Kevin Bronson on March 23rd, 2017

0

[Chris Morris is an L.A.-based journalist and author whose work includes “Los Lobos: Dream in Blue” (published in 2015) and “Together Through Life: A Personal Journey With the Music of Bob Dylan,” published last year. On Saturday night at the Alex Theatre, he will serve as host for the Wild Honey Foundation’s salute to The Band, which features original member Garth Hudson along with a host of guests including Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, Peter Case and Van Dyke Parks. (Info, tickets.) Here, he recalls the genesis of The Band, and what it felt from the outside looking in.]

By Chris Morris

Even today, nearly half a century later, one marvels at the mystery of The Band’s arrival on the music scene. They presented themselves as ciphers; though they seemed to have stepped right out of the past, they didn’t appear to have a past themselves. Oh, we received information about their history, but it seemed to conceal as much as it revealed. It was no surprise that the first major story about them, an Al Aronowitz piece in the Aug. 24, 1968, issue of Rolling Stone, swathed them in shadow. In the Elliott Landy photo that graced the magazine’s cover, the five members are squeezed together on a bench, facing a river or small lake, their backs to the lens.

When it materialized out of the ether in 1968, Music From Big Pink was hard to figure out on a first listen, or even on a tenth or twentieth. Who was playing what? Who was singing? How many singers were there? Where did those horns come from? Were all those weird sounds coming out a keyboard, or were they transmitted from Mars? And what the hell were those strange, cryptic songs about? Who were those curious characters that inhabited them: Crazy Chester, Miss Moses, Lonesome Suzie? What’s that Bob Dylan painting supposed to mean? Who are these guys?

The record conjured a powerful mystique, and its sound rippled through hippiedom like a musical smoke signal. Its sequel The Band, released 14 months later, was earthier, more straightforward; if Big Pink resembled some magical text translated from a hitherto unknown language, the sophomore album played like a raunchy history book. And yet, by the time it landed, we still knew very little about the Band. The vast majority of their fans, and they had rolled up a few by then, hadn’t even had a chance to hear them perform live – they had played just two concerts by the time the second LP reached stores in September 1969.

They had a secret history, it seems, a long one, one that predated their justly acclaimed debut, which could hardly be considered a real debut at all. Finally based in America after a long apprenticeship on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, with side trips to Europe and the Antipodes, and a fateful siege of woodshedding in West Saugerties, New York, they weaved everything they had learned into their music. And they had learned much, for most of them were whey-faced teens, almost absolute beginners, when they began. It’s a rich tale, best heard in the music they scattered in the early days of their career.

Its sound rippled through hippiedom like a musical smoke signal

Most now know that they had their genesis as members of the Hawks, the backup band for Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas native who discovered he could make more money playing rockabilly, blues, and R&B covers in the clubs on Toronto’s Yonge Street than in the buckets-of-blood back home. So he settled in up north, with fellow razorback Levon Helm serving as his drummer and musical director, reeling in young, feisty Canuck players to fill out his outfit.

They came aboard one by one, like the Magnificent Seven: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel, all in their teens and spoiling for adventure, were recruited by Hawkins and Helm. Keyboardist Garth Hudson, the senior member of the band, by then in his late 20s, completed the crew when he signed on in 1964.

Hawkins and his band, christened the Hawks, made music for clubs where chicken wire was strung in front of the stage to deflect flying beer bottles; in time, they would encounter the one-armed stripper who worked in Jack Ruby’s bombed-out Dallas joint.

The task of making music that would entertain some of the most drunken and pugnacious clientele in the Northern Hemisphere resulted in recordings, made for Roulette Records, the province of magnate/mobster Morris Levy, which displayed an intense ferocity and an authentic bluesiness. You can hear “Who Do You Love,” “Further On Up the Road,” and “She’s Nineteen Years Old” – covers of Bo Diddley, Bobby Blue Bland, and Muddy Waters numbers, respectively – on the superlative retrospective The Band: A Musical History. It was tough stuff, played with no frills.

Hawkins took the Hawks to finishing school, but the boss proved too parsimonious and dictatorial for their tastes, so they dropped out and went along on their own, cutting singles for Roman, Ware, and Atco Records under the names Levon & the Hawks and (ugh) the Canadian Squires. Their 1964-65 45s – “Leave Me Alone,” “The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men),” “Go Go Liza Jane” – were written by Robertson, and display a folksiness as generic as their titles. They were more at home slugging it out in support of John Paul Hammond, the mush-mouthed, blues-singing son of Columbia A&R man John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan a few years earlier.

It may have been fated that the Hawks would end up playing with Dylan. A Canadian connection apparently brought them together. If working with Hawkins had been the musicians’ secondary education, they received their post-graduate degrees, master’s and Ph.D, behind Dylan, then entering his acid dandy period and looking for a band that could put electric flesh on the poetic bone of his careening new songs.

In the immediate wake of his uproarious debut with an electric band (mostly Paul Butterfield’s) at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan enlisted the Hawks to back him on his first rock ’n’ roll tour. Their initial American dates with him – which coincided with some ill-fated recording sessions for his next album – are poorly documented on recordings, but the limited evidence – most notably a date in Berkeley, California – show the group groping toward a grander ensemble conception.

They tried their best in the studio, but they did not really succeed. They cut a venomous remake of Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,” but the single was a resounding flop. Worse, attempts to cut more sprawling, vaporous tunes like “Visions of Johanna” and “She’s Your Lover Now” came to naught; on the huge, comprehensive set of Dylan’s 1965-66 studio recordings, “The Cutting Edge,” you can hear him vibrating with frustration over his musicians’ incomprehension. He soon decamped to Nashville, bringing only Robertson with him, and employed Al Kooper and some top session men to bring “Blonde On Blonde” to fruition.

By the time more live dates began in February of 1966, Levon Helm — who had been hip-checked to the side by Dylan in the New York studio – had wearied of being booed and exited for a job on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. First with studio man Sandy Konikoff and ultimately with Mickey Jones of the Trini Lopez and Johnny Rivers bands on drums, the rest of the Hawks played on in the U.S., Australia, and Europe.

Many of the outraged crowds spat fire and brimstone

Many of the outraged crowds spat fire and brimstone at Dylan and his over-amped punks, and they spat back. The often frenzied performances of ’66 were comprehensively compiled on a recent Columbia box, Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings; the best electric sets – Manchester, Paris, London – play with a silken grandeur, and sometimes with bristling animosity. (“Play fucking loud!”) In that day, hearing these high-volume shows must have been like sticking your head into a jet engine.

By late May, when the tour concluded in London, Dylan was hurtling toward a wall at light speed; you listen with horror to his incoherent stage rants during the final gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Two months later, he broke some bones in his neck in a bad motorcycle accident near his secluded home in Woodstock, New York. He burrowed into hiding to recuperate, but he soon would have the company of his backup band again.

They trickled into town. Robertson, who had grown close to Dylan on the European dates, showed up first, late in the year, ostensibly to help with the editing of an impressionistic film drawn from footage of the ’66 European concerts. In the early spring of 1967, Manuel, Danko, and Hudson reached Woodstock; they set up shop in a garish pink ranch house in West Saugerties. (Robertson was already ensconced with his fiancée in a house of his own, not far from the manse of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman.)

Thus bunkered, far from the day-to-day tumult of the record biz, the Hawks began their doctoral work, sometimes in Dylan’s living room, more frequently in the basement of the communal Big Pink house.

What became known as the Basement Tapes (after a fraction of them were first bootlegged for the first time in 1969 on The Great White Wonder) can today be heard as a sort of private musical symposium. At first, Dylan and his group ranged through nearly every imaginable style of American music – blues, R&B, folk, country – and ran down some English and Celtic antecedents as well. (On their own, the group, who knew their way around horns, would bring jazz to the table as well.)

First came covers, but then new original songs followed: mostly by Dylan, but some of them penned with Manuel and Danko as well. Inspired now, with a world of music flowing easily through them, they began to write songs of their own – allusive, funky songs that veered afield from their earlier work on their own. You can hear them on A Musical History; a few are included in doctored form on the 1975 Columbia set The Basement Tapes. Some of these songs – “Word and Numbers,” “You Don’t Come Through,” “Ferdinand the Imposter,” “Ruben Remus” – would be demoed, only to disappear. Others – the ripping “Yazoo Street Scandal,” “Katie’s Been Gone,” “Orange Juice Blues” – would be professionally recorded but remain unreleased. Others still would form the basis of a debut album.

After the group was put on the market by Albert Grossman and signed to Capitol Records, the promise of that album finally lured Levon Helm back into the fold, and he settled in with the rest of them at Big Pink. The die was now cast: They were a new act now, and their old handle would not do. What to call something so rich and strange? Some jokes were proposed: the Crackers, the Honkies. In the end, the moniker they chose for themselves settled comfortably on their shoulders, at once generic yet encompassing everything that flowed into their music: The Band. And thus the mystery began.