![]() ![]() There were no guitar solos, just winding songs that filled the American landscape with quasi-religious folk parables and wanderers, in a sound that was at once timeless yet new. ![]() ![]() Like The Velvet Underground & Nico, it probably helps if you were there, but the lack of pretense, the slowness, the sense that this was a group of people listening to each other, blending instruments and voices, made it unlike anything else going on. The record has gone down as one of the most influential rock albums of all-time. Picked up by Dylan's manager, The Band was signed by Capitol Records in 1968, leading to their first album, Music From Big Pink, in July of that year. The recordings made there have long since been known as "The Basement Tapes," while around this same time, The Band became known officially as The Band. When Bob Dylan was looking for a band to back him on his first electric tour, he reached out to them, and a legend was born.Īlthough they only played on one Dylan studio release-the minor hit "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"-they accompanied him for his infamous world tour of 1966 (minus Helm, who didn't enjoy being booed), where they all but invented the modern rock sound they also stuck with Dylan after the tour when they all moved to Woodstock (with Helm back in the fold) and dabbled in the bottomless still water pool of American folk music in the basement of their ugly pink house, lovingly called Big Pink. Eventually, The Band struck out on their own as The Hawks and earned a reputation as one of the hardest and toughest blues-and-R&B-based rock bands of the pre-Beatles era, playing an endless string of one-night stands up and down the coasts. He went up with drummer Helm and, as his fellow Arkansas musicians drifted back down South, he replaced them with The Band That Would Be The Band. They began as the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins, a minor rockabilly singer who figured out that while he may be one in a million in America, in Canada, he was the only game in town. The Band's music is a sweep that takes in the whole of rock and roll music. No wonder they got away with calling themselves The Band. Helm is one of rock's finest and most thoughtful drummers Danko's bass had a lilting, slippery sound that was the sonic equivalent of a paintbrush swishing its way across a canvas Manuel's piano could be a Saturday night honky-tonk or a Sunday morning church service, pounding straightforward chords or adding lovely embellishments Robertson's guitar often darted around the other instruments, sometimes blending back with chords and sometimes taking a brief spotlight with a stinging solo Hudson was everywhere at once, his organ (and/or horns, accordion, keyboards, etc.) textures hanging like tapestries in the background, coloring the songs in ways that could only be felt. Technically, they are only 1/5th American-drummer Levon Helm is from Arkansas, while guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and organist Garth Hudson are all from The Great White North-but it doesn't matter more than any other band, The Band has been able to define that quintessentially American sound, that quintessentially American idea, better than anyone else this side of Bob Dylan, who was their early collaborator and, one imagines, American spiritual mentor.Īs an outfit, The Band is both classic yet distinct-no other group in popular music can nail the way the way in which they could sound so simultaneously loose and tight. I've been listening to The Band ever since. I have long considered it "The Great American Novel" of rock and roll. So I went to the most American place I knew in rock music: The Band's self-titled second album. Elvis was too big bands of people I knew personally were too small. Bob Dylan was too omnipresent in my life, he was more like a constant than a place to which I could retreat. Punk rock was too harsh and the best of the political stuff was British. I need an America that I could hold close, a refuge, a place that felt like home, an America I could crawl into. ![]()
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