The Band.

Or the story of Robertson plus irresponsible junkies. And some other guy.

tbf I knew Manuel and Danko were fucked up, but I had no idea Levon Helm was on heroin too.

The story goes that he'd shot up literally moments before cutting the vocal on "Strawberry Wine", which is why his voice sounds different there than in any other vocal he did.

History has told the story: the Robertson-less Band made a couple of decent records; and the first Danko record, and Helm’s Dirt Farmer, are superior to some ‘70s Band records.

Robertson on his own, however, has yet to make so much as a halfway-tolerable record. He can say what he wants about how he was the brains of the operation yadda yadda, but no Band or solo-Band-member record has anything as colossally awful as “American Roulette.”

JRR is obviously one of those vampire/chameleons who responds to and feeds off the energy of whoever he is around, which I guess is not really that rare tbh, but very well-defined in his case. He did pretty well with those guys when they were “just” alkies and not junkies or however you want to describe it. All the later long hard years of showbiz schmoozing clearly took a toll on his creative abilities.

Looking at what they recorded after 1976/78, the truth really does seem like somewhere in-between, at least to me. The Robertson-less Band albums were almost painful in how disappointing they could be, but they had their moments, and except for Garth's solo instrumental "French Girls," the best ones weren't written by any of the original members. In fact, there are very, very few writing credits for Danko and Helm in general until you get to their last one, Jubilation (probably my least favorite one). Those later records lean heavily on covers. My favorites are "Blind Willie McTell," "Atlantic City," "She Knows" (I can't tell if they overdubbed the strings, which sound awful, but Richard's performance is beautiful), "Book Faded Brown"...all covers.

Levon's Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt (which I prefer to Dirt Farmer) are good records, but Levon doesn't have a lot of writing credits - it's mostly other people, great covers or traditional songs. I wasn't a fan of Rick's first album but that live bootleg of him and Levon from the early '80s is wonderful - they could still be great performers.

Robertson's didn't record as much, but his albums are mostly his own original compositions. I think the songs on his first album are wildly uneven - "American Roulette" and at least a few others really are terrible, but there are a few good songs elsewhere. More controversial is the production - kudos to Robertson for trying something different, but I was hoping for something more than asking Daniel Lanois to do for him what he did for Peter Gabriel and U2. Some people liked it - you can find effusive praise for his first album, and it had a strong placing in the Pazz & Jop poll - but I wonder how many of them would be so kind to it now. I guess his next one is a "better" album, it hangs together better, but I have no interest in revisiting it. Since then his albums have sounded like a string of failed attempts to do something new or contemporary.

I don't doubt Robertson was the main songwriter for the Band, at least within the legal parameters of what constitutes songwriting, but he really needed the fucking Band to make something of his compositions. The music really was a collaborative effort, it wasn't just a vehicle for Robertson's songwriting.

Many, Many (seems like not quite all?) albs that members of The Band played on:
http://theband.hiof.no/albums/major_involvement_albums.html I did not know about their friendship with Charles Lloyd during The Hawks' "Cannonball Adderly Period, or that Robertson seems to have played on at least a couple of his tracks---see, he could have gone back in that direction, or a similar one, as an instrumentalist, if he'd cared too, at least as a prestigious guest, now and then.But he's not that socialible, or maybe I just haven't read far enough.. Fave entry in early years:
The Bauls of Bengali were a family of itinerant street troubadours that Albert Grossman had met on a visit to India, and he invited them to stay in a converted barn in Bearsville in 1967. The brothers Luxman and Purna Das (that also can be seen posing with Bob Dylan on his John Wesley Harding album) became friends with the Band in Woodstock, and often visited them in Big Pink to inhale illegal substances and jam with the guys. One night, the Bauls wanted to jam, and Garth Hudson wanted to record, with Rick Danko and Levon sitting in with the Das brothers. The music was a bit too weird for the guys from the Band ("they were wailing in their own language, in their own world, Bubba"), so they left while Garth's tape machine rolled for hours. The tapes were released, years after, as Bengali Bauls at Big Pink.
-- extracted from Levon Helm's This Wheel's on Fire

[Dylan and the Bauls]
Luxman Das, Bob Dylan and Purna Das, on the cover of John Wesley Harding, 1967
Band guys can be heard saying "that's nice" after one track, they don't actually play. The album is produced by Garth Hudson. It was recorded in the basement of Big Pink on an Ampex 400 tape recorder using two Altec Lansing 1567A mixers with Norelco D-24 microphones. Engineered at A&R Studios, New York, by John Kryda. Purna Das of the Bauls also appears on Garth Hudson's 2001 solo album The Sea to the North,(linked to solo albums section)

In the Bob Dylan magazine The Telegraph, issue 51, there was an article on the John Wesley Harding LP cover with some info on the Bauls of Bengal. Below are a four-part scan of this article, that also mentions The Band's, and in particular Garth Hudson's, relationship with the Bangali Bauls links are incl. here, though I haven't tried 'em :
http://theband.hiof.no/albums/bengali_bauls_at_big_pink.html

Oh yeah, the links in there (to The Telegraph) def. work! The Ginsberg connection to the Bauls (sent Grossman to India to check them out), and I sure hope their tape with Dylan turns up, or maybe it has? As to thee JWH cover...

Yall I just listened to the xpost Rhino Handmade 3-CD expansion digital ghost on Spotify (also available as downloads, like maybe all the Handmades; I've noticed Fugs, Beefheart, Television: two more LPs-worth of good-to excellent tracks, which hopefully he still had the rights to put (w/o re-recording) on yon self-released albums, when he reportedly fled Woodstock Babylon for Sweet Home Louisiana(nuthin weird goin' on down there, nuh-uh). Listening this way, I don't have the CD booklet, but who specifically played what on what has always been conjectural, according to my not-very-extensive research, and a lot of this sounds as Bandy as the original s/t; also, several cuts sound like they might incl. Garth *and* Dr. John, ideally enough. Anybody looking for cover material should def. check this out, "You Were There" def. rec. to Willie

Listened to Moondog Matinee. I was never really a fan of it before - it's tough getting excited over a "covers" album. Skipping around, I thought there were only two, maybe three distinguished tracks ("Share Your Love With Me," "Mystery Train" and maybe "I Ain't Got No Home"). It's a short album so I started over and let it play start-to-finish. Then I played it yet again and for some reason it really clicked. Hard to say why, but when I focused on the group, it sank in that if this was a Last Waltz situation where they were backing other singers, they'd be doing a damn fine job. But on the second play, I learned to appreciate all the vocal performances more, not just the few that stood out. I know it already had its fans (I think Gary Graff, Greil Marcus, the late critic Robert Palmer, Robert Christgau sort of) but I think I finally hear what they were hearing.

It's interesting that this record, Pinups by Bowie, and These Foolish Things by Bryan Ferry all came out in October of 1973 (although the Carpenters had released their oldies tribute Now and Then in May of that year). Had songwriters (or groups that usually did originals) done entire albums of old songs before this?

I was flipping through Levon and Robbie's books (interesting to skim them concurrently) and it's pointed out that Lennon was in the midst of recording Rock 'n' Roll at the same time and they were definitely informed of that while they were still recording Moondog Matinee.

Anyway, so many artists who became songwriters released a LOT of covers at the start of their careers (like virtually every major artist in the UK), so I don't think the concept was considered novel in that respect. It's been suggested that it was a logical extension of the "going back to your roots" philosophy that came up towards the end of the '60s.

There's got to be more, but at the moment Paul McCartney's Run Devil Run is the only covers album that feels like a major work, at least in relation to his post-Beatles career. It's not purely covers, there are three originals, but they shore up the whole idea behind it. The cliché is that "going back to your roots" can be a bad sign of careerist desperation, like you have no idea where else to go artistically. But in this case it's not about his next artistic move, it's purely personal with McCartney recovering from his wife's death. Reportedly he hadn't even sung or performed a song since her passing and those rehearsals were indeed the first time he belted out a song since then. The fact that it's music from his youth feels appropriate because it's naturally what a lot of people do when they need solace in the face of grief - it could be music or people in your life, but it's basically retreating into the familiar and what's brought you the most peace of mind and happiness.

The original vision for the Stones' It's Only Rock'n'Roll album was half-live material/half-studio covers, from the latter of which only "Ain't To Proud To Beg" making the final album, while a version of "Drift Away" is pretty easily found online.

Oh, and don't forget Nilsson's mostly covers Pussycats, and then a couple years later ... That's The Way It Is.

There's also A Touch of Schmilsson In The Night and Nilsson Sings Newman, but those are slightly different things than what we're talking about.

Closer to the Moondog/Pin-Ups thing is Laura Nyro's It's Gonna Take A Miracle, her classic R&B covers LP recorded with LaBelle in '71.

Love Pussy Cats (I prefer its original and too-outrageous title Strange Pussies), but six of those ten cuts were originals. I also love the Newman album, but yeah, that is a big different - kind of a throwback to songbook albums based around one particular writer.

The Nyro album is a great example - Nov 1971.

I don't know if Dylan's Self Portrait really counts.

Dr. John's Gumbo: April '72

Often a sign of a band/artist contractually having an album to make but not having enough new material to make one, ditto double live albums.

i guess no one is bringing up ferry’s these foolish things because that one is actually great?

It was mentioned, but the Ferry covers albums are perhaps a little too eclectic for what we're talking about? Moondog and the Lennon: '50s-'60s Rock'n'Soul. Pin-Ups: '60s Brit Rock. Gumbo: Nola R&B. It's Gonna Take A Miracle: Vintage Soul.

Whereas Ferry is all over the map, taking in almost all of that stuff plus Country and Standards.

Tim Hardin's Painted Head from 1972 is one of these. Guy was probably too zonked out on H to write songs at this point

i guess no one is bringing up ferry’s these foolish things because that one is actually great?

I would definitely include that. I love that album, and the string of others built on covers though These Foolish Things would be my favorite of those LP's.

As much as I love Bowie, I've never been a big fan of Pin Ups. I'll revisit it again, but it's never really did it for me. I LOVE the covers he's dropped into my favorite live sets (the Santa Monica show from 1972, the Nassau show from 1976, etc.), but in the studio they feel really hit-or-miss to me.

I took about three listens to Pin Ups from start-to-finish and it didn't take. There are covers elsewhere that I really enjoy - "Kingdom Come," "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday," "Waiting for the Man" from different eras and "White Light/White Heat" - but the only one here I really like is "Sorrow," and it's probably no coincidence that it's the only "quiet" number. There's something about the band that's a little stilted on all the rockers here, and I don't think Bowie makes those numbers his own like he does with those other covers.

Anyway, back to the Band, I've given Northern Lights-Southern Cross a good listen too. It's a nice, pleasant album, but it left me with the feeling that Robertson is really hit-or-miss as a lyricist. "Acadian Driftwood" is beautiful - perhaps a little too meticulous and a little too academic compared to their earlier classics, but I don't think it would feel as powerful to me if it weren't so richly detailed. On the other hand, stuff like "Forbidden Fruit" is really clunky - the chorus alone on that one is kind of insipid. It's a real credit to the performances and the music that I can enjoy the whole album even when the lyrics sound wildly uneven under close scrutiny.

At one point, given how well they backed everyone in The Last Waltz, I wondered if they should've cut a studio album loaded with guests, except with NEW material written by said guests or perhaps in collaboration with them. Levon, Richard and Rick would still handle the lead vocals, but I figure bringing in someone like the Staples or Paul Butterfield could add some welcome elements to their music (see "The Weight" or Butterfield's playing on "Mystery Train") while someone like Joni Mitchell could shore up the songwriting where it needs it most.

The production is very wispy on Northern Lights-Southern Cross, but I like a number of the songs. "Ophelia" is very charming, and sounds like rock-and-roll if it had been invented by white people in 1890. I acknowledge "Forbidden Fruit"'s clunkiness, and enjoy it anyway, though it's a pretty lame response on Robertson's part to a majority of his group being substance abusers.
The title track of "Islands" sounds like the perfect theme music to a mid-70s Sunday afternoon travel show, and I love it.

The "big three" off of Northern Lights are all keepers - "Ophelia," "It Makes No Difference" and "Acadian Driftwood." The rest are tuneful and wonderfully played, but in terms of what they have to convey, they don't feel all that memorable or compelling. I really chalk that up to the songwriting, especially when there are only eight songs on this thing - they needed better material or at least continue developing the songs they had.

I can revisit Islands - it's probably best to approach that for what it is, an odds 'n' sods compilation, rather than a full-realized LP. I know "Georgia on My Mind" is nice...fans should hear their SNL performance where Richard's vocal tops the otherwise fine studio version. I have a soft spot for "Livin' in a Dream" - it's a bit light but it sounds like it would've been perfect as a great B-side to an awesome single.

That SNL performance is grebt!

Nice! Glad you know it - it was definitely a brilliant inclusion on that Musical History box set.

Forgot to mention, "Twilight" is also a real gem...but surprisingly, none of "The Band" versions are any good. Some diehard Band fans directed me towards Rick Danko's solo renditions, and there are a ton on Spotify, all live. They range from full-band arrangements to mostly solo renditions, and the one I ended up liking the most is the one on The Best of Mountain Stage Live, Vol. 1. It's possible most people will prefer one of the solo renditions, and I definitely think the full band arrangements are often too much, but the one on Mountain Stage finds a perfect balance - drums, bass, keyboards, a steel guitar (or pedal steel?) solo and even a harmony vocal are all there, but they're very soft, very tasteful and spare. Unlike the other full-band arrangements, the other elements always complement Rick's vocal and never threaten to overwhelm him, much less do just that.

Someone posted that Georgia on My Mind from SNL on Vimeo - enjoy!

This is definitely nice...forgot it was also included on the Musical History box. Another smart pick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBL_1aKFhaM

And here's that later "Twilight" with the quieter full-band arrangement. Both Rick and Garth play on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIxH1KaI0Pg

FWIW, apparently it dates from 1989 - more from NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/06/776941566/rick-danko-and-garth-hudson-on-mountain-stage

Kind of went down a rabbit hole, but apparently Robbie was going to play in the 2013 Grammy Award tribute for Levon following his death in 2012. At the time, Jonathan Taplin posted this on his blog: “As angry as I was that Levon’s wife (Sandy) kept Robbie Robertson off the stage (it’s a long and sad story of paranoia), Zac, Mavis, T Bone and the Mumfords did a wonderful version of ‘The Weight’, which was a fitting end to a great night of Americana.” It got reported in Glide Magazine, but I guess it started a shitstorm because when I tried to dig up the original post on archive.org, any mention of Levon's wife was gone, with an added note by Taplin that said "Let’s see if we can just talk about the music."

That SNL Band performance is the first I've seen where any of the vocalists weren't also playing!

Good point!

Don't think I've mentioned this 'un on here----haven't listened in a long time, but liked most of it a lot---thanks again, wiki!

Endless Highway: The Music of The Band, a tribute to the Band, was released on January 30, 2007.
Released January 30, 2007
Recorded July 19, 2005 – August 1, 2006
Genre Rock, Americana
Label 429 Records
Track listing
All songs written by Robbie Robertson unless noted otherwise.

"This Wheel's on Fire" (Bob Dylan, Rick Danko) performed by Guster - 3:24
"King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" performed by Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers - 4:03
"It Makes No Difference" performed by My Morning Jacket – 6:19
"I Shall Be Released" (Dylan) performed by Jack Johnson with ALO – 4:11
"The Weight" performed by Lee Ann Womack – 4:48
"Chest Fever" performed by Widespread Panic - 6:34
"Up on Cripple Creek" performed by Gomez – 4:37
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" performed by the Allman Brothers Band – 5:03
"Stage Fright" performed by Steve Reynolds – 3:44
"Rag Mama Rag" performed by Blues Traveler – 3:18
"Whispering Pines" (Richard Manuel, Robertson) performed by Jakob Dylan – 4:05
"Acadian Driftwood" performed by the Roches – 6:20
"The Unfaithful Servant" performed by Rosanne Cash – 4:56
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" (Dylan) performed by Josh Turner – 5:03
"Life Is a Carnival" (Danko, Levon Helm, Robertson) performed by Trevor Hall – 4:09
"Look Out Cleveland" performed by Jackie Greene – 3:13
"Rockin' Chair" performed by Death Cab for Cutie – 5:31
Bonus disc included 4 extra songs.

"Across the Great Divide" performed by Lucas Reynolds
"Ophelia" performed by ALO
"Bessie Smith" performed by Joe Henry
"The Shape I'm In" performed by Gov't Mule
References
Jurek, Thom. "Endless Highway: The Music of The Band - Various Artists". Allmusic. Retrieved March 21, 2012.

xxxpost Run Devil Run was so intense, even harsh at times, as he seemed to break through his usual limits: I even thought of it as more like John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band than Rock n Roll Dr. John's Gumbo was equally revelatory in its own way: the originals of those songs were waaay OOP and I hadn't heard most (the early 70s were pretty shitty for historical reissues, even for stuff like from early 60s)

Also: Kelly Hogan (and Jon Langford. eventually), "Whispering Pines":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBAWPXVbcoE

Someone just sent me this in response to that SNL video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZqMlhdUoSM

Has anyone read Jonathan Taplin’s recent book?

It's supposed to be really good. I skimmed through it really fast just to pass the time and it is filled with amazing stories that go all over the place (beyond the rock 'n' roll world), so to be clear, it's not just a book on the Band - it stretches into politics and the '60s, Hollywood, the rise of corporate America and the digital age.

Here's what Greil Marcus wrote on it for his column:

10. Jonathan Taplin, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life (Heyday). This is a unified story, from Taplin’s time as road manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to movie producing to investment banking to technology writing, and what makes it so is thinking: someone always wondering what’s behind the curtain, if only because what’s behind it is almost certainly going to make a better story than what’s in front of it. So in a concise and burrowing manner, he tells you about the music business, with Meyer Lansky behind both MCA and Warner Communications; Michael Milken as the architect of the media landscape that Donald Trump harvested; how with their version of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It” the Band, having “trapped themselves within a sort of puritan destiny,” at least for a few minutes “shed the hair shirt”; or for that matter why Gaye’s What’s Going On “was as politically symbolic as track star’s John Carlos’s raised fist at the 1968 Olympics.” And a hundred other tales and grace notes — but, for me, nothing matches what Taplin excavates from his time as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, where he turned after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., just a paragraph from a speech at the University of Kansas: “Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. […] It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.” And the echoes of that speech, which was even tougher than Taplin’s quotation encompasses — the Gross National Product, Kennedy said, “counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife” — run all through the book.

Cahoots Expanded Deluxe
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/the-band-cahoots-50th-anniversary-box-set/

It's funny to think that when I was discovering records like this one 35 years ago, they were practically forgotten in public libraries and dollar bins. Certainly the Band weren't forgotten, but the idea that individual albums like Cahoots were going to be refurbished, remixed and re-released in fancy packages wasn't anybody's prognostication.
That said, I'd like to hear the remixes of the two good songs on this.

Concert might be good.

They still did great shows on the Cahoots tour. (Hell, Rock of Ages was essentially compiled from several of those shows.)

I gave this another chance earlier and hated it. It's really a good EP that didn't have the material to make it a full-length LP.

The EP:
1. Life Is A Carnival
2. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. 4% Pantomime

Should've made it:
Don't Do It

Potentially good had they done a better recording:
7. The Moon Struck One
9. Smoke Signal
11. The River

"Bessie Smith" would have been good but I think their recording is actually from 1975 and doctored to sound older. (It was written in 1967, so they had the chance to record it for Cahoots.)

*The River Hymn

I bought Rock of Ages on CD many years ago and the sound was muddy and awful. Guess I need to see if it’s been remastered.

I bought Rock of Ages on CD many years ago and the sound was muddy and awful. Guess I need to see if it’s been remastered.

It was mixed poorly, a remaster alone won't cut it. You need to get Live At The Academy Of Music 1971 (released in 2013) either in the 2CD version or the 4CD + DVD box set (which is OOP and very expensive).

The 2CD version will have every performance (same song and take) from the expanded 2001 reissue of Rock of Ages except in a sequence that reflects their actual setlists, newly mixed by Bob Clearmountain. It's THE definitive live document of these concerts.

The box set includes a DVD for a 5.1 mix and what little film footage they have of the tour (it's only a few songs IIRC), but it also has two CD's of just the New Year's Eve show in its entirety, newly mixed by Sebastian Robertson (Robbie's son). Some may prefer it, and I kind of do, but it's a very different mix - it's called a "soundboard" style mix, but to me it's like if you're sitting with the band while they play a full show for posterity in a studio. A whole different feel. Clearmountain's show sounds like a rock concert in the best seat of a concert hall, and they arguably picked the best takes across all shows.

hey thanks for the recommendation, done.