With four albums of their own under their belt, The Band knew a few things. They’d had all that training — mostly years of “Midnight Rambles” with Ronnie Hawkins — in enough beer halls and strip joints right up the center of the U.S. and back into Canada that they’d become masters of rock ‘n’ roll and outright R&B.
They’d digested the history of blues, and, with encouragement from Conway Twitty’s cousin, Levon Helm, country music. They could play all of it, and well. The road experience with Dylan had shown them what ambition might look like; most importantly, The Basement Tapes — a summoning of old musical spirits; a process of free association with the past — had helped them to find a way to make new music, seemingly at will, that could stay connected to history.
All of this had been digested, made their own, and made to work, with a few clear parameters: They’d emphasize the songs now — ones they could sing with those three ageless lead voices, ones they could play tight and hard onstage, shifting off instruments as needed. The songs would, as working with Dylan had shown possible, at once be very grounded and specific in American experiences and references and wide open for audience participation. “I work for the union, ’cause she’s so good to me…” they’d sing — not quite R&B, not quite C&W — managing to evoke working for a trade union, the Union Army, and a good relationship with a lady — all at once, before you could think about it.
That approach yielded Music From Big Pink and The Band, two polished/ragged monuments of several centuries of time and the American place, against which most roots-rock gets measured — including the rest of this outfit’s material. They were unlikely to be topped, and they weren’t.
There was a bit of a slide on the third album, and the fourth, Cahoots, revealed major problems. Robertson’s grounded, singable songs had given way to Big Concepts and Ideas, vague artiness and cultural namedropping — and directions in sound his bandmates were not born to take. Plus, we’ve since learned, the Band that seemed to stand for removal from the ’60s excesses in fact was falling into personal dissolution, and it was showing.
Since conventional wisdom is that they never really recovered, Capitol’s reissue of their last four releases on that label, even spruced up and extended, will not necessarily get the attention the earlier reissues did. But they should. In retrospect, these albums stand as varied and variously successful answers to how to get the magic back, and they offer far more listening pleasures than memory may recall.
The Band’s musical approach — tight enough in broad strategy to be really loose in specific tactics — meant the live Rock Of Ages would not, thankfully, be an exercise in ’70s noodling and jamming. Nor would Moondog Matinee, marketed as a salute to their own early days as the Hawks at the time, be a slavish reproduction of anything — including the definition of an “oldie.”
The live Christmas-to-New Year’s Eve week ’71 shows for the former album famously added horns — not tightly charted Stax-style horns, but New Orleans arrangements written out (and lost!) by Allen Toussaint with responsive, jazz-trained musicians adding to the slippin’ and slidin’ R&B. The result was a whole new sound. Rock Of Ages, one of the handful of essential live rock albums, stands the test of time — with sound dynamics in the highs and lows never heard on CD until this 24-bit mastered redo.
The additions are news. Some songs that were deemed better off without horn treatment, mainly numbers with country string band antecedents such as “Cripple Creek” and “Rockin’ Chair”, get heard for the first time on a separate second disc. They are as subject to evocative new moments (the surprising give-and-take of call/response, loose R&B harmonies, a sudden rhythm change, a new dramatic emphasis) as the justly famed brass-backed cuts.
But the big news is the first release here, after 30 years, of the never-bootlegged New Year’s encore with Bob Dylan — his only unmitigated hard rock set between 1966 and 1974. Basement Tapes songs “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” and “Down In The Flood” get the full raucous rock treatment, reminiscent of the “Watching The River Flow” single of the time, as does the then-new “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, complete here with that “Coca-Cola/gondola” bridge, and there’s a full-tilt “Like A Rolling Stone”, 1966 style. The set shows what that ’74 revival tour might have sounded like in ’71 — powerful — and any Band and Dylan fan will want to hear it.
Moondog Matinee escapes the oldies cover album trap by focusing on the far-flung sources that had been digested in the course of becoming The Band, and playing them in a developed — but still developing — Band style. A tune as familiar as “Mystery Train” is treated not as a predictable blues jam or rockabilly revival piece, but as the basis of a workable modern funk-for-rockers experiment, with the loose New Orleans touch of the live show still in place.
With the addition of newer production techniques and electronics (including the appearance of synthesizer sounds), and the merging of Robertson’s experimentation with The Band’s particular proficiencies as players and singers, “Mystery Train” and a take on “Third Man Theme” present an early dose of Modern Rock, pointing the way to what Television or Talking Heads would be doing with (and to!) traditional R&B/rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation a few years up the road.
The Moondog Matinee re-release adds tasty outtake turns on Johnnie & Jack’s “Crying Heart Blues” (hardly a country tune here), the gospel of “Didn’t It Rain”, and Chuck Willis’s notorious suicide-note single “What Am I Livin’ For?” — the flip side of “I Don’t Wanna Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes”, covered on the live set. This disc will probably be the greatest surprise for those who skipped it or haven’t heard it lately. And its successful sonic blends set up what came next — the utter shock of one late major Band album in 1975: Northern Lights — Southern Cross.
The Moondog experience, bringing the instrumentation back home remade, coincided with Robertson’s involvement in Canadian narrative film, and the combination was a set of new material that “came home” in more ways than one, exploring explicitly the incongruity of this primal “Southern band” having come largely from the Great White North. “Acadian Driftwood” is a sort of “Night They Drive Ol’ Acadia Down” group masterstroke of up-north memory and regret. “Ophelia” provides Levon the new rocker he’d been waiting for. And “It Makes No Difference” is the most moving ballad, among many through the years, that had been designed for Rick Danko’s lead.
“Rags & Bones” even takes up a back-home subject unprecedented in roots-rock — the sounds of an urban Jewish tenement alley, shouting rag man included, not just as part of Robertson’s roots, but everyone’s. Late in the game, it was the best Band album besides the first two, and since it already had the advantages of more contemporary recording techniques, it’s the least changed of the reissues.
Bonus alternative versions of “Twilight” and the “Christmas Must Be Tonight” single on Northern Lights only make the last disc, Islands, that much less vital. It was always a collection of dispensable odds and ends, including those songs, and it still is, notable mainly for Richard Manuel’s stunning vocal on “Georgia On My Mind”, utterly soulful and managing the seemingly impossible feat of owing little to Ray Charles’ version. Manuel’s heartbreaking vocals are a continuing, not-so-secret special strength throughout these late albums.
With their improved sound, detailed new liner notes including commentary from the three surviving Band members, and considerable bonus material, these reissues are among the most significant in rock ‘n’ roll this year. They’re going to get played a lot, too.
