Big Pink is one of those middle-class homes you'd expect to find in the suburbs, not on a secluded mountain in rustic Woodstock, New York. When the band moved in in the spring of 1967, the house looked like it had been rented to a housewife who only came through the door once a week with a duster.
The band had spent the previous six years in hotels, bed and breakfasts, motels and friends' apartments. They had brought the dust of the road to Big Pink. With Cardiff still black under their fingernails and Stockholm still caked on their boots, with Paris still waiting to be brushed off their trousers and Copenhagen unwashed from their hair, with the grime of Dublin, Glasgow, Sydney and Singapore plastered to their suitcases, staining their clothes and seeping into their pores, the band had just returned from a world tour with Bob Dylan when Dylan, recovering from a motorbike accident, summoned them to Woodstock to help him complete a television film.
A friend found them Big Pink for $125 a month. Finally settling like the dust they carried with them, the band settled in Big Pink for a while. Then, kicking their boots off the coffee tables, they dragged their equipment down to the basement where they improvised a home recording studio. Dylan, who lived a few miles away, came every night to play with them, a repertoire that ranged from old folk songs to music they composed on the spot.
The audience was occasionally a friend or neighbor. The band started growing moustaches and beards and wearing hats. It was at Woodstock that people started calling them The Band. The lack of a name for the group might be puzzling, but as Robbie Robertson explains: “For one thing, there aren't many bands around Woodstock and our friends and neighbors just call us The Band and that's how we see ourselves. And secondly, we don't think a name means anything. The name thing got out of hand.”
They were once known as the Hawks. For a while they considered calling themselves the Crackers. Now that they've released an album, they still don't have a name. Inevitably they'll be identified as Bob Dylan's band, but even Dylan doesn't call them that. Although Dylan painted the cover image, wrote one of the songs on it, co-wrote two others, and imbued the others with the unmistakable influence of his presence, Music from Big Pink is for the band a reclamation of their identity. “There's the music of Bob's house,” says guitarist Jaime (Robbie) Robertson, “and there's the music of our house. John Wesley Harding It comes from Bob's house. But they are two different houses.”
Robbie was born and raised in Toronto. “I was young, really young when I got into music. My mom was a musician and I grew up on country. Then, when I was about 5, I developed a love for big bands. I’ve been playing guitar so long I don’t remember when I started, but I think I got into rock like everyone else.” Robbie dropped out of high school to play in the Toronto area and had his own band for a while before he was 16.
At 24, Robertson could be considered the band’s leader, if the band cared about such things. He was once described by Dylan as “the only mathematical genius on the guitar I’ve ever come across who doesn’t offend my intestinal nervousness with his old-school sound.” Robertson was only 15 when he was hired by Ronnie Hawkins, one of the early kings and legends of rockabilly. At just 18, Robertson was already a legend in his native Toronto and had traveled thousands of miles across rural North America with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.
For a musician, road dust doesn't just get into your pores. It gets into your hair, your nose, your eyes, your mouth, your voice and your music. “We've played everywhere from Molasses, Texas, to Timmins, Canada, which is a mining town about 100 miles from the edge where the trees don't grow anymore,” Robertson says, and that grit comes through when you listen to Music from Big Pink. “I stopped in Nazareth,” he writes in The Weightone of four Robertson songs on the album, “I felt half dead / Lord, can you tell me where a man can find a bed? / He smiled and shook my hand / No, that was all he said…”.
Photo: Elliott Landy
The group is composed of four other musicians. Like Robertson, three of them are from Canada. On bass is Rick Danko, born to a lumberjack in the Canadian village of Simcoe where he grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry with a wind-up Victrola and a battery-powered radio. His home, he says, didn't have electricity until he was 10. Danko began playing guitar, mandolin and violin before high school and was in a band before he was a teenager. He dropped out of high school and joined Ronnie Hawkins' band at 17. “I always wanted to go to Nashville and be a cowboy singer. From the time I was 5, I listened to the Grand Ole Opryblues and country stations.” Before joining the Hawks he played rhythm guitar and now bass, he doesn't like to consider himself a musician. “I can't read music.”
At the piano is Richard Manuel, singing in a style that echoes the faint signal of John R’s rhythm & blues program, broadcasting from Nashville on WLAC radio. “It was the underground radio of the time,” Manuel recalls. “I was about 13 years old and had to stay up late to listen to it. You have to remember, I was living in Stratford, Ontario at the time.”
On the organ is Garth Hudson, who had started at agricultural college until a photograph of his uncle playing trombone in a dance band inspired him to study music theory and harmony. At 13, he says, he was the only one in London, Ont., who could play rock and roll. “My uncles were all in bands and my dad had a lot of old instruments in the house. I think I started playing piano when I was about 5.” Garth’s high school band played “kind of vaudeville,” and he didn’t start playing rock and roll until later. “But I listened to country for years. My dad would find all the Hoedown stations on the radio, and then I played accordion in a country band when I was 12.” After high school, Garth left Canada to form his own band in Detroit. Unlike most rock organists, he uses the Lowrey organ which, having a wider variety of orchestral sounds, has an effect that enriches the texture of the band's music.
The only member of the group born in the United States, drummer Levon Helm, hails from West Helena, Arkansas, which is also the home of blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson. “I listened to him a lot as a kid,” he recalls, “but I think my influences are broader.” Like the other band members, Levon had his own rock band in high school. “It was called the Jungle Bush Beaters, but it was a good band.” Levon doesn’t listen to records. “It’s like TV,” he notes, “I once watched TV for six months. I didn’t do anything else. That’s what happens when you spend all your time listening. You end up not playing music, which is all I want to do.”
The five met while playing with Ronnie Hawkins, who hired them one by one until they quit after three years. They were playing a nightclub in the seaside town of Somers Point, New Jersey, when Dylan called in the summer of 1965. “We’d never heard of Bob Dylan,” Helm says, “but he’d heard of us. He said, ‘Do you want to play the Hollywood Bowl?’ We asked him who else was going to be on the show. ‘Just us.’”
If Dylan, even unofficially, can be heard on the album as the sixth member of the group, Music from Big Pink will have to be judged on the merits of the band, not Dylan's. But that's unlikely to happen. In taste, modesty, humor, and perhaps even perception, many of these merits tend to coincide. One of Dylan's finest unreleased songs, I Shall Be Releasedembellishes the album like a blessing. “They say every man needs protection / They say every man must fall / And yet I swear I see my reflection / Somewhere so high above this wall,” the lyrics say, but the music with which, from an instrumental point of view, the band justifies Dylan's choice of them as his backing band is no less.
They play country-rock, with WS Wolcott-like cadences and Original Rabbit Foot Minstrel Show and music that tells stories like Uncle Remus did, with the flavor of Red River Cereal and the texture of King Biscuit Flour Show. Robertson himself calls it mountain music, “because this place where we are, Woodstock, is in the mountains.”
With Music from Big Pink The Band dips into the well of tradition and pulls out buckets of clear, fresh country soul that washes your ears with a sound you’ve never heard before.
Music from Big Pink it's the kind of album that will have to make its way with its uniqueness, opening a door through which other artists could pass, children of the exodus from the cities in search of a different morality, with the hunger for wisdom cultivated on the earth. “Aren't they all dreaming?”, sings Richard Manuel. “So the voice I hear is real / among so many plots and conspiracies / can't we go back to feeling something?”
From Rolling Stone US.
