The Band.

that's not a criticism

i haven't been terribly excited by the walkabouts stuff i've heard, but maybe i should listen again

It could simply be a reflection of a private passion, but at their best the Walkabouts synthesize so much in such a striking way that I'm in quiet awe (and consequently frustrated at how other bands in theoretically similar veins just don't work as well).

damn

no i would attribute it to bob dylan's horrendous voice

Ah, friend!

charlie rich seemed genuinely uncomfortable with genre categories and that hampered his music as much as it helped it i think

the band were without doubt a 'rock' band--whether or not thats endemic of the time in which they were recording, they were comfortable with the label

but yes i agree that mixture of sensibilites is really exciting

better still that the soul influence and country influence is somehow sublimated in such a fashion where it becomes exceptionally difficult to parse the songs for evidence of discrete influence

Yep that's it. Let's face it the 'grizzled old-timer' thing wouldn't have lasted. It's the extraordinary blend of soul, country, funk, rock n roll, wurlitzer/jug-band weirdness, and it all sounds uncalculated.

Classic Or Dud: The Band

Well Aretha Franklin did record a great version of "The Weight".

There's a similarity in the vocals at times (I think Rick Danko is the most Garcia-like one?), but the Band never wanked off quite like the Dead...

"Music From the Big Pink" is just about perfect, the rest a bit hit-and-miss.

"The Weight" is, of course, great - is it representative of the rest of their material. Can I just buy whatever album that's on and be set for a start?

I like the Band a lot, but I admit I like them best on The Basement Tapes. Their first several albums are all classics, though. When I was a kid, I was always put off by their muddy, murky sound. Now that's one of the things I love about them.

Yes miloauckerman, get Big Pink, it's awesome. I always found it much better than their self-titled second album, more diverse, less "reactionary" I suppose. "Life is a Carnival" from Cahoots is a party of a song, no wonder the Avalanches use it. Wouldn't qualify it as "corny" though...

how embarassing, I said the same thing on the other thread.

i feel this doubly

fritz, shame on you

And I can't believe you dissed "The Last Waltz" on the other thread, Matos - everybody knows the guest spots are mostly cack (they should have instituted a ban on performances by anyone named Neil) and Robbie was a douche, but "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" should be proof enough that Fleetwood Mac AND Outkast together are not fit to lick Levon Helm's boots when it comes to adding brass bands to your sound for fun and profit(!!! Yeeeahh)

this isn't what i was trying to say, exactly; i was asserting (as i guess i had done on the other thread, but i forgot about that) that without having an ideological program necessarily they had a specific approach to arranging and recording and mixing which later became identified with a certain subgenre of rock music that is often called "rootsy"

i dunno about "authenticity" (a power word that doesn't really clear anything up) but robertson et al were certainly going for a certain "rooted" sense of americana, a music with a strong sense of history, and like ccr they were selfconsciously tapping into an existing mythology, adding to it besides (ccr was both more monomaniacal and i think even more successful in this regard)

i guess there was a kind of low-key program at work, perhaps not charged with the reactionary values that much subsequent "rootsy" music has adopted but purposeful and willful nonetheless

there's an interesting dynamic involved, however, that Barney Hoskins' Band book explored, that to the members of the Band, the cultures they were tapping in their music were both alien and natural to them, and the extent to which they were scholarly exploring these genres and musics, and simultaneously the closeness they felt to them (thinking mostly here of levon's arkansas roots). so their music was simultaneously an exercise in attempted authenticity, and imaginative explorations of genres they revered.

lately i've been spinning 'Rockin' Chair' a lot - love the heartsick, pleading sound of manuel's vocals, the absence of drums, the entwined mandolin and guitar, and the way the lyrics shift between 'downhome' nostalgia and a kind of resigned dread: these lines are especially devastating

Hear the sound, Willie Boy,
The Flyin' Dutchman's on the reef.
It's my belief
We've used up all our time,
This hill's to steep to climb,
And the days that remain ain't worth a dime.

god i love the band soo much

Great song

so is this really the only thread? or just a impediment of searching "The Band"?

i've been rather obsessed lately, mostly w/ the first three records. but i'm thinking of digging around for the others on the cheap. challop: Stage Fright is every bit as good as the first two. "The Rumor" and "Sleeping" are heartbreakingly awesome.

and hey, anyone remember this POS?: http://www.artistdirect.com/artist/videos/robbie-robertson/485778-811823-1

certainly some of the most creative and breathtaking uses of time signature changes in rock/popular music imo.

<3<3<3Levon @ 2:58 - "maybe they won't, you know i sure hope they don't"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Pt_ZkGg8I

this other thread is mentioned above: Classic Or Dud: The Band
certainly some of the most creative and breathtaking uses of time signature changes in rock/popular music imo.
this is otm -- for being known as such a "down-home, authentic, straightahead" their songs are hard as fuck to play. i mean, there's straight up rockabilly, but also new orleans + appalachian + country rhythms going on, sometimes all in the same song.

Screen Prints did a lovely cover of that one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0jSj4sb2SE

I have that Hirth Matinez lp, i’m pretty sure it was a Goodwill find. I didn’t check out the liners, so I had no clue there was a Band connection. For a record I had never heard of that probably cost a buck, it was a really nice surprise. It’s definitely wacky but not painfully so. It sorta sounds like the sort of album that Gene Ween could make. The voice is very different, but the tonality of the songs is bent like some of Ween’s more subtle tunes.

wtf… that’s totally a re-recording. Blech nevermind don’t listen to that

(Xp)

So weird, I can't remember if it was here or where it was, but I literally just read some account of iirc a band being pressured by a producer or label to cover "Christmas Must Be Tonight"? I can't remember what it was or what I was reading ...

Auspiciously, the Pogues!!!!!

The Pogues had decided to record a Christmas single. In the second half of 1985, in between bouts of touring, they’d been rehearsing and recording a number of new songs with Elvis Costello, some of which would materialise on the ‘Poguetry In Motion’ EP.

Frank Murray had given each group member a tape of a song by The Band, ‘Christmas Must Be Tonight’, suggesting that it might be an ideal cover. Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer had other thoughts, setting their minds to an original composition. MacGowan was dreaming of something sumptuous, with strings, while Finer chewed over ideas for lyrics and melodies. It may have been a deliberate attempt to write a seasonal hit record, but whatever they came up with, it had to have quality too.

Finer had only just mastered the art of writing full-length instrumentals. Now he intended to venture into whole, structured songs.

“I thought the idea of a cover was a bloody stupid one,” he says. “We thought, ‘If we’re going to do a Christmas song, let’s write one. Come on – we’re songwriters! Why do someone else’s song that isn’t even very good?’

“The idea had been knocking around for a while of Shane and Cait doing a duet. I wrote one song, a duet. It’s embarrassing to think about, cos it wasn’t very good. At that time, I’d started to write songs without words – a melody and chords and instrumental bits – or songs with words which I’d always expect Shane to rewrite because his lyrics were going to be better than mine. So I’d written this duet with crap words. Often, I’d try out my new material at home on Marcia. On this occasion, I played her this song. It was very banal, a miserable song about a sailor being away from home. He was singing his bit and his wife or lover back home was singing her bit. I think at the end he committed suicide or something. Rubbish. Marcia said the sailor romance thing was naff, that it didn’t ring true and how Christmas was always a battle with the true events or circumstances of anyone’s life – the way the call to have fun, go shopping, kiss under the mistletoe and all that crap appears like some evil spotlight and only shows up how miserable, poor or furious you might be in your circumstances.

“I said, ‘Okay, well, you tell me a better story.’ I remember her saying that I should think of something that was more like the sort of song I’d want to hear. She suggested a couple having a row at the time of peace and goodwill, trying to crank up some Christmas spirit but failing and fighting, lost in recriminations about money and other disillusions. The guy takes what they have got, and he’s meant to be out buying stuff for Christmas. He goes out to the bookies and the pub and he drinks and gambles it away, which causes an altercation. But she warned that the song shouldn’t end on a bleak note and there should definitely be some kind of redemption for the end of the story, that it should end in a weird romantic truce that just couldn’t be helped, a little glimmer of uncanny hope amidst the torture of packaged party time. I thought, ‘Okay, I take the point.’

“I wrote a second song which had that plot to it. It was based on the people who lived across the street from us. We went into the studio and we rehearsed ‘Body Of An American’ and, I think, ‘London Girl’. I took these two songs of mine along. Shane took them away and he wrote ‘Fairytale Of New York’ using the melody of the first song I’d written and the storyline of the second one, which he then transposed to New York, and he made it into what it is now.

RIP Garth

goodbye garth

i always wanted to be able to play piano like him, never quite could manage it. guess i will have to settle for growing a beard like him, instead

Sad lol

He was some kind of quiet fire mad genius, that's for sure.

he could make his organ sound like anything! he was that mysterious fifth element that elevated the group from traditionalists (not just folk tradition, but rock and blues) into something strange and wonderful.

what's "cripple creek" without the bullfrog clavinet? or "tears of rage" without that mournful hammond?

His grinning on their Ed Sullivan show appearance is so infectious. They were a charming bunch.

A couple of decades ago I was walking down the street behind the Continental Club in Austin in the middle of the day and there happened to be a limo parked there. As I passed by, Garth Hudson emerged from the car and I was completely taken aback at the surprise of seeing him, legendary figure that he was. Turns out he was there to play with Sneaky Pete later that night.

rip garth </3

listening to this, which is ... pretty awesome?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uXUVhDw7ZQ

A few of the sounds on Our Lady Queen of the Angels are not instruments, but Maud Hudson and Richard and Arlie Manuel "singing" to sound like instruments, along with a variety of Californian Wren calls with stream-side and pool-side frogs recorded by Hudson himself in Malibu. In the middle of it, Charlton Heston reads a poem to Los Angeles written by Ray Bradbury.

missing from the video posted above

B-b-but how can it possibly live up to the billing of that description?

here's the "poetic invocation" — 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZC2oBZ6vw

_A few of the sounds on Our Lady Queen of the Angels are not instruments, but Maud Hudson and Richard and Arlie Manuel "singing" to sound like instruments, along with a variety of Californian Wren calls with stream-side and pool-side frogs recorded by Hudson himself in Malibu. In the middle of it, *Charlton Heston reads a poem to Los Angeles written by Ray Bradbury*._


missing from the video posted above

That thing is totally giving me a Beneath the Planet of the Apes vibe.

Jamie Saft has tons of never-before-seen video of Garth playing in the studio from the late 2010s and he still sounds amazing despite looking frail. He is beginning to post them on Instagram.

Never heard of Jamie Saft before, but liking those Garth videos and his own stuff seems like it might be good as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe4uT5EGrIw

Paul S. straps on an accordion to duet or duel with Garth but of course can’t keep up. He also shares a mic with Rick, in fact everyone in the World’s Most Dangerous Band seems to have a mic in front of them, although Will is the only one who actually had a gig doing that as far as I know.

Man, Danko, gotta love that plaintive voice.

Who is the other percussionist, not Anton or Levon but that third dude?

That guy is here, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyMOrYFDaIw

'twould appear to be one Randy Ciarlante, who I played drums in later incarnations of the Band and I guess did Richard's vocal parts.

Now that the Band are all gone, these are the Last Waltz headliners that are left:

Eric Clapton
Neil Young
Joni Mitchell
Neil Diamond
Van Morrison
Bob Dylan

Plus the late-jam participants Ron Wood, Ringo Starr and Stephen Stills.

Emmylou Harris would like a word with you, Halfway

She didn't perform at the show.

True but she is in the film and alive. She's in neither of your two categories but nothing stops us from creating a third.

mavis staples is also still alive

(i know the same caveat applies)

I never listened much or at all to any of the post-breakup studio albums or even most of the pre-breakup albums from beginning to end after the first two, although I started listening to Stage Fright after it's recent deluxe treatment, but now I am feeling a need to give some of the rest a chance. Maybe I will start with Jericho.

At the least, the "Atlantic City" cover is all time, just as the cover of "High on the Hog" is one of the all time worst.

By cover do you mean album cover in the latter case?

in both i'm assuming ... although "High on the Hog" is kind of extremely awesome depending on your perspective

Album cover! I'm not even going to post it, it would give Primus pause.

oh wait, no, i see what you mean. i do think "Jericho" has great album art though

Heh, watching those Band on Letterman videos led the algorithm to recommend me an entertaining video interview with the engineer on Time Out of Mind.

Richard has a vocal on Jericho!

Today is also the first time I ever heard Jimi Hendrix perform “Tears of Rage.”

"Atlantic City" is a great cover - tbf, it's not an entirely new arrangement, they basically embellish what Springsteen and the E Street Band played during the Born in the USA tour (albeit translating it to mostly acoustic instruments). Dylan must love their cover of "Blind Willie McTell" (it's on the same album) because when he finally included it on the occasional setlist in the '90s, it was the same arrangement, not what he had done during the Infidels sessions.

Just looking up when Robbie passed. August of '23. Really slowly feeling it more and more that all of them are gone.

Encomium and valediction from Dylan:

Sorry to hear the news about Garth Hudson. He was a beautiful guy and the real driving force behind The Band. Just listen to the original recording of The Weight and you’ll see.

— Bob Dylan (@bobdylan) January 27, 2025

xxxxposting of Jamie Saft, as James Blech was, while wondering about what else he's done, I gave him a gold star for his Vacation Bible School indie jazz paper crown in passing, while reviewing Bobby Previte's eveready to roll Coalition of the Willing:

...Charlie Hunter abstains from his Blue Note albums’ eight-string guitar, and the effects box that makes him sound like a (so-so) organist. (Why bother, when an actual organist, the judiciously theatrical Jamie Saft, is always lurking nearby, and with his own guitar as well.)

Recently played on Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: “Dark Star” by Garth Hudson. The multi-instrumentalist of The Band died Tuesday at the age of 87.

Still want that shirt Levon is wearing in The Last Waltz.

Jamie Saft just posted some clips and photos from Garth's memorial.

Also, a photo from awhile back posted on a fan's account. Bittersweet to see them so young and happy, just kids happy to make a living playing the music they loved.

Jamie Saft was one of the pallbearers!