THE BAND
''A MUSICAL HISTORY, DISC ONE''
SEPTEMBER 27 2005
410:45
DISC ONE
1 /Who Do You Love? feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
Ellas McDaniel /2:41
2 /You Know I Love You feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawk/2:44
3 /Further on Up the Road feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
Don Robey /3:08
4 /Nineteen Years Old feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
McKinley Morganfield /4:14
5 /Honky Tonk feat: Hawks
Don Robey /3:05
6 /Bacon Fat feat: Hawks
Garth Hudson / Robbie Robertson /2:39
7 /Robbie's Blues feat: Hawks/3:37
8 /Leave Me Alone feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson/2:37
9 /Uh Uh Uh feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson/2:21
10 /He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart) feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:39
11 /(I Want to Be) The Rainmaker
Robbie Robertson /2:59
12 /The Stones I Throw
Robbie Robertson /1:07
13 /The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men) feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:06
14 /Go Go Liza Jane feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:13
15 /Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:33
16 /Tell Me, Momma feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /4:05
17 /Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /5:37
18 /Words and Numbers
Richard Manuel /4:13
19 /You Don't Come Through
Robbie Robertson /2:03
20 /Beautiful Thing
Richard Manuel /1:41
21 /Caledonia Mission
Robbie Robertson /2:28
22 /Odds and Ends feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /1:48
23 /Ferdinand the Imposter
Robbie Robertson /4:06
24 /Ruben Remus
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:14
25 /Will the Circle Be Unbroken
Traditional /0:55
DISC TWO
1 /Katie's Been Gone
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /2:45
2 /Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos
Traditional /3:58
3 /Don't Ya Tell Henry feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:13
4 /Tears of Rage
Bob Dylan / Richard Manuel /5:21
5 /To Kingdom Come
Robbie Robertson /3:58
6 /In a Station
Richard Manuel /3:32
7 /The Weight
Robbie Robertson /4:37
8 /We Can Talk
Richard Manuel /3:04
9 /Long Black Veil
Danny Dill / Marijohn Wilkin /3:03
10 /Chest Fever
Robbie Robertson /5:15
11 /Lonesome Suzie
Richard Manuel /3:00
12 /This Wheel's on Fire
Rick Danko / Bob Dylan /3:13
13 /I Shall Be Released
Bob Dylan /3:15
14 /Yazoo Street Scandal
Robbie Robertson /3:56
15 /I Ain't Got No Home feat: Bob Dylan
Woody Guthrie /3:46
16 /Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)
Richard Manuel /3:18
17 /Baby Lou
Jimmy Drew /3:39
18 /Long Distance Operator
Bob Dylan /4:33
19 /Key to the Highway
Big Bill Broonzy / Charles Segar /2:24
20 /Bessie Smith
Rick Danko / Robbie Robertson /4:17
DISC THREE
1 /Across the Great Divide
Robbie Robertson /2:53
2 /Rag Mama Rag
Robbie Robertson /3:05
3 /The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Robbie Robertson /3:33
4 /When You Awake
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:15
5 /Up on Cripple Creek
Robbie Robertson /4:34
6 /Whispering Pines
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:58
7 /King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
Robbie Robertson /3:40
8 /Get Up Jake
Robbie Robertson /2:17
9 /Jemima Surrender
Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:49
10 /Daniel and the Sacred Harp
Robbie Robertson /4:24
11 /Time to Kill
Robbie Robertson /3:28
12 /All la Glory
Robbie Robertson /3:26
13 /The Shape I'm In
Robbie Robertson /4:02
14 /Stage Fright
Robbie Robertson /3:43
15 /The Rumor
Robbie Robertson /4:15
16 /Slippin' & Slidin'
Eddie Bocage / Richard Penniman /3:22
17 /Don't Do It
Lamont Dozier / Brian Holland / Eddie Holland /3:47
18 /Strawberry Wine
Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:46
19 /Rockin' Chair
Robbie Robertson /4:12
20 /Look Out Cleveland
Robbie Robertson /3:34
21 /4% Pantomime
Van Morrison / Robbie Robertson /6:01
DISC FOUR
1 /Life Is a Carnival
Rick Danko / Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:55
2 /When I Paint My Masterpiece
Bob Dylan /4:21
3 /The Moon Struck One
Robbie Robertson /4:09
4 /The River Hymn
Robbie Robertson /4:41
5 /Don't Do It
Lamont Dozier / Brian Holland / Eddie Holland /4:36
6 /Caledonia Mission
Robbie Robertson /3:22
7 /Smoke Signal
Robbie Robertson /5:09
8 /Unfaithful Servant
Robbie Robertson /4:41
9 /The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show
Robbie Robertson /4:05
10 /The Genetic Method
Garth Hudson /7:31
11 /Chest Fever
Robbie Robertson /5:04
12 /(I Don't Want to Hang Up My) Rock 'N' Roll Shoes/4:30
13 /Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever)
Ivy Jo Hunter / Stevie Wonder /3:37
14 /Endless Highway
Robbie Robertson /5:07
15 /Move Me
Rick Danko /2:57
16 /Two Piano Song
Robbie Robertson /4:12
17 /Mystery Train
Junior Parker / Sam Phillips / Robbie Robertson /5:33
DISC FIVE
1 /Ain't Got No Home
Clarence "Frogman" Henry /3:25
2 /Share Your Love with Me
Alfred Braggs / Deadric Malone /2:56
3 /Didn't It Rain
Traditional /3:19
4 /Forever Young feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /4:56
5 /Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:37
6 /Highway 61 Revisited feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:57
7 /Ophelia
Robbie Robertson /3:32
8 /Acadian Driftwood
Robbie Robertson /6:41
9 /It Makes No Difference
Robbie Robertson /6:35
10 /Twilight
Robbie Robertson /3:25
11 /Christmas Must Be Tonight
Robbie Robertson /3:36
12 /The Saga of Pepote Rouge
Robbie Robertson /4:14
13 /Livin' in a Dream
Robbie Robertson /2:51
14 /Forbidden Fruit
Robbie Robertson /5:40
15 /Home Cookin'
Rick Danko /3:44
16 /Out of the Blue
Robbie Robertson /3:21
17 /Evangeline feat: Emmylou Harris
Robbie Robertson /3:11
18 /The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Robbie Robertson /4:34
19 /The Weight feat; The Staples
Robbie Robertson /4:36
Review
By Official Site
A Musical History is a comprehensive boxed set documenting The Band's recording career from 1963 to 1976, with 37 previously unreleased tracks. Released by Capitol/EMI Music Catalog Marketing in September 2005, A Musical History includes five audio discs and a DVD featuring rare live performance footage. The release concludes the comprehensive restoration campaign for The Band's entire Capitol Records catalog, that also produced the 2000/2001 remastered-with-bonus-tracks re-releases of their 8 first albums.
Among the previously unreleased audio tracks here are live and studio recordings The Band created with Bob Dylan and Ronnie Hawkins, as well as various song sketches. The DVD's nine film clips include previously unreleased concert performances, a filmed studio jam, and three songs The Band performed on "Saturday Night Live" in 1976, never before issued in their entirety.
The boxed set, which was overseen by Robbie Robertson with producers Cheryl Pawelski and Andrew Sandoval, comes packaged with a 108-page hardbound book with previously unseen photos and memorabilia, and a cover painting of The Band by world-renowned artist Ed Ruscha.
On the rather inexpensive 67-track iTunes version of A Musical History, the tracklisting is quite different, disc 1 and the DVD are completely absent, and also tracks with Dylan and others are omitted, but it includes a previously unissued(?) live version of "I Shall Be Released."
Review
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AllMusic)
Given the countless Band compilations released over the years, plus the exhaustive bonus-track-laden reissues of the proper albums in 2000 and 2001, it's easy to be suspicious of the six-disc A Musical History, especially since it's the third Band box set released in the CD era. It would seem that all the worthwhile previously unreleased music has been excavated and that the Band's career has been anthologized in every possible way, but A Musical History proves that's not true. As its title implies, the set is a biography, tracing the group's career from their early days as the Hawks supporting Ronnie Hawkins, through their stint as Levon & the Hawks, through their time as Bob Dylan's backing band in 1966, through their emergence as the Band in 1968, then through their years of stardom in the early '70s, leading up to their departure at The Last Waltz in 1976. No previous compilation has done this -- they've either picked up the story with Music from Big Pink or offered up the greatest hits, and they've never weaved Ronnie Hawkins or Bob Dylan tracks into the story line -- and this thorough, all-encompassing approach does result in an absorbing narrative that does provide some revelations, most arriving on the spectacular, necessary first disc that traces the evolution of the band before they were the Band. Here, for the first time on a Band album, you get to hear the group's beginning as a rough rock & roll and blues combo, and while some of this material is a bit generic (albeit in the best possible sense, since they were a lean, tough, straight-ahead rock & roll group), this music echoes throughout the four CDs that follow, whether it's in the muscular R&B grooves of Levon Helm and Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson's tight, squealing guitar, or Richard Manual's piano chord clusters, or how the group touched on rockabilly, Motown, New Orleans R&B, country, and folk even on their earliest recordings. In this context, their teaming with Dylan not only seems like a natural outgrowth of their work as the struggling Levon & the Hawks, but it's clear that Dylan helped give the band focus and ideas, inspiring not just the songs that the group wrote for Music from Big Pink, but the whole Americana aesthetic that came to define the Band and made them separate from their rock & roll peers of the late '60s.
Once A Musical History hits the second disc, the Band's story enters familiar territory and the revelations start drying up even if the unreleased material doesn't (there are a whopping 32 unreleased tracks on this 102-song set, and there's about ten or so other cuts that could qualify as rarities, as well). All the same, the conventional story line carries more weight here, since the first disc not only provides context, but because the sequencing and song selection are excellent, helping to drive the Band's story in addition to just being flat-out entertaining. Plus, there are some great rarities scattered throughout here, including an exciting, careening live version of Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home" with Bob Dylan that was only released on a Woody tribute album, the funky, gritty "Baby Lou," a raucous "Slippin' & Slidin'" from the Festival Express tour in 1970, hard-rocking live versions of "Strawberry Wine" and "Look out Cleveland" from Royal Albert Hall in 1971, a live "Highway 61 Revisited" with Bob Dylan from a 1974 Madison Square Garden show, and Rick Danko's sweet, lazy unreleased "Home Cookin'" from 1976. These not only help keep a familiar story interesting to the hardcore fans (who, after all, are the primary audience for such a lavish set as this), but help fill little details within that story, along with illustrating how good the Band could sound as a band right up until the very end of their career.
Despite all this, the arc of their career -- the sudden, glorious beginning and the slow descent into equal parts pretension and lethargy -- can't help but shine through in a biography such as this. No amount of well-chosen rarities and expert song sequencing (all the group's major songs, along with all of their noteworthy minor tunes, are here in some incarnation or another) can hide the downward turn in the Band's fortunes. There was a pretty steep decline in quality material after their third album, Stage Fright, in 1970, and while the next four studio albums, plus the live Rock of Ages and The Last Waltz, are summarized on the final two discs of the set, it's hard to ignore how covers keep popping up or how numerous songs are repeated in different versions (no matter how good the alternate versions are, it's clear that the group was running out of strong new songs), nor is it easy to ignore that the rest of the Band, for whatever reason, simply stopped writing, transferring the burden to Robbie Robertson, who struggled to come up with songs that seemed as effortless and graceful as his early songs, despite a slight rejuvenation on Northern Lights-Southern Cross. That doesn't mean these last two discs are bad -- far from it, they put the best spin on an uneven era -- but they do make it clear that the Band were caught at an awkward spot and were unable to successfully move forward, no matter how much Robertson prodded. As the accompanying DVD, which has nine live performances beginning with a 1970 clip from Woodstock and ending with three spots from Saturday Night Live in 1976, illustrates, Robertson had his mind elsewhere, but the rest of the guys were happy to simply be in a band. Being the one with ambitions, Robertson made the move and brought the curtains down on their career when the rest of the Band weren't necessarily ready to call it quits, as evidenced by their ongoing reunions in the '80s and '90s.
Despite the existence of a touring Band minus their guitarist and songwriter, Robertson wound up as the member who was generally acknowledged as the one who kept the spirit of the group alive, at least according to the mainstream rock press. He also shepherded nearly all of the official Band reissues, including this one, where he acts as executive producer and the main interview for Rob Bowman's detail-heavy, perhaps too affectionate liner notes. Bowman's long piece ends abruptly when Robertson leaves the group; it's acknowledged that the Band soldiered on, but this fact is dismissed quickly, since it doesn't fit the romanticized notion of the Band's career that Robertson has been selling since Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz. The bad blood between Robertson and Levon Helm runs too deep for them to make friends over this project (Garth Hudson is credited as an archival producer), but that acrimony is only noticeable within the liner notes to this beautiful hardcover book-styled box set. The five discs captures the Band at their peak as a band, containing their very best music. Music from Big Pink and The Band remain the essential, definitive albums, the records that not only capture their essence but have a nearly mythical grandeur. This box is for those who already know and love the group, who know their ups and downs, and who want to hear them in all their glory -- and, as this proves, the Band were glorious indeed.
Biography
by Bruce Eder (AllMusic)
For roughly half a decade, from 1968 through 1975, the Band was one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the public) as seriously as the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their albums were analyzed and reviewed as intensely as any records by their one-time employer and sometime mentor Bob Dylan. Although the Band retired from touring after The Last Waltz and disbanded several years later, their legacy thrived for decades, perpetuated by the bandmates' respective solo careers as well as the enduring strength of the Band's catalog.
The group's history dates back to 1958, just about the time that the formative Beatles gave up skiffle for rock & roll. Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas-born rock & roller who aspired to a real career, assembled a backing band that included his fellow Arkansan Levon Helm, who played drums (as well as credible guitar) and had led his own band, the Jungle Bush Beaters. The new outfit, Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks, began recording during the spring of 1958 and gigged throughout the American south; they also played shows in Ontario, Canada, where the money was better than in their native south. When pianist Willard Jones left the lineup one year later, Hawkins began looking at some of the local music talent in Toronto in late 1959. He approached a musician named Scott Cushnie about joining the Hawks on keyboards. Cushnie was already playing in a band with Robbie Robertson, however, and would only join Hawkins if the latter musician could come along.
After some resistance from Hawkins, Robertson entered the lineup on bass, replacing a departing Jimmy Evans. Additional lineup switches took place over the next few years, with Robbie Robertson shifting to rhythm guitar behind Fred Carter's (and, briefly, Roy Buchanan's) lead playing. Rick Danko (born December 9, 1943) came in on bass in 1961, followed by Richard Manuel (born April 3, 1944) on piano and backing vocals. Around that same time, Garth Hudson (born August 2, 1937), a classically trained musician who could read music, became the last piece of the initial puzzle as organ player.
From 1959 through 1963, Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks were one of the hottest rock & roll bands on the circuit, a special honor during a time in which rock & roll was supposedly dead. Hawkins himself was practically Toronto's answer to Elvis Presley, and he remained true to the music even as Presley himself softened and broadened his sound. The mix of personalities within the group meshed well, better than they did with Hawkins, who, unbeknownst to him, was soon the odd man out in his own group. As new members Danko, Manuel, and Hudson came aboard -- all Canadian, and replacing Hawkins' fellow southerners -- Hawkins lost control of the group, to some extent, as they began working together more closely.
Finally, the Hawks parted company with Ronnie Hawkins during the summer of 1963, the singer's at times overbearing personality and ego getting the better of the relationship. the Hawks decided to stay together with their oldest member, Levon Helm, out in front, variously renaming themselves Levon & the Hawks and the Canadian Squires and cutting records under both names. A hook-up with a young John Hammond, Jr. for a series of recording sessions in New York led to the group's being introduced to Bob Dylan, who was then preparing to pump up his sound in concert. Robertson and Helm played behind Dylan at his Forest Hills concert in New York in 1965 (a bootleg tape of which survives, and can be heard), and he ultimately signed up the entire group.
The hook-up with Dylan changed the Hawks, but it wasn't always an easy collaboration. In their five years backing Ronnie Hawkins, the group had played R&B-based rock & roll, heavily influenced by the sound of Chess Records in Chicago and Sun Records in Memphis. Additionally, they'd learned to play tightly and precisely and were accustomed to performing in front of audiences that were interested primarily in having a good time and dancing. Now Dylan had them playing electric adaptations of folk music, with lots of strumming and lacking the kind of edge they were accustomed to putting on their work. His sound was traceable to the music of Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White, while they'd spent years playing the music of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. As it happens, all of those influences are related, but not directly, and not in ways that were obvious to the players in 1964.
Ironically, in the spring of 1965, the group had just missed their chance at what could have been a legendary meeting on record with a musician they did understand. They'd met Arkansas-based blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II, and jammed with the singer/blues harpist one day, hoping to cut some records with him. They hadn't realized it at the time, but Williamson was a dying man -- by the time the Hawks were ready to return and try to cut some records with him, he had passed on.
Another problem for the group about working with Dylan concerned his audience. the Hawks had played in front of a lot of different audiences in the previous four years, but almost all of them were people primarily interested in enjoying themselves and having a good time. Dylan, however, was playing for crowds that seemed ready to reject him over principle. the Hawks weren't accustomed to confronting the kinds of passions that drove the folk audience, any more than they were initially prepared for the freewheeling nature of Dylan's performances -- he liked to make changes in the way he did songs on the spot, and the group was often hard put to keep up with him, at least at first, although the experience did make them a more flexible ensemble on-stage.
Eventually the group did get together with Dylan as his backup band on his 1966 tour, although Levon Helm left soon after the tour began at the end of 1965. The group ultimately fell under the management orbit of Dylan's own manager, Albert Grossman, who persuaded the four core members (sans Helm) to join Dylan in Woodstock, NY, working on the sessions that ultimately became the Basement Tapes in their various configurations, none of which would be heard officially for almost a decade. (Indeed, up to this time, only a single song, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," done live from the tour just ended, on a 45 B-side, had surfaced representing the group playing with Dylan).
Finally, a recording contract for the group -- rechristened the Band -- was secured by Grossman from Capitol Records. Levon Helm returned the fold, and the result was Music From Big Pink, an indirect outgrowth of the Basement Tapes. This album, enigmatically named and packaged, sounded like nothing else being done by anybody in music when it was released in July of 1968. It was as though psychedelia, and the so-called British Invasion, had never happened; the group played and sang like five distinct individuals working toward the same goal, not mixing together smoothly. There was a collective sound to "the band," but it made up five distinct individual voices and instruments mixing folk, blues, gospel, R&B, classical, and rock & roll.
The press latched on to the album before the public did, but over the next year, the Band became one of the most talked about phenomenon in rock music and Music From Big Pink acquired a mystique and significance akin to such albums as Beggars Banquet. The group and album ran counter to the so-called counterculture, and took a little getting used to, if only for their lack of a smooth, easily categorizable sound. Their music was steeped in Americana and historical and mythic American imagery, despite the fact that all of the members except Helm came from Canada (which, in fact, may have helped them appreciate the culture they were dealing with, as outsiders). Robertson, Manuel, and Danko all wrote, and everyone but Robertson and Hudson sang; their vocals didn't mesh sweetly but simply flowed together in an informal manner. Classical organ flourishes meshed with a big (yet lean), raw rock & roll sound and the whole was so far removed from the self-indulgent virtuosity and political and cultural posturing going on around them that the Band seemed to be operating in a different reality, to different rules.
During this same period, the group's past association with Bob Dylan -- whose name at the time had an almost mystical resonance with audiences -- was mentioned in the rock press and also put right in the faces of listeners through a new phenomenon. Only a single track from the group's 1966 tour with Dylan had ever surfaced, and that was an out-of-print B-side to an old single. But in 1969, the first widely distributed bootleg LP, The Great White Wonder, featuring the then-unreleased Basement Tapes, started turning up on college campuses and record collectors' outlets. The quality was limited, the labels were blank, and there was no "promotion" as such of this patently illegal release, but it got around to hundreds of thousands of listeners and only heightened the mystique surrounding the Band.
Music From Big Pink, which featured a painting by Bob Dylan on its cover, began selling -- slowly at first and then better -- and the group played a few select shows. A second album, simply titled The Band, was every bit as good as the first. Dominated by Robertson's writing, it was released in September of 1969, and with it, the group's reputation exploded; moreover, they began their climb out of the shadow of Bob Dylan with songwriting of their own that was every bit a match for anything he was releasing at the time. A pair of songs, "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down," captured the public imagination, the former getting them onto The Ed Sullivan Show in an appearance that's fascinating to watch on the official Ed Sullivan video release; the host comes out to embrace and congratulate them, obviously thrilled after the psychedelic and hard rock acts that he usually booked, to see a group whose words and music he understood. Meanwhile, "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down" became a popular radio track and yielded a hit cover version in the guise of an unaccountably corrupted rendition by Joan Baez (in which, for reasons that only Baez may be able to explain, Robert E. Lee is transformed into a steamboat) that made the Top Five.
Following the release of the second album, things changed somewhat within the group. Partly owing to the pressures of touring and the public's expectations of "genius," and also to the growing press fixation on Robbie Robertson at the expense of the rest of the group, the other group members remained familiar enough that their names and personalities were well-known to the public. the Band was still a great working ensemble, as represented on their brilliant third album, Stage Fright, but gradually exhaustion and personal pressures took their toll. Additionally, the huge amounts of money that the members started collecting, against hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of record sales, led to instances of irresponsible behavior by individual members and their spouses and raised the pressure on the group to perform. The members had always engaged in a certain amount of casual drug use, mostly involving marijuana, but now they had access to more serious and expensive chemical diversions. Some private resentments also began manifesting themselves about Robertson's dominance of the songwriting (some reality of which was questioned openly in Levon Helm's autobiography years later), and the fact that the group was now constantly in the public eye didn't help.
By the time of the fourth album, Cahoots, some of the glow of experimentation and easygoing camaraderie was gone, though ironically, the album was still one of the best released in 1971. The problem for the group became fulfilling all of the commitments involved in success, including touring and writing new material to record. By the end of 1971, they'd decided to take a break, cutting a live album, Rock of Ages, that was all fans had to content themselves with in 1972. The fact that their next album, issued in 1973, was a collection of studio versions of the oldies that the group used to do on-stage, and numbers that they knew from their days as the Hawks, should have been a warning sign that not everything was well within the group. More troubling still was the fact that the renditions were so plain and flat sounding compared to the music they'd cut on every prior album; it simply wasn't up to the standard that one expected of the group and the fact that they didn't tour behind the record seemed to indicate that they were marking time with Moondog Matinee. The group did play one major show that year, at the race track at Watkins Glen, NY, before the largest audience ever assembled for a rock concert -- it was a demonstration of their place in the rock pantheon that the Band was booked alongside the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band.
The year 1973 was also where they let the other shoe drop on their association with Bob Dylan, cutting the Planet Waves album with him and preparing for a huge national tour together in 1974. That tour, in retrospect, seemed more a basis for cashing in on their association with Dylan than for any new music-making of any significance. In many critics' eyes, the Band was superior to Dylan in their performances, an idea borne out on much of the live LP Before the Flood that was distilled down from the two February 14, 1974, performances. Everyone made a fortune from it, but the tour with Dylan also thrust the group right into the middle of the most decadent part of the rock world. A lot of the simplicity and directness of their music and lives succumbed to the easy availability of sex, drugs, and other diversions and the expensive lifestyles they were all starting to maintain.
By the end of 1974, the Band had expended much of the good will they'd built up from their first four albums. Another album, Northern Lights -- Southern Cross released in late 1975, was a major comeback and restored some of the group's reputation as a cutting-edge ensemble, even encompassing elements of synthesizer music into its writing and production. Around this same time, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson made a belated contribution to the history of Chess Records (in light of their near-miss with Sonny Boy Williamson a decade earlier) when they worked with Muddy Waters, cutting an entire album with the blues legend at Helm's studio in Woodstock, NY. The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, although ignored at the time by everyone but the critics, was the last great album cut by the label or by Waters at the label, and his best album in at least five years.
It was too late to save the Band as a working ensemble, however; the members were all involved in their own interests and lives and the group stopped touring. The inevitable best-of album in 1976, ahead of what proved to be their final tour, marked the unofficial end of the original lineup's history. One last new album, Islands, fulfilled the group's contract and had some fine moments, but they never toured behind it and it was clear to one and all that the Band was finished as a going concern. The group marked the end of their days as an active unit with the release of the film (and accompanying soundtrack LP set) The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, of their farewell concert, which was an all-star performing affair pulling together the talents of Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and a dozen other luminaries drawn from the ranks of old friends, admirers, and idols of theirs. Robertson and Helm pursued musical and film careers, while Danko tried to start a solo career of his own.
Capitol Records kept repackaging their music on vinyl with an Anthology collection and a second best-of LP, as well as a pair of CD recompilations, To Kingdom Come and Across the Great Divide, in the '90s. As it turned out the members, apart from Robertson, weren't quite as ready or willing to close the book on the group, in part because they saw no reason to and also because several of them proved unable to sustain profitable solo careers (Robertson, having written most of the songs, had a steady income from the publishing as well as the record sales). The other members of the group reunited at various times -- in 1983, four members of the Band, with Robertson replaced by Earl Cate of the Cate Brothers on guitar, reunited for a tour that yielded a full-length concert video and a healthy audience response. The death of Richard Manuel in 1986 cast a dark pall on any future reunions, of which there were several -- Robertson issued his first solo album a year later, which included a tribute to Manuel ("Fallen Angel").
This was as close as the guitarist would get to a Band reunion, however, which became a bone of contention among onlookers and the members. Robertson publicly questioned what the meaning of The Last Waltz had been and would never participate. And as the group's major songwriter and principal guitarist, he was their most famous member, but he almost never sang significant vocal parts on their recordings (indeed, it is said that one reason their set from Woodstock was never issued was because his mic was live and his voice too prominent). Other guitarists could build on his work well enough, and the rest of the group had made significant contributions to virtually every song they ever did, so the reunions made sense. In 1993, the Band released Jericho, their first new album in 16 years, which received surprisingly good reviews. High on the Hog followed in 1996 and two years later, they celebrated their 30th anniversary with Jubilation. The death of Rick Danko in his sleep at his home in Woodstock on December 10, 1999, the day after his 56th birthday, called an end to future activities by any version of the Band, even when they received the Grammys' Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. Levon Helm, whose solo career had accelerated during the 2000s (including the well-received Vanguard album Dirt Farmer), contracted cancer and died in April 2012.
OFFICIAL SITE
''A MUSICAL HISTORY, DISC ONE''
SEPTEMBER 27 2005
410:45
DISC ONE
1 /Who Do You Love? feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
Ellas McDaniel /2:41
2 /You Know I Love You feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawk/2:44
3 /Further on Up the Road feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
Don Robey /3:08
4 /Nineteen Years Old feat: Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks
McKinley Morganfield /4:14
5 /Honky Tonk feat: Hawks
Don Robey /3:05
6 /Bacon Fat feat: Hawks
Garth Hudson / Robbie Robertson /2:39
7 /Robbie's Blues feat: Hawks/3:37
8 /Leave Me Alone feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson/2:37
9 /Uh Uh Uh feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson/2:21
10 /He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart) feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:39
11 /(I Want to Be) The Rainmaker
Robbie Robertson /2:59
12 /The Stones I Throw
Robbie Robertson /1:07
13 /The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men) feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:06
14 /Go Go Liza Jane feat: Hawks
Robbie Robertson /2:13
15 /Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:33
16 /Tell Me, Momma feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /4:05
17 /Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /5:37
18 /Words and Numbers
Richard Manuel /4:13
19 /You Don't Come Through
Robbie Robertson /2:03
20 /Beautiful Thing
Richard Manuel /1:41
21 /Caledonia Mission
Robbie Robertson /2:28
22 /Odds and Ends feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /1:48
23 /Ferdinand the Imposter
Robbie Robertson /4:06
24 /Ruben Remus
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:14
25 /Will the Circle Be Unbroken
Traditional /0:55
DISC TWO
1 /Katie's Been Gone
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /2:45
2 /Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos
Traditional /3:58
3 /Don't Ya Tell Henry feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:13
4 /Tears of Rage
Bob Dylan / Richard Manuel /5:21
5 /To Kingdom Come
Robbie Robertson /3:58
6 /In a Station
Richard Manuel /3:32
7 /The Weight
Robbie Robertson /4:37
8 /We Can Talk
Richard Manuel /3:04
9 /Long Black Veil
Danny Dill / Marijohn Wilkin /3:03
10 /Chest Fever
Robbie Robertson /5:15
11 /Lonesome Suzie
Richard Manuel /3:00
12 /This Wheel's on Fire
Rick Danko / Bob Dylan /3:13
13 /I Shall Be Released
Bob Dylan /3:15
14 /Yazoo Street Scandal
Robbie Robertson /3:56
15 /I Ain't Got No Home feat: Bob Dylan
Woody Guthrie /3:46
16 /Orange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast)
Richard Manuel /3:18
17 /Baby Lou
Jimmy Drew /3:39
18 /Long Distance Operator
Bob Dylan /4:33
19 /Key to the Highway
Big Bill Broonzy / Charles Segar /2:24
20 /Bessie Smith
Rick Danko / Robbie Robertson /4:17
DISC THREE
1 /Across the Great Divide
Robbie Robertson /2:53
2 /Rag Mama Rag
Robbie Robertson /3:05
3 /The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Robbie Robertson /3:33
4 /When You Awake
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:15
5 /Up on Cripple Creek
Robbie Robertson /4:34
6 /Whispering Pines
Richard Manuel / Robbie Robertson /3:58
7 /King Harvest (Has Surely Come)
Robbie Robertson /3:40
8 /Get Up Jake
Robbie Robertson /2:17
9 /Jemima Surrender
Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:49
10 /Daniel and the Sacred Harp
Robbie Robertson /4:24
11 /Time to Kill
Robbie Robertson /3:28
12 /All la Glory
Robbie Robertson /3:26
13 /The Shape I'm In
Robbie Robertson /4:02
14 /Stage Fright
Robbie Robertson /3:43
15 /The Rumor
Robbie Robertson /4:15
16 /Slippin' & Slidin'
Eddie Bocage / Richard Penniman /3:22
17 /Don't Do It
Lamont Dozier / Brian Holland / Eddie Holland /3:47
18 /Strawberry Wine
Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:46
19 /Rockin' Chair
Robbie Robertson /4:12
20 /Look Out Cleveland
Robbie Robertson /3:34
21 /4% Pantomime
Van Morrison / Robbie Robertson /6:01
DISC FOUR
1 /Life Is a Carnival
Rick Danko / Levon Helm / Robbie Robertson /3:55
2 /When I Paint My Masterpiece
Bob Dylan /4:21
3 /The Moon Struck One
Robbie Robertson /4:09
4 /The River Hymn
Robbie Robertson /4:41
5 /Don't Do It
Lamont Dozier / Brian Holland / Eddie Holland /4:36
6 /Caledonia Mission
Robbie Robertson /3:22
7 /Smoke Signal
Robbie Robertson /5:09
8 /Unfaithful Servant
Robbie Robertson /4:41
9 /The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show
Robbie Robertson /4:05
10 /The Genetic Method
Garth Hudson /7:31
11 /Chest Fever
Robbie Robertson /5:04
12 /(I Don't Want to Hang Up My) Rock 'N' Roll Shoes/4:30
13 /Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever)
Ivy Jo Hunter / Stevie Wonder /3:37
14 /Endless Highway
Robbie Robertson /5:07
15 /Move Me
Rick Danko /2:57
16 /Two Piano Song
Robbie Robertson /4:12
17 /Mystery Train
Junior Parker / Sam Phillips / Robbie Robertson /5:33
DISC FIVE
1 /Ain't Got No Home
Clarence "Frogman" Henry /3:25
2 /Share Your Love with Me
Alfred Braggs / Deadric Malone /2:56
3 /Didn't It Rain
Traditional /3:19
4 /Forever Young feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /4:56
5 /Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:37
6 /Highway 61 Revisited feat: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan /3:57
7 /Ophelia
Robbie Robertson /3:32
8 /Acadian Driftwood
Robbie Robertson /6:41
9 /It Makes No Difference
Robbie Robertson /6:35
10 /Twilight
Robbie Robertson /3:25
11 /Christmas Must Be Tonight
Robbie Robertson /3:36
12 /The Saga of Pepote Rouge
Robbie Robertson /4:14
13 /Livin' in a Dream
Robbie Robertson /2:51
14 /Forbidden Fruit
Robbie Robertson /5:40
15 /Home Cookin'
Rick Danko /3:44
16 /Out of the Blue
Robbie Robertson /3:21
17 /Evangeline feat: Emmylou Harris
Robbie Robertson /3:11
18 /The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Robbie Robertson /4:34
19 /The Weight feat; The Staples
Robbie Robertson /4:36
Review
By Official Site
A Musical History is a comprehensive boxed set documenting The Band's recording career from 1963 to 1976, with 37 previously unreleased tracks. Released by Capitol/EMI Music Catalog Marketing in September 2005, A Musical History includes five audio discs and a DVD featuring rare live performance footage. The release concludes the comprehensive restoration campaign for The Band's entire Capitol Records catalog, that also produced the 2000/2001 remastered-with-bonus-tracks re-releases of their 8 first albums.
Among the previously unreleased audio tracks here are live and studio recordings The Band created with Bob Dylan and Ronnie Hawkins, as well as various song sketches. The DVD's nine film clips include previously unreleased concert performances, a filmed studio jam, and three songs The Band performed on "Saturday Night Live" in 1976, never before issued in their entirety.
The boxed set, which was overseen by Robbie Robertson with producers Cheryl Pawelski and Andrew Sandoval, comes packaged with a 108-page hardbound book with previously unseen photos and memorabilia, and a cover painting of The Band by world-renowned artist Ed Ruscha.
On the rather inexpensive 67-track iTunes version of A Musical History, the tracklisting is quite different, disc 1 and the DVD are completely absent, and also tracks with Dylan and others are omitted, but it includes a previously unissued(?) live version of "I Shall Be Released."
Review
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AllMusic)
Given the countless Band compilations released over the years, plus the exhaustive bonus-track-laden reissues of the proper albums in 2000 and 2001, it's easy to be suspicious of the six-disc A Musical History, especially since it's the third Band box set released in the CD era. It would seem that all the worthwhile previously unreleased music has been excavated and that the Band's career has been anthologized in every possible way, but A Musical History proves that's not true. As its title implies, the set is a biography, tracing the group's career from their early days as the Hawks supporting Ronnie Hawkins, through their stint as Levon & the Hawks, through their time as Bob Dylan's backing band in 1966, through their emergence as the Band in 1968, then through their years of stardom in the early '70s, leading up to their departure at The Last Waltz in 1976. No previous compilation has done this -- they've either picked up the story with Music from Big Pink or offered up the greatest hits, and they've never weaved Ronnie Hawkins or Bob Dylan tracks into the story line -- and this thorough, all-encompassing approach does result in an absorbing narrative that does provide some revelations, most arriving on the spectacular, necessary first disc that traces the evolution of the band before they were the Band. Here, for the first time on a Band album, you get to hear the group's beginning as a rough rock & roll and blues combo, and while some of this material is a bit generic (albeit in the best possible sense, since they were a lean, tough, straight-ahead rock & roll group), this music echoes throughout the four CDs that follow, whether it's in the muscular R&B grooves of Levon Helm and Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson's tight, squealing guitar, or Richard Manual's piano chord clusters, or how the group touched on rockabilly, Motown, New Orleans R&B, country, and folk even on their earliest recordings. In this context, their teaming with Dylan not only seems like a natural outgrowth of their work as the struggling Levon & the Hawks, but it's clear that Dylan helped give the band focus and ideas, inspiring not just the songs that the group wrote for Music from Big Pink, but the whole Americana aesthetic that came to define the Band and made them separate from their rock & roll peers of the late '60s.
Once A Musical History hits the second disc, the Band's story enters familiar territory and the revelations start drying up even if the unreleased material doesn't (there are a whopping 32 unreleased tracks on this 102-song set, and there's about ten or so other cuts that could qualify as rarities, as well). All the same, the conventional story line carries more weight here, since the first disc not only provides context, but because the sequencing and song selection are excellent, helping to drive the Band's story in addition to just being flat-out entertaining. Plus, there are some great rarities scattered throughout here, including an exciting, careening live version of Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home" with Bob Dylan that was only released on a Woody tribute album, the funky, gritty "Baby Lou," a raucous "Slippin' & Slidin'" from the Festival Express tour in 1970, hard-rocking live versions of "Strawberry Wine" and "Look out Cleveland" from Royal Albert Hall in 1971, a live "Highway 61 Revisited" with Bob Dylan from a 1974 Madison Square Garden show, and Rick Danko's sweet, lazy unreleased "Home Cookin'" from 1976. These not only help keep a familiar story interesting to the hardcore fans (who, after all, are the primary audience for such a lavish set as this), but help fill little details within that story, along with illustrating how good the Band could sound as a band right up until the very end of their career.
Despite all this, the arc of their career -- the sudden, glorious beginning and the slow descent into equal parts pretension and lethargy -- can't help but shine through in a biography such as this. No amount of well-chosen rarities and expert song sequencing (all the group's major songs, along with all of their noteworthy minor tunes, are here in some incarnation or another) can hide the downward turn in the Band's fortunes. There was a pretty steep decline in quality material after their third album, Stage Fright, in 1970, and while the next four studio albums, plus the live Rock of Ages and The Last Waltz, are summarized on the final two discs of the set, it's hard to ignore how covers keep popping up or how numerous songs are repeated in different versions (no matter how good the alternate versions are, it's clear that the group was running out of strong new songs), nor is it easy to ignore that the rest of the Band, for whatever reason, simply stopped writing, transferring the burden to Robbie Robertson, who struggled to come up with songs that seemed as effortless and graceful as his early songs, despite a slight rejuvenation on Northern Lights-Southern Cross. That doesn't mean these last two discs are bad -- far from it, they put the best spin on an uneven era -- but they do make it clear that the Band were caught at an awkward spot and were unable to successfully move forward, no matter how much Robertson prodded. As the accompanying DVD, which has nine live performances beginning with a 1970 clip from Woodstock and ending with three spots from Saturday Night Live in 1976, illustrates, Robertson had his mind elsewhere, but the rest of the guys were happy to simply be in a band. Being the one with ambitions, Robertson made the move and brought the curtains down on their career when the rest of the Band weren't necessarily ready to call it quits, as evidenced by their ongoing reunions in the '80s and '90s.
Despite the existence of a touring Band minus their guitarist and songwriter, Robertson wound up as the member who was generally acknowledged as the one who kept the spirit of the group alive, at least according to the mainstream rock press. He also shepherded nearly all of the official Band reissues, including this one, where he acts as executive producer and the main interview for Rob Bowman's detail-heavy, perhaps too affectionate liner notes. Bowman's long piece ends abruptly when Robertson leaves the group; it's acknowledged that the Band soldiered on, but this fact is dismissed quickly, since it doesn't fit the romanticized notion of the Band's career that Robertson has been selling since Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz. The bad blood between Robertson and Levon Helm runs too deep for them to make friends over this project (Garth Hudson is credited as an archival producer), but that acrimony is only noticeable within the liner notes to this beautiful hardcover book-styled box set. The five discs captures the Band at their peak as a band, containing their very best music. Music from Big Pink and The Band remain the essential, definitive albums, the records that not only capture their essence but have a nearly mythical grandeur. This box is for those who already know and love the group, who know their ups and downs, and who want to hear them in all their glory -- and, as this proves, the Band were glorious indeed.
Biography
by Bruce Eder (AllMusic)
For roughly half a decade, from 1968 through 1975, the Band was one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the public) as seriously as the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their albums were analyzed and reviewed as intensely as any records by their one-time employer and sometime mentor Bob Dylan. Although the Band retired from touring after The Last Waltz and disbanded several years later, their legacy thrived for decades, perpetuated by the bandmates' respective solo careers as well as the enduring strength of the Band's catalog.
The group's history dates back to 1958, just about the time that the formative Beatles gave up skiffle for rock & roll. Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas-born rock & roller who aspired to a real career, assembled a backing band that included his fellow Arkansan Levon Helm, who played drums (as well as credible guitar) and had led his own band, the Jungle Bush Beaters. The new outfit, Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks, began recording during the spring of 1958 and gigged throughout the American south; they also played shows in Ontario, Canada, where the money was better than in their native south. When pianist Willard Jones left the lineup one year later, Hawkins began looking at some of the local music talent in Toronto in late 1959. He approached a musician named Scott Cushnie about joining the Hawks on keyboards. Cushnie was already playing in a band with Robbie Robertson, however, and would only join Hawkins if the latter musician could come along.
After some resistance from Hawkins, Robertson entered the lineup on bass, replacing a departing Jimmy Evans. Additional lineup switches took place over the next few years, with Robbie Robertson shifting to rhythm guitar behind Fred Carter's (and, briefly, Roy Buchanan's) lead playing. Rick Danko (born December 9, 1943) came in on bass in 1961, followed by Richard Manuel (born April 3, 1944) on piano and backing vocals. Around that same time, Garth Hudson (born August 2, 1937), a classically trained musician who could read music, became the last piece of the initial puzzle as organ player.
From 1959 through 1963, Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks were one of the hottest rock & roll bands on the circuit, a special honor during a time in which rock & roll was supposedly dead. Hawkins himself was practically Toronto's answer to Elvis Presley, and he remained true to the music even as Presley himself softened and broadened his sound. The mix of personalities within the group meshed well, better than they did with Hawkins, who, unbeknownst to him, was soon the odd man out in his own group. As new members Danko, Manuel, and Hudson came aboard -- all Canadian, and replacing Hawkins' fellow southerners -- Hawkins lost control of the group, to some extent, as they began working together more closely.
Finally, the Hawks parted company with Ronnie Hawkins during the summer of 1963, the singer's at times overbearing personality and ego getting the better of the relationship. the Hawks decided to stay together with their oldest member, Levon Helm, out in front, variously renaming themselves Levon & the Hawks and the Canadian Squires and cutting records under both names. A hook-up with a young John Hammond, Jr. for a series of recording sessions in New York led to the group's being introduced to Bob Dylan, who was then preparing to pump up his sound in concert. Robertson and Helm played behind Dylan at his Forest Hills concert in New York in 1965 (a bootleg tape of which survives, and can be heard), and he ultimately signed up the entire group.
The hook-up with Dylan changed the Hawks, but it wasn't always an easy collaboration. In their five years backing Ronnie Hawkins, the group had played R&B-based rock & roll, heavily influenced by the sound of Chess Records in Chicago and Sun Records in Memphis. Additionally, they'd learned to play tightly and precisely and were accustomed to performing in front of audiences that were interested primarily in having a good time and dancing. Now Dylan had them playing electric adaptations of folk music, with lots of strumming and lacking the kind of edge they were accustomed to putting on their work. His sound was traceable to the music of Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White, while they'd spent years playing the music of Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. As it happens, all of those influences are related, but not directly, and not in ways that were obvious to the players in 1964.
Ironically, in the spring of 1965, the group had just missed their chance at what could have been a legendary meeting on record with a musician they did understand. They'd met Arkansas-based blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II, and jammed with the singer/blues harpist one day, hoping to cut some records with him. They hadn't realized it at the time, but Williamson was a dying man -- by the time the Hawks were ready to return and try to cut some records with him, he had passed on.
Another problem for the group about working with Dylan concerned his audience. the Hawks had played in front of a lot of different audiences in the previous four years, but almost all of them were people primarily interested in enjoying themselves and having a good time. Dylan, however, was playing for crowds that seemed ready to reject him over principle. the Hawks weren't accustomed to confronting the kinds of passions that drove the folk audience, any more than they were initially prepared for the freewheeling nature of Dylan's performances -- he liked to make changes in the way he did songs on the spot, and the group was often hard put to keep up with him, at least at first, although the experience did make them a more flexible ensemble on-stage.
Eventually the group did get together with Dylan as his backup band on his 1966 tour, although Levon Helm left soon after the tour began at the end of 1965. The group ultimately fell under the management orbit of Dylan's own manager, Albert Grossman, who persuaded the four core members (sans Helm) to join Dylan in Woodstock, NY, working on the sessions that ultimately became the Basement Tapes in their various configurations, none of which would be heard officially for almost a decade. (Indeed, up to this time, only a single song, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," done live from the tour just ended, on a 45 B-side, had surfaced representing the group playing with Dylan).
Finally, a recording contract for the group -- rechristened the Band -- was secured by Grossman from Capitol Records. Levon Helm returned the fold, and the result was Music From Big Pink, an indirect outgrowth of the Basement Tapes. This album, enigmatically named and packaged, sounded like nothing else being done by anybody in music when it was released in July of 1968. It was as though psychedelia, and the so-called British Invasion, had never happened; the group played and sang like five distinct individuals working toward the same goal, not mixing together smoothly. There was a collective sound to "the band," but it made up five distinct individual voices and instruments mixing folk, blues, gospel, R&B, classical, and rock & roll.
The press latched on to the album before the public did, but over the next year, the Band became one of the most talked about phenomenon in rock music and Music From Big Pink acquired a mystique and significance akin to such albums as Beggars Banquet. The group and album ran counter to the so-called counterculture, and took a little getting used to, if only for their lack of a smooth, easily categorizable sound. Their music was steeped in Americana and historical and mythic American imagery, despite the fact that all of the members except Helm came from Canada (which, in fact, may have helped them appreciate the culture they were dealing with, as outsiders). Robertson, Manuel, and Danko all wrote, and everyone but Robertson and Hudson sang; their vocals didn't mesh sweetly but simply flowed together in an informal manner. Classical organ flourishes meshed with a big (yet lean), raw rock & roll sound and the whole was so far removed from the self-indulgent virtuosity and political and cultural posturing going on around them that the Band seemed to be operating in a different reality, to different rules.
During this same period, the group's past association with Bob Dylan -- whose name at the time had an almost mystical resonance with audiences -- was mentioned in the rock press and also put right in the faces of listeners through a new phenomenon. Only a single track from the group's 1966 tour with Dylan had ever surfaced, and that was an out-of-print B-side to an old single. But in 1969, the first widely distributed bootleg LP, The Great White Wonder, featuring the then-unreleased Basement Tapes, started turning up on college campuses and record collectors' outlets. The quality was limited, the labels were blank, and there was no "promotion" as such of this patently illegal release, but it got around to hundreds of thousands of listeners and only heightened the mystique surrounding the Band.
Music From Big Pink, which featured a painting by Bob Dylan on its cover, began selling -- slowly at first and then better -- and the group played a few select shows. A second album, simply titled The Band, was every bit as good as the first. Dominated by Robertson's writing, it was released in September of 1969, and with it, the group's reputation exploded; moreover, they began their climb out of the shadow of Bob Dylan with songwriting of their own that was every bit a match for anything he was releasing at the time. A pair of songs, "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down," captured the public imagination, the former getting them onto The Ed Sullivan Show in an appearance that's fascinating to watch on the official Ed Sullivan video release; the host comes out to embrace and congratulate them, obviously thrilled after the psychedelic and hard rock acts that he usually booked, to see a group whose words and music he understood. Meanwhile, "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down" became a popular radio track and yielded a hit cover version in the guise of an unaccountably corrupted rendition by Joan Baez (in which, for reasons that only Baez may be able to explain, Robert E. Lee is transformed into a steamboat) that made the Top Five.
Following the release of the second album, things changed somewhat within the group. Partly owing to the pressures of touring and the public's expectations of "genius," and also to the growing press fixation on Robbie Robertson at the expense of the rest of the group, the other group members remained familiar enough that their names and personalities were well-known to the public. the Band was still a great working ensemble, as represented on their brilliant third album, Stage Fright, but gradually exhaustion and personal pressures took their toll. Additionally, the huge amounts of money that the members started collecting, against hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of record sales, led to instances of irresponsible behavior by individual members and their spouses and raised the pressure on the group to perform. The members had always engaged in a certain amount of casual drug use, mostly involving marijuana, but now they had access to more serious and expensive chemical diversions. Some private resentments also began manifesting themselves about Robertson's dominance of the songwriting (some reality of which was questioned openly in Levon Helm's autobiography years later), and the fact that the group was now constantly in the public eye didn't help.
By the time of the fourth album, Cahoots, some of the glow of experimentation and easygoing camaraderie was gone, though ironically, the album was still one of the best released in 1971. The problem for the group became fulfilling all of the commitments involved in success, including touring and writing new material to record. By the end of 1971, they'd decided to take a break, cutting a live album, Rock of Ages, that was all fans had to content themselves with in 1972. The fact that their next album, issued in 1973, was a collection of studio versions of the oldies that the group used to do on-stage, and numbers that they knew from their days as the Hawks, should have been a warning sign that not everything was well within the group. More troubling still was the fact that the renditions were so plain and flat sounding compared to the music they'd cut on every prior album; it simply wasn't up to the standard that one expected of the group and the fact that they didn't tour behind the record seemed to indicate that they were marking time with Moondog Matinee. The group did play one major show that year, at the race track at Watkins Glen, NY, before the largest audience ever assembled for a rock concert -- it was a demonstration of their place in the rock pantheon that the Band was booked alongside the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band.
The year 1973 was also where they let the other shoe drop on their association with Bob Dylan, cutting the Planet Waves album with him and preparing for a huge national tour together in 1974. That tour, in retrospect, seemed more a basis for cashing in on their association with Dylan than for any new music-making of any significance. In many critics' eyes, the Band was superior to Dylan in their performances, an idea borne out on much of the live LP Before the Flood that was distilled down from the two February 14, 1974, performances. Everyone made a fortune from it, but the tour with Dylan also thrust the group right into the middle of the most decadent part of the rock world. A lot of the simplicity and directness of their music and lives succumbed to the easy availability of sex, drugs, and other diversions and the expensive lifestyles they were all starting to maintain.
By the end of 1974, the Band had expended much of the good will they'd built up from their first four albums. Another album, Northern Lights -- Southern Cross released in late 1975, was a major comeback and restored some of the group's reputation as a cutting-edge ensemble, even encompassing elements of synthesizer music into its writing and production. Around this same time, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson made a belated contribution to the history of Chess Records (in light of their near-miss with Sonny Boy Williamson a decade earlier) when they worked with Muddy Waters, cutting an entire album with the blues legend at Helm's studio in Woodstock, NY. The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, although ignored at the time by everyone but the critics, was the last great album cut by the label or by Waters at the label, and his best album in at least five years.
It was too late to save the Band as a working ensemble, however; the members were all involved in their own interests and lives and the group stopped touring. The inevitable best-of album in 1976, ahead of what proved to be their final tour, marked the unofficial end of the original lineup's history. One last new album, Islands, fulfilled the group's contract and had some fine moments, but they never toured behind it and it was clear to one and all that the Band was finished as a going concern. The group marked the end of their days as an active unit with the release of the film (and accompanying soundtrack LP set) The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, of their farewell concert, which was an all-star performing affair pulling together the talents of Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and a dozen other luminaries drawn from the ranks of old friends, admirers, and idols of theirs. Robertson and Helm pursued musical and film careers, while Danko tried to start a solo career of his own.
Capitol Records kept repackaging their music on vinyl with an Anthology collection and a second best-of LP, as well as a pair of CD recompilations, To Kingdom Come and Across the Great Divide, in the '90s. As it turned out the members, apart from Robertson, weren't quite as ready or willing to close the book on the group, in part because they saw no reason to and also because several of them proved unable to sustain profitable solo careers (Robertson, having written most of the songs, had a steady income from the publishing as well as the record sales). The other members of the group reunited at various times -- in 1983, four members of the Band, with Robertson replaced by Earl Cate of the Cate Brothers on guitar, reunited for a tour that yielded a full-length concert video and a healthy audience response. The death of Richard Manuel in 1986 cast a dark pall on any future reunions, of which there were several -- Robertson issued his first solo album a year later, which included a tribute to Manuel ("Fallen Angel").
This was as close as the guitarist would get to a Band reunion, however, which became a bone of contention among onlookers and the members. Robertson publicly questioned what the meaning of The Last Waltz had been and would never participate. And as the group's major songwriter and principal guitarist, he was their most famous member, but he almost never sang significant vocal parts on their recordings (indeed, it is said that one reason their set from Woodstock was never issued was because his mic was live and his voice too prominent). Other guitarists could build on his work well enough, and the rest of the group had made significant contributions to virtually every song they ever did, so the reunions made sense. In 1993, the Band released Jericho, their first new album in 16 years, which received surprisingly good reviews. High on the Hog followed in 1996 and two years later, they celebrated their 30th anniversary with Jubilation. The death of Rick Danko in his sleep at his home in Woodstock on December 10, 1999, the day after his 56th birthday, called an end to future activities by any version of the Band, even when they received the Grammys' Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. Levon Helm, whose solo career had accelerated during the 2000s (including the well-received Vanguard album Dirt Farmer), contracted cancer and died in April 2012.
OFFICIAL SITE
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