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.
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