Category: Music

The Band (aka the Brown Album)

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.

Music from Big Pink

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.

More on Robertson and The Band

An obit today said he put out a record titled Contact from the Underworld of Redboy [a derogatory nickname for Robertson in his youth]. It contains snippets from an interview with Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist convicted of murder. I’ll look for it.

Also, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a blog of politics, academia, and culture, posted an item about Robertson shortly after he died. It ended with this recap: ‘The Band produced much great music in the late 1960s and early 1970s; by the time the farewell concert captured by The Last Waltz took place 47 (!) years ago, the group’s members were in the midst of squandering their talents in substance abuse, fights over money and songwriting credits, and other classic dysfunctions of those who can afford a rock and roll lifestyle.

‘Still, as Orwell once remarked, how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.’

Robbie Robertson died

Yesterday when I got the news I started to write a death notice. The angle I took was that he was the rare big star rocker who chose to fade away. He was on two great, successful albums in 1968 and ’69 as a member of The Band; he exited from rock and roll in 1976 in a big show filmed by Martin Scorsese; then he spent 40 years going out with a whimper scoring sound tracks. He famously said he didn’t want to travel playing old hits. The result, I thought, was that he saved some dignity but nobody was going to miss him. If one wasn’t 18 in 1969, you wouldn’t care.

Today I saw I Robertson’s obit started on the front page of the New York Times, then filled the last page of the front section. I clearly underestimated the continuing power of the folks who worship Bob Dylan. Dylan liked Robbie, even doing a star turn in The Last Waltz. Robertson got the big rock star treatment despite not having done much since Woodstock because in 1966 when a fan yelled ‘Judas’ at Dylan for performing with amplified instruments, Robbie did indeed play it fucking loud, as Dylan requested. It is an odd legacy. I have oodles more to share about Robertson and The Band.

December by George Winston

Winston died June 4. It took me a week to remember I had an album of his reviewed and in the queue. I thought the record was okay for solo piano. That is: no lyrics, no hooks to pull me in, and no sex and drugs to keep me interested. I had no idea it sold three million copies. Obviously other people liked it MUCH more than I did. Allmusic said December had ‘unparalleled—and undeniable—beauty. How can music be simultaneously stirring and soothing, relaxed and yet exalted?’ I think they gave it the same review I did, they just had to pretend they don’t prefer rock and roll to classical lite.

Records I’ve received from friends and relatives tend not to be what I prefer. When my buddy Sean died I inherited ‘December,’ for example, along with some pop gospel and old-fashioned folk music. When my in-laws downsized for the last time I got some jazz and showtunes I might not have chosen for myself. Time for me to get past my squeamishness and integrate these outsider records into my collection.

Billie Joe Day

It’s Billie Joe day.

No, not the Piano Man who didn’t start the fire, it’s the poor fellow who jumped from the Tallahatchie Bridge. Ode to Billie Joe was a hit in 1967, so if you were born since 1960 you probably don’t have a clue. It was a big hit for Bobbie Gentry. I liked it the first 10,000 times I heard it, but I got tired of it.

But every time it started the same: “It was the third of June, a sleepy, dusty Delta day.” There aren’t many songs that mention a specific day—Richmond fell on May 10 (plus or minus six weeks; James McMurtry says that songwriters are bound by meter and rhyme, not historical accuracy) and Papa stopped rolling on September third. Some songs feature the Fourth of July or Christmas Day. I’m keeping track. Hope not to be late to the party next time.

I was in the Delta in late March one year. Believe me, it was hot. It must be very sleepy by June.

William of Occam let me down

The simplest reason for Graham Nash, 81-year-old rocker about 50 years past his prime, to appear in stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker in the same week would have been his death. But you can’t always depend on the simplest explanation being the truth. Maybe I should have read the stories—turns out he is making a comeback. Man, old rockers make comebacks all the time—why should this be big news?

I really liked the Hollies, so I can say I cared about Carrie Anne and Carousel. Bus Stop is immortal. But later songs such as Marrakesh Express, Our House, Teach Your Children, Chicago/We Can Change the World, and Immigration Man (to name a few) run together in their mediocrity.

I remembered Stop, Stop, Stop was about a belly dancer. I looked it up—it’s a light-hearted tune about serial sexual assault. It’s no Stray Cat Blues, but I don’t imagine it gets much airplay today.

Gordon Lightfoot died

He was 86. I have two of his albums—The Way I Feel (notable for the Canadian Railroad Trilogy, which said the railroads were bad for the environment and worse for the indigenous Canadians) and Lightfoot, which has many good songs. He did First Time, by Ewan McColl, Changes, by Phil Ochs, Pride of Man, by Hamilton Camp, Early Morning Rain, and That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me. In Rich Man’s Spiritual, he said a dying rich man figures if he buys a long white robe, golden slippers, a smiling angel, and a poor man’s troubles he’d have checked all the boxes to get to heaven.

Lightfoot got long and positive reviews in his obituaries. I was afraid it would be all The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a six-minute song that was played to death on CKLW (which was always looking for Canadian content). I’d never stopped to realize how many good songs Lightfoot did.

Self Portrait

Bob Dylan

The first question: How can an artist who produced Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits put out this perfectly awful dreck a few years later? I thought the answer was that Columbia was in a dispute with Dylan about his earlier work that ultimately became the Basement Tapes. The record company put it out to embarrass Dylan and get some leverage. That might have been an urban legend at the time to shift the blame from Dylan. The explanation widely available these days on the innertubes is that Dylan was tired of being adored by his fans and put out crap—joke’s on you, record-buying public.

More questions: Why do I remember so little about it? I didn’t even remember it was a double-record set. Could I have left the second disk in the sleeve? Did I cut my losses and stop? It has my sister-in-law’s name on it. My guess is after she played it once, she gave it to her sister. My wife wouldn’t have wanted it either and made sure to mix it into my collection. It could be I never played it.

A Long Time Comin’

Mike Bloomfield founded the Electric Flag after he left the Butterfield Blues Band. The album came out in 1968. It opened with a snip of Lyndon Johnson’s speech of March 15, 1965, announcing he would send the Voting Rights Act to Congress. It was designed to end illegal barriers to the right to vote. The tape of Johnson started, “I speak tonight for the dignity of man,” Bloomfield hit a big chord, the audience laughed, and the band launched into ‘Killing Floor,’ by Howlin’ Wolf. When I first heard the song, I had no idea what it meant. I used the innertubes to figure out the singer is depressed about love gone bad, using ‘killing floor’ as a grisly metaphor. Wolf said he should have followed his first mind and quit his woman a long time ago. Nick Gravenites made it ‘listened to my second mind.’

The album had a version of Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee, a classic about drinking cheap fortified wine and getting into fights. There are many examples; I’ll point them out. Don’t know when wine’s image improved; in Super Freak in 1980 Rick James linked it with incense and candles in a freaky scene.