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.
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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.’
What is a pair of Chuck Taylors?
I looked down at my feet when I was at the eye doctor’s the other day. I was in a chair with a foot rest so the doctor could roll a stool up to look me in the eye. My shoes were closer than usual, and there wasn’t much else to look at. The shoes weren’t a pair!
You might think this is headed toward the joke in Pogo about the farmer who couldn’t tell his two horses apart until he measured them and found that the black one was a foot taller than the white one. (Good material never gets old.) No, they were both red high-top Chuck Taylors, a left and a right. One time when I was rounding up the strays from around the apartment I must have jumbled them up.
You have to look closely to see that the line on the curve on the front of the shoes isn’t the same. I can hear my mother: If you’re so smart, why don’t your shoes match.
I have one pair I think was in the window at the Army surplus store for 20 years before I offered to buy it. The fronts of those look as if they were designed for getting cockroaches in the corners–much longer and skinnier than any others I own. They are also sun-faded into a mellow red. No one has ever noticed those, either. Konrad Lorenz talked about babyness; me, I say there is red-high-top-Chuck-Taylorness, and so long as two shoes seem have it, everyone sees a pair.
converselyspeaking 