The Band.

Yeah it's back for me now, don't know what was up with that.

Martin Scorsese will direct the filming of a Robbie Robertson tribute concert in L.A. Thursday night for a future release, it was announced Tuesday morning.
...The lineup of artists performing at the show at the Kia Forum Thursday includes Trey Anastasio, Eric Church, Eric Clapton, Warren Haynes, Bruce Hornsby, Jim James, Daniel Lanois, Taj Mahal, Van Morrison, Margo Price, Robert Randolph, Nathaniel Rateliff, Allison Russell, Mavis Staples, Bobby Weir and Lucinda Williams.
The house band will feature Ryan Bingham, Jamey Johnson, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Don Was, John Medeski, Dave Malone, Terence Higgins, Cyril Neville, Mark Mullins and the Levee Horns.
Robertson acted as either music supervisor or scorer for Scorsese films in the decades from “The Last Waltz” through his death in 2023, the last of which was the score for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Robertson’s posthumous nomination for best original score for that film was his first.

Amy Helm, daughter of Levon and recently deceased Libby Titus, performed w Levon's Midnight Ramble Band and Olabelle, recently returned to Mountain Stage w her real good touring band, can download here (w Todd Snider, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, Randall Bramblett) https://mountainstage.org/podcasts/

I haven't heard Libby much,though The Band info archive sez (referring to her second s/t LP):

On the 1977 Libby Titus, Robbie produced "The Night You Took Me to Barbados in My Dreams" (by Libby and Hirth Martinez), a marvelous tune with Garth on keyboards, and "Miss Otis Regrets" (by Cole Porter) with Robbie on guitar. Of note to Band fans is a Libby Titus/Carly Simon song "Can This Be My Love Affair" (sound sample available below) which is obviously about Levon Helm. She also co-wrote (with Eric Kaz) "Love Has No Pride" which was covered by Bonnie Raitt (on her Woodstock-session LP, "Give it Up"), and later by Linda Ronstadt.

...Libby Titus can also be heard on the Band's album Cahoots, where she is part of the backing vocals on the track "The River Hymn."

Insta served up them and emmylou Harris doing “Evangeline” and it was so great. Ricardo on drums

It was a rehearsal I guess? Not the LW version?

oh cool, thanks.
That Libby Titus entry mentions

Robbie produced "The Night You Took Me to Barbados in My Dreams" (by Libby and Hirth Martinez), a marvelous tune with Garth on keyboards,

Hirth Martinez: Hirth from Earth [Warner Bros., 1975]
Martinez sings like Dr. John out of breath from doing the samba: he is interested in UFOs, not really as stars to guide us but as occasions for metaphorical speculation. Unclassifiable funky objects of this sort used to appear at a rate of about a dozen a year; now they're down to three or four. Thank Robbie Robertson, who produced. B+

Any of yall heard it?

Oh, he did another one! Produced by John Simon, who I think we've talked about on here---xgau again:

Big Bright Street [Warner Bros., 1977]
I like a man whose dream of utopia goes "And they never grew old/And they never caught a cold," and I like this record. Hirth has learned to use his wizened voice more forcefully without relinquishing any of the amateurism that is his special charm, and since John Simon is a relatively reticent and eccentric producer, the funky gloss that so often accrues to El Lay favorites never turns to glitz. B+

^^Both of those are on Spotify (and presumably other streamers).

There's a high school radio station here that switches to all-Christmas songs during the holidays, providing a more interesting mix than the commercial stations that do similar. Every year I hear them play "Christmas Must Be Tonight" by the Band more than a few times, a song that I don't think I've ever heard anywhere else. Islands is the one album of theirs that I've never bothered with and I see that this song was never released as a single... is it widely known?

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!