July Record Club - The Band, "The Band"

Maybe at the time Dylan weighed on their reputation. You could claim that the Band’s career runs a track parallel to their mentor’s (they formed before Dylan recorded his first album). But this second album creates its own universe, and I don’t think much about Dylan while hearing it. Don’t forget that the group’s most distinctive personality, the only non-Canadian American in the group, drummer Levon Helm, was not part of the touring Hawks band that fought crowds across Europe with Dylan. He also was MIA during the Basement Tapes sessions near Woodstock. More importantly, the lyrics – most by Robbie Robertson – don’t have the free-wheeling looseness and spontaneity of Dylan’s. The lyrics here are in character, and studious, crafted. Any mysteries in the lyrics are planned and executed. The character-driven lyrics have as much in common with Paul McCartney’s work on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper as with Dylan.

The Band has a powerful reputation separate from its history with Dylan, and that is of five players perfectly in tune with each other. They worked as a team, and while every player took turns calling out the strokes, they all pulled together. The ramshackle tuba-led sprint through “Rag Mama Rag,” the pause and sudden galumphing charge at the end of “Look Out Cleveland,” the misty, wandering organ line behind the call-and-response singing on “Whispering Pines,” the competing yodels on “Up On Cripple Creek,” the percolating near-funk on “King Harvest (Will Surely Come)” – bands have done stuff close to this, but never in such a tightly-knit way. They started off as a rockabilly band that played R&B covers, but they never really got the black music quite right, the way the guys at Muscle Shoals did. They called themselves “The Crackers” at one point, but the people of Woodstock gave them the moniker “The Band,” and the name stuck.

Their folk and country roots differentiated them from the trend of the time, that of the power trio – Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who. The vocals were different, too, described by one journalist as the sound of white Baptist churchgoers singing hymns (their first live album was called Rock of Ages). Levon Helm was the boy from the Bible Belt, Rick Danko was the manual labor trying his best to cope, and Richard Manuel was the broken soul. This wasn’t the sound of massive sonic assault now possible through improved amplification and recording devices. This was the sound of guys who only had each other, trading lead vocals like nobody before, a traveling band finding their way through every dive bar, who measured their success by how much pussy they could get.

This insular mutually reliant atmosphere was expressed in the lyrics of their second album, which was at one point going to be called Harvest. These are songs of friends, families, and communities – more specifically, rural communities. The drama and discomfort in the album come from communities under stress. When things are good, you pull together, but when things are bad, the tension can become unbearable. Good woman Molly cooks chicken for her man every Sunday, but sometimes shooting him is a viable option. This record is steeped in sex, full of dirty jokes. Bessie’s always ready for a roll, Jemima makes them work a little, Cleveland and Houston aren’t prepared for the roving cads on their way.

There’s a great divide between the sexes, and that makes all the other tests of loyalty so charged. Words of wisdom are passed down through generations on “Rocking Chair” and “And When You Wake” – the message is you can go on adventures, but home is where happiness is. Jawbone the thief is out on his own – his friends try to talk him out his life, knowing it’s going to come to bad end. The world’s a dangerous place for the lonely and depressed – the character in “Whispering Pines” has only the clouds and a star to keep him alive.

“The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down” came out at a time when our national community was fraying. It was about an earlier time when the community was torn. I hear it now…. And I just can’t enjoy it. It sounds like an apology for the south. I have to remove myself a little and remind myself – it was written by a Native American from Canada, a man who grew up in his own poor and repressed community. He wrote it as a gift to the only U.S. American in the group, the boy from Arkansas. It’s a generous gesture, and it’s empathetic. If Joan Baez can cover it, there must be something us liberals can take from it, and I have. But it must be because the Pride-to-Doubt ratio is too high – Virgil Kane is too ready to be put in his grave (did Robbie Robertson pick Virgil’s last name as an allusion to Cain murdering Abel?). I comfort myself out of my white northern liberal guilt by thinking how I love Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” who followed the old folks’ direction, “never stopped to wonder why,” and who is gone, “one you never figured.” I can empathize without celebrating. The great musicianship, so much starker in The Band's original studio release than in the blown up dirge it became in live versions, isn’t enough to save it from the message. All art is propaganda, and I just can’t totally buy in.

The final two songs on the album, however, are emotionally and intellectually as rich as pop music gets. In “Unfaithful Servant” some sort of crime is committed. Is it a theft, or a sexual indiscretion? That detail doesn’t matter. What does matter is that everybody, the entire community, is hurt. Even for the victim, the crime hurts less than the aftermath. The album closes with “King Harvest (Will Surely Come),” where the continual risky cycle of farming life becomes too much. You live all year, dealing with weather and random catastrophes, hoping for a bountiful harvest to reward you – and your family - for your diligence. One bad year, two, and the security of a union factory job can seem like salvation. So you buy in – and now another set of uncertainties bedevil you. But now you’ve been divorced from the joys that your community had – the carnival, the wind, the sound of the rice. Progress beckons – but who knows where that train will take you.

I grew up in a small town, one where the farming was augmented by a meat-packing corporation. After a few decades, just a lifetime or two, the meat-packing corporation took the train out of town and left the families behind. Then the kids from those families mostly left, leaving behind bitterness. I felt lonely there – I had books, records, and TV, and a mother from the Netherlands. I understood the big beyond, and I wasn’t afraid of it. (Whether I had the ambition to go there was a totally different question.) The stories and attitudes told in the lyrics of this album give me the willies. Everybody knows what you’re up to, and if you sound like you don’t want to be there, they’ll give you a good shove, repeatedly.

But listening to the album this week this music carries me away. Levon Helm’s drums are fat and thudding – “When You’re Awake” proves he’d been listening to Ringo’s work on Sgt. Pepper. The horns joyfully sashay through “Across the Great Divide.” I remember the classy little saleswoman at the cable company who heard “Jemima Surrender” when I was setting up the studio. “Ooh, I like that!,” she said, and I think was less the dancing piano and more the stomping, grinding guitar and drum groove that set her off.

I’m a music guy. Although some days I prefer the more varied emotions and colors of their first album, Music From Big Pink, this is the album that shows the patented The Band sound. Whatever benefit The Band got from backing Bob Dylan they more than paid back in influence – Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, and George Harrison all gravitated to it. Listen to The Beatles unreleased version of “All Things Must Pass” and hear them trying to recreate this sound, this feel, this spirit. Togetherness, resistance, appreciation. Despite my qualms, in the end the great stuff beats the troublesome stuff down. It’s an A+ album.