On its launch in November 1975, Northern Lights – Southern Cross appeared like the start of a brand new part within the unimaginable profession of The Band. It was the primary album to be recorded at Shangri-La, their state-of-the-art Malibu clubhouse/studio, and featured a few of principal songwriter Robbie Robertson’s strongest materials in years, extraordinary performances from the vocal dream workforce of Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and Richard Manuel, and a brand new stage of virtuosity, innovation and studio craft from multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. The {photograph} chosen for the album’s entrance sleeve – taken by Reid Miles, the photographer and designer accountable for numerous iconic covers for Blue Notice Information – definitely recommended a way of renewed unity, capturing The Band huddled round a fireplace they’d made on the seaside behind Robertson’s home.
Regardless of all this, the making of Northern Lights – Southern Cross had been fraught. “I was in and out of [Malibu] for most of 1975, as we struggled to make our next album. Which took longer than any other we ever made because it became impossible to get everyone together at one time,” Helm wrote in his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s On Hearth. The Band had been drifting aside, due to a mix of particular person tasks, in addition to disagreements over writing credit and band funds. “The writing was on the wall, Robertson told Uncut in 2016. “Things were drifting. It was becoming a little bit harder to coordinate what we needed to do, people came in late or wouldn’t show up, and it felt like the interest level in what we were doing was fading.”
The songwriting course of
As he’d executed on Stage Fright’s “The Rumor,” Robertson discovered inspiration within the private struggles of his bandmates for Northern Lights – Southern Cross’ opening monitor “Forbidden Fruit.” In sharp distinction to the strutting funk-rock backing, Robertson’s lyrics provided a thinly-veiled phrase of warning in regards to the risks of heroin use (“Forbidden fruit, don’t you shoot the whole works away”) and hinting on the function substance abuse performed within the breakdown of relationships in The Band (“How can you hear with a bad connection?/You can’t see when there’s no reception”). It’s no accident maybe, that it was sung by Levon Helm.
However Helm wasn’t the one member of The Band to be given materials to sing that mirrored the hard-living of the last few years. Through the album periods, pianist and singer Richard Manuel lived in a bungalow at Shangri-La which had a well-known former tenant, as Helm remembered in This Wheel’s On Hearth, “Down toward the beach there was a horse shed, which had been Mr Ed’s when TV’s talking horse had been a resident. We had Mr Ed’s stable concerted to a bungalow, and Richard moved in and basically stayed there for the next year, drinking seven or eight bottles of Grand Marnier orange brandy a day.”
Robertson wrote the soulful ballad “Hobo Jungle” particularly for Manuel, with a lyric that celebrates society’s outcasts – the “drifters and rounders” using trains and sleeping beneath the celebrities. Although Robertson’s lyric can veer in the direction of an excessively romantic and surface-level understanding of individuals experiencing homelessness (“Though nobody here really knows where they’re goin’/At the same time, nobody’s lost”), Manuel’s tender vocals present a deep respect and empathy for these residing on the margins of society.
In the meantime, Robertson had just one singer in thoughts when he wrote essentially the most heartbreaking tune on Northern Lights – Southern Cross. “There was no question in my mind who was gonna sing ‘It Makes No Difference’,” Robertson advised Rock Cellar in 2017. “I wrote it and I cast it perfectly for Rick Danko.” “It Makes No Difference” is a simple tune from the attitude of an individual left bereft after the disintegration of a relationship – typical tears-in-your-beer stuff – however Danko’s husky, emotionally exhausted efficiency is completely convincing, pushing the tune in the direction of greatness. The impact is heightened by a sublime Robertson guitar solo adopted by a saxophone solo by Hudson which underlines the staggering extent of his musicality.
A brand new studio
Certainly, whereas Hudson was the unsung hero behind a lot of The Band’s music, Northern Lights – Southern Cross noticed their “music teacher” come to the fore. Hudson’s mastery of the cutting-edge know-how at Shangri-La gave Northern Lights – Southern Cross a sophistication and polish that was a world away from The Band’s earliest information. “Shangri-La had 24 tracks, and Garth used that leeway to craft as many as half a dozen keyboard tracks on a single song using the ARP, Roland, Mini Moog, and other synthesizers he was working with,” wrote Helm in This Wheels On Hearth. “A lot of this stuff was tied together with a computer keyboard, which Garth wielded like the wizard he is, giving the music an almost orchestral overlay.”
That wizardry was emphatically demonstrated on one of many album’s stand-out tracks, the Helm-sung “Ophelia.” The monitor noticed Hudson successfully turning into a one-man Dixieland band, overdubbing a number of synth, brass and woodwind elements to create a seamless and funky backing for Helm’s easy vocals. Robertson later praised Hudson, saying, “The full-on modernism in the sound, in the arrangement, was paramount in Garth’s experimentation. It is unquestionably one of his greatest feats, in my opinion, on any Band song.”
New inspirations
Northern Lights – Southern Cross additionally featured two songs which noticed Robertson pursuing new instructions as a songwriter which might inform later solo work. Although he’d explored US historical past via his songwriting beforehand, “Acadian Driftwood” and “Rags And Bones” noticed him actually exploring his personal roots for the primary time. “I had to come here [to Malibu],” Robertson advised Crawdaddy! in March 1976, “to write the first song I’ve ever written from a Canadian aspect.”
“Acadian Driftwood” is considered one of Robertson’s biggest songs, with lyrics that give voice to the French Acadian folks, a bunch displaced from their settled lands by the British in 1755. Once more, Robertson used the ability of The Band’s vocalists – Danko, Helm, and Manuel take turns to sing verses – to push the tune past a mere historical past lesson into one thing that feels actually evocative of the struggles and desires of an exiled folks. The fictional first-person recollections breathe life into historical past. In the meantime, the music evokes Cajun tradition – many French Acadians ended up settling in Louisiana – with Hudson on chanter, accordion, and piccolo in addition to a stirring cameo from fiddle participant Byron Berline.
In the meantime, the closing monitor “Rags And Bones” took inspiration from Robertson’s ancestry. “My great grandfather came to this country, he was a scholar from Israel,” he advised Crawdaddy!. “When he got here all he studied was meaningless. He was capable of nothing but reading and intellectualizing. He became a rag man, not an unusual thing at the time. He had a horse and a wagon and he would go up and down the lanes singing this song, ‘Rags, bones and old used clothes.’ It’s a chant that stuck in my head. The image. I never saw him doing it, but the legacy carried on. When I was a kid, I would see the rag man and it was a frightening symbol to me. The chant would never leave my mind.” From that place to begin, Robertson paints a picture of a bustling metropolis road, with the disparate characters – the blind fiddler, preacher, and organ grinder – unified by music, a becoming method to finish considered one of The Band’s most eclectic albums.
Northern Lights – Southern Cross was heralded as a triumphant comeback by critics, with Rolling Stone saying that The Band had “kicked a field goal,” whereas reaching No 26 on the US Billboard Scorching 200. However in the course of the tour that adopted its launch, the tensions and problematic habits that had stalled the periods continued, exacerbated by life on the highway. “I was seeing a lot of people in bad shape, and we weren’t doing so good ourselves,” Robertson advised Barney Hoskyns in Small City Speak, “I just thought, ‘We’ve gotta get off the road.’” The Final Waltz was across the nook, however with Northern Lights – Southern Cross, the traditional line-up of The Band had made an album with materials that ranked alongside their absolute best.
