The look and sound, the entire presentation of The Band, evoked a notion of authenticity that has underscored writing about them ever since, usually to contrast them with the countercultural rebellion. As Grossman, who knew show business, surely understood, this was both an iconic extension and an ironic inversion of the folk revival's would-be purity. For the counterculture, and show business, were The Band's home. They were outriders on Dylan's panoramic influence, mountainside avatars of the Jeffersonian "back to the land" ideal that recurred in the Woodstock generation's ideology. As Greil Marcus rather romantically noted of their early music, "It felt like a passport back to America for people who'd become so estranged from their country that they felt like foreigners even when they were in it."

When The Band (Capitol) followed Music From Big Pink in 1969, it cemented the group's reputation and enhanced their Dylanesque mystique of invisibility: Refusing to tour, partly because of Band members' car crashes and flipouts, they watched promoters' offers climb from $2,000 a show to $50,000.

The Band were in the midst of recording their second album far from the Catskills, in Hollywood at Sammy Davis Jr.'s pool house, which they'd converted into a studio, when they decided to resist no longer. But before they debuted onstage at Winterland in April 1969, Robertson got such a bad case of nerves (he has always claimed he had the flu) he stayed in bed for three days of rehearsal, and had to be hypnotized to go onstage.

Since they'd been musically weaned in roadhouses and spent such care on recording live, it's always been one of the odder ironies of The Band's career that they were erratic, often uncomfortable performers. Unconsciously extending the folk revival's ideology, reviewers tended to explain their unevenness as an emblem of honest authenticity, which, in the ways of do-it-yourself, folk-culture amateurism, it sometimes was, though this was somehow also the culture The Band was posited to be different from. "A lot of mysticism was built up around The Band," Robertson has said. "These guys up in the mountains...." At any rate, the quality of their concerts was as fully unpredictable as that of their putative opposite numbers, the Grateful Dead.

From Winterland they hit the Fillmore East, where I can testify they did at least one good show; then they finished recording at the Hit Factory in New York City. The Band still stands as their masterpiece. Loosely built around a harvest-is-in, carnival-is-in-town feel, it's incredibly consistent and divergent at the same time, the strength of their studies and abilities ramifying its depth and breadth. Their brand of self-consciousness of sources and sounds marked one key difference between rock and earlier roll and rock.

From "Across the Great Divide," with its bouncy rhythms, yearning Manuel vocal, bleary horns and slippery guitar fills, to "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)," the surprisingly downbeat rural closer that cuts in snapshots of union struggles, it has a rare scope and power. "Up on Cripple Creek," with its bump-grind rhythms and allusion to an old folk tune, was all over FM radio, as were the hoedowns-in-your-basement "Rag Mamma Rag" and "Jemima Surrender." "The Unfaithful Servant" gave Danko's aching tenor a Dylanesque vehicle, while "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" told a moving tale of one Southern family's Civil War hardships.

After this album, the madness and musical unevenness accelerated. In early 1970, The Band made the cover of Time--a rarity then. The group's substance abuse, especially Manuel's and Danko's, deepened, particularly when they were off the road, as they were for months at a time. Robertson had become the dominant figure--embarking on self-education, dealing with Grossman, writing first most, then all the songs, disciplining the others into rehearsing and recording. The relatively equal distribution of ability at the heart of The Band's music was coming unbalanced.

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