The Band's Long Waltz (Page 2)

Nestled in Big Pink, playing cards and getting stoned and writing and working out new stuff, as well as tweaking old bar-band tunes and hymns and pieces of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan and The Band forged a remarkable creative symbiosis. Thanks to their Dylan-paid salaries and a rent that, depending on whom you believe, was somewhere between $125 and $275 a month, The Band played musical chairs with instruments as they groped for fresh ideas. As Robbie Robertson, The Band's chief songwriter and guitarist, has shrewdly observed, "Sometimes the limitation of the instrument can provide originality."

Improvising was key to their artistic process, as their shortcomings or imaginations prodded them from instrument to instrument, lineup to lineup, to find what worked with the tune at hand. The result was contemporary folk music, new-minted yet old-sounding, with strains of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, rockabilly and soul. It wobbled foggily somewhere between jug bands and Stax-Volt, surreal wet dreams and revival meetings.

Robertson's guitar stayed mostly low profile, rearing for occasional stabbing outbursts; he rarely sang. The three vocalists were startlingly different, but found offbeat ways to blend. As Robertson has observed, "A lot of the time with The Band they were somewhere between real harmonies and, because of our lack of education in music, they would be things that just sounded interesting--or they would be the only thing the person could hit."

Levon Helm's singing was gritty and soulful and at times sardonic; he doubled on drums and mandolin. Rick Danko had a clear, yearning tenor, played bass that burbled like a McCartney-esque tuba, sawed a backwoods fiddle and strummed guitar. Richard Manuel doubled on engagingly ramshackle drums and pounded what has been described as "rhythm piano"; as for his voice, Robertson has said, "There's a certain element of pain in there that you didn't know whether it was because he was trying to reach for a note or because he was a guy with a heart that'd been hurt." Garth Hudson was classically trained, said he learned to improvise from playing at his uncle's funeral parlor and invented one after another "blackbox," the kinds of soundshapers so integral to the era's musical sensibility. Hudson didn't sing, but the sounds he made became The Band's sonic glue, as they fitted parts together that breathed, leaving spaces float, stepping into others, with the sort of interlocking discipline found in, say, the jammed-out music of Count Basie, Muddy Waters or Booker T. & the MGs. Not surprisingly, they cut their first two albums mostly live in the studio. (See The Band [Rhino] for an informative, if talking-head-heavy, video history of the making of the group's first two records.)

"Tears of Rage," written by Dylan and Manuel, kicked Music at Big Pink off-kilter from the start. Manuel's eccentric r&b cry and falsetto staggered dangerously, seductively around the confessional lyrics; Robertson's treated guitar approximated organ tones; Hudson's winding, churchy organ swelled and subsided; and a drunken Salvation Army-ish horn section (courtesy Hudson and producer John Simon) punctuated the flow over the spare, Booker T. & the MGs-style bass and drums. Simon has observed of the distinctively moaning horn blend, "That's the only sound we could make." The rest of the album was a bit uneven but ear-opening, challenging, even wonderful. "To Kingdom Come" bounced airily, blearily beneath Manuel's vocals; "The Weight" mixed Curtis Mayfield guitar licks into a surreal gospel setting; "Long Black Veil" tipped its classicist hat at Lefty Frizell; and "Chest Fever" was an instant radio hit, with its swelling, skirling, gnashing organ and nightmare-incoherent lyrics.

With Grossman behind them, The Band--or at least Robertson, who was rapidly becoming primus inter pares--learned to use reticence and image to enhance their music. Like Wynton Marsalis a decade later in jazz, they self-consciously looked back to tradition. "We were rebelling against the rebellion," Robertson has said. "It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack." That instinct drew the attention of the nascent rock press, which became their champions: Outlets like Rolling Stone, co-founded by jazz historian Ralph J. Gleason, fused the old fanzines and more critical and historical perspectives. These new media helped make The Band counterculture heroes.

As did the lyrics, which were increasingly written by Robertson. Enigmatic and vaguely religious and poetic, full of questions and retorts that didn't necessarily mesh, painting realistic scenes and Dadaist laments, they clearly owed a great deal to Dylan. Robertson had also been reading Cocteau, thinking in terms of movies, wanting to replicate what he's called Dylan's disruption of song forms.

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