09/22/2024
One of the greatest albums ever recorded in my humble opinion. Music and voices sprung for the fields, mountains and plains without a hint of irony or winks. A masterpiece that will stand the test of time, a must have piece of work.
ON THIS DATE (55 YEARS AGO)
September 22, 1969 – The Band: The Band is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5 (MUST-HAVE!)
# Allmusic 5/5 stars
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
The Band is the eponymous second album by The Band, released on September 22, 1969. It reached #9 on Billboard's 200 Top LP's chart, and features two singles that reached the Billboard Hot 100 - "Rag Mama Rag" ( #57) and "Up on Cripple Creek" ( #25).
The album includes many of The Band's best-known and critically acclaimed songs, including "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", which Rolling Stone named the 245th greatest song of all time (in the updated version, it was the 249th greatest song of all time). In 2003, the album was ranked number 45 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2009, the album was preserved into the National Recording Registry because the album was "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or informs or reflects life in the United States."
Initially renowned as Bob Dylan's backing group, the Band emerged from the singer's shadow to proclaim a distinctive talent. Drawing upon a musical canon embracing soul, country, folk and rock `n' roll, the quintet created a unique sound that was quintessentially American. Its rustic qualities were enhanced by principle songwriter Robbie Robertson who created vistas suggestive of a pre-industrial age, and as such, captured the restlessness of the late 60s without the need for explicit manifestos. Expressive singing, sublime melodies, and telepathic musicianship instills The Band with quality, but its adult themes and perspectives ensure an absolute timelessness.
According to the liner notes to the 2000 reissue of "The Band" by Rob Bowman, the album, "The Band", has been viewed as a concept album, with the songs focusing on people, places and traditions associated with an older version of Americana. Thus, the songs on this album draw from historic themes for "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" , "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" and Richard Manuel's "Jawbone" (which was composed in the unusual 6/4 time signature.)
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*TRACK NOTES
Across the Great Divide
As he’d done on Big Pink, Richard Manuel took the lead vocal on the album’s opening track. But this time the mood was very different, loping and blithely good-humored where 'Tears of Rage' had been dragging and mournful. Imagine Fats Domino let loose in a Faulkner landscape. Manuel played piano triplets and beseeched his gal Molly to stop waving her gun at him; Rick Danko’s fretless bass gulped at each bar; Robertson and Hudson supplied whimsical fills and asides; and Helm’s drums were as "woody and thuddy" as James Van Eaton’s on the classic Sun hits of Jerry Lee Lewis.
Rag Mama Rag
The album’s second track was a perfect instance of The Band’s flexibility and open-mindedness. Initially attempted in the poolhouse as a more conventional rock song, 'Rag Mama Rag' didn’t, in Robbie Robertson’s words, "feel like what I was hearing in my head." When Levon Helm gave up the drum stool to Richard Manuel and shifted to mandolin, Robertson’s l***y, bumptious "rag" was transformed into something that seemed to hail from turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Garth Hudson tinkled on an upright piano, Rick Danko sawed away on a cheap fiddle, and — in lieu of a bass guitar — John Simon puffed away on a tuba. A floppy, rollicking masterpiece.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
An instant and dramatic contrast to 'Rag Mama Rag', with Helm singing in the unrecognisably plaintive voice of young Virgil Caine, a survivor of the attacks made on the Danville and Richmond railroad by General George Stoneman’s Union cavalry during the American Civil War. "It took me about eight months in all to write that song," remembered Robertson. "I only had the music for it, and I didn’t know what it was about at all. Sometimes you have to wait a song out." Over a stark arrangement and piano chords that descended before climbing back up to the chorus, Helm sang with a callow, battered pride that — as Greil Marcus wrote — "leaves behind a feeling that... every American still shares this old event".
When You Awake
With its soft, sk**ky beat, this dreamy Manuel-Robertson collaboration was a perfect vehicle for Rick Danko, who sang it in the voice of an earnest country bumpkin. "It’s a story about someone who passes something on to you, and you pass it on to someone else," noted Robertson. "But it’s something you take to heart and carry with you your whole life."
Up on Cripple Creek
Firing off with an intro so viscerally funky it was sampled years later by hip hop duo Gang Starr, 'Cripple Creek' was another track that had to simmer for a while. "It took a long time to seep into us," recalled Levon Helm, who sang lead on it in his best good-ole-boy drawl. "We cut it two or three times, but nobody really liked it. It wasn’t quite enough fun. Finally one night we just got hold of it, doubled up a couple of chorus and harmony parts, and that was it."
Whispering Pines
Again, a perfect response — slow and elegaic — to a preceding track. Richard Manuel wrote the music for, and sang a falsetto lead on, this almost mystical song of loss and loneliness. "Richard briefly lived in a house in Woodstock that had belonged to the painter George Bellows," recalled sometime Band manager Joe Forno. "There was an old piano in the house which had been left behind, and Richard wrote ‘Whispering Pines’ on it. "Robbie Robertson followed the melancholy of Manuel’s chords and came up with a suitably desolate lyric, reaching a serene kind of resolution in the final words, "The lost are found".
Jemima Surrender
The yelping good-ole-boy of 'Cripple Creek' returns on this gnarly rocker recorded — like 'Creek' and 'Whispering Pines' — at the Hit Factory in New York. Helm sang and played guitar while Manuel brought his inimitably loose sticksmanship to the drums and Hudson picked up where he left off on 'Rag Mama Rag'.
Rockin’ Chair
The old-timey string-band arrangement was perfect for Robertson’s enchanting song about a pair of retired seafarers: Helm on mandolin, Hudson on accordion, Robertson himself on acoustic guitar. "In my time I’ve run up against some old people who were able to explain things to me and make me see things in a way nobody else could," Robertson said. "Their experience made me feel like not saying a word. At this time, in this country, there’s a whole thing that old people are almost put away. I can’t buy that."
Look Out Cleveland
This was about as hard-rocking and contemporary as The Band got, with the apocalyptic theme clearly suggesting storms of a more political kind. "When we were doing the album," Robertson remembered, "there were all these riots and outbursts around the country, and it was kind of like living on the fault-line of revolution." Sandwiched between the old-world feel of 'Rockin’ Chair' and 'Jawbone', 'Cleveland' sounded an urgent present-day note that would recur on Stage Fright’s 'Just Another Whistle Stop'.
Jawbone
Richard Manuel’s character on 'Jawbone' could have been the same feckless roustabout of 'Across the Great Divide' — an endearing loser of the type The Band had known all too well in their Ronnie Hawkins days. "These people would live this life with other choices and say, ‘No, this is what I choose; I like the action,’" recalled Robbie Roberston. Recorded with the poolhouse bathroom as an echo chamber, the song was full of typically odd time signatures and changes and boasted one of Robbie’s most full-blooded guitar solos.
The Unfaithful Servant
American Gothic meets Tennessee Williams. "Everyone is now interested in being the same, so I was kind of playing a game in writing this song," Robbie Robertson commented on this heartfelt ballad’s political incorrectness. Sung beautifully by Danko, the track concerned the fate of a man who had in some unspecified way transgressed against his mistress and sent packing. The simple instrumentation was bolstered by lugubrious horn parts played by Garth Hudson and John Simon.
King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
The climax of The Band came with this superbly bitter song of union dues and crop failure — James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in song. "The chord progression was a little bit complex," Robertson recalled. "There’s a sifty feeling we were trying to get, which was subtle and bold at the same time." Manuel took the anguished lead vocal, Hudson filled every available space with his Lowrey organ riffs, and Helm played his heart out in one of his most intuitively brilliant drum performances. "This was one track where I got my drums sounding the way I always wanted them," Levon remembered. All that and a livid, stinging Telecaster solo from Robertson.
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
It's homemade, Robbie Robertson says, done in the house they rented in Hollywood last winter in which they fixed up a room with baffles and a projector for flicks and the recording equipment. Robbie was engineer for about 90% of the work and they really produced the album themselves. John Simon, aside from being odd man in for the horn section, became "that outside ear and outside opinion you could trust."
So it really is just the Band.
There are twelve tracks. Robbie wrote eight of the songs himself and collaborated on one with Levon Helm and on three with Richard Manuel. Richard Manuel sings lead on five of them, Levon sings lead on four, Rick Danko on three and there are numerous occasions when the lead voice is joined by another and sometimes two others. Robbie and Garth Hudson do not sing at all on the album, unless they are way in the background on some of the ensemble vocal bits.
The band doubles all over the place on various instruments. Richard Manuel, for instance, not only sings but plays piano, drums, baritone sax and mouth harp; Garth plays organ, clavinette (which he keeps on top of the organ), accordion, soprano, tenor and baritone sax and slide trumpet. Levon plays drums, mandolin and guitar; Rick Danko plays bass, violin and trombone and John Simon plays tuba (a fine effort, too, it is), baritone and pack horn, and Robbie plays guitar.
About the only way I can go about discussing the content of the album is to use as an illustration a view of Mt. Tamalpais on the Pacific Coast shore line above San Francisco. The western part of that mountain runs right down to the sea and the more you look at it, the more you see. Week in, week out, month by month, hour by hour even, nature conducts a change which rings through the twelve months and the four seasons, and there is the change in daylight when the sun shifts and the shadows bring out silhouettes and crevices in the rocks and accentuate the gullies and the draws and at night when there's moonlight, it is a different mountain altogether.
The album is like that. It is full of sleepers, diamonds that begin to glow at different times. As with the Beatles and Dylan and the Stones and Crosby-Stills and Nash, the album seems to change shape as you continue to play it. The emphasis shifts from song to song and songs prominent in the early listening will retreat and be replaced in your consciousness by others, only in later hearings to move to the fore again. Little things pop up unexpectedly after numerous listenings and the whole thing serves as a definition of what Gide meant by the necessity of art having density.
Take "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a Civil War song sung by Levon ("I aimed it right at him, I wrote it for him, he gets to say it all," Robbie says). It is the story of a Rebel soldier who served on the Danville and Richmond railroad which supplied Richmond during the war and which was cut several times by Gen. George Stoneman's Union Cavalry. Virgil Kane is the soldier's name and the song builds a story of the winter after Appomattox, lean and sparse like a Hemingway short story.
Nothing that I have read, from Bruce Catton to Douglas Southall Freeman, from Fletcher Pratt to Lloyd Lewis, has brought home to me the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is the Red Badge of Courage. It is a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Rick and Richard Manuel in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some oral tradition material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of '65 to today. It has the ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity. Yet after playing the album a dozen times, I began to feel that "Dixie" was an obvious song, the superficial standout number on the album and I acquired other favorites. But I kept coming back and coming back until now I am prepared to say that, depending on one's mood, these songs stand, each on its own, as equal sides of a twelve-faceted gem, the whole of which is geometrically greater than the sum of the parts.
Just as "Dixie" evokes history, "Up On Cripple Creek" throws images of trucks and trailers rolling down the great inland highways, putting the Danville and Richmond Railroad, as well as many others, out of business. "Up On Cripple Creek" is a modern song, its rhetoric is the rhetoric of today and even the line "When I get off of this mountain, 'y' know where I'm gonna go, straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico" (on Highway 61 from Minneapolis to New Orleans, paralleling Ole Miss?), which is, as a friend remarked, surely the oldest line in American folk history, does not date it. "Cripple Creek" is the story of a trucker and the gal he has stashed away in Lake Charles, "a drunkard's dream if I ever did see one." It is a salty, sexy, earthy (rather than funky) ballad and it is Levon who sings it with a little help from his friends Rick and Richard. (Levon's chuckle towards the end is surely the nastiest, dirtiest, evilest sexual snort in the history of the phonograph record). And again the rhythmic tension created between the interplay of the bass and drums and the line of the voice sets up a tremendously moving pulse. It vies with "Dixie" as the song that hooks you first and like the former it fades and then returns to fade and return again.
I hear these songs as a sound track to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to the real documentary of the American truth. They are sparse songs with never a superfluous note or an unnecessary syllable. And yet the sparseness, like a Picasso line, is so right that it implies everything needed. Lean and dusty, perhaps, like Henry Fonda walking down the road at the beginning of Grapes of Wrath, it says volumes in a phrase ("me and my mate, we were at the shack, we had Spike Jones on the box. I can't take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk") and though the device is folkish the images are contemporary ("I'll bring over my Fender and I'll play all night for you" in "Jemima Surrender," a racy love song).
There is, paradoxically, no paradox at all in the electrical band giving forth the simple philosophy of country living backed by the sounds of Fender bass and electric guitar (there hasn't been really since TVA). Robbie's wah-wah pedal makes a human sound and the snarl of his guitar string twisting through the amplifier is the triumph of the man over the machine. That they could produce this contemporary marvel in the basement, home cookin', so to speak, is in itself a triumph of man over the increasing complexities of the electronic studio and its 60 hours of recording, twelve track machines and God knows how much overdubbing. The simple way, with only as much overdubbing as is needed to allow Garth to play organ and then dub on a horn track, turns out in the end to be more effective (and greater art) than the electronic marvels.
With their flashing images of the American continental landscape, Canadians though they are, they speak for the continent in "King Harvest Has Surely Come." They could have called the album America, Robbie says, and after you play it a few times you know what he means. We live in these cities and we forget that there is more than 3000 miles between New York and the smog of Los Angeles and those 3000 miles are deeply rooted to another world in another time and with another set of values. "King Harvest" takes us there.
The hymn-like quality of the voicings, the use of counterpoint and contrapuntal rhythms by the singers, the weaving of the voices in and out into a pattern that grows each time you hear it, are the things that make the sound of this music so compelling. In "King Harvest," as in other songs, individual sections with contrasting timbres, moods, rhythms and sounds are juxtaposed to make a totality that is so open it can cover whatever you feel. The sense of doom, almost Biblical in its prophetic warning, of "Look Out, Cleveland" is unique in contemporary popular song, so far removed from the obvious morbidity of some of the songs of past years as to be an adult to their child. (This music, of course, is mature, made by men who know who they are and what they want to do. Its appeal to the teenybopper Top 40 audience seems, on the evidence, to be limited.)
In a way, it seems to me that the use of the drums in this band typifies how their music in constructed. The drums are not used solely to keep time nor solely to underscore a line or emphasize a rhythm. Rather the drums are used as sound, as punctuation, as the spine for the whole skeleton of the song. Levon uses wooden drums and tunes the bass so that it gets a crunchy, not a zappy sound, as Robbie explains it, which is like a punch in the stomach. You hear the drums if you listen for them, but, like the bass, you feel them all the time. That is how the music is made, out of the flesh and blood of human beings and part of their flesh and blood and its humanity sings to you, music that you feel you know. 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. As the old pitchman used to say, "it's good for what ails you and it gives you what you haven't got."
~ Ralph J. Gleason (October 18, 1969)
TRACKS:
All songs written and composed by Robbie Robertson, except where noted..
1. "Across the Great Divide" - 2:53
2. "Rag Mama Rag" - 3:04
3. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" - 3:33
4. "When You Awake" (Richard Manuel, Robertson) - 3:13
5. "Up on Cripple Creek" - 4:34
6. "Whispering Pines" (Richard Manuel, Robertson) - 3:58
Side two
1. "Jemima Surrender" (Levon Helm, Robertson) - 3:31
2. "Rockin' Chair" - 3:43
3. "Look Out Cleveland" - 3:09
4. "Jawbone" (Richard Manuel, Robertson) - 4:20
5. "The Unfaithful Servant" - 4:17
6. "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" - 3:39
