Recently I’ve watched with a mixture of fascination and horror a TV docu-soap called “Making The Band”, which purports to show a Backstreet-like boy group pieced together with an assembly-line rigor that would do Henry Ford proud. This, we’re to believe, is how we make music in the year 2000. And why would big business trust something as important as popular music to anything but a calculating team of experts?
These reissued and expanded editions of the first four albums by The Band are an elegant reply to that question. If one were to come up with a sure-fire formula for making great music, chances are it wouldn’t resemble their story. You’d be hard-pressed to pull together five more improbable collaborators than former butcher’s apprentice Rick Danko (bass), eccentric master musician Garth Hudson (keyboards, horns), dour but sweet-voiced Richard Manuel (piano), streetwise and ambitious Robbie Robertson (guitar) and the lone American in this mix of Canadians, Arkansas’ Levon Helm (drums).
Nothing about their history is easy, a point driven home by the lingering enmity between surviving members. Yet analyze their music from any perspective — lyrics, pure musicianship, ensemble chemistry, innovation, tradition — and you’ll be left fumbling for superlatives.
Their unlikely story should be legend; the cross-border assemblage around rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, the spell in honky-tonk hell, the link with the newly-electrified Bob Dylan, the retreat to Woodstock, The Basement Tapes, and finally setting out on their own.
It’s a great tale, but the truth is, you don’t need to know anything about The Band to appreciate this music. Like the greatest recordings, the sound of The Band is timeless and familiar upon the first listening. Hearing the records with restored sound and upgraded packaging would have been enough, but for these long-overdue reissues, each album has been generously appended with extra material.
The knock against adding unreleased stuff is that it fundamentally changes the original artifact, and using discarded or abandoned material risks exposing flaws. That certainly isn’t the case here, where the new songs — 25 cuts spread across the four discs — will only enhance one’s admiration for The Band’s achievements.
For years, I have listened to Manuel’s anguished vocal performance on “Tears Of Rage” (the leadoff track to 1968’s Music From Big Pink) with the mistaken assumption that this was an inspired moment, impossible to equal or duplicate. Now comes an alternate take that features Manuel discovering entirely different emotional worlds to explore. It is brilliant in ways for which even serious Band scholars probably won’t be prepared. Ditto a radically different performance of “Lonesome Suzie”.
And after acclimatizing to the winningly off-kilter collision of deep Americana (“The Weight”, “Caledonia Mission”, “Long Black Veil”) with Hudson’s flamboyant, experimental keyboards (“This Wheel’s On Fire”, “Chest Fever”, “In A Station”), the new edition of Big Pink forces the listener to consider how very different a record it could have been. If their cover of the Stanley Brothers’ “If I Lose”, Helm’s murky blues “Yazoo Street Scandal”, the mournful country lament “Katie’s Been Gone”, or Manuel’s outstanding “Orange Juice Blues” (all added to this edition of Big Pink) had made the cut, it could have swung the cumulative effect of the record toward the rustic sound they explored more fully on 1969’s The Band.
Of all the unlikely elements in the story of The Band, none can rival the genesis of their eponymous sophomore release. It’s an undeniable classic of North American roots music, exploring folk, gospel, country, rhythm & blues, soul, funk, and rock ‘n’ roll. And while it might sound like it was written and recorded in a backwoods cabin, it was in fact created in the poolside cabana at the Beverly Hills home of Sammy Davis Jr.
While a stereo mix of the B-side “Get Up Jake” is the only new song added to the set, the remaining six alternate takes give fascinating insight into the album’s storied creation. Turn up the volume at the start of the unused version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, and catch Robertson teaching the song to his bandmates. On an early take of “Up On Cripple Creek”, Danko gives a sheepish mea culpa when he cocks up the song’s groove.
Producer John Simon, the unsung hero in these sessions, makes a cameo piloting the group through Manuel’s unearthly falsetto performance on “Whispering Pines”. A rehearsal of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” (with a sizzling Robertson guitar solo) is preceded by an impromptu jam and followed by Helm’s humble assessment: “Tempo sounds slow; I think we’re warmed up.”
The 1970 sessions for Stage Fright yield fewer unheard treasures. Take one of “Daniel And The Sacred Harp” captures Helm and Manuel discussing the song’s rhythm before launching into a stripped-down rendition that rivals the finished product. Producers Todd Rundgren and Glyn Johns each prepared their own mixes of the album, and their alternate renderings of “Time To Kill” and “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” are included for comparison’s sake. The album, recorded at the Playhouse Theatre in Woodstock, is still a marvel, but of the four reissues, this one seems shortchanged.
Cahoots, released in 1971, benefits the most from the remastering job. The horns on “Life Is A Carnival” punch right out of the speaker, and Manuel’s spirited duet (or is that duel?) with Van Morrison on “4% Pantomime” sounds like two lions trying to outroar each other. The original 11-track album has been sweetened with an unreleased studio version of “Endless Highway” (which the group performed at the 1973 Watkins Glen festival), an insightful early crack at “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, a scratchy but worthwhile cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It” (taken from an acetate), and the gorgeous “Bessie Smith” — long believed to be a Basement Tapes relic, but apparently recorded around the time of Cahoots.
Capitol intends to do a similar upgrade job on The Band’s entire catalogue, and there’s no reason the archive-digging should end there. The exemplary three-disc bootleg Crossing The Great Divide mined their pre-Dylan work as Levon & The Hawks. The Band’s Basement Tapes output deserves an official release that matches the multiple volumes that have leaked out to collectors, and high-quality tapes of the group’s 1970 Hollywood Bowl concert and 1974’s Roosevelt Stadium show (both now trading among collectors) would likewise make fine additions to their official canon.
Danko and Manuel are gone, Robertson and Helm’s feud hasn’t cooled, and that means the music of The Band is well and truly at an end. But these reissues, which open a window to the making of this Band, also represent a gratifying new beginning.
