Veil" elevates it from a country cover to something more interesting entirely. Fittingly, Garth gets the spotlight on "Chest Fever," his organ sounding like Bach if he had spent a couple of years in New Orleans. It's so overtly muso that it almost becomes an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer song before stepping back and letting the rest of the band groove. 

That groove is key. The Band brought the roll back to rock and roll, which you would expect from a bunch of guys who spent years getting paid to get the punters out on the floor to shake their asses. The groove is there even on the sadder songs like "Long Black Veil." Robbie Robertson's guitar has the Chicago blues' ghost of electricity in it, but there are none of the self-indulgent pyrotechnics of the likes of Clapton and Hendrix. None of the songs are the kind of up-tempo ravers they reeled off with Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan, however. They are profound, mysterious, like messages from another world. These songs emerged amidst the tumult of 1968, but only speak to them elliptically. "Tears of Rage" references the state of the nation, but more the feeling of things being unsettled, rather than the events themselves. The same goes for "I Shall Be Released." a song about injustice, a topic of much discussion then, that universalizes the plea of the poor prisoner singing the song. 

In spite of themselves, The Band managed to write one hippy anthem, "The Weight," due to its use in Easy Rider. I think this song is why people assume this album is the wellspring of roots rock, since it's the most country, with the famous harmony vocals rough-hewn and full of Gospel flourishes. Most people today don't know The Band, and if they did, it'd be through this song. It is a glorious song, one made for campfire singalongs and dive bar juke boxes both. There's good reasons for its endurance. It also signals the direction the group will take on their next record, which to me is in fact the real beginning of "roots rock." 

I think the key to this album can be found in its interior gate-fold. On the one side there's a picture of the group in black and white wearing beards and hats in a look that I heard someone describe as "Appalachian rabbi." These are not people conforming to the love beads and Nehru jacket fashions of the time. On the other side is a picture of the band members with their families, including their parents. In the time of "don't trust anyone over 30" this was a pretty radical move. What's especially interesting to me is that this iconography is wedded to truly innovative music. By calling on the past, The Band found the future. It's quite a magic trick, one that might be useful in our own confused time of turmoil. 

Rating: Five Levons (out of five) 

Autumn of the Band Part II: Dylan's Gunslingers

The Band's story is one that makes me think about the role of fate in the universe. The Hawks were a crack rock and roll band of the old school, ripping it up at dive bars and jook joints from Dallas to Toronto. They were precisely not the kind of band that emerged from The Beatles' revolution. They spawned garage bands from coast to coast of young men trying to imitate the mop tops and the more rough and rowdy Rolling Stones. By 1967 this had morphed into psychedelia, which Richard Manuel commented on hilariously in The Last Waltz as a time with groups with names like "Chocolate Subway" and "Marshmallow Overcoat." One can imagine a universe where The Hawks just faded away, relics of the pre-rock era rock and roll talked about by record collectors who might note that this Robertson guy who played on some killer obscure Ronnie Hawkins records went on to be a session man. Or a kid in Ontario may have discovered that his high school music teacher Mr Hudson was once a rock and roller. 

That didn't happen. Instead, the hand of fate came down in the form of Bob Dylan, who chose The Hawks to be his backing band for his tour in 1966. Dylan had famously gone electric, apparently giving in to the post-Beatles shift to rock (not rock and roll) music and abandoning the folk religion. That at least was the narrative of a certain subset of butthurt folkies who loom a bit too large in the memory of the event. What really happened was that Dylan was already shifting his songwriting away from folk into more personal and I would daresay poetic territory, even if he still strummed an acoustic guitar and blew into a harmonica. He was going to make music in a rock band format that was going to go way beyond what it had done so far. 

On the '66 tour he played an acoustic set followed by an electric set, which the aforementioned sect of aggrieved folkies detested and even booed. It was a whole lot of mishagas and Hawks drummer and de facto leader Levon Helm pulled out of the tour, not wanting to put up with it. The rest of the band drew on Canadian stoicism and soldiered on. You can hear the results in the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series, a famous show in Manchester that had been erroneously labelled as being from the Royal Albert Hall in London. If you were to ask me about my favorite Bob Dylan album, I would tell you that it's the second, electric disc from this release. Dylan and the Hawks play with both abandon and precision, rocking harder and louder than what just about anyone would have heard at the time. "She Acts Like We Never Have Met" is not a Dylan classic on the record, but here it rips and snarls. "Tell Me Mama" rollicks like a runaway train. The sneer behind "Ballad of a Thin Man" cuts sharper knowing that Dylan is directing it straight at members of his own audience who think him a Judas. Someone in fact famously yells that accusation (which you can hear on the album) right before Dylan turns to the band, tells them "playing fucking loud man" and they tear into a monumentally percussive version of "Like A Rolling Stone." Those folkies didn't know they were messing with some rock and roll gunslingers who had played some of the toughest clubs in North America. 

Relistening to the "Royal Albert Hall" show again I found myself even more impressed with it. I also thought of the role of fate. Dylan could have chosen any number of backing bands, many that have fallen into obscurity since. Somehow I don't think any of them would have worked as well as The Hawks. They were steeped in the older musical traditions, the ones Dylan had been drawing on his whole musical life. Hearing Rick Danko's high lonesome backing vocals I just don't think any other group could have worked out as well. In 1966 the meeting of Dylan and The Hawks was a world-historical bit of kismet, like Paul McCartney being the Liverpool bloke that John Lennon happened to meet and make music with. 

Even if The Hawks had never become The Band, they would have thus written a page in rock history. They ended up making a bigger impact with Dylan not by taking the stage and daring his audience to hate them, but by recording songs in their basement in upstate New York while Dylan was taking a break from the spotlight in Woodstock in 1967 after the tour in 1966 almost killed him. It was here that Dylan and The Band's shared expertise in the forms of American music really came together. Their basement recordings were bootlegged and circulated at a time when Dylan had taken a step back from the ground-breaking glories of his trio of albums from 1965-1966. The Basement Tapes are quite a thing to listen to, a combination of covers and Dylan songs far more elliptical and even silly than what he had done up to this point. The epic, logorrea of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" had been replaced by relatively terse trifles like "Santa Fe" and "Quinn, The Eskimo." "Clothes Line Saga" funnily parodies/references the Gothic horror of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" while "Lo and Behold" takes us to a Mark Twain universe of shysters and ramblers. The Basement Tapes are such a rich text that Greil Marcus wrote a whole book about them that I consider one of if not his best (I read it when it was called Invisible Republic, not The Old Weird America.) 

For this blog I re-listened to the entire officially released six disc set, which I own because I am a weirdo like that. (Although a friend did burn CD copies of his bootlegs for me back in the 2000s.) This time around it was interesting to hear the primitive nature of the early recordings and covers, and slowly find The Band and Dylan figuring out an entirely new path in American music by drawing on its deepest wellsprings. It starts mostly with covers, with the lonesome "Still in Town" among my faves, along with the Johnny Cash covers like "Big River" and "Folsom Prison Blues." There's folk classics too, like "Ol' Roisin the Beau." It's a whole lot of fun, the fun you might have just hanging out with friends and banging out old favorites on guitar, like some of my happiest evenings in my 20s in grad school. Things get really wacky on stuff like "See You Later Allen Ginsburg," but there's also heartfelt beauty like the epic "The Sign on the Cross." 

I am not giving this album a ranking as a "Band" album because Levon Helm did not join up with them again until late 1967, after completing these recordings with Dylan. It's not the true Band sound without Levon on drums. Richard Manuel would often play drums in a delightfully ramshackle way that I think Greil Marcus described once as a "shopping cart with a broken wheel." (If you can't tell, Manuel is my favorite.) Levon also doesn't play on the 1966 tour, and you can hear it. Mickey Jones eagerly bashes the shit out of his kit, and in the context of that tour and its alienation of its audience, it makes sense. However, Helm played the drums with a kind of light, loving touch that would give The Band a foundation more profound than the hard rockers of the day. 

I can't even imagine what impact the Basement Tapes bootlegs would have made at the time, coming amidst the countercultural explosion of 1967-68. According to the Dylan obsessives of the day, the Bobfather had withdrawn from his position as generational prophet (one he NEVER wanted) at a time when the hippie masses needed him most. Here the supposed savior is making silly songs disengaged from the headlines. I think his true prophecy was to understand that "the Sixties" were going to run out of gas, and that the Chocolate Subways and Marshmallow Overcoats of the day were going to be period curios, not lasting milestones. By partnering with The Band, he rediscovered the rich seam of American music that could sustain him for over another fifty years. Again, a true moment of the rare benevolence of the hand of Fate.

Next time I will finally get into The Band's first proper album, one that supposedly prompted Eric Clapton to break up Cream and ended up radically reshaping rock music. Appropriately, it would be named for the big pink house where the Basement Tapes were mostly recorded. 

Autumn of The Band Part One: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks

I have been neglecting this blog in favor of my Substack and part of the reason is that I use this space for pop culture stuff, but I have been getting that out of my system through multiple academic writing projects. To get back on track here I have decided to do one of my patented "listen throughs" of a classic rock artist. 

This summer, as I was driving home from a Southern trip and I decided to put on the entire Last Waltz show so I wouldn't have to futz with Spotify while trying to concentrate on the road. I hadn't listened to The Band for a long time, and I was suddenly reminded that there was a three year period in the 2000s where I was absolutely obsessed with them. There is something about them that inspires fervid conversion experiences, like Clapton hearing them and breaking up Cream because they exposed the emptiness of the en vogue psychedelia. I had also been fortunate this summer to spend time with old friends from those 2000s days who shared my love of the group. Since it's been awhile, I thought it was time to go back, both to The Band and the time in my life I associate with it. There's also the sad fact that with Garth Hudson's passing, all of the original members are dead.

Unlike my other listen-throughs, I am going to do this one mostly album by album, since The Band's catalog is not as huge as Dylan or Springsteen's. The first installments, about their days before their first proper album under the name of "The Band" will be exceptions. Albums will be rated from one to five Levons once I get there.

They started as The Hawks, playing with Arkansas rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins. The story is improbable, as Hawkins settled in Toronto and over time replaced his Arkansas band with local Canadian musicians (except for drummer Levon Helm.) The Band made some of the most quintessentially American music, but ironically, five out of the six members were Canadians. As a lover of Canada in a time when our president is threatening our relationship with that great nation, I think it's especially good to contemplate The Band.

I listened to Hawkins' first album, even though it was still the Arkansas players, just for context. He really rips it up on this record, which is a hidden gem in my book. I am a big fan of 1959's "Forty Days," his take on Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days." This is some real deal rockabilly from the piney woods of the "Natural State," not the watered down music that was beginning to cash in on and replace the harder-edged stuff that broke out of Memphis a few years before. 

After that first record (which was without The Band) it's hard to know which songs and albums had the whole compliment of The Band on them since different members joined at different times. Instead of trying to name them, I'd rather write about the general feel of the music. I've heard rockabilly described as up-tempo country-style hillbilly music with R&B singing over it, which makes sense with Hawkins' first record. On Mojo Man, which had a lot of Band participation, things are VERY bluesy. I find it striking because while The Band was obviously aware of the blues in their music, the first music with their name on it drew more from country. That in fact is what seemed to draw in other musicians in the late 60s, who had mostly been playing a hopped up version of Chicago blues music. It's as if The Band already went through their blues phase before anyone else got there. 

The Hawkins records, which I do really enjoy, are a reminder that The Band were not of the British Invasion, nor were they of the legions of garage bands that formed in the wake of The Beatles and Rolling Stones. They predated both, but like The Beatles they cut their teeth playing in rough clubs to rough customers. It makes sense that they would seemingly come out of left field in 1968 with Music From Big Pink because they had been woodshedding far from the mainstream. Even though their music in that time sounded nothing like the raw early rock n' roll they cut with Hawkins, it had the same uncompromising spirit. 

That spirit meant that the Hawks would have to leave Hawkins' nest and fly. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.) They would really make a name for themselves playing with Bob Dylan, but before then managed to cut a 45 for Atco with "The Stones I Throw" on the A side and "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)" on the flipside back in 1965. The A side seems to be a song in favor of civil rights, and it's dominated by a heavy organ from Garth and muscular singing from Rick Danko. The B side is less hooky but better, a funky groovy number that sounds like a lost track from the Stax vaults. Danko gives it the appropriate level of sweat. This sounds nothing like their later music, but crucially, it also does not sound like Ronnie Hawkins, either. 

You can hear in their early music why Dylan would have chosen them to be his backing band on tour in 1965. If he was going to enrage the folkies by going electric, best to do it with a bunch of guys who could really play some hardcore, gut bucket music and knew how to survive a hostile audience. The angry folkies were child's play next to the kind of people who showed up to Jack Ruby's burnt-out club in Dallas. 

Next time I will write about those famous live shows, along with the "Basement Tapes" recorded with Dylan.