The Band.

I don’t know what’s left to be said on this topic but now that it’s on upthread and I kind of think about it, it’s weird that his sinking is so wimpy, especially given his speaking voice. I mean it’s not like he yelled at Morris Levy immediately after polyp surgery or something.

“Ain’t No More Cane” is one of my favorite Band songs (really, just one of my favorite songs, period), and the verse he sings works…but his singing of it on the Woodstock performance ruins the song. He sounds like he’s trying to prove or establish that he’s as good a singer as anyone else in the band, overshoots, and comes off as clumsy. Whereas, on the studio version his singing is effective and evocative, comfortably settling into his range.

stellar guitar player, instantly recognizable sound, those stabs

the waltz version of "it makes no difference" as good as it gets, the soloing with garth in the end chef's kiss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7yOGAmItFY

truly could not sing but all the same I liked the "how to become clairvoyant" album

he was pretty hot too

🐦[I loved so much of his writing. It’s just Garth left now. pic.twitter.com/ewKzvOwgkW🕸
— Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) August 9, 2023🕸]🐦

I had to stop "Fallen Angel" two minutes before it croaked on for 16 more minutes. He brings Peter Gabriel in on backup vocals + synths so they can both sound like Peter Gabriel with intestinal cramps.

re: Live 1966 and his role as the George Harrison to Dylan's JL; he, Mike Bloomfield, Roy Buchanan and who else, really? are the mid 60s North american guys who could be said to be just as virtuosic as Page, Clapton, Beck and sundry brit hotshots… but although his solos are generally excellent and completely credible in the chops dept., when the Band's run commenced in 1968, he focused on songwriting, band leading etc etc, and never pursued the path of shit hot licks again.

also: he really must have disliked touring, because his live music CV is nearly nil after 1976. He never toured any of his solo records, the only performance he did w/r/t the '87 solo album was on SNL that year; and i guess he would do Clapton's AA guitar festivals (more than once?), and he did some guitar festival in the early 90s in Europe; and I think he's shown up to cameo at some of those dumb last waltz recreations… does anyone know if during the handful of times he's played in the past 46 years whether it seemed like he tried to keep his guitar skills together? Artificial harmonics!

his clanging rhythm guitar during the chorus of "look out cleveland" is ace, adds some apocalyptic vibes that the other band members are having too good of a time to provide

^^ royal albert hall version, particularly

He was a bit like Harrison in that showboating repulsed him.

I've said some mean things about Robbie over the years, but the fact remains he was one who got everyone's drunk ass out of bed, into the studio and onto the stage. There would have been no The Band without him.

"w.s. walcott" riff is unstoppable, sheesh

he really must have disliked touring, because his live music CV is nearly nil after 1976

See the man with the stage fright
Just standin' up there to give it all his might
And he got caught in the spotlight

but when we get to the end...he stops touring cause he doesn't like it :(

who else can we cite as a great songwriter, in the sense of songs to be SUNG, who is not even a secondary or tertiary singer of those songs? we can leave the cole porter/carole king/ Billy steinberg axis and their respective milieus out of this… I'm talking about a creative engine of an act, but who never had a role as a conduit of the songs to the public?

"great" is a strong word, but the first person i thought of was...pete wentz lol

Nikki Sixx (again the greatness is highly debatable)

Neil Peart?
Bernie Taupin?

Benny Andersson

just lyricists though, I thought it was writing the entire song?

I would have said Andersson/Ulvaeus but Bjorn sang quite a few songs - unfortunately some might say (not me though).

Posting a picture of what is now a pretty morbid tic-tac-toe board hanging in my living room:
Josh, those have to be by Jon Langford, right?

dave stewart wrote some good songs. i would say mike campbell but i think he just wrote all the music. not the words.

Listening to The Band last night what really hit me is the absurdity of talking about songwriting credits for a group whose collective sound — their groove — was really their defining characteristic. Yes the songs are great, the hooks are great, Robertson was a great writer! But also those songs didn't become those songs until that collective of people played and sang them. It would have been a great case for the U2 approach to royalties, and might have kept them together longer. (Though also they probably would have fallen apart anyway, because obv there were issues of many kinds.)

Not sure how long Danko and Manuel would have lasted with a massive influx of disposable income tbh.

Ringo will outlive Paul.

Somebody just texted me with the same remark and got me thinking how Ringo is 83 and has looked the same for the last 20 years, and how that is definitely not the case with Paul.

Josh, those have to be by Jon Langford, right?

Yep! I've only bumped into him casually now and then, but way back when I dropped him a line when I saw him post a picture of the Band piece. When I went to his studio he apologized and said it was a one-off and sold already, but then he realized he had the means to make a second one. Got lucky, 'cause it's cool.

I'm on another, sports-based message board and people keep posting songs from Robbie's debut as evidence of his genius and I can't overstate how terrible I think these songs all are.

Is there a single redeeming quality to that first solo record? I haven't heard the whole thing, but the songs I've heard are just...inept. I remember laughing out loud when I first heard "American Roulette."

To respond to something I think I saw upthread, I think his guitar playing did deteriorate over the years along with his songwriting. Dunno if this is challops or not, but I don’t really even like that Claptonesque solo in The Last Waltz.

Sorry, Claptonesque is the wrong word.

I guess if there’s a lesson to be learned it’s that some creative people are only as good as the company they keep whereas others have more of a portal to the seemingly bottomless well of inspiration inside

Good piece on Garth:

https://defector.com/the-last-of-the-band

Rod Stewart rescued "Broken Arrow" in '91:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d-BGmHVFa0

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" is one of the worst songs I've ever heard.

OTFM about Rod Stewart's cover, his best of the decade imo.

"Crazy River" was played CONSTANTLY on Much Music in Canada and boy was it annoying. Peak Lanois pretentiousness. 17 year old me only watched the video to see Maria McKee (what was she doing there in the first place?!). Canadian media continues to fawn over that album, and CBC played the video again last night on their national news obit.

oh yeah, I was thinking about Broken Arrow, but wondering why in my mind it had better vocals than Robertson's version.

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" is one of the worst songs I've ever heard.

YES. For the life of me, I can't figure out why so many people single that out as the album's highlight (or for many people, the ONLY highlight). I have no proof that Lanois's story is bullshit, but it sure sounds like bullshit - is that really a surreptitious recording of Robertson telling a story? Regardless of whether or not it is, it sounds horribly self-conscious, as if Robertson thinks he's doing some great Southern mythology shit when it's just some hammy crap fit for a beer commercial.

The RR album was a key piece of the late 80s Wilbury Era.

Lanois's story for reference:

...to hear co-producer Daniel Lanois tell it, the song happened by accident. “I had presented him with this toy instrument…like an electric autoharp. He found a little chord sequence with it that was sweet and wonderful. As he was developing his chord sequence I recorded him and superimposed his storytelling, which I was secretly recording, on top,” Lanois told the Canadian music site Exclaim in 2007. “It’s kind of like a guy with a deep voice telling you about steaming nights in Arkansas. So I presented it to him and he went, ‘Whoa, how did this happen?’”

misread that as "streaming rights in Arkansas"

It's worse: it sounds like a failed attempt to write a Michelob commercial.

"Sorry Robbie...try the guys handling the Zima account!"

That first album is about a year early to qualify for the Poppy Bush Interzone, but it wasn't a great seller (or, rather, it sound at Band levels, i.e. certified gold) and...did those singles get heavy MTV/VH-1 play? I know old fart P&J voters loved both his solo albums enough to list them, but he wasn't omnipresent like the Wilburys.

xpost It's an Omnichord, a Lanois/Eno secret weapon. You can hear it all over Lanois's solo stuff (and also U2). Like here:

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

"Crazy River" also has a really cool Manu Katche drum part.

By contrast Katche is hysterically emphatic all over "Fallen Angel" -- the first time I thought, "Whoa, chill out, dude!"

Elvis Costello, a massive fan of The Band, had a pretty good take on that solo debut: "it was like he decided to make a Peter Gabriel album, whereas his songwriting was much more interesting and enigmatic when he was working on that smaller scale. It's almost like the best songs on the record are the ones that operate on that scale but have then been artificially inflated with steroids to become this widescreen Peter Gabriel music."

That first album is about a year early to qualify for the Poppy Bush Interzone, but it wasn't a great seller (or, rather, it sound at Band levels, i.e. certified gold) and...did those singles get heavy MTV/VH-1 play? I know old fart P&J voters loved both his solo albums enough to list them, but he wasn't omnipresent like the Wilburys.

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, August 10, 2023 12:47 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I never once saw a Robertson video, except for just now watching "Crazy River," which I assume is a parody of the actual video. But WXRT in Chicago played 3-4 songs from that album all the goddamn time. I will only be baffled that the reaction to those songs isn't/wasn't universally, "What the hell happened to him?! Is that even the same guy who wrote 'The Weight'?"

lol at Elvis Costello throwing implied shade at Gabriel

Wilbury-era is what I call the zone from 87-91 or so when a bunch of oldsters put out high profile albums that got good reviews in Rolling Stone.

Checking wiki, "Showdown At Big Sky" was a #2 Mainstream Rock hit, while "Crazy River" hit #24 there (and #15 Pop in the UK!).