The Band

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Jurgen Pieters

"They brought us in touch with the place where we all had to live," Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train. Thirty years after The Band's first appearance on the international music-scene toward the end of the 1960s, Marcus' words still ring true. More than that of any other group, The Band's work represents America at its sincerest, the diversity of its musical heritage, the vividness of its culture, and the lasting attraction of its history. Marcus noted that "against the instant America of the sixties they looked for the traditions that made new things not only possible, but valuable; against a flight from roots they set a sense of place. Against the pop scene, all flux and novelty, they set themselves: a band with years behind it, and meant to last." Last they certainly did.

Having started off as backing musicians (The Hawks) to rockabilly veteran Ronnie Hawkins, Rick Danko (1943--), Garth Hudson (1937--), Levon Helm (1942--), Richard Manuel (1944-1986), and Jaime 'Robbie' Robertson (1944--) played their first gigs in 1964 as an independent group called Levon and the Hawks. As this group they recorded a couple of singles that went largely unnoticed. Chance came their way though, when they met with Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager at the time. Grossman felt that Levon and the Hawks might well be the backing group Dylan was on the look-out for after his legendary first electric appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. After having met and played with him, the group joined Dylan in 1966 for a tour that took them through the United States, and later to Australia and England.

Back in the States in the summer of 1966, they moved to the area around Woodstock--without Levon Helm, though, who had left the tour after two months. There, in Saugerties, New York, they rented a big pink house (appropriately named 'Big Pink'), in the basement of which they recorded well over a hundred songs with Dylan, who at the time was recovering from a serious motorcycle accident. Some twenty of these songs were later released on The Basement Tapes (1975). The sessions in the basement of 'Big Pink' must have made clear to Robertson, Danko, Hudson and Manuel that their musical talents and the originality of their sound were considerable enough to enable them to make it without Dylan. After Albert Grossman cut them a record deal with Capitol, Levon Helm returned to the group and together they recorded Music from Big Pink, still one of the all-time great debuts in the history of popular music. Upon the album's release in August 1968, both the critics and the public realized that something unique had come their way. Music from Big Pink confirmed the uniqueness of the group's sound--a highly individual blend of the most varied brands of American popular music: gospel, country, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, New Orleans jazz, etc. But it also set the themes which The Band (for this was what they had finally decided on as a name) would explore in albums to come.

Most of the songs on the album, three of which were written by Dylan, are set in the rural South. They belong to a tradition long gone, yet the revival of which the members of The Band considered to be beneficial to a country that yearned for a change but did not really know where to look for it. The songs of The Band should not be taken as nostalgic pleas for the past, for the simpler things in life or for values long lost and gone. The characters in the songs of Music from Big Pink and later albums are in no way successful romantic heroes who have truly found themselves. They are flesh-and-blood people, loners, burdened with guilt, and torn up by love and heartache.

Compared to most albums to come out of the wave of psychedelic rock at the end of the 1960s, the music of The Band was anything but typical of its era. It is a pleasant irony, therefore, that The Band's records have aged so easily, while those of contemporaries like Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe and the Fish already sounded dated a couple of years after their release. From the beginning, the music of The Band--an idiosyncratic combination of several voices (Manuel, Danko, Helm), Robbie Robertson's guitar, the drums of Levon Helm, and the organ of musical wizard Garth Hudson--is full of seeming contradictions that somehow blend into a harmonious whole. The music is playful yet serious, soulful yet deliberate, traditional yet rebellious, harmonic yet syncopated.

The group's second album, The Band (1969), is generally rated as better than its predecessor, representing The Band at its best. The record shows that the group found their idiom, both lyrically and musically. From this album Robertson emerged as the most prominent member of the group; not only did he write most of the songs, but also he also looked after The Band's financial interests. There can be little doubt that at the time The Band was both at its artistic and commercial zenith. In 1970 they made it to the cover of Time magazine and gave their first public performances. The latter soon made clear, however, that the group was at its best in the recording studio.