Postmodern Blues

The Band: Remastering The Masters

originally published September 19, 2001

"If you're lookin' for the real thing,
He can tell you where it went."
- The Band, "W.S. Walcott Medicine Show"

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But Capitol had my number with their cute marketing ploy. I was accustomed to the mysterious aura attached to certain musical celebrities residing in Woodstock, New York, and had been au courant enough to know that the musicians on Music From Big Pink had something to do with the reclusive Bob Dylan and his relocation there. The label of the record bore simply the album's title followed an alphabetical listing of the names of the five musicians - Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Jaime Robbie Robertson - and then "John Simon-Producer." No other clues, and somehow that "Jaime," which Robertson dropped after the third album, added to the mystique (those who had been paying careful attention knew him as one of the musicians credited on the 1966 Dylan masterpiece Blonde On Blonde). Of course the striking album cover and liner featured additional clues, including the information that Bob Dylan painted the cover picture. He also shared songwriting credits with Danko ("This Wheel's On Fire") and Manuel ("Tears of Rage") and his anthemic "I Shall Be Released" brought the record to a close.

Listening obsessively to Music From Big Pink on my very modest hi-fi, I plunged deliriously into the mystery of its provenance. And I slapped that garish pink sticker onto my guitar case. It became the permanent emblem of my very memorable summer of 1968, and is included, in the version described from the newspaper ad, in the CD booklet of Capitol's remastered version of Music From Big Pink. The "Band Remasters Series," all eight albums released by Capitol originally between 1968 and 1977, is now complete. This welcome development is what prompts my musings about the incomparable quintet who came to be known simply, justifiably, as "The Band."

Their association with Woodstock's most famous recluse helped to cloak the five musicians in mystery, but the Dylan connection was a mixed blessing. It opened doors through which they otherwise would not have passed - as in bringing them under the fiercely protective, lucrative guidance of Dylan manager Albert Grossman - but almost derailed them just as pop music success loomed on the horizon. Drummer Levon Helm had quit "The Hawks," as they had been known, in disgust after the hostile audiences encountered on the 1966 tour with Dylan so unnerved him that he abandoned music completely for several months. But then Danko lured him to Woodstock by the Spring of 1967, where they all participated with the convalescing Dylan - after his motorcycle wreck - in the wonderfully weird sessions that produced The Basement Tapes.

To be sure, the members of what came to be called "The Band" contributed a certain amount of mystique of their own. In Elliott Landy's memorable photographs that adorned their first two albums, they looked like they had stepped out of some early nineteenth century rotogravure. (The very same Landy had scored a cover photo essay in The Saturday Evening Post devoted to the subject of family-man Dylan's new life in Woodstock.) In fact they would not have looked out of place in an album of photographs by Matthew Brady or Alexander Gardner. Four of the five (excepting Helm) were Canadians, but their furred visages seemed to embody some deeply-rooted "American" essence.

Landy would describe in later years how the five collaborated with him to contrive poses that maximized this sense of them, with their albeit youthful faces appearing as craggy and imposing as the mountains Russell Banks describes in his unforgettable stories set in upstate New York.

But then on another level one might protest that their beards merely embodied the affectations of the hippie era. That, however, serves to encourage the idea that The Band's music was expressive of psychedelia, in keeping with the San Francisco bands among others. I would insist that their association with "Woodstock generation" music was a combined accident of timing and geographical location. Listening to their music now, having gained much distance from the over-discussed - but poorly understood - late 1960s, it is much easier to locate them in the rootsy R&B tradition they mined for years as "The Hawks" under the tutelage of rockabilly front man Ronnie Hawkins. As several outtakes on the newly available remastered CDs make clear, they were much closer to Stax/Volt than to Haight-Ashbury; more Motown than Monterey. The same sort of misrecognition afflicts the reputation of the late Janis Joplin. She wanted to be another Bessie Smith, not just some tie-dyed hippie chanteuse.

Historical reinterpretation and previously undisclosed details abound in the excellent essays that adorn the CD booklets in the Remasters series. Rob Bowman, their author, interviewed all five members of the group over many years, and of course, also John Simon, producer of their brilliant first two albums. The historical dimension, both in Bowman's writing and in the gorgeous sound achieved in the remastering process, also extends to the individual musicianship of the players. Again, the R&B genre looms large in importance.

(End Part 1)