Month: August 2023

The Band (album) by The Band (group), using a name that applies to every rock band. Folks didn’t think much of keeping names straight back before there were databases. Fleetwood Mac put out two albums named Fleetwood Mac, for example, and it is hard to track a singer named ? and a band named X. Any album review for AC/DC or Three Dog Night, say, refers to the band—you can’t find this record with a full-text search with Word. Life was different.

This was my favorite record for years—it’s hard to remember for how long now, I didn’t keep a diary of my rankings. I decided it was better than Music From Big Pink, and better than Moondance and Let It Bleed. I had impossibly high standards for double records so I thought it was better than Exile on Main Street. My Aim is True and Some Girls slipped by it in the late ’70s. I got old and liked American Beauty.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a great song. Like most effective communication, it says a few important things and leaves out a lot. It tells the story of the U.S. Civil War in less than four minutes. The South lost, the people who didn’t die had it hard, the leaders who started it were lying to the plain folks. They surely had no right to take the very best. Four Canadians and a guy from Arkansas said it well.

Levon Helm’s vocals and drumming help make the record great. I don’t want to overdo the praise for the group: I heard The Band twice in concert, I think, before I figured out they weren’t at all expressive. They sounded exactly like their records—played the same songs the same way. I realized I could stay home and play the records loud and save $4 (about $33.33 today). I remember they did “Don’t Ya Tell Henry”–I was thrilled to get that crumb. Robbie Robertson put out a remastered record with their Woodstock appearance about five years ago; they murdered Marvin Gaye 15 years before his dad did.

Back to the discussion: How can a record with the lyric “my horse Jethro, he went mad” be anything but country? After this listening, I am sure this is rock and roll. The Band sang about the country using rock and roll. [Just listen to the guitar.] If Rod Stewart sang this, it would be no more country than “Maggie May” (and it wouldn’t be nearly as good as The Band’s version).

I thought half of the songs were about sex, but I guess it’s just “Across the Great Divide,” “Rag Mama Rag,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Jemima Surrender,” and “Unfaithful Servant”–merely 42 percent. I will never figure out the lyrics to “Jawbone”–I’m a thief and I dig it, I’m up on a ? Not beef, I don’t think, but the lyrics sites have it. Not many songs have “chain lightning” in their lyrics.

The Band is down to Garth Hudson now, Robbie Robertson having died this week. I want to make two points about the group to people who didn’t listen to them at their peak: They made a big difference in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and they were a rock band that played in a country style, not a country band.

Music from Big Pink (in Ohio in 1968, we thought that Big Pink was the name of the band; Pink Floyd members might think that was funny) and The Band (their second record) were positive and unifying when everything else was falling apart. Country music was “Okie from Muskogee.” Rock and roll was “We are the forces of chaos and anarchy” and “Anastasia screamed in vain.” Rock and rollers visiting people who listened to country music ended with the shootings in Easy Rider. And The Band sang “We can talk about it.” A friend who used LSD in those days said he would play Music From Big Pink when he was coming down from a trip because The Band had been in dark places and made it back. Those records were a positive force when nothing else was. Even the plain photo of real people on the inside spread of the record cover was a positive statement.

I have heard that kids these days make faces when they hear old-timers praise The Band. It’s a country band, they say, and Helm’s manure-tinged twang and Manuel’s falsetto just get on their nerves. The band sings about milking a cow—not only country but also from the 1930s. But listening to it now I say this album has Dylan tunes, horns, at least eight bars of syncopation, and the wild organ of “Chest Fever”—clearly rock. The vocals for “and (and) (and)” in “The Weight”–not country. Some of it might even be pop–”Caledonia Mission.” Don’t know how many songs have “hexagram” in the lyrics, by the way.

Friends once said that the singer in “Long Black Veil” is a sap—he’d be better off saying he slept with his best friend’s wife and being alive. I think I’d generalize that one shouldn’t engage in behavior that one wouldn’t use as an alibi for murder.