Band - The Roots-Rock of the Frontier

The Band's story is one of the most fascinating in rock mythology. An original acoustic orchestra that, over the years, has "preached" a roots-based rock, anchored to Southern traditions and the legends of the Frontier.

Ronnie Hawkins, singer and pianist from Arkansas, is an ambitious and arrogant rocker, a showman of modest fame and decent artistic ability. Struck by a thunderbolt of black music, he dropped out of college and, for the first time, in an Oklahoma club (1957), got the chance to see and join an all-black band, the Black Hawks.

The first official recording came out in '58 from a dusty garage, titled "Hey Bo Diddley" and credited to the Ron Hawkins Quartet. On drums sits fellow Arkansan Levon Helm, then seventeen years old: the first key piece of what would become The Band comes straight from the deep South, an eyewitness to countless street shows (minstrel shows), to concerts by Elvis Presley (before fame hit), Bill Monroe or Sonny Boy Williamson. He would become the engine behind so many rural stories, the wellspring for the fables later told by Robbie Robertson.

Finally rebranded Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks, the band cut its first two albums for Roulette, a self-titled record in '59 and "Mr. Dynamo" - our man's nickname - the following year. But the real winning move, the strategic one, was something else entirely: leaving behind the circuit of seedy bars and clubs around Memphis and heading north, to Canada. Up there, far fewer rock'n'roll idols were on offer, there was less competition, and a belated hunger among the local youth to shake loose and dance. The group, riding in a black Cadillac that reeked of an old-school gang, found gigs easily, no shortage of girls, and plenty of post-show Wild West brawls.

The punishing touring routine triggered a series of lineup changes: one by one, all the future members of The Band came on board. Robbie Robertson (from 1960) on lead guitar and Rick Danko on bass, followed by Christmas '61 by keyboardists Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson.

Unfortunately, the career struggled to take off, turning on its one fleeting moment of glory: a cover of "Who Do You Love" by the beloved Bo Diddley (1963). At that point the backing band left him, and began touring Canada and the States under the new name Levon & The Hawks.

A true goldmine of different influences: rock'n'roll, but also rockabilly, country, blues, gospel and R&B.

The five Hawks fed off each other, gradually weaving a sonic mélange that would soon cement into an unmistakable sound.

The backstories are just as striking: Robertson, son of a Jewish gambler (who died when he was a child) and a Mohawk woman, grew up on a Toronto reservation with his ears permanently tuned to Nashville radio waves; Rick Danko, a little further north, sprouted up among the tobacco fields on the shores of Lake Simcoe; then Manuel, with his obsession for alcohol and for Ray Charles's singing; and finally Hudson, an organist and child prodigy, a wild blender of Bach and Chuck Berry inside his uncle's funeral parlor business.

The music said it all: on one side, the rhythm section - precise, thunderous, solemn and evocative; on the other, Garth Hudson's organ, the most mature and musically schooled of the group (with a background in classical studies), yet also a charismatic experimenter with textures and arrangements. In between, Robbie's guitar work, winding like no one else's, virtuosic without a trace of arrogance, a passionate champion of unconventional melodic landscapes. As for the voices: Richard Manuel's wonderful, lonesome romantic falsetto stood in counterpoint to the rowdy, countrified cheer of the charismatic Danko and Helm.

In two years of touring on their own, five sets a night, the boys managed to cut a handful of singles and, above all, to be admired on stage (summer '64) by a delighted John Hammond Jr. The latter - the twenty-year-old son of Columbia's legendary talent scout John Hammond - offered them the chance to record with him in New York, serving as a deluxe backing band for a (still!) modest white blues singer-songwriter. Those two albums would be the prelude to the decisive encounter with Bob Dylan, during the fateful summer of 1965. The quintet barely knew him, worlds away from the new, aggressive, ante-litteram heavy aesthetic the songwriter was pushing. And yet...

The little man from Duluth was, at that moment, the new folk prophet, hailed with equal fervor by musicians, fans, critics, industry insiders, young and old alike.

"The times," however, "they are a-changin'," just as he himself had predicted: tired of tradition and protest ballads, Bob picked up an electric guitar for the first time and put together a backing band, determined to match - and, deep down, to surpass - the socio-musical earthquake set off by the Beatles. Enter "Bringing It All Back Home," his first million-selling success, and the "rock baptism" on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival at the end of July, with Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and three-fifths of the Butterfield Blues Band.

The first real contact with the Hawks came through Robbie Robertson's friendship, acting as the Hawks' emissary -- the band having, among other things, been strongly recommended to Bob by Mary Martin, secretary to his manager Albert Grossman.

Robertson struck up an excellent rapport with Dylan, becoming his inseparable sidekick: from there to appearing alongside him at the Forest Hills concert (08/27), with Levon Helm on drums, was a short step. Two separate sets, one acoustic and the other (booed by old-school "purist" fans) electric and clattering. Bob was thrilled and chose the Hawks themselves (helped along by the departure of Kooper, Bloomfield and Harvey Brooks) to carry on through the dates of the exhausting, legendary '65/'66 world tour. That endless run of concerts, interviews, protests and time zones wore the merry crew down to the bone: Helm quit almost immediately (late November), in constant conflict with a new leader who had gradually usurped his status as the group's charismatic tribal chief.

And so, amid drummer changes (from Bobby Gregg to Mickey Jones for the European leg) and daily jeers from the enemies of electricity, one of rock's most storied tours came to a close - a pivotal moment in the evolution of a toy becoming aware of itself. Dylan's tragic motorcycle accident in the countryside near Woodstock (07/29/'66) did the rest.

The recovery dragged on, and Bob chose to settle down for good in that rural "buen retiro," far from amphetamines and journalists. He imposed a full year of artistic silence, raising kids with his partner Sara. Then something loosened up. Hudson, Danko and Manuel decided to rent a big house painted pink nearby (duly nicknamed "Big Pink"), turning its spacious basement into a recording studio and musical hideaway. A few miles away stood Albert Grossman's mansion, with Robbie and his wife as permanent houseguests, while Helm came and went from the South. Out of that bucolic calm came the Dylan demos later released as "The Basement Tapes" and, above all, the material for the debut under the new name: The Band. The mood was lazy and relaxed, the mild weather allowing for small group excursions into the surrounding woods, outings and long chats with the neighbors, between a picnic and a game of football.

The first thing that strikes rock audiences is the actual content of the Band's debut album (July 1, '68, No. 30 on the US charts), miles away from what people had been used to hearing up to that point: there are no Indian ragas, no ten-minute songs, no references to mind-expanding drugs. On "Big Pink" there's no room for flashy clothes or ethnic instruments. Words like "virtuosity," "solipsism," and "star power" are banned from the vocabulary. Instead, what listeners (at first drawn more by the presence/event of Dylan than anything else) stumble upon is a "bittersweet celebration of old & young Americas." The hidden story behind that strange watercolor cover (a gift from Bob, credited on three tracks) concerns the present read through the eyes of the past, reeking of the old West, cowboys and Indians, the Great Depression and wide-open spaces, a sense of belonging and a yearning for escape.

Nothing, not even ten years of "professionalism" behind them, would have suggested a fresco so spectacularly vivid, one you need to listen to many times before it truly sinks in. The groundwork was there, the background was there. Dylan had already paved the way with his cryptic "John Wesley Harding," recorded with local musicians in Nashville and released the previous winter.

On Music From Big Pink (1968) there's a collective in total command of its technical means, of all the different musical languages absorbed over time (country, folk, blues, gospel, rock, soul, R&B), with songwriting that has finally reached maturity. It's eleven songs that go straight to the heart, moving in their simplicity, sincerity and the immediacy of the performances. The dialogue, the questioning of one's own roots, proves to be a populist commitment that would go on to influence plenty of fellow musicians and herald the revival of roots music, the Great American Sound codified once and for all.

This "ancient book of young ancestors" opens with the indolence and bitterness of "Tears Of Rage," the story's first chapter, co-written with Dylan.

What stands out is Robbie's electric guitar filtered through a Leslie speaker (a rotating-action speaker originally designed to alter the sound of the Hammond organ, later tried out on voice and other instruments too, which changes its tone), Garth's carpet of organ, and Levon's gorgeous drumming, one of the greatest and most underrated drummers of all time. Manuel's voice, somewhere between sentimentality and "big chill" depression, starts to frame a father-son conflict. Things seem to take a turn for the worse: the desire for reconciliation curdles into resentment, and the anger over a dialogue that came too late and was never encouraged is plain to hear. The son, an original "homo novus" of democratic America, is searching for himself, for love and for the friendship of his fellow man. The parent's disappointment is unavoidable, punctuated by piano and the lovely interweaving work of the two saxophones in the second verse. The Independence Day celebration evoked in the lyrics is ruined by the farewell, but it's America as a whole that weeps bitter tears, a homeland afflicted by war.

The father's pain continues in "To Kingdom Come," nothing less than a Zen meditation on death: the old man warns the younger generation not to make mistakes, not to show their cards too soon. The vocals are handled by Robertson's rasping, strident verve, with Richard on the countermelodies. The tone is ironic and playful, more naive than the previous track. The rhythm spins like a merry-go-round, driven by a lovely piano pulse. The golden calf is the first in a series of unsettling biblical and mythological figures haunting Robbie's sleep, with Manuel as the main lyricist: in this case the beast is outside the window, eyeing the unfortunate old man menacingly. "In A Station," ushered in by electric piano and clavinet, is another beautiful showcase for the "loner" Richard Manuel: it's a dreamlike ballad still steeped in sadness and a sense of abandonment.

The "road trip" grows more tangible with "Caledonia Mission," a wistful look back at a love gone cold. Rick Danko takes the wheel of the story: a girl from a good Jewish family lives contentedly, self-confined, in a mission in the South. Spoiled and conservative, she doesn't have the nerve to give in to the escape promised by the romantic musician, and instead works tirelessly, a prisoner of her garden and its locked gate. The song gathers momentum and catches fire in the chorus, where Manuel joins in on backing vocals. However vigorously the voices intertwine, together with piano and electric guitar, the underlying perspective never really changes.

The heart, the message of the whole album, lies in "The Weight," also released as a single, the only hit of their career, later featured on the soundtrack to "Easy Rider." Here the music alone would be enough: an opening of acoustic guitar, a handful of inimitable arpeggios, and the entrance ("Ba-dum-badum-dum") of the drums. Then the piano and the voices. In between, gorgeous three-part harmonies, fragile and fleeting as a gust of wind.

In the Old Book there's room for everyone, working as a team like seasoned boy scouts.

The second half of the Old Book dwells on the themes laid out at the start, fading a bit and losing some of its flavor by the end. In "We Can Talk," a gospel mid-tempo carried by organ and piano/drums, the conflict returns, now between peers: in place of the beloved, a friend enslaved to oppressive working conditions. The advice is to reconsider what's been done, convincing oneself that it's never too late, since the dialogue championed in the title can overcome the plow, the cows and the yoke of an ignorant master.

A case apart is "Long Black Veil," the only cover in the bunch (a country hit for Lefty Frizzell in '59, one of Robertson's idols). Its gloomy murder-ballad atmosphere is reinterpreted without pathos, in an unexpectedly relaxed key, with vocal harmonies that build and a lovely alternation of keyboards and acoustic guitar. Only a sinister bass-tuba (?) drone ripples the surface.

The best part of the unbridled "Chest Fever" is its opening, a chance for Garth Hudson to show off his talent: a hellish Hammond organ incipit, layered over structures that, as we've seen, tend to be quite choral. Next comes the achingly sweet slow tune "Lonesome Suzie," yet another attempt to rescue a hero/princess in distress. In "Fever" it's a self-destructive femme fatale, a fierce beast enough to make your knees tremble; "Suzie" is the lonely, sad, aging spinster in need of human warmth. In both cases, the solution the protagonist settles on is the same: escape, freedom, a new life.

"This Wheel's On Fire" stands out for its charging fast tempo, the harmonies, and Robertson's razor-sharp electric guitar. The anguished lyrics threaten a new encounter between enemies, two imaginary gunslingers waiting to face each other before the end, before darkness and destruction swallow everything. The farewell of "I Shall Be Released," sung by Manuel, sums up the whole discourse in the tones of a torch song: the irreconcilable split between weakness and hope, the distances of the heart still to be bridged, the need to give and receive love (symbolized in the song by light), freedom as a mirage to be seized with one last, titanic effort.

Can you picture that night from so many years ago: the dim glow of candles, the dusty basement, five stormy Heathcliffs with beards, hats, and that bitter smile capable of cracking the hardest of rocks. "Any Day Now, Any Day Now, I Shall Be Released"…

After all that singing and excitement, all that emotion, night has fallen. Silence over the green valleys of Woodstock, the moon hides away and the stars play their usual beauty contest. Not a breath of wind, only the owls among the bare trees, the river flowing, the leaves on the dry ground.

The follow-up, The Band (September 1969), only adds to the legend of these frontier roots-rockers.

"Across the Great Divide" is a cheerful little tune in which the Band runs through a full showcase of its instrumental range. "Rag Mama Rag" instead draws its inspiration from the American past: a piano structures the song, while the interlude is left to Danko's fiddle. The rustic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is an acoustic blue-grass number, richly colored by the voices and harmonica. Cheerful keyboards mark "When You Awake", with plucked guitars and a light rhythm. Adding to this joyful, country-fair atmosphere is also the fresh "Up on Cripple Creek", carried by an excellent rhythm section.

The album's masterpiece, however, is "Whispering Pines": keyboards and piano weave a soft carpet beneath the whispered vocal, accompanied by Robertson's acoustic guitar.

It's the horns that drive the raw soul-rock of "Jemima Surrender", while radiant harmonies between accordion, violin and mandolin pervade "Rockin' Chair", an excellent country-tinged ballad. A boogie piano rhythm and constant overlapping vocals dominate "Look Out Cleveland", a track that should have given more prominence to the lead guitar.

In "Jawbone" the rhythms grow more syncopated, but the overly repetitive bass riff holds the song back, partly redeemed by an excellent electric guitar solo. Intimate melodies return in "The Unfaithful Servant", a fine soul piece with a standout sax part. Finally, "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" closes the album in soul-rock territory, with an excellent bass line tracing the rhythmic backbone while the keyboards sketch out the melody.

The Band offers an utterly personal style, built above all on Robbie Robertson's songwriting, to which Richard Manuel rarely contributes on the compositional side. But what proves decisive is the cohesive blend of sounds produced by all the other musicians in the group during the arranging process. The more rock-leaning side draws heavily on American rural tradition, running through rag, honky-tonk, dixie, blues, country and folk, while the distinctive use of horns delivers fine flashes of "white soul".

Stage Fright (August 1970) was recorded performing on the stage of the Woodstock Playhouse with no audience present, a curious setting that produced further classics such as the title track "Stage Fright" and "The Shape I'm In". In their live shows, moreover, the group showed off its sheer musicianship, managing through flawless performances to carve out a new path for rock.

Cahoots (September 1971), despite an excellent reworking of Bob Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece", "Life Is A Carnival" (with horn arrangements by Allen Toussaint) and a guest appearance by Van Morrison, seems to mark the beginning of a downward trajectory, confirmed by the decision to release the double live album Rock Of Ages (August 1972) and by the uneven Moondog Matinee (October 1973), which features interesting covers of rock'n'roll songs by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and others (the title is taken from the radio show hosted by DJ Alan Freed).

Aside from a brief appearance alongside Dylan at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the Band did not work with the famous singer-songwriter for the first part of the Seventies. They teamed up with Dylan again in 1974 for the making of "Planet Waves" and the live album "Before The Flood".

Confirming a conscious crisis within the band is the fact that it took two years for the group to release their new LP Northern Lights Southern Cross (November 1975), their first album of original material since Cahoots, a prelude to the historic lineup's final studio work, titled Islands (March 1977), preceded by The Best Of The Band, an anthology featuring unreleased material.

Robertson, feeling creatively exhausted, decides to stage a grand farewell, realized in the film directed by Martin Scorsese and in the triple live LP The Last Waltz (April 1978), a splendid document of the concert held on Thanksgiving Day 1976 at Winterland in San Francisco (the venue where the group first performed under the name "The Band" back in 1969), featuring illustrious guests and friends such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters and Dr. John. The concert film remains an essential reference point for any director wishing to tackle a similar undertaking.

After the group's breakup, Helm founded The Rco All Stars (featuring Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Booker T. Jones), while Danko pursued a career as a film actor. Manuel's story, however, ended in tragedy: under the influence of a mix of alcohol and cocaine, he took his own life by hanging on March 4, 1986.

Robertson, meanwhile, composed part of the soundtrack for the 1980 film Candy and wrote the music for Martin Scorsese's film The King Of Comedy. In 1987 he made his solo debut with the album Robbie Robertson (produced by Daniel Lanois), lining up a handful of illustrious guests such as U2 and Peter Gabriel. Storyville (1991) followed, along with the soundtrack for the TV documentary The Native Americans. All of it marked by a rediscovery of his Native American roots (Robertson is the son of a Mohawk woman), with bucolic sounds, ceremonial dances and forays into electronics. Memorable is the ballad "Ghost Dance", a moved prayer for the survival of the great Native American "spirit", wounded by the white man (“You can kill my body/ You can damn my soul/ For not believers in your god/ And some world down below/ You don’t stand a chance against my prayers/ You don’t stand a chance against my love/ They outlawed the Ghost Dance/ But we shall live again, we shall live again.”).

The Band reformed in 1983 with Danko, Helm, Hudson, and Jim Weider replacing Robertson and Manuel. After the latter's death, the three original members worked as session musicians before recording Jericho (1993), a decent album featuring one of the last songs recorded by Richard Manuel in 1985 ("Country Boy") along with a few covers (among them, Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City" and Bob Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell"). The distinctly rootsy style confirmed a winning interpretive streak once again with the following High On The Hog (February 1996).

Meanwhile, Capitol released the 3-CD box set Across The Great Divide (1994) and Live At Watkins Glen (1995), the latter a document of the historic festival held in July 1973.

Extra: music influenced by the Band: Fairport Convention, "Liege & Lief" (the same premise as the Band's, but with the desire to rediscover their own roots instead, ferrying them into old Victorian England); The Byrds, "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo"; Rolling Stones, "Beggar's Banquet"; Elton John, "Tumbleweed Connection"; Grateful Dead, "Workingman's Dead" or "American Beauty"; the Paisley Underground side via Green On Red; Alt. Country via Uncle Tupelo, then Wilco, Jayhawks, Lambchop. Unlikely names like Eric Clapton or Procol Harum, self-confessed devotees of the caliber of Will Oldham or Mercury Rev, superstars like Ryan Adams or Norah Jones. And the list could run longer than the Mississippi — far longer than those forty-two minutes which, by this point, you'll be dying to rediscover.

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