Provenance: Steady Sounds — Richmond, VA
What is there to even say about The Band? It’s the inaugural installment of this exercise I’m setting out on simply because it was already on the turntable after a small Saturday night gathering, which feels appropriate given the album’s focus on friendship, revelry, and other assorted ties that bind. It’s also — The Last Waltz excluded — the Band’s high-water mark, which I suppose makes it as fitting a starting point as any: Might as well get things going with a high note.
I didn’t know anything about the Band growing up. I heard “The Weight” in Easy Rider and the Cingular (?) commercial that it soundtracked, but I kept ignoring the group whenever they popped up in my reading. I think the name turned me off too much for me to check them out: “The Band” — who the hell did they think they were? It was when I was working at a Blockbuster (I am old) in Fairfax, Virginia in college, ca. 2007/8, that I finally saw The Last Waltz, which turned me into a devoted obsessive who basically spent the next year forcing the film and the Band on everyone I knew.
If there was ever an album that fits the vinyl medium, it’s The Band. The whole of the record — from Levon Helm’s voice and wood-rimmed drums to producer John Simon’s horn arrangements — is resolutely warm and autumnal. The nickname “the Brown album” fits for more reasons than simply the sleeve design; even when cranked, it never sounds harsh or tinny, just well-worn and inviting, like a beloved sweater or elderly pet.
“Across the Great Divide” is the title of Barney Hoskyns’ pretty, pretty, pretty good Band bio, and it’s tempting to burden this song with undue symbolic weight. After all, they were a group of Canadians with one American blah blah blah and Robbie Robertson created his own great divide from the others as he disappeared up his own asshole, etc. But as great an album opener as it is, the song’s lyrics don’t fit as a thesis statement for the group’s career. “I had a goal in my younger days, I nearly wrote my will / But I changed my mind for the better?” They emphatically did not; half the Band’s problem was that they continued living like bar-band teenagers rather than adults with professional obligations (and drug addictions). They might have grabbed themselves the brides and children mentioned in the chorus, but they certainly didn’t bring them down by the riverside; most of them were, sadly, absentee dads or just plain bad ones. Still, a great opener, with one of Simon’s swinging-est horn arrangements, even if it’s immediately overshadowed by …
Motherfuckin’ “Rag, Mama, Rag.” That table-saw of a fiddle riff, Manuel’s Saturday-night-wasted swing and fills on the drums, Simon’s pep-band tuba bass line, a Levon vocal at peak horniness … the list of things to love in this song is endless. And as far as pure, uncluttered joy in this miserable world, it doesn’t get much better than watching Helm crank up Garth Hudson’s mad-professor barrelhouse piano during The Band’s Classic Albums episode (which, you’re fucking up if you haven’t watched this). “Brother Garth,” he says, grinning ear-to-ear, “ain’t it easy when you know how!” Excuse me, I seem to be weeping.
Robertson never really preached in his songs, preferring blurry-at-the-edges — and occasionally flat-out stupid and one-dimensional — sketches. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” works because it lucked into a truly perfect, one-of-a-kind synergy with Helm, with his “wounded dignity of the defeated” gravitas that Robertson could only hope to attain secondhand, despite, as a Jewish Native American, having a legitimate claim to that mien. The way Helm’s voice flares on “Like my brother above me” crushes me (though I do think the alternate take of the song is slightly better, even as he flubs the pronunciation and renders it “buh-bove me”). Sonically, this is one of the Band’s most idiosyncratic arrangements. To wit: The weird, off-time pickup riff into the verse that most cover versions elide (and which the group whiffs on the aforementioned alternate take); the lurching transition into the chorus that really only works because of Levon’s flawless press-rolls on the snare (while singing!); the way they drop briefly into a four-on-the-floor feel instead of the half-time beat for the “a Yankee laid him in his grave” line. The Band peaked, at least instrumental-chops-wise, with the complex syncopations of “Life Is a Carnival” off Cahoots, but their performance on “Dixie” has more going for it than its sort-of unearned reputation as a regressive piece of Confederate propaganda and/or Joan Baez’s flattened-out cover would suggest. One last thing: Has a melodica ever sounded so plaintive as it does in this song? (Well, maybe in New Order’s “Your Silent Face.”)
My feelings on “When You Awake” are probably clouded, as I’ve watched Fat Old Danko’s Acoustic Version™ enough times to warm my heart towards what I consider one of the Band’s weaker tunes and one of Robertson’s most half-assed Nostalgic McAntebellum™ compositions. I’m not even sure what’s supposed to be happening in this song — did the grandfather hypnotize the singer? Why was this phrase also written on a wall somewhere in his youth? Normally, when Robertson dips into his grab-bag of cliches, he’s saved by A) the vocalist; B) some thematic unity to the words; and C) the music under them. “When You Awake” seems to know that it’s little more than a collection of couplets without much to buoy them; witness how the song starts its fade-out before the vocals finish. Some nice Robbie guitar work panned hard-left, though, which seems to lend weight to my theory that he knew this one was a dud.
“Cripple Creek” is, simply, everything I love about Levon Helm in a nutshell: Way-back-on-the-beat drumming, a super-horny vocal … just a delight. And while I don’t know enough about the history of the clavinet to bolster or dispute Don Was’ claim that Hudson’s part on this song predates Stevie Wonder’s similar use of the instrument, I’m fine with it. Some of the group’s best ensemble singing on the outro, too, with Manuel’s falsetto keening over Danko and Helm. One thing that’s unfortunate about the album recording of this tune, though: Helm absolutely detonated its claim as the definitive version with one well-placed ad-lib in The Last Waltz. Say it with me: “YEAH YEAH YOU KNOW I SURE WISH I COULD YODEL LIKE HER!” (I have chills.)
I’ve got to confess that “Whispering Pines” has never really done it for me. This may be sacrilege; Hoskyns calls the song “a cry of exquisite desolation that no one but [Manuel] could have sung,” which I suppose is accurate. According to this quite extensive write-up by Peter Viney, Robertson wrote the lyrics over the melody and chords Manuel brought him, and there’s something I find a little patronizing about them. Granted, I’m just as guilty as the next guy of mythologizing Manuel as this sad figure who eventually broke under the weight of his assorted demons, but at this point, he was still the good-looking and talented dude who Hoskyns maintains the others thought of as their “lead” singer. I sort of resent Robertson painting him as such a lonely, sad guy, when I think there was a lot of joy in him. But then again, Manuel sings the shit out of this, so maybe Robertson did have him figured out with this one.
So much writing on The Band’s music focuses on their unselfish ensemble playing, but listening to “Jemima Surrender,” I have to say Garth’s piano is as much a lead voice here as Manuel, Helm or Danko. Hudson, who eventually retreated musically into a haze of synth atmospherics and literally into actual hermitry, is a commanding pianist, and he almost overplays on this track, pounding away in the background with what I believe the kids call “reckless abandon.” Manuel — who eventually lost his beautiful falsetto to cocaine and Gran Marnier — is still in amazing form at this point, gleefully hooting over Hudson and Danko’s voices in the wonderful blend that defined their early years.
It’s hard, for me at least, to listen to any Band music without at some point being reminded of the depressing straits most of the members found themselves in after Roberson fled for the greener pastures of Hollywood and big fat Marty Scorsese paychecks. A much-circulated quote from Helm quotes someone else as saying Manuel “had a tear in his voice” and hearing him sing about the utterly ridiculous, “Song of the South”-type characters in “Rocking Chair” is tragic, given his superfluously depressing end. As he improvises over Helm and Danko on the outro to this song, it’s painful to think that he never got his own rocking chair, just a belt from a shower rod in a Winter Park, Florida hotel.
At some point, you do have to hand it to Robbie, and “Look Out Cleveland” has some of my favorite of his hot-shit guitar playing. As much as I dislike the guy, he is one of my favorite guitarists, and his tone on this song is shimmering and woozy, perfectly fitting a song about a catastrophic storm. And I love, love, love the way the group ends this song, drunkenly slamming into that closing riff after the last chorus, eventually ending the tune like a pack of drunks falling down a set of stairs arm-in-arm.
“Jawbone” is something of a Band deep cut, but it’s always been one of my favorites. The shifting rhythmic feels of the song (built around a tricky 6/4 meter) and that stuttering pentatonic riff over an all-time Manuel chorus (“I’m a thief and I dig it,” sung just at the top of his chest voice) — it’s all just *chef’s kiss.* Manuel’s vocal on this one is treated in a fairly different way from the other tunes on the record — there’s a ton of room sound on it, which, per Levon, is because it was recorded at least partially in a bathroom — and that is also perfect. The song has a great Robertson solo, and Hudson’s iridescent organ is, as usual, in perfect counterpoint to everything else. It’s sorta weird, for a group as nostalgic and backwards-looking as the Band, to hear Hudson utilize the then-novel pitch wheel on his Lowrey organ for those bends, but a testament to his musicianship that it rarely actually tips over into being jarring.
“Unfaithful Servant” — whew. I always say that “Million Dollar Bash” off Basement Tapes is my favorite example of Danko’s amazing ability to invest the antiquarian claptrap he was singing about with incredible pathos, but this song is up there as well. The guy grew up on a rural Canadian tobacco farm; what did he know about servants, unfaithful or otherwise? And good lord, another beautiful John Simon horn chart on this tune. I love Rock of Ages and Last Waltz for the Allen Toussaint horn charts, but there’s something so charmingly huffy-puffy and amateurish about the guys playing their own horn parts on the records. Great little acoustic solo from Robertson on this one as well, showing off his tremolo picking.
Succinctly, “King Harvest (Has Finally Come)” is maybe my favorite Band song, definitely my favorite Robertson solo, and probably my favorite Manuel vocal. Levon really know how to hit a snare, and that sparse, sharp crack that intros the verse is flawless. As much as I love when Danko starts cooking on bass, he’s equally as good when he’s being understated, and the bass part on the verse here is super-tasteful and restrained. Perhaps my only quibble with this song is that Robertson’s solo on the alternate take of this song is, in my own opinion, way better that the “official” one, with more of those spine-tingling harmonics he was so goddamn good at. That said, the fact that he supposedly recorded his “regular” “King Harvest” solo on the lowest volume setting of his amp is a bit of trivia I’ve always loved.
I won’t be grading any of these records. What’s the point? How could I grade something that — as with The Band — felt at once perfectly familiar and so bracingly new when I discovered it? It will always be a part of my life, and despite my familiarity with the rancor The Band descended into and the ignominious ends of two of its lynchpins, it still only ever brings me a level of rare, timeless joy.