Classic Or Dud: The Band

'Smiley Smile' is not really stripped-down. It's just sketchy and unfinished.

(I'm not sure if or how this fits with Tom's Roxy analogy.)

The only crazy thing about this record (apart from the line "My horse Jethro, now he went mad") is that for some reason EMI put out a reissue of it in the 80s that was inexplicably missing a couple of tracks. I've got no idea why the fuck they did it, but the first version I bought of it didn't have 'When you awake' or 'King Harvest' on it. There is absolutely no logic behind that - it's not like it would have saved them any money or anything.

I love Rick Danko and Richard Manuel's voices but I can't abide Levon Helm and all that hokey downhome shit-kickin' good ole boy stuff. Plus I HATE "The Weight"! Instrumentally they were all great but special marks go to Rick Danko who was one of the funkiest rock bassists of all time.

California? New Orleans!

(is all lower-case the new hard n' ghetto amateurist?)

yep!

Not that good, although they should be credited for combining elements from some of the worst musical genres ever and actually manage to make some good songs out of it.
-- Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Friday, 25 April 2003 22:01 (4 years ago)

Did the Band combine rap and funk or something? I don't understand Geir's ire…love for him to pop in and explain…

not enough British music hall influences I would imagine... remember Geir thinks one of the most loathsome musical forms ever is the 12-bar blues, so that should give you some kind of clue.

veronica, just remember it's always "opposite day" in norway, that makes geir's posts easy to understand.

btw

I've never heard Cahoots, Moondog Matinee, Northern Lights Southern Cross, or Islands....if anyone could give me any idea which of these are worth getting i'd appreciate it..

I've enjoyed what I've heard from Moondog, their covers lp. Altough they cheat on "Ain't Got No Home"--Levon doesn't get to sing like a girl.

Danko's "It Makes No Difference" off Northern Lights - Southern Cross is tearjerker. In fact, that's not a bad album at all: "Acadian Driftwood," "Ophelia."

Moondog Matinee is spotty, but has some great cuts. "Mystery Train," "Share Your Love," "Great Pretender." Southern Lights, Northern Cross is always very good, never great. Cahoots and Islands are for diehards only.

"Sleeping" off Stage Fright is a real amazing, sad song.

also, getting close to the end of the band book...found out that Levon and Rick play on "Revolution Blues" on On the Beach! crazy!

yeah i have dreams that the NY archives box sets will have more stuff from those Young/Danko/Helm sessions. even if it's just stoned wankery, i'd like to hear it all!

hahahah!

Shakey's got an interesting angle, but CCR were from El Cerrito (which hasn't changed too much maybe?!??!), not the Central Valley.

Lodi is where Fogerty played minor league baseball before becoming a fulltime musician.

Also, California has a very rich and storied country music history in case those of you reading at home didn't know that.

Back to the topic at hand, I think The Band's cover of "Not Fade Away" is better than The Stones.

Track down the San Francisco Snack! boot. It's a radio broadcast from '75. jamming together is dylan, young, the band, and members of crazy horse/stray gators. the sound quality isn't hot, but they do rock: are you ready for the country, ain't that a lot of love, looking for love, loving you is sweeter than ever, i want you, the weight, helpless, knockin o heaven's door...

i shouldn't have brought CCR into this! different beasts, but yeah of course bakersfield and all them are huge in country.

Steve I know where El Cerrito is (altho yes I'm no local historian expert and I'm not sure how much or how its changed since the 50s). While El Cerrito itself isn't rural, it wasn't far from a fair amount of rural country, and CCR spent a lot of time gigging and touring in the central valley (as The Golliwogs) - I forget where Tom had to do army time but that was somewhere in the central valley too if I'm not mistaken.

http://www.creativedifferences.com/baxtercreek/frogpond.jpg
El Cerrito's frog pond circa 1930

that's where the pharoah's maidens picked young baby fogerty out of the bullrushes

perhaps here is where we should mention that the second band album was recorded in sammy davis jr.'s Hollywood Hills mansion.

a/k/a <i>Music From Little Sammy</i>

Music From Little Sammy

there...

I've said this before, but not on this thread, apparently:

For me, the genius of The Band (and, to a lesser extent, CCR and even Little Feat) was the completely modernist invention of a mythic past that never existed but should have. Very similar (at least in my mind) to Garcia Marquez with 100 Years of Solitude -- taking a bunch of folk elements and combining them in a way that both feels like it was always there but makes sense in (and of) a modern context.

Fairport Convention or Pentangle are not so dissimilar, but they were jazzing (or bluesing) up actual traditional material, primarily, and playing it with electric guitar solos. Plenty nice, but not the same level of myth-creation that The Band did.

So, anyway, ultra-classic. Towering.

"I'd never been anyplace. Went to Montana once. But when I was young, we used to do a lot of vacationing or whatever up near Sacramento. There's a town called Winters. And there is a Cody's Camp there. And we went there, like, every year and it was tremendous. It was exactly what Green River was all about. It was like the West Coast version of the Bayous. And that part fit together. In other words, I always thought what I had lived must have been the same thing. Because, like, it had sort of a swampy kind of deal. And there were lots of bullfrogs and the whole thing. So in that respect, I DID live it. Lot of happy memories there. I learned how to swim there. There was a rope hanging from a tree. Certainly dragonflies, bullfrogs. There was a little cabin we would say in owned by a descendant of Buffalo Bill Cody. That's the reference in the song to Cody Junior. The actual specific reference, Green River, I got from a soda-pop syrup label... My flavor was Green River, it was lime-flavored and they would empty some out over some ice and pour some soda water on it and you had yourself a Green River."
- John Fogerty 1970

THREAD DERAIL!

I thought this was going to be about a newly formed band called CLASSIC OR DUD

<i>So, anyway, ultra-classic. Towering.</i>

The idea was better that the way they pulled it off, I think. Or maybe it reads better than it sounds. I've never been able to get into these guys as much as I'd think I would.

I think about the Band a lot these days, mainly from the perspective of their being the original Canadian Third Way; Big Pink is routinely and mistakenly labelled as untrammelled roots-revisiting though it's more like roots-rewiring - much of it is as adventurous as any '68 music, but less obviously "confrontational" since it's a tentative-masquerading-as-bold answer to the question of where "we" go from "here." But yes; without the Band, no Arcade Fire, no Broken Social Scene etc.

The Band were also rock's Art Ensemble Of Chicago - they came to prominence at roughly the same time after long apprenticeships in other set-ups, both were viewed as a way out of the noise cul-de-sac, reintroducing space and silence, both were nominally leaderless groups of multi-instrumentalists with the exception of their most readily identifiable member who stuck doggedly to the one instrument (i.e. Robbie Robertson/Lester Bowie).

Can "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" be understood as anything other than a romanticization of the Lost Cause narrative of the civil war? I had always pushed this into the back of my mind, but I heard the song a couple days after Charlottesville and it suddenly really rubbed me the wrong way.

joan baez version is so much better.

I never heard it as a romanticisation of the Lost Cause so much as a song from the perspective of a kid caught up in the Confederate side of the war without any actual commitment or relation to its cause - more about the pointlessness of war and the loss of life than the Cause itself? Like, the kid doesn't care about what the war's about, he just feels he has to join the war to defend his family and his home. Which, when I type that aloud, feels like a pointed omission in 2017. I don't know - maybe I'd be less forgiving of the song if I hadn't loved it since I was kid and before I could interrogate the lyrics. I've always felt Robertson was writing in character rather than delivering his opinion of the Civil War.