Mark Reads!

Across the Great Divide, Barney Hoskyns (Hyperion) It's amazing to think that it's been close to 40 years since Music from Big Pink brought The Band to most listeners' attention. In the same year that brought us Wheels of Fire, Electric Ladyland, and White Light, White Heat, this album by a bunch of mysterious Woodstock musicians felt like a present delivered from way, way back in time. I read about it in Sing Out (being a dutiful aspiring folksinger at age 11), which raved about the album, and musicians from Eric Clapton to Lowell George to Fairport Convention were blown away by the rich, soulful, rootsy sound of the album. Although it was clear The Band could really sing and play, they sounded antivirtuousic, rarely soloing, rarely stretching a song out past the length of a standard 45 rpm single.

Their second album, The Band, was the one that really sold it for me. The production was drier and clearer, the songs both hookier and more rockin'. I was soaking up a lot of off-center guitar influences at the time, and Robbie Robertson's playing showed me how to say a lot with a little and to use the guitar (like the other instruments in the band) to fill spaces in the musical tapestry rather than step out front solo. Their vocal approach really rubbed off on me, too, especially the idea of assigning different lines or verses of a song to different voices, setting up musical conversations, dropping different parts and harmonies in and out of the mix. Only later (when I finally found a record store in Phoenix brave enough to sell bootleg recordings) did I discover what The Band sounded like backing their most famous employer, Bob Dylan, and why people like Greil Marcus were awestruck--like a carnival spinning out of control into a riot, with Robbie's guitar sounding (as one reviewer put it) like a crowbar dragging nails out of railroad ties. And, as Dylan instructed them on their recording of "Like a Rolling Stone," they "play[ed] fucking loud."

What I didn't know was that those first two records were more a culmination than a debut. They'd been touring for years already, raising hell and playing raw honky-tonk blues and country music with people like Ronnie Hawkins in dive bars throughout the South and Toronto (talk about polar opposites!). So the sound of their first two records was as much a counterreaction to that lifestyle and the music they'd been playing the previous five years as it was to the revolutionary attitudes and superamplification that defined "hip" music at the end of the Sixties.

All of this is in Hoskyns' book (unfortunately, now out of print though you can find it used), along with the usual sad denouement into fame, decadence, and dissolution (climaxing with The Last Waltz). It's doubly sad reading it now that the band's two most soulful singers, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, have gone to Rock and Roll Heaven. But for my money, these guys are every bit the godfathers of art-roots bands like Wilco and Los Lobos that Gram Parsons was.