The Band: A History Of Music Out Of The Box
The Band: A History Of Music Out Of The Box
By Nick Coleman
All groups need a distinctive voice. Happy the group that has three. All groups need to be able to play and to make up songs. Happy the group that works together like the fingers on a single hand. Happier still the group which can write too. But happiest of all is the group that, by means not necessarily understood even by themselves, gets its
timing right.
The Band got everything right throughout the second half of the 1960s, although they never gave the impression that they were all that happy. But timing is a gift as much as any other, and they showed up at just the moment Bob Dylan required a bunch of guys to make a stand with him, to tough out the invention of rock as a grown-up thing – a painful birth unenthusiastically midwifed in 1965/6 by a record-buying public composed of pop fans, blues revivalists, rock’n’roll purists and a hefty rump of right-thinking folk folk (not to be confused on any account with thinking folk folk). The Band then took rock music down an entirely new path – one that resolved into a backwoods glade in which blues, soul, hillbilly, folk, country, Gospel and the shrill, mechanical music of carnival appeared to stand together as a single crop, the fruit of common ground. The result? Two of the best records ever made by anyone.
Here was rock music acting for the very first time as a traditionalist form – a form suddenly bothering itself with such un-rock’n’rolly ideas as history, weather, memory, the land, the movement of people across the land, the suffering of people both individually and collectively, the complicated play of acts and consequences; morality, time and space. Adult thoughts expressed in altered terms. It’s around this time – 1967-9 – that you begin to hear rock music fretting over its own “authenticity”.
And that was The Band’s purple patch: a swelling moment that, in the UK at least, was experienced as just another cross-current in the rising tide of counter-culture. The group then declined slowly over the course of the next decade into slightly weary, even bewildered mannerism, as if not quite understanding that acts and consequences had moved time and morality on – not forgetting as they went, mind you, to record more lovely songs. And then, having exhausted most of the possibilities open to a quintet of scratchy musical intellectuals from either end of the north-American landmass, to all useful intents and purposes they split.
It’s a long and involved story, told over the length of five CDs (and one DVD) in A Musical History, a new box-set sealing The Band’s career with the classy plushness most of us would wish for our own entombment. The set traces The Band’s story from the very beginning in the late Fifties, when, as The Hawks, they accompanied the lascivious and not hugely talented rockabilly shouter Ronnie Hawkins on the road to rock ’n’ roll perdition (which is just outside Flagstaff, Arizona), before devolving into Levon & the Hawks – four Canadians and a pipecleaner drummer from Arkansas playing in-the-pocket R&B as if New Orleans ran hot and red in their veins. That’s disc one. Glorious, savage and, in the case of “Who Do You Love?”, about as fundamental as rock’n’roll ever got.
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About Petrol Records
About Petrol Records
