In accordance with guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson, The Band’s identify was a sensible alternative. “When we were working with Bob Dylan and we moved to Woodstock, everybody referred to us as ‘the band,’” Robertson recalled in The Final Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary about The Band’s farewell live performance. “He called us the band, our friends called us the band, our neighbors called us the band.”
In fact although — and Robertson knew this higher than anybody — the band’s identify was an announcement; a daring declaration of expertise and musicianship that additionally spoke of a back-to-basics method at odds with the psychedelic fashions of the day.
The Band had been adequate to dwell as much as it. The 5 members — Rick Danko (bass, vocals, fiddle), Levon Helm (drums, vocals, mandolin — the one non-Canadian), Garth Hudson (keyboards, accordion, saxophone), Richard Manuel (vocals, piano, drums) and Robertson (guitar, backing vocals) — served their musical apprenticeship as The Hawks, Ontario-based rockabilly wildman Ronnie Hawkins’ backing band. Helm joined Hawkins’ band straight from highschool in 1958. Two years later, the then-15-year-old Robertson was recruited, adopted shortly after by Danko, who was a yr his senior. Manuel arrived in the summertime of 1961, and by the tip of that yr, Hudson was on board. The Hawks tore via golf equipment and dive bars, changing into a well-oiled rock ’n’ roll machine, however early in 1964, dissatisfied with their wages and feeling creatively held again, the Hawks handed Hawkins their discover.
Order The Band’s The Better of the Band on vinyl now.
They went it alone, first as The Levon Helm Sextet (that includes saxophonist Jerry Penfold), earlier than spells as The Canadian Squires and Levon & The Hawks, whereas touring as arduous as ever. Their huge break got here when Mary Martin — then working as an assistant to Bob Dylan’s supervisor Albert Grossman — really helpful The Hawks to Dylan, then looking out for an electrical backing band. In late 1965, The Hawks backed Dylan on his rambunctious single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and — besides Helm, who left to work on an oilrig — had been known as upon for the 1966 excursions of North America, Europe, and Australia. The reveals had been break up between Dylan solo acoustic units and thrilling electrical units, inflicting excessive reactions from factions of the viewers eager to see Dylan stay within the folks singer field he’d lengthy since outgrown.
In early 1967, The Hawks (nonetheless minus Helm) moved to Woodstock, the place Dylan was recuperating following a bike crash and on a scorching writing streak. Danko, Hudson, and Manuel lived in Large Pink, whereas Robertson lived close by along with his spouse. Finally, Helm was persuaded to rejoin his previous bandmates. Large Pink quickly doubled up as a basement and recording studio. Robertson instructed this author in 2019, “We had been simply having such a good time collectively and, as a result of we had this little tape machine, we had been capable of doc a number of the nice instances we had been having. A few of them had been achieved in jest and having enjoyable and a few had been recorded as a result of they turned out to be stunning songs.
“The lack of pressure was so wonderful; it’s such a rare thing to be able to feel something that is just about joy… We didn’t think that the majority of that music would ever be heard outside of the basement.”
Since then, each present minute of the music Dylan and The Band made within the basement has been launched and pored over by followers, whereas dozens of the songs that emerged from Large Pink have grow to be classics. What’s extra, the environment of heady creativity kickstarted a profession for The Band away from their mentor. From their 1968 debut album, Music From Large Pink, to The Final Waltz, The Band gave us a number of the defining music of their era. Right here’s our decide of their 20 finest songs.
20. This Wheel’s On Hearth (Music From Large Pink, 1968)
“I realised that Bob had been coming every day for six or seven days a week,” Rick Danko instructed MOJO’s Barney Hoskyns in 1995, reflecting on The Band’s early days in Woodstock. “If we were sleeping, he’d get us up, he’d make noise and make some coffee, or bang on the typewriter in the living room on the coffee table. Maybe 150 songs were composed in about a seven- or eight-month period.”
One of the enduring basement songs was the collaboration between Danko and Dylan, “This Wheel’s On Fire.” Danko recommended that he wrote the music and verse melody, Dylan contributed the lyrics, and so they wrote the refrain collectively — the tune’s ingenious use of diminished chords definitely backs up Danko’s declare. In the meantime, Dylan’s lyrics are without delay plain talking and unsettling — its verses carry a threatening tone, with the narrator reminding an unnamed accomplice of an inextricable (and maybe everlasting) bond, whereas the placing picture of the refrain (“This wheel’s on fire/Rolling down the road”) is loaded with biblical imagery. The basement model of “This Wheel’s On Fire” was a doomy nation shuffle, however The Band’s model, a spotlight of Music From Large Pink, quickens the tempo and ramps up Garth Hudson’s trippy organ sound to create an intoxicating environment, echoed by Danko’s more and more frantic-sounding vocals.
19. The Rumor (Stage Fright, 1970)
“It was a dark album, and an accurate reflection of our group’s psychic weather,” Levon Helm says of The Band’s third album, Stage Fright, in his 1993 autobiography This Wheel’s On Hearth. Nowhere was this extra obvious than “The Rumor,” a tune written by Robbie Robertson concerning the gossip spreading round Woodstock about members of The Band experimenting with arduous medicine. However regardless of being fuelled by paranoia, “The Rumor” was one of many album’s highlights, with sturdy vocal performances from Danko, Helm, and Manuel and probably the most satisfying grooves they’d decide to tape.
18. When You Awake (The Band, 1969)
The success of Music From Large Pink meant its follow-up was extremely anticipated. Eager to keep away from document label interference and craving for the informality of the basement, The Band took the then-radical step of constructing their very own studio. They spent a month organising a studio within the pool home of a mansion within the Hollywood Hills, as soon as owned by Sammy Davis Jr, whereas residing collectively in the principle home. Their instincts proved right; the ensuing self-titled album has a way of relaxed bonhomie they’d struggled to search out in an costly studio.
Nowhere is that this extra obvious than in Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel’s “When You Awake,” a countrified charmer in two components sung by Rick Danko. It begins with Robertson’s unhurried, informal guitar and an organ line from Garth Hudson that has the heat of early morning sunshine hitting your face. A narrative unfolds of a younger boy looking for recommendation from his grandfather. “It’s about someone who passes something on to you, and you pass it on to someone else,” Robertson mentioned in Barney Hoskyns’ Throughout The Nice Divide. “But it’s something you take to heart and carry with you your whole life.” On this case, phrases of grandfatherly knowledge are handed on and sung in unison by Danko, Manuel, and Levon Helm, underlining the vocal prowess The Band had at their disposal. Midway via, there’s a seamless segue into what might initially have been a completely completely different tune, with a younger man boasting of dates and despairing of the frosty climate. It fades out abruptly, leaving the listener leaning in, wanting extra.
17. Ophelia (Northern Lights – Southern Cross, 1975)
Come the mid-70s, The Band had been in hassle. Disputes over royalties and worsening alcohol and drug issues had weakened the brotherly bond solid by years on the highway. In the meantime, Robertson’s songwriting misplaced a few of its sparkle on 1971’s Cahoots, and the remainder of The Band barely contributed. Their musicianship was by no means in query, although, due to the beautiful dwell album Rock Of Ages (1972), the energetic covers set Moondog Matinee (1973) and backing Dylan on 1974’s underrated Planet Waves and a record-breaking joint tour.
Trying to recapture the previous magic, in 1974, The Band arrange Shangri-La, a state-of-the-art recording studio in Venice Seaside, the place they recorded Northern Lights – Southern Cross. For the primary time, the fabric was solely written by Robertson, whereas Garth Hudson’s embrace of synthesizers gave it a polish their earlier data kicked towards — however nonetheless, Northern Lights – Southern Cross confirmed flashes of greatness. “Ophelia” was one such instance, an irresistibly funky tackle Dixieland jazz with a horn association put collectively single-handedly by Hudson within the studio.
The Ophelia in query has break up city in a rush, and it’s consuming the singer up inside — he can’t await her to return and doesn’t care who is aware of it. Robertson knew that such a lyric known as for the lusty charisma of Levon Helm. “It had his name written all over it,” Robertson wrote in his 2019 autobiography Testimony. “I loved the way the track felt after we cut it. The combination of horns and keyboards that Garth overdubbed on this song was one of the very best things I’d ever heard him do. ‘Ophelia’ became my favorite track on the album, even if it didn’t have the depth of some of my other songs. The pure, jubilant pleasure of that tune swayed me.”
16. Rag Mama Rag (The Band, 1969)
One among The Band’s secret weapons was their capability to change issues up — if the monitor’s not working, why not play musical chairs? The storming “Rag Mama Rag” noticed Rick Danko swap the bass for fiddle, vocalist Levon Helm placing his drumsticks apart to play mandolin, Garth Hudson shifting from behind his financial institution of keyboards to an upright piano, and Richard Manuel maintaining time on drums slightly than enjoying piano. Robbie Robertson was the one member to stay to his normal instrument — electrical guitar — whereas producer John Simon added tuba.
It was an unlikely set-up, however the lascivious rocker gave The Band their greatest hit single within the UK, reaching No. 16. As with a lot of the self-titled album, it’s timeless — Danko’s fiddle enjoying is straight out of Nashville; Hudson’s ragtime piano is an utter delight — and unfeasibly thrilling.
15. Tears Of Rage (Music From Large Pink, 1968)
One other Dylan co-write from that productive summer season in Woodstock, this time with Richard Manuel, “Tears Of Rage” was the opening monitor on Music From Large Pink and most listeners’ introduction to The Band. They play it as a slow-burning funereal dirge, with Robertson’s closely phased guitar in dialog with Manuel’s anguished falsetto, which wrings each drop of emotion from the lyrics; a exceptional feat contemplating he was not sure as to their precise which means.
“[Dylan] came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper,” Manuel recalled in a 1985 Woodstock Instances interview, “and he just said, ‘Have you got any music for this?’… I had a couple of musical movements that seemed to fit, so I just elaborated a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean, Bob?’ ‘Now the heart is filled with gold, as if it was a purse.’”
“Tears Of Rage” was additionally a breakthrough by way of The Band discovering their sound. The engineer in A&R Studios had set the studio up as any fashionable rock band would — with acoustic baffles between the gamers for separation so errors could possibly be mounted later. The Band had been used to listening to, seeing, and responding to 1 one other’s enjoying, so Robertson requested for the baffles to come back down. Though the engineer initially despaired, one thing magical occurred. “John [Simon] says over the talkback, ‘I think we’re getting somewhere, guys.’… We go in the control room and they play back our first take. That was the first time we heard the sound of The Band coming out of those speakers. We looked at one another and, in that moment, we knew we had the confidence, we had our own rules, our own way of making music.”
14. Throughout The Nice Divide (The Band, 1969)
Within the ’80s, Robbie Robertson grew to become an in-demand soundtrack producer, engaged on films together with Martin Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (1983), On line casino (1995) and Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023). However his songs for The Band reveal an intuition for the cinematic which flourished method earlier than Marty got here calling. The opening monitor to 1969’s self-titled album emphasised Robertson’s expertise for scene setting and use of dramatic gadgets (on this case, Chekhov’s gun). It begins with a fearful-sounding Richard Manuel pleading with a girl who appears intent on inflicting him hurt, “Standing by your window in pain, a pistol in your hand/And I beg you, dear Molly, girl, try and understand your man the best you can.” At that time, his buddies all take part, remodeling the monitor right into a good-time groove as Manuel recounts a lifetime of roguish escapades. However any concept that Molly will let him get out of Dodge is thrown into query by the ultimate verse and a anxious, “Now tell me, hon, what you done with the gun?”
“I knew what these guys could do,” Robertson instructed Traditional Rock in 2019. “I knew who their characters were. And I was writing screenplays for these characters. I thought I was Ingmar Bergman. I was writing for Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. I thought that was my job. But that’s different than any other group, and it was a different format. Everything was different about The Band.”
13. Life Is A Carnival (Cahoots, 1971)
By The Band’s fourth album, Cahoots, success and superstar had set in, and Danko, Helm, and Manuel’s hell-raising methods had been starting to take their toll, whereas Robertson was scuffling with a extreme case of author’s block. A lot of Cahoots feels just like the work of an ideal band trudging via underwhelming materials, however on the New Orleans funk of “Life Is A Carnival,” they sound weightless.
The tune’s heady groove was cooked up throughout a Danko and Helm jam session, and Robertson added lyrics that discovered parallels between the uncertainty of life and the chaos of a carnival. Figuring that no one might do syncopated New Orleans horn preparations just like the grasp, Robertson requested legendary Large Simple author, performer, and arranger Allen Toussaint to put in writing a horn chart for the tune. The Band had been long-term followers and had just lately been impressed by his manufacturing on Lee Dorsey’s 1970 basic, Sure We Can. “They’d heard Lee’s album and they were, I guess, impressed a little,” Toussaint mentioned in 1973. “They’re such good guys, and communications were very, very good. They immediately know where you’re coming from.”
12. It Makes No Distinction (Northern Lights – Southern Cross, 1975)
One other instance of Robertson selecting the right singer for his materials got here with this heartbreaker to finish all heartbreakers, sung by Rick Danko. Chatting with this author in 2019, Robertson was stuffed with reward for his former bandmate, “Rick might’ve been the best friend you could have in this group; he was so warm and generous in his spirit. There was an openness with Rick, and it came through in his playing, in his singing and everything about him. More so than anybody else in the group, perhaps.” On “It Makes No Difference” that openness permits Danko to inhabit a lyric about post-break-up loneliness and ship it with fathoms-deep melancholy and complete vulnerability. In a 1975 interview with New York Instances journalist Robert Palmer, Danko defined how he approached the vocal, “I thought about the song in terms of saying that time heals all wounds. Except in some cases, and this was one of those cases.”
“It Makes No Difference” is among the best tracks on Northern Lights – Southern Cross, however nothing beats Danko’s gut-punch efficiency of the tune on The Final Waltz, an emotional tour-de-force topped off by a jaw-dropping duel between Robertson on guitar and Hudson on soprano saxophone.
11. The Form I’m In (Stage Fright, 1970)
Following the mature sounds of The Band’s first two albums, audiences who’d seen The Hawks may’ve puzzled what grew to become of the wild younger rock ’n’ rollers. The stomping “The Shape I’m In” from the third album, Stage Fright, proved they may nonetheless reduce free. Backed by powerful, driving R&B, Richard Manuel sings from the angle of a down-on-his-luck rogue residing on the fringes of society (“I’ve just spent sixty days in the jail house/For the crime of having no dough/Now here I am back out on the street/For the crime of having nowhere to go”). Manuel’s gruff, soulful vocals are an ideal match for the character — contemplating the singer’s urge for food for self-destruction, it’s straightforward to think about that Robbie Robertson wrote it with him in thoughts. “I always felt very comfortable with Richard in The Band. I knew nobody else had a better singer,” Levon Helm mentioned in 1997. “Richard’s policy was to hold up his glass and say, ‘spend it all!’ — which is a pretty good policy when you think about it.”
10. Up On Cripple Creek (The Band, 1969)
As The Band’s second album took form, Robbie Robertson was searching for inspiration within the on a regular basis lives of Individuals. “We’re not dealing with people at the top of the ladder,” Robertson mentioned in 2022. “We’re saying, ‘What about that house out there in the middle of that field?’ What does this guy think, with that one light on upstairs and that truck parked out there? That’s who I’m curious about.”
“Up On Cripple Creek” was a chief instance, a group of shaggy canine tales instructed by a road-weary trucker craving for his girl. “This person, he just drives these trucks across the whole country, and he knows these characters that he drops in on, on his travels,” Robertson added. “Just following him with a camera is really what this song’s all about.”
Levon Helm clearly had the time of his life singing these tales of playing, consuming, and womanizing, even main his bandmates in a yodelling session to shut the tune. In the meantime, Garth Hudson imitates a jaw harp by enjoying a clavinet via a wah-wah pedal, and Helm’s drumming and a Robertson guitar lick are so funky that Gang Starr sampled them on 1990’s “Beyond Comprehension.”
9. Chest Fever (Music From Large Pink, 1968)
The supremely funky Large Pink monitor “Chest Fever” showcased The Band’s ace within the gap, the prodigiously gifted multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. It begins in spectacular trend, with Hudson vamping on Bach’s “Toccata And Fugue In D Minor” — a passage he’d prolong at dwell reveals to the purpose the place it grew to become a separate tune, “The Genetic Method” — earlier than he brings in the remainder of The Band with a killer organ riff.
“Garth Hudson was from a different world,” Robertson instructed this interviewer in 2019. “We’d never witnessed anybody who could do what he does, musically. His improvizing would incorporate so many kinds of music that it was bedazzling. He could’ve been playing with Miles Davis, or a Symphony Orchestra, he just had such a broad horizon when it came to music. He was a very different guy — quiet in personal ways, but not at all in an expressive, musical way. People have said to me over the years, musicians that I really admire in rock ’n’ roll, there was only one Garth Hudson. Still people have no idea how extraordinary this guy really is, so I cherish that. Levon and I wanted him in the group so bad that we begged to have his music help us grow.”
8. Whispering Pines (The Band, 1969)
Although The Band had been blessed with a number of the best voices in rock music, Richard Manuel’s stood out. “We talked about him in the group like he was the lead singer and he hated that, but there was a truth to it,” Robbie Robertson instructed this author. “He was the most legitimate singer of all of us; he had the widest range, the most power and everything. The depth of his soulfulness was something that we loved and admired so much.” Manuel’s spellbinding vocal on “Whispering Pines,” which he co-wrote with Robertson, explains the esteem through which his bandmates held him.
Robertson knew from the second he heard Manuel engaged on the music that “Whispering Pines” could be particular. “Richard had this thing he was playing on the piano, he was hitting this same note over and over again and it almost echoed inside of itself,” he instructed Rock Cellar in 2017. “Right away, there was this distant, lonely, beautiful, sad feeling to it… In writing the words to ‘Whispering Pines’ I was writing something that I thought Richard could break your heart with if he sings these words.”
7. Jawbone (The Band, 1969)
Manuel’s different main contribution to The Band confirmed a wholly completely different facet of him. “Jawbone” solid Manuel as one other of lyricist Robertson’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks characters; the scoundrel in query might simply be the narrator of “Across The Great Divide,” or a consuming buddy of the trucker in “Up On Cripple Creek.” The verses admonish Jawbone for his dangerous behaviour and plead with him to wash up his act. His response? The completely unrepentant refrain of “I’m a thief and I dig it!,” sung with cathartic pleasure by Manuel.
Musically, it’s like no different tune on the album. Manuel deployed tricksy time signatures (the verses are in 6/4, whereas the refrain flits between 4/4 and a half-time shuffle), giving “Jawbone” a suitably anarchic really feel. In the meantime, it’s one of many few factors on the album the place Robertson solo…
6. Stage Fright (Stage Fright, 1970)
The success of Music From Large Pink meant that there was an enormous quantity of expectation and hype round The Band’s first dwell reveals. Anticipation solely grew as they turned down gives from promoters all through 1968 — unbeknownst to the press, Rick Danko had a automotive crash, which he was fortunate to outlive, that put him out of motion for months. With Danko totally recovered, The Band finally booked a run of reveals at Winterland, San Francisco, on April 17–19, 1969. However within the days main as much as the primary present, Robbie Robertson started to really feel so ailing he couldn’t get up. “I felt like I was dying,” wrote Robertson in Testimony. “I couldn’t move… I couldn’t hold any food down… Is this stage fright? Is this all in my head?”
With the present quick approaching and Robertson exhibiting no signal of bettering, promoter Invoice Graham known as in a hypnotist named Pierre Clement. “I was so sick and pining to feel better,” Robertson instructed Salon in 2020. “I went with it. ‘Please help me and allow me to feel better.’ I said ‘I’ll go under your spell or over your spell. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’” Finally, the guitarist made it on stage, although he might barely stand and solely lasted seven songs. Seems hypnosis can’t treatment a abdomen virus.
Nonetheless, the incident fed into the title monitor of The Band’s third album, Stage Fright. Rick Danko took the lead vocal, investing the story of a performer “caught in the spotlight” with uncooked ardour. “They gave this choirboy his fortune and fame,” Danko sang, “and since that day he ain’t been the same…” — it’s tough to imagine Robertson wasn’t writing about The Band’s response to success.
5. Acadian Driftwood (Northern Lights – Southern Cross, 1975)
Although Robertson spent a lot of The Band’s profession writing about America, “Acadian Driftwood” marked the primary time he actually dug into the historical past of his native Canada. Robertson writes movingly concerning the British expulsion of round 10,000 French Acadians from their settled lands in 1755, on the eve of the Seven Years’ Struggle, in addition to the craving of the Acadian diaspora for a way of house. However that is a lot greater than reportage — in giving voice to the Acadian individuals, Robertson offers them a dignity that was taken away from them by the wealthy and highly effective so a few years in the past.
Fittingly, given the gravitas of the tune, the lead vocal is shared between Danko, Helm, and Manuel. Nonetheless, it’s Danko who takes the evocative closing verse, singing in French, “Do you know, Acadia, I’m homesick/Your snow, Acadia, makes tears in the sun.” The music is stirring, given a Cajun flavour — appropriately, as many Acadians settled in Louisiana, finally contributing to Cajun tradition — by Hudson on accordion, piccolo and chanter and bluegrass nice Byron Berline’s sorrowful fiddle.
“Acadian Driftwood” was step one in direction of later materials that explored Robertson’s Indigenous heritage — he was raised on the Six Nations reserve close to Ontario — such because the soundtrack to Ted Turner’s movie, Music For The Native Individuals, and his 1998 album, Contact From The Underworld Of Redboy.
4. King Harvest (Has Certainly Come) (The Band, 1969)
Has agrarian tragedy ever sounded funkier? “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” tells the story of a Mud Bowl farmer getting ready to monetary destroy and placing his belief within the union to save lots of him. This man can’t catch a break — drought has devastated his livelihood, his barn has burned down, and his horse has gone mad — there’s little marvel he’s pleased to embrace “a man with a paper and pen, tellin’ us our hard times are about to end.”
“It’s just a kind of character study in a time period,” Robertson wrote within the sleevenotes to the compilation Anthology. “At the beginning, when the unions came in, they were a saving grace, a way of fighting the big money people, and they affected everybody from the people that worked in the big cities all the way around to the farm people. It’s ironic now, because now so much of it is like gangsters, assassinations, power, greed, insanity. I just thought it was incredible how it started and how it ended up.”
Although the ending is ambiguous, there’s an air of desperation to “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” not least in Richard Manuel’s powerhouse vocal efficiency, that means issues received’t finish properly for the farmer. The sensation of pent-up frustration is felt keenly within the tune’s finale, as Robertson brings issues house with a stinging guitar solo. “This was a new way of dealing with the guitar for me,” Robertson mentioned within the To Kingdom Come sleevenotes, “this very subtle playing, leaving out a lot of stuff and just waiting till the last second and playing the thing in just the nick of time. It was an approach to playing where it’s so delicate. It’s just the opposite of the ‘in your face’ guitar playing that I used to do. This was the kind of thing that was slippery. It was like you have to hold your breath while you’re playing these solos. You can’t breathe or you’ll throw yourself off.”
3. Rockin’ Chair (The Band, 1969)
“I’m knocked out by older people,” Robertson instructed Time journal in 1970. “Just look at their eyes. Hear them talk. They’re not joking. They’ve seen things you’ll never see.” Until this level, rock music had been outlined by youth. The Band’s apparent respect for the older era was genuinely radical. And nowhere was it extra obvious than on his poignant-beyond-words “Rockin’ Chair.”
“Rockin’ Chair” transports the listener to a different time, with Helm on mandolin, Hudson’s wheezing accordion and a number of the best close-knit harmonies of The Band’s profession. Manuel takes the lead, enjoying the a part of an aged sailor trying to steer his finest pal, the marvellously named previous seadog Ragtime Willie, to lastly retire and return house, the place the 2 can see out their remaining years in one another’s firm, seeing previous pals and telling previous jokes. Manuel sings it with such empathy and feeling that it’s scarcely plausible that he was simply 26 on the time of recording — and a tragedy that he’d by no means attain the age of the character within the tune.
2. The Evening They Drove Outdated Dixie Down (The Band, 1969)
When Robbie Robertson wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” he knew that solely Levon Helm might sing it. Born in Elaine, a small city in Phillips County, Arkansas, Helm was the one Southerner in The Band. With out the authority his voice gave, the tune, sung from the angle of Virgil Kane, a former Accomplice soldier, wouldn’t have labored in any respect.
“Levon and I went back the furthest and I thought I understood his instrument better than anybody else,” Robertson instructed this author in 2019, “so I tried to the best of my ability to write songs that he could sing better than anybody in the world. When I would play him the songs, he knew that I was writing them for him. He just accepted it in a very natural way and tried to figure out as quickly as possible how to do the song justice. The only thing he told me, when it came to the writing of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, was, ‘Don’t mention Abraham Lincoln.’”
Robertson took Helm’s recommendation, however the tune has nonetheless courted controversy, with some seeing it as a glorification of the Accomplice trigger. However when heard alongside Robertson’s work of the time, it’s clear that it’s an try to really get underneath the pores and skin of an extraordinary particular person and perceive the human value of conflict — the wounded pleasure, trauma, class and regional divides. It was written because it was changing into clear that the Vietnam Struggle was deeply unpopular within the U.S., to not point out a international coverage catastrophe — although it appeared to look to the previous, in the way in which that it confirmed how extraordinary Individuals had been collateral harm for the wealthy and highly effective, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was well timed.
1. The Weight (Music From Large Pink, 1968)
“The Weight” is The Band’s signature tune, on the one hand a secular hymn that speaks of the worth of sharing a burden; on the opposite, a road-weary traveller’s surreal encounters in a city populated by oddball characters. It’s a showcase for The Band’s musicianship, vocal expertise, and skill to assimilate nation, gospel, blues, and soul, creating music that pays no thoughts to style. However based on author Robbie Robertson, it wasn’t initially within the working to be included on Large Pink.
“After The Basement Tapes, where there was all kinds of imagination and madness involved in some of the songwriting, that loosened up things,” Robertson instructed author Steven Hyden’s Celebration Rock podcast in 2018. “When I wrote ‘The Weight’, I thought, ‘Now I’ve gone too far. Nobody’s going to understand this, even me.’ So, it was hard to think, ‘Guys, I’ve written a song here that really could change things or make a difference,’ or anything like that. I thought, ‘It’s too outside the lines here, but we’ll keep it as a back-up in case one of the other songs doesn’t work out.’”
The seed for “The Weight” was planted when beat poet Gregory Corso really helpful Robertson go to the famed New York Metropolis bookshop, Gotham Guide Mart. Ever the cinephile, Robertson was delighted to find they stocked film scripts, together with Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay for The Seventh Seal, and Luis Buñuel’s scripts for Nazarín and Viridiana.
Pictures from these scripts caught with Robertson and, months later, impressed “The Weight.” “One night in Woodstock, upstairs in my house in a workspace next to my bedroom, I picked up my 1951 Martin D-28 acoustic guitar to write a song. I turned the guitar around and looked in the sound hole,” Robertson instructed the Wall Road Journal in 2018. “There, I noticed a label that mentioned ‘Nazareth, Pennsylvania’, the city the place Martin was based mostly. For some purpose, seeing the phrase ‘Nazareth’ unlocked a variety of stuff in my head from ‘Nazarin’ and people different movie scripts.
“‘Take a load off and put it right on me’” can also be pure Buñuel. When you assist and assume another person’s burden, you’re concerned. ‘Carmen and the devil walkin’ facet by facet’ is from The Seventh Seal and the chess recreation with Loss of life.”
The Band’s genius was in turning this tune, loaded with arthouse film references and biblical portent, right into a communal anthem, one which grew to become a defining second of their set at Woodstock and impressed numerous cowl variations by artists together with Aretha Franklin, The Staple Singers, and The Supremes & The Temptations.
“That group, the brotherhood and musical connection between us all was so powerful,” Robertson instructed this author in 2019, attempting to resolve what made The Band so particular. “Everybody played such an important part in this production, in this movie, in this story — the characters and the way they all fit together, musically and personally. This wasn’t a group where there were a couple of main guys like the singer and the guitar player, and then some other guys back there. That’s why it could be called The Band — because it really was, truly that. The different musicalities of these guys was extraordinary. And the power of that brotherhood and how serious we were at honing the craft and doing something that had meaning and depth to it. We weren’t on a pop cavalcade, our job wasn’t to figure out if people liked us, it was to find a sound, a feeling, a music that goes beyond all of that. We just came in on a different train.”
Order The Band’s The Better of the Band on vinyl now.
