If The Band single-handedly created Americana with their debut album, on their self-titled sophomore effort (aka “The Brown Album”), they honed every thing that made Music From Large Pink so quietly epochal. Initially, the group relocated from their iconic Woodstock residence to a New York studio in an effort to work up the 12 songs that fashioned their self-titled second album, however the professional services didn’t go well with the group’s laidback, down-home method.
Packing up and heading west, they recreated the Large Pink vibe with what lead guitarist Robbie Robertson referred to as “a clubhouse feel” at 8850 Evanview Drive in West Hollywood, a home that had beforehand been owned by Sammy Davis Jr. The place had sufficient bedrooms that the group might reside there with their households and a pool home the place they arrange the studio.
The right workshop
In an interview with uDiscover Music, in November 2019, Robertson described why the ambiance was good for what they have been making an attempt to realize. “I thought of The Band as a committee of people making music, and this was the best circumstances that we ever had,” he mentioned. “We were all living together, we were all playing together. Nobody had to go anywhere, no one was ever late. It was all-encompassing. I had a set up at that house where I was writing and I was continuing to experiment with ideas. So it really was the perfect workshop. We had the time and the concentration to do what we wanted. It was a bit of a dream for me, because I knew these guys and their musicality. This was a situation to get the very best out of them.”
Robertson laughed as he recalled how they needed to overcome some resistance from the report firm. “I told the record company that we were not going to come to the studio, we are going to do it in the house. They really thought I was losing my mind. They were like, ‘Why bother? Why do that? The Capitol Studios are just down the road and it is one of the best in the world – and you want to turn a pool house into a recording facility?’ I guess I had to act like I really knew what I was doing and that I was very determined. They just finally said, ‘OK, we’ll help you with that.’ This idea of making your own atmosphere and clubhouse studio was unheard of. Now it is common. People make records in the kitchen!”
Truckers, sailors, Civil Warfare troopers
The Band’s second album got here after a tough interval. Bassist Rick Danko had damaged his neck in a severe automobile crash and had taken time to recuperate. The transfer from East Coast to West Coast proved an invigorating change. Crossing the huge expanse of North America was apt: The Band was virtually merely titled America, and its songs are populated with characters from the continent’s previous; just like the fortunate hopefuls who set off west searching for the American Dream within the mid-1800s, The Band struck gold.
Truckers, sailors, Civil Warfare troopers: it’s the type of roll name that will really feel contrived in lesser fingers, however Robertson and co’s deft performances and innate knack for storytelling allowed these disparate characters – just like the big range of devices the group rotated by way of – to coalesce, working up a set of songs that, as Ralph J. Gleason put it in his Rolling Stone evaluation, are “equal sides of a 12-faceted gem, the whole of which is geometrically greater than the sum of the parts.”
First-time listeners normally gravitate in direction of “Rag Mama Rag,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up On Cripple Creek” – and with good motive. Drummer Levon Helm’s vocals are the apogee of white soul, infectious, and intimate on the identical time. Sung from the angle of solider Virgin Kane, “Dixie” just about time travels to the Civil Warfare, bringing it again to life with a poignant narrative that, as Rolling Stone famous, “makes it seem impossible that this isn’t some oral tradition material handed down from father to son from that winter of [18]65 to today.”
But repeated listens are richly rewarded with The Band’s extra delicate charms. “Whispering Pines,” with Richard Manuel taking lead, is a lament that haunts the listener lengthy after the track is over; Danko’s larger, extra emotive register involves the fore on “When You Awake,” an train in nostalgia that additionally exhibits how a lot the group matured within the yr since they launched their debut.
And not using a Bob Dylan co-write in sight (in truth, Robertson will get a full or co-writing credit score on each observe), the album finds The Band doing what they did greatest: creating house between devices, letting the music breathe, and permitting for every particular person character to shine by way of, whereas all working in service to the group’s unified imaginative and prescient.
The reception
Launched on September 22, 1969, The Band’s self-titled album would attain No.9 on the Billboard Pop Album chart and peak at No.2 of their Canadian homeland. Writing in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau, who’d been unmoved by Music From Large Pink, praised the album as “an A-plus record if ever I’ve rated one,” and finally declared it to be the fourth-best album of the yr. Rolling Stone went one additional, evoking the timeless nature of the report itself when it declared: “It has the sound of familiarity in every new line because it is ringing changes on the basic truths of life, you have been there before, and like the truths of life itself, it nourishes you.”
The album’s title
Was it unusual for Robertson to suppose that this memorable album is 50 years outdated? “These numbers are mind-boggling to me. We say them and accept them, but it is really hard to believe,” he says. The commonly-used title for the eponymous second album, “The Brown Album,” took place by likelihood due to the enter of the acclaimed artwork designer and photographer Bob Cato, a person who had labored with jazz legend Miles Davis and rock star Janis Joplin.
“It was after we got Bob Cato, the album designer, that the name came about,” explains Robertson. “It was something about the music that led us to the artwork that was in the album. The album just happened to be brown. So it wasn’t us who called it “The Brown Album,” it was different folks. Regardless of the title, that was a tremendous album to be a part of.”
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