"The Band": the greatest LP in Rock history

The most accomplished, inventive and intriguing rock band America has ever produced is The Band.  I enjoyed their 1968 hit single, “The Weight”and 1969’s UK hit, “Rag Mama Rag”, but I had just bought my first stereo system, recorded music was expensive back then, and there was oodles of great new stuff to choose from.

It was the constant advocacy of my bi-weekly music bible at that time, Rolling Stone, that persuaded me to buy Stage Fright, The Band’s third LP, in 1970. 

I must have played it ten times in a row that first day: it was that good. The musicianship – not something I’d ever cared about before – was immaculate. Levon Helm’s drums sounded like drums never sounded before - impossibly thick and chunky and clear,  as if microphones had been placedinside the equipment. Garth Hudson’s swirling keyboards were mesmerizing - churchy and ecstatic and impossibly authentic, conjuring up 1890s’ carny shows and prayer meetings and saloons. Robbie Robertson had eschewed extended guitar-hero wailings for tight, simple Telecaster solos that gripped the memory fiercely and added immeasurably to the atmosphere and drive of the song rather than serving as an advert for the size of the picker’s wang. 

The voices, too, were just startling. Levon Helm sounded like a Southern farmer turned  confederate soldier and Richard Manuel had an aching quality that drenched his songs with emotional meaning. 

The next day, I cadged some money and bought their true masterpiece – their eponymous second album. This was even better. I realized after one play of The Band that Stage Fright had been a slightly self-conscious attempt to capture the wonders contained in the twelve tracks that make up the greatest American album of all time. (By the time I’d decided to take an interest, The Band were already in decline.)

There’s jaunty “Rag Mama Rag” - fiddles, honky-tonk piano, and parping tubas. And the stately “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, a poignant lament for the Confederacy’s Civil War defeat seen through the eyes of Virgil Caine, an ordinary Southerner. (Imagine the howls that would greet such a song in our PC age.)

There’s the sloppy, feel-good roll of “Up On Cripple Creek”, a tale of a feckless, feel-good gambler and his girl-friend, Bessie: 

Up on Cripple Creek, she sends meIf I spring a leak, she mends meI don't have to speak, she defends meA drunkard's dream, if I ever did see one

There are several delicate, yearning ballads: “Rockin’ Chair”, “Whispering Pines” and “When You Awake”.

And, of course, there’s the sublime zenith of their career, the superb “King Harvest Will Surely Come” which seemed utterly unique in terms of its music and its subject matter. It’s about a farmer who, suffering hard times,  joins the union, but the core of the song, its real beauty, lies in a series of quietly-delivered, descriptive refrains:

Corn in the fieldsListen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the waterKing Harvest has surely come...

Scarecrow and a yellow moonPretty soon a carnival on the edge of townKing Harvest has surely come

It’s hard to believe that rock music has ever produced such rich, evocative imagery.

To make it quite perfect, there’s a guitar solo from the composer, Robbie Robertson, which is as subtle and beautiful and urgent – and simple – as any I’ve ever heard.

The Band went on to produce some other great records, but they never again approached the heights achieved in The Band. 

They weren’t the first rock performers to plunder America’s distant past – dirt farms and Western cow-towns: Bob Dylan had done it with John Wesley Harding, and The Byrds, with Gram Parsons in the line-up, had visited that particular well for Sweetheart of the Rodeo (and Parsons would return to this imaginary landscape gloriously on his two solo albums). But most subsequent attempts to evoke the “old, weird America” mainly consisted of five glum-looking millionaire dope-heads dressed in silly, pretend Western clothes on the covers of albums consisting of pseudo-Country Music AOR jog-alongs.

The Band, by contrast,  had authenticity dripping off it. It didn’t strike one as the result of  childhoods packed with Western movies and TV series – this felt like grainy old sepia 1860s photographs come to life: the people in these songs were real, their emotions and ruminations were genuine.

So why were The Band so original? 

The group consisted of four Canadians (including their song-writer) and a Southerner. So they were North American – but not really American. Did that subtle differentness help them create a unique vision devoid of Old West cliches?

They started off by spending years backing the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins on endless US tours – like the Beatles and the Stones, they honed their craft playing rock and roll music in front of rowdy, violent  drunks: by the time they came to record their own albums, they had become one musical entity.

The fact that they were so musically-gifted – they were all multi-instrumentalists in the studio – was just luck, one presumes.

They became Bob Dylan’s backing band in the mid-’60s, and one can only surmise that playing in front of outraged folkies baying for their electric blood night after night helped them ignore the mainstream middle ground when they got the chance to do their own thing.

They spent months in Woodstock extemporizing with popular music’s most original composer, Bob Dylan. The collaborative Basement Tapes evoked a real but mythical America which is to be found in John Wesley Harding and The Band. (Dylan wanted The Band to record backings for Hardin, but Robbie Robertson handed the tapes back, recommending that Dylan release them exactly as they were – good call.) 

One can only conjecture that his association with Dylan allowed Robertson to hone his composing skills to such a level that he was able to churn out one timeless classic after another without apparently breaking sweat.

Whatever factors produced it, The Band is one of rock music’s finest creations - and still my personal favourite.