The Band.

you just take the 's' out of 'https'. that's all

That youtu.be messes things up too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Nw_pKXl8U

streamed some of the "new" live at the academy" thing, and however you feel about the endless repackaging of their stuff, the band sounded fucking glorious.

Totally. I was holding off on that, but I never got the 2001 reissue with extra stuff, so I may end up springing for the box.

Fun fact: everyone in that amazing horn section (except for Snooky Young) played in the bands of Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon at one time or another.

haha, is that right?
danko's bass was sounding particularly good -- what a weird player!

Yep, in fact, Howard Johnson's recording debut was on a Bill Dixon record.

OTM re: Danko. Played with a pick, yet was still a funk monster.

http://bassmusicianmagazine.com/2012/04/how-to-danko-a-lesson-in-the-style-of-rick-danko-by-rob-collier/

Unless I'm totally wrong, the new box is a total rip. It's the same set as Rock of Ages, two discs remastered (again), two discs a board mix of the same set, and then a DVD with a 5.1 mix. When it was announced as a 4 CD/DVD package, I expected more.

there are previously unreleased performances on there, from different nights during the Rock of Ages shows.

The collection's first two discs feature performances of every song played over the course of the four concerts, and the New Year's Eve soundboard mix on discs 3 and 4 puts the listener in the room for that entire legendary night: Uncut, unedited, taken straight from the master recordings and presented in full for the first time. The set's DVD presents the tracks from discs 1 and 2 in 5.1 Surround, plus Alk and Lerner's filmed performances of 'King Harvest (Has Surely Come)' and 'The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show.'

From an Amazon review:

Disc 1 & 2 is the show sequenced from performances on 12/28/71 to 12/31/71 with one previously unreleased track. (So basically Rock of Ages)

Disc 3 & 4 is the New Year's Eve show in its entirety and labeled the soundboard mix. It's very close to the same setlist as the first two discs. (with 7 repeat performances)

Disc 5 is what originally prompted me to buy the set. It is a DVD in 5.1 sound of the NYE performance. I thought I was getting a video performance. I guess I didn't read the details well enough. It is indeed the show in 5.1 and it sounds spectacular but there is no video just a photo montage.

right, so the unreleased stuff is from the NYE show.
Disc: 3
1. Up On Cripple Creek (Previously Unissued Performance)
2. The Shape I'm In
3. The Rumor (Previously Unissued Performance)
4. Time To Kill (Previously Unissued Performance)
5. Rockin' Chair (Previously Unissued Performance)
6. This Wheel's On Fire (Previously Unissued Performance)
7. Get Up Jake (Previously Unissued Performance)
8. Smoke Signal (Previously Unissued Performance)
9. I Shall Be Released (Previously Unissued Performance)
10. The Weight (Previously Unissued Performance)
11. Stage Fright
Disc: 4
1. Life Is A Carnival (Previously Unissued Performance)
2. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
3. Caledonia Mission (Previously Unissued Performance)
4. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show
5. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Previously Unissued Performance)
6. Across The Great Divide (Previously Unissued Performance)
7. Unfaithful Servant
8. Don't Do It (Previously Unissued Performance)
9. The Genetic Method
10. Chest Fever (Previously Unissued Performance)
11. Rag Mama Rag
12. (I Don't Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes (Previously Unissued Performance)
13. Down In The Flood (with Bob Dylan)
14. When I Paint My Masterpiece (with Bob Dylan)
15. Don't Ya Tell Henry (with Bob Dylan)
16. Like A Rolling Stone (with Bob Dylan)

chest fever

What are the best solo albums?

Danko's is great; best Band record since Stage Fright.

surely this band was just paving the way for the Walkabouts

from memory the danko solo also features some co-writes with the elusive emmett grogan. i should really pull that one out again sometime, only given it a couple of listens...

Does that one have "Java Blues"?

Yep, that's the one.

http://touch.dangerousminds.net/all/bob_dylan_joni_mitchell_eric_clapton_neil_young_the_band#1

Never seen this footage before, why isn't there a live bootleg series for The Band dammit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFgyD3Uk1JQ

i have never listened to stage fright. i need to check it out

also that footage is great

totally great. The Band stuck pretty close to the script when it came to their live shows -- not sure if there's much that isn't covered in the officially released live recordings. Wouldn't mind hearing their full set at the Isle of Wight in '69 ... there's a late 76 Palladium gig that is pretty solid. And a Royal Albert Hall show (some of which is on A Musical History) that could be good to hear in full.

this is the Band release that needs to happen: http://theband.hiof.no/albums/from_bacon_fat_to_judgement_day.html
Levon and the Hawks: From Bacon Fat to Judgement Day

8-CD + DVD Levon and the Hawks Limited Edition Box Set, documenting the Hawks' evolution from the pre-Hawkins bands of the late 50's to the Basement Tape recordings of Big Pink in 1967. Includes previously unheard historic studio & archival live recordings, rare singles, extensive liner notes, interviews and photos. Included among the material on the DVD are video interviews with Garth Hudson.

[obviously it didn't actually come out this year]

xposts: love that live footage^ available on this thing if you can find it: http://theband.hiof.no/videos/boot_iow_69-70_DVD.html

That 1970 footage linked me to this 76 show - Manuel's voice seems a bit shot, but kinda surprised how much all of them are still putting into the performance - the clothes have got much worse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZeboTzerHQ&list=LLWwmSqUluMWZ5qidhsGaTzA

The Band stuck pretty close to the script when it came to their live shows

Yeah, wasn't totally expecting Dead-style workouts (tho I'm sure they could've done it) but a nice-sounding box set of live recordings etc from throughout their career wld hit that sweet spot for me - thanks for the suggestions, tylerw and no lime, will hunt for more, I've got the taste.

some high points available here: http://www.ousterhout.net/mp3/theband.html

thanks again tyler, will take a load off you

man, not much is gonna make me stop watching the vids for SGomez's "same old love" and Demi's "Confident," but that '76 shit shows what those guys were made of…unlike the useless Last waltz… watching Helm play the shit out of those tunes there suggests that he had an inviolable right to be pissed about that band shutting down.

Does anyone have any information on jug(instrument) or jug bands?
If you do, Then that's going to save me heaps

Pitchfork gave the self-titled record the Sunday Review treatment.

Anyway, I’d never thought of “Dixie” as problematic, despite its subject matter, but here’s Hyden on listening to the song in 2018:

This complementary dynamic is on display in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” about a Confederate soldier named Virgil Cane who’s resigned to a downtrodden life as a poor farmer after the Civil War. It is one of the songs on which Robertson based his reputation as a budding Serious Rock Songwriter—he aped ancient American folk forms like his mentor Dylan, and successfully composed a new tune that felt like it was already 100 years old, while also commenting obliquely on the class and regional divides that are seemingly eternal in this country.

Today, “Dixie” and the empathy it has for defenders of Southern slavery makes it a thorny listen. But the tenderness and pain in Helm’s voice stand apart from Robertson’s words as an eloquent expression of profound sorrow, the type of immutable loss that’s passed down from generation to generation, as both birthright and original sin. It’s possible to both question whether a song like this needs to exist, and appreciate how Helm’s naked hurt transcends it.

I seem to remember tension between Robertson and Helm on the sentiment of that song, but I don’t remember the specifics.

Robertson had been reading books and thought the Civil War was just about slavery, so Helm had to sit him down and explain through a southern lens the political picture of the time.

That song, I always listened to it as the root of what Patterson Hood would term "The Duality of the Southern Thing."

Yeah, and the narrator of that song may not have even particularly given a shit about the Confederacy per se (the further from the cotton, the more likely that was). But when the Union finally showed up, they sometimes decimated the farm, town, etc. (likewise the Confeds on occasion). Scorched earth, yeeha.

Wanna read this, got me interested in Canada of 50s-60s, though prob most about him x Dylan, as indicated below:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-road-with-dylan-1478900285
By
WESLEY STACE
Updated Nov. 11, 2016 6:08 p.m. ET
Robbie Robertson, the lead guitarist and main songwriter of the Band, is in the unenviable position of never having been much of a singer. (He posits asthma as a factor.) Luckily, the Band was blessed with three of the greatest vocalists of the rock era (Rick Danko,Richard Manuel and Levon Helm), who were able to give his beautiful melodies and lyrics their fullest possible emotional expression. In “Testimony,” however, the “voice” is not in question. Robust, wry, gritty and wise to the vicissitudes of a career in rock ’n’ roll, it is just what the reader wants, marred only occasionally by stiff dialogue.
TESTIMONY
By Robbie Robertson
Opening with a train ride, Mr. Robertson captures the rhythm of rock’s mystery train, even its final lurch into the terminal. In this memoir named for a song from his solo debut, Mr. Robertson bears witness to his life in music, from his precocious success in Ronnie Hawkins’s “raging rockabilly” Hawks to that band’s historic involvement in Bob Dylan’s mid-1960s “explosive electric sacrilege”; the subsequent retreat to Woodstock, N.Y., for the “loose as a goose” sessions with Mr. Dylan that became known as “The Basement Tapes” to the group’s rebranding as the Band, whose career climaxed, as this book wisely does, with “The Last Waltz,” a 1976 concert in San Francisco that was filmed by Martin Waltz,” a 1976 concert in San Francisco that was filmed by Martin Scorsese.
“Testimony” comes 23 years after drummer Levon Helm’s memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire,” notable partly for its extremely negative portrayal of Mr. Robertson. Of that book, Mr. Dylan enthused: “You’ve got to read this!” The blurbs here are by Mr. Scorsese and David Geffen, neatly delineating the great divide in the Band. But after the deaths of Manuel (suicide, 1986), Danko (heart failure, 1999) and Helm (throat cancer, 2012)—which triumvirate he often pits himself against in his memoir—Robertson is one of the two men left standing (along with keyboardist Garth Hudson). His may be the last word.
The haphazardly collaborative nature of the Band’s work, and the natural disinclination of most of the members to deal with business, led to arguments over songwriting credits, a feud that
Helm took to the grave. Resentments had long simmered: The film “The Last Waltz” seemed contrived to put Mr. Robertson center-stage, as the genius Mr. Scorsese clearly believed him to be, yet he was the only member of the Band who actually wanted that Waltz to be the Last. His Band-mates were happy to play on, and this was by no means the final Band concert, though it was the last to feature Mr. Robertson. If you saw a later incarnation of the group, you heard precisely what you would have wanted to hear: the singers singing their beloved songbook accompanied by a great rhythm section. If anything, one later felt the lack of Manuel more than of Mr. Robertson.
Half-Jewish, half-Mohawk, Jaime Royal Robertson was brought up on the streets of Toronto and on the Six Nations Indian Reserve, where he was “introduced to serious storytelling. . . . The oral history, the legends, the fables, and the great holy mystery of life.” The reader might suppress a groan, but add to the mix a steel-trap memory and a muddled childhood—featuring two fathers, numerous gangsters, alcoholism and some diamond smuggling—and you have the makings of a Dickensian bildungsroman.
“Testimony” next becomes a bible of road lore, a lurid coming-of-age story that veers wildly between the sweet and the brutal and a how-not-to guide to running a band. The Hawks, formed at the whim of Arkansawyer Ronnie Hawkins, who enjoyed regular residencies in Toronto, take off on the road, and the craziness of these early days is presented in brilliant Technicolor, with Helm cast as blood brother and Hawkins as amoral Virgil. A 16-year-old Mr. Robertson, too young to frequent any of the joints he’s playing, descends into an underworld of torched nightclubs (the arsonists thoughtfully remove Leon Russell’s band’s equipment before they light the match), bitten-off nipples (word to the wise: Don’t “taste her milkshake” while traversing bumpy terrain in the back seat of a car) and a vast choice of artificial stimulation.
As for Mr. Dylan, a key attraction, the book offers a refreshing account all the better for starting no earlier than the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” to which Mr. Robertson was escorted by producer John Hammond Jr. in 1965. Here is by far the fullest first-person account of the early electric tours of Mr. Dylan, not to mention an astonishing tale of a “passed out sitting up” Mr. Dylan, “deliriously exhausted” after the final date of the emotionally and physically exhausting 1966 tour, whom Robbie and Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, try to revive him in a bathtub (returning once to find him submerged) while four Beatles await an audience in the adjacent hotel room. The account of Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident is refreshingly lucid, as is that of the subsequent making of “The Basement Tapes,” as the Band improvises around Bob’s “vibing vocables.”
The Nobel Prize winner himself will probably not opine on Mr. Robertson’s livelier claims, among which is that he clothed Mr. Dylan (the classic ’66 houndstooth tweed: “Bob didn’t seem like much of a suit guy, but Lou [the designer] was on top of his game”); suggested the iconoclastic cover design of “Blonde on Blonde”; gave Mr. Dylan’s song “Obviously Five Believers” its title, adding that witty adverb—both positively (4th Street) and absolutely (Sweet Marie) something Mr. Dylan might have come up with himself; finished the editing of Mr. Dylan’s film “Eat the Document”; taught the neophyte rocker how to stretch guitar strings to keep them in tune; and saved Mr. Dylan from his musical self (by refusing to clutter the sparse perfection of “John Wesley Harding” with the requested overdubs). And of course he is responsible for creating the circumstances, and ambience, that brought the “The Basement Tapes” into existence. I am not suggesting that these claims aren’t true, merely that the abundance of them becomes slightly comical.
Occasionally one has the impression that Mr. Robertson is tiptoeing around awkward issues, always to the detriment of the book: Helm’s 1993 account of the various delegations sent in to get Mr. Dylan onstage at “The Last Waltz” is agonizing (the singer didn’t like it assumed that he had given his consent to being filmed, fearing a conflict with a forthcoming movie of his own, “Renaldo and Clara,” shot the previous year). But Mr. Robertson barely scratches the surface, preferring to deal with the technical problems involved in creating the movie.
Mr. Robertson’s writing about music, either from inside looking out or simply from the point of view of an audience member at a Bo Diddley or Velvet Underground concert, can be beautiful, as when, in the closing pages, he pays full tribute to each Band member and their role within the overall sound, repeating, as if in litany, “God only made one of those.” Here “Testimony” becomes a testimonial, and the effect is redemptive. Generosity suits him, and whatever the truth, “Testimony” is a graceful epitaph.​
—Mr. Stace is an author and musician who has also recorded under the name John Wesley Harding.

the narrator of that song may not have even particularly given a shit about the Confederacy per se (the further from the cotton, the more likely that was). But when the Union finally showed up, they sometimes decimated the farm, town, etc. (likewise the Confeds on occasion). Scorched earth, yeeha

Which is also why the song strikes me as a veiled Vietnam commentary, even if that was totally not Robertson/Helm etc's intent.

If so, it’s a very bad analogy

No that can fit: scorched earth, shock 'n' awe, vengeance, random outbursts, calculated trauma, in a lotta countries, lotta wars. Ditto rape and pillage as perks, at least the first night.

But back to the Band--what are the best solo albums/side projects? Best Band albums without Robertson?

Dude -- the overall treatment of civilians in (a) Sherman's March to the Sea and (b) The Vietnam Fucking War were highly dissimilar.

i feel like Jericho was well-regarded when it came out but i don't really fuck w/ the Band too much after Cahoots

Jericho has the Springsteen cover right? That version of Atlantic City has come close to becoming canon for the Band.

yeah it's really good

or "AC" is, i should say. i'm sure i've heard more from Jericho but I can't say specifically what

Just gave it a listen and "Jericho" goes on a little long, and too many of the songs seem to intentionally echo past Band work. But on the plus side, it sounds pretty good, and the singing and playing are good. The guitarist, Jim Weider, does a pretty solid Robertson impression.

What a weird messy post-band history the Band had. You've got Robertson, who tried to snag all the credit, yet didn't release a solo album until 1986, with an album that sounded absolutely nothing like the Band, for that matter. The other guys scattered or, tragically, worse, and never got much momentum going. Danko managed that one album, Hudson went more or less journeyman session guy, Levon did a few albums here and there and tried acting; his solid late career recording comeback came after a 25 year gap. When the Band did reconvene to record those 17 or so years after breaking up, for "Jericho," the songwriting was almost all from outside sources, which was a strange way to counter Robertson's claims.

Maybe Ophelia should be higher idk

watching the classic albums doc on the self-titled right now. that album truly holds a special place in my heart.

glad you picked jawbone. what a weirdly enchanting little ditty.

the way it switches to the waltz time in the verses and lets loose during the chorus, along with the switch in lyrical perspective...

Manuel had some great cowrites with Robertson

he was something else, "Sleeping" is such a strange beauty