The Band: why were they so revered?*

Found a great online story from 2015 about Mr. Hudson:
Garth Hudson Honored in Woodstock.

 

I love Stage Fright equal to their first 2 albums.

 

Like Steve said, If you gotta ask, you'll never know.

But, I'd say, there are really two answers. The first is historical, the one everyone knows, in '68, at kind of the height of psychedelic and a period when rock was getting bigger with suite like songs, and album length jams, or proggy songs about trolls, here they were playing this kind of back to basics music that harkened back not just to early rock but to pre rock music; at the height of the "generation gap" and the hippie vs. older, rural community gap was ripping the fabric of the nation, here they were posing on the inner sleeve of their album with family: old people who were farmers and covering Lefty Frizzell. Unassuming though it was, in fact, because it was so unassuming, Music from Big Pink was received, especially among British rockers as a kind of complete if not repudiation, challenge to everything they were doing at at point -- stuff like Tommy and Pipers at the Gate of Dawn and Sgt. Pepper etc. (not just clapton and croby but Roger Waters has had some really interesting things to say about the impact Big Pink had on him and Pink Floyd).

The second has to do with musicianship, the way these guys played: with a loose but tight feel that just seemed to fall together, a kind of front-porch informalism, a groove an feel, a complete unconcern for solo flash but total commitment to group feel, was just kind of a reference standard that you can't really study and execute, you just have to have it. For me and my peers coming along as teenage musicians in the mid-70s, the way these guys played together, the loose but tight feel, the loopy country funk, this was (and still is for me) a references standard. Basically the entire school Americana in rock since the late '60s descends from the Basement Tapes, Big Pink and The Band (and Gilded Palace of Sin).

 

That's what I think is one of the funniest things about the Basement Tapes: Dylan and The Band were laying that stuff down in 1967- it's like Bob and the boys were giving the finger to the whole psychedelic movement whether they knew it or not...

 

But that's just a qualitative measure. I mean, the Sex Pistols only made on album, and it's a great album and it and the band had a huge impact. Nick Drake only made only made three, and he's tremendous. The Velvet Underground, etc. The Basement Tapes, Big Pink, The Band, Stage Fright (which is at least half great and maybe more than that), Rock of Ages, and a bunch of later songs and performances like "Acadian Driftwood" and "It Makes No Difference," "Share Your Love," "Mystery Train," "Life Is a Carnival" -- that's hardly a quantitatively inconsequential body of work compared even to other praised peers. Around here I think we focus way too much on albums and the number of "great albums" as THE marker of greatness or achievement. It's a rock era thing I think. I mean, if you grew up or still listen to jazz or classical or whatever -- music where so much of the great music either pre-dates the album or even the recorded music era -- this measurement of quality by quantity of classic albums seems bizarre. At least it does to me.

 

Yeah. Songs like "The Weight", "Tears of Rage", "I Shall be Released", etc., sound like they could have been written decades ago.

 

Garth Hudson's a freakin' genius.

 

I'm playing the latest Last Waltz box set, and it sounds different than the previous reissues. Am I alone with this perception?

 

Yes, although Dylan's motor accident of course was lamentable, it at the same time was convenient to him for skipping that whole psychedelic period, with which in terms of musical style he had little affinity. When Bob is working in the studio he doesn't like spending too much time on endless overdubs, studio effects or a gazillion different takes.

 

There was a time that I REALLY TRIED to like The Band, after all those rave album reviews and all that stuff

But they never did anything to me. Other than 'The Weight' and a few others, their music doesn't appeal to me

 

Yeah, it's all about the songs and their impeccable musicianship.
And they had 3 vocalists that other bands would have killed to have.
Not 1, not 2, 3.

 

Their charms are more subtle than many, but they're definitely full of charms. I didn't appreciate them as much until I was a bit older and far more musically experienced. Which isn't to suggest that you're young or not musically experienced, or that you'll necessarily like them more down the road, but for me, that's what it took. The same was true re Dylan for me, by the way, and really, singer-songwriter stuff, a lot of folk, etc. in general. When I was younger and consumed with building skills on my chosen instruments, I was more focused on in-your-face, flashy musicianship. I still like that stuff just as much as I ever did, but I gained a much better appreciation of subtlety, nuances, etc. later on. (And I also started to notice a lot of nuances I hadn't noticed before in the flashy stuff, too.)

 

+ Levon and Rick could sing like no-one else.

 

i've read multiple places that it's the same mastering as the last time they issued the 4-disc set. no new tracks either.

 

I don't know for a fact, but I'm guessing critics liked them....and that doesn't hurt.

 

Supposedly is key here. The timeline doesn't allow for the Big Pink-Beggars Banquet connection, since the Stones' album was already in the can when the Band's debut was released. Rather, Jagger has claimed that the album was influenced by Basement Tapes acetates that Marianne Faithful introduced him to, but then the credit of influence would be due Dylan rather than his backup band.

 

There really barely were any such things as rock critics in 1968. The Band's first and foremost impact was on fellow musicians especially English ones. Townshend has talked about how hearing Big Pink turned him around. Clapton has talked about the influence on his pivoting to something like Blind Faith. The Beatles were working a quote from "The Weight" into a TV performance of "Hey Jude" and clearly their attempt to get back to basics was influenced by Harrison's visit to Woodstock and Dylan's house...Roger Waters has spoken eloquently about how the sound of The Band's first records really changed his way of thinking about the sound of music.

 

Not really, the aesthetic and the sound of the music on the basement tapes -- which of course were recorded in The Band's basement by The Band's keyboard player with most of the music being played by The Band and the sensibility most closely resembling the music The Band would go on to make, not the music like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline that Dylan would go on to me -- is as much The Band's as Dylan's, even if the compositions are principally Dylan's. And don't forget, some of the material circulated by Albert Grossman as publishing demos to get covers on, contained co-composed material: "This Wheel's on Fire" with Rick Danko; "Tears of Rage" with Richard Manuel. I really don't think you can separate the sound of the nascent Band and what they brought to the development of that material from Dylan's parts of it and attribute the influence and impact from only one or the other of the two.

 

This article from the August 24, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone provides some idea of contemporary critical reception of The Band and Music from Big Pink. The album had been released less than two months earlier, on July 1, 1968. I bought the album that fall at Cutler's Record Shop in New Haven, and was hooked. I believe that The Weight was released as a single in August, 1968 and peaked on the Billboard chart in late September, 1968.
Friends and Neighbors Just Call Us the Band

 

Yeah, I was just listing famous roots rock albums that came after Big Pink when I wrote that. I looked it up and found out after that that Beggars Banquet was already done. That is interesting, though, that the music that ended up on the Basement Tapes was an influence.

 

Early on, one noteworthy magazine had noticed:


The US and Canadian covers of Time Magazine, Vol. 95
No.2, 12 January 1970.
Painting by Bob Peak.
By the way, I still have the Canadian edition.

 

"Northern Lights/Southern Cross" was anything but bland.

 

northern lights/southern cross......no blandness at all....sublime music, yes.....their last great album...

 

The Basement Tapes has always been my favourite music made by Dylan or The Band. I'll never forget playing The Basement Tapes (A Tree With Roots, to be specific) for a friend of mine who considered himself a total Dylan freak...I couldn't believe his verdict when it was done: "Meh...nuthin' special." Say whaaaaat???!!!

IMO, if The Band had stayed closer to the aesthetic put forward in The Basement Tapes and their first two albums their music might not have suffered as much. I'm noticing the word "bland" cropping up time and again in regard to their post-The Band material..."bland" might not be the word I'd use, but I reckon that the more The Band's music got caught up in the latest studio gimmickry and whatnot on their last few albums something was definitely lost in translation. I'm probably exaggerating to prove a point here but, Rick, Richard and Levon's voices aside, when you compare, say, The Band to Northern Lights/Southern Cross it almost sounds like two completely different bands. Sure, I can understand expanding your musical horizons and all that but by the end of their career it seems like just about everything that made The Band's music so special -that whole "wooden" feeling- was just about gone, replaced with a lot of mid-'70's studio cliches. To me, what makes Big Pink and The Band (especially The Band) so special is their timeless feel, whereas just about every other record they made sounds very much like a product of its time, and not necessarily in a good way at times- especially once Garth Hudson discovered synthesizers and Robbie Robertson bought a wah-wah pedal and talk box...

 

Easily my favourite track from the album, along with being a "history lesson":

"Acadian Driftwood" - The Band.