As musical counterculture and rock psychedelia matured into a full blown movement in 1968 and peaked in 1969, another rock revolution was quietly unfolding in upstate New York, at a spare, flourescent-colored split-level shared by five friends four Canucks and one Arkansas mountain boy who made music as beautiful as a classic symphony, as hard as Delta blues and as folk-soaked and American as the psyche of any healthy hippie.
Collectively, they were The Band, and the album that emerged from these poignant sessions at this house was Music from the Big Pink. Slightly rough around the edges and balanced somewhere between both of their musical mentors – Arkansas rockabilly pioneer Ronnie Hawkins, who fronted them as the Hawks in the mid-1960s, and the great Bob Dylan, who would lead them for a time in the early 1970s The Band, in 1968, made a thunderous reminder that a rock band, first and foremost, was about music and musicians, not individual egos, fame, production or anything else. Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, they were: four singers, two keyboardists, a guitar, a bass and a simple drum kit, and an ethos that said no one man was more important than any other but without him there was no full group.
Every song on Big Pink is quintessential Americana: the rollicking ‘This Wheel’s On Fire,’ which preserves the erratic, slightly left-of-center Hawkins influence; the hard-rocking barn-burner ‘Chest Fever,’ which proves The Band were as much in touch with Elvis and his blues forebears as they were with Dylan and hippie folk; the haunting ‘Tears of Rage,’ which Manuel co-wrote with Dylan and in which finds grace at the apex of beauty and terror; and Robertson’s classic ‘The Weight,’ a lament on martyrdom that remains a high watermark in folk balladry. Even the album’s two cover songs resonate: a straight forward reading of ‘Long Black Veil,’ and a Rick Danko-sung version of Bob Dylan’s own ‘I Shall Be Released,’ which, although criticized for its lack of Dylan’s grit, reveals a softer, hymn-like quality to the song that maybe its author himself didn’t even realize was there.
The Band effortlessly melds American music styles, harnessing the spiritual guidance of their two most important mentors, Hawkins and Dylan, while at the same time proving that they were a respectfully better group without either of them and without any one front man, for that matter. Big Pink is their best collective example of their folksy rock sensibility, enhanced by the Canadian mysticism of four fifths of the group and grounded with Helm’s Arkansas country rock anchor.
Big Pink’s sequel, The Band (1969, and more popularly known as ‘The Brown Album’), is arguably a better album: tighter production, noticeably higher confidence from the band members (especially Robertson, who would eventually emerge as the group’s spokesman and de facto leader) and the first appearances of many of their best songs (‘Rag Mama Rag,’ ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ and ‘Up on Cripple Creek,’ to name a few). But it’s the unrefined purism and positively freewheeling, Dylanesque texture found only on Big Pink that makes it the seminal masterpiece.
The Band’s simplistic moniker suggests a bare-bones ensemble, free of egos, pretentiousness and massive production gloss, and for years, as rock and roll eddied into all those things straight on into the 1970s, they quietly became one of the most important groups in musical history, staying true to their ensemble philosophy. The Band, at their best, were quite possibly the only rock group worthy of the trite ‘whole is more than the sum of parts’ descriptor and no group of musicians has played as well as an ensemble or expressed itself as one collective voice since.