Fact #39848
When:
Short story:
The Band release their mould-breaking debut album, Music From Big Pink, on Capitol Records in the USA. One of the songs, I Shall Be Released, is written by Bob Dylan, while two others, Tears Of Rage and This Wheel's On Fire, are co-written by Dylan.Full article:
THE BAND - MUSIC FROM BIG PINK
by Johnny Black, first published in Hi-Fi News.
In 1965, Bob Dylan chose a hoary and somewhat grizzled rock'n'roll combo, The Hawks, as his backing group when he famously "went electric".
Their 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink, not only put them on the path to lasting international fame in their own right, but also set the music world on its head by rejecting virtually everything that defined rock music in that era.
Between the summer of 1965 and the Spring of 1967, Dylan and The Band toured the world until they were all exhausted. In a move which was very probably the first recorded instance of a 60s rock band "getting its head together in the country", they shelled out $125, the first month's rent for Big Pink, a pink-painted middle-class ranch house at 2188 Stoll Road, in the shadow of Overlook mountain, at West Saugerties, a few miles east of Woodstock in upper New York State.
Woodstock - not yet famous as a festival venue - had long been known as a haven for bohemians of all sorts, from painters to poets, sculptors and musicians.
"In Woodstock," as The Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson pointed out, "we would meet in a little diner in the country and be greeted like a mechanic from down the road. You feel like you're in the mountains, because you are in the mountains."
The band's bassist, Rick Danko, and keyboardist Garth Hudson were the first to move in. "Garth washed the dishes, Richard Manuel (pianist) did the cooking, and my job was to keep the fireplace going and hire the young girls to clean. Bob Dylan would come by and we'd record and write. Eventually Levon (Levon Helm, drums) came up from New Orleans, and the music from Big Pink was born."
Helm has spoken of how, "We cleaned out the basement of Big Pink, and Garth put together a couple of microphones and connected them to a little two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and that was our studio."
During these informal summer sessions with Dylan, several songs emerged, including Tears Of Rage, This Wheel's On Fire and I Shall Be Released which would end up on Music From Big Pink, but a meeting at Halloween that year with record producer John Simon would transform the songs and take The Band on a new course.
"I got very infatuated with them," Simon told Band biographer Barney Hoskyns. "I thought it was just the best music I'd ever heard. They were true originals, they didn’t listen to the music of the day. They were absolutely like brothers, all of them. I can’t recall a single real argument during those sessions."
Consider, for a moment, the context in which Music From Big Pink was being birthed. While the band were in Woodstock, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, the most sophisticated and technically complex album of the period. Jimi Hendrix was taking guitar pyrotechnics in a direction that would lead to heavy metal and Al Kooper was planning Blood, Sweat And Tears, the band which would initiate jazz-rock. Meanwhile, in Big Pink, The Band were chopping logs, walking their dog and laying down simple, rootsy Americana songs.
"We were rebelling against the rebellion," is how Robertson summed it up. "If everybody else was going east, then we were going west. It wasn’t like we even discussed it; there was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack."
Early in 1968, funded by money hustled up by Dylan's infamous manager Albert Grossman, Simon took them into A + R Sound, (formerly CBS Studio) at 799 Seventh Avenue, New York City.
It was here, on January 10, that they transformed the demo of Tears Of Rage from a rough-hewn spine-tingler into a world-beating completed track. "We were into gospel music," Robertson has pointed out, "Not particularly spiritual gospel music, black gospel music, but white gospel music. It was easier to play, and it came more natural to us. We were trying to get a bigger sound going on. We had, like, piano, guitar, bass and drums for a long time, and we tried horns and all kinds of things but there were too many people. So we realised that the only instrument that could make that fullness, and take the place of horns or anything like that, was an organ."
The organ, of course, was Garth Hudson's domain, and he knew exactly how to achieve the sound they were searching for. "It was all on the Lowrey FL, then later on the Lincolnwood, and then the big one - the H25. All of the textures and so on are from Lowreys. I’ve tried to describe why a Lowrey fit right in with our guitar work, and the singing - it complements the voices. One reason for using an organ other than the Hammond is that the Lowrey has a wider harmonic structure. It has, I think, 27 different harmonics at various levels to get a sound, while the Hammond has eight or nine.
Just two days later, they laid down the song that would introduce them to the world - The Weight. "I was thinking of it as maybe a fallback," remembers Robertson. "The Weight was like, if we ran out of songs, I had an extra one there just in case."
Robertson points out that a lot of imagery in the song was inspired by the way in which the film director Luis Bunuel would include characters in his movies whose good intentions would turn out badly.
Levon Helm revealed that the characters in the song were based on people they knew around Woodstock. "Luke was Jimmy Ray Paulman. Young Anna Lee was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. Crazy Chester was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns and walked around town to help keep the peace. He was like Hopalong Cassidy … two big cap guns he wore, plus a toupee!"
The Weight took just one day to write and was refined a little the next day. "The chord structure is very simple," points out Robertson, "but there was kind of a joy and sadness at the same time in those chords that appealed to me." Even so, when he played it to the other members of The Band, neither he nor anyone else recognised it as a potential rock classic. "I thought it was OK, and nobody else really got it at the time either. Everybody was like, 'Oh, that sounds pretty good. We should give that a shot.' Nothing more."
In the depths of an east coast winter, they set about recording their debut album at the rate of roughly two songs a day, speedily completing The Weight, We Can Talk, Chest Fever, Tears Of Rage and Lonesome Suzie.
Capitol were so pleased with what they heard from the A&R sessions that they flew The Band and Simon out to L.A. to finish the album in their own eight-track studio.
The best-known track from the Los Angeles sessions is a speedier version of This Wheel's On Fire, previously recorded at Big Pink with Dylan. "These were lyrics that Bob had, which Rick out music," explained Helm in his autobiography, also titled This Wheel's On Fire. "Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ."
The players were pleased with this rendition but, when they returned to New York to make the final mixes for the album, its shortcomings became evident. John Simon has recalled how, "The snare drum wasn't loud enough on our four-track recording, so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare - an awful chore. When it was over, Levon growls at me, 'Don't lemme ever have to do that again.'"
Rleased on July 1, 1968, the album's initial sales were disappointing, and it barely scraped into the bottom of the Billboard Top 30 Albums chart. It was, however, immediately championed by some of the most taste-making musicians of the era. One of the first was Eric Clapton, who revealed, "I got hold of a bootleg tape of Big Pink at the end of the last Cream tour. I used to put it on as soon as I checked into my hotel room, do the gig and be utterly miserable, then rush back and put the tape on and go to sleep fairly contented until I woke up the next morning and remembered who I was and what I was doing. It was that potent!"
According to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, "After Sgt. Pepper, the next record that changed everything was Music From Big Pink, because of the way it was recorded. Particularly Levon's drum sound, and the way the drums were recorded. But also the way they harmonised ... and the way it was put together. You heard that record and went, 'Wow!'"
Gradually the album grew in stature so that by 2003 it was rated at No34 on the Rolling Stone magazine list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, and is now considered a timeless classic.
Tweet this Fact
by Johnny Black, first published in Hi-Fi News.
In 1965, Bob Dylan chose a hoary and somewhat grizzled rock'n'roll combo, The Hawks, as his backing group when he famously "went electric".
Their 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink, not only put them on the path to lasting international fame in their own right, but also set the music world on its head by rejecting virtually everything that defined rock music in that era.
Between the summer of 1965 and the Spring of 1967, Dylan and The Band toured the world until they were all exhausted. In a move which was very probably the first recorded instance of a 60s rock band "getting its head together in the country", they shelled out $125, the first month's rent for Big Pink, a pink-painted middle-class ranch house at 2188 Stoll Road, in the shadow of Overlook mountain, at West Saugerties, a few miles east of Woodstock in upper New York State.
Woodstock - not yet famous as a festival venue - had long been known as a haven for bohemians of all sorts, from painters to poets, sculptors and musicians.
"In Woodstock," as The Band's guitarist Robbie Robertson pointed out, "we would meet in a little diner in the country and be greeted like a mechanic from down the road. You feel like you're in the mountains, because you are in the mountains."
The band's bassist, Rick Danko, and keyboardist Garth Hudson were the first to move in. "Garth washed the dishes, Richard Manuel (pianist) did the cooking, and my job was to keep the fireplace going and hire the young girls to clean. Bob Dylan would come by and we'd record and write. Eventually Levon (Levon Helm, drums) came up from New Orleans, and the music from Big Pink was born."
Helm has spoken of how, "We cleaned out the basement of Big Pink, and Garth put together a couple of microphones and connected them to a little two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and that was our studio."
During these informal summer sessions with Dylan, several songs emerged, including Tears Of Rage, This Wheel's On Fire and I Shall Be Released which would end up on Music From Big Pink, but a meeting at Halloween that year with record producer John Simon would transform the songs and take The Band on a new course.
"I got very infatuated with them," Simon told Band biographer Barney Hoskyns. "I thought it was just the best music I'd ever heard. They were true originals, they didn’t listen to the music of the day. They were absolutely like brothers, all of them. I can’t recall a single real argument during those sessions."
Consider, for a moment, the context in which Music From Big Pink was being birthed. While the band were in Woodstock, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, the most sophisticated and technically complex album of the period. Jimi Hendrix was taking guitar pyrotechnics in a direction that would lead to heavy metal and Al Kooper was planning Blood, Sweat And Tears, the band which would initiate jazz-rock. Meanwhile, in Big Pink, The Band were chopping logs, walking their dog and laying down simple, rootsy Americana songs.
"We were rebelling against the rebellion," is how Robertson summed it up. "If everybody else was going east, then we were going west. It wasn’t like we even discussed it; there was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack."
Early in 1968, funded by money hustled up by Dylan's infamous manager Albert Grossman, Simon took them into A + R Sound, (formerly CBS Studio) at 799 Seventh Avenue, New York City.
It was here, on January 10, that they transformed the demo of Tears Of Rage from a rough-hewn spine-tingler into a world-beating completed track. "We were into gospel music," Robertson has pointed out, "Not particularly spiritual gospel music, black gospel music, but white gospel music. It was easier to play, and it came more natural to us. We were trying to get a bigger sound going on. We had, like, piano, guitar, bass and drums for a long time, and we tried horns and all kinds of things but there were too many people. So we realised that the only instrument that could make that fullness, and take the place of horns or anything like that, was an organ."
The organ, of course, was Garth Hudson's domain, and he knew exactly how to achieve the sound they were searching for. "It was all on the Lowrey FL, then later on the Lincolnwood, and then the big one - the H25. All of the textures and so on are from Lowreys. I’ve tried to describe why a Lowrey fit right in with our guitar work, and the singing - it complements the voices. One reason for using an organ other than the Hammond is that the Lowrey has a wider harmonic structure. It has, I think, 27 different harmonics at various levels to get a sound, while the Hammond has eight or nine.
Just two days later, they laid down the song that would introduce them to the world - The Weight. "I was thinking of it as maybe a fallback," remembers Robertson. "The Weight was like, if we ran out of songs, I had an extra one there just in case."
Robertson points out that a lot of imagery in the song was inspired by the way in which the film director Luis Bunuel would include characters in his movies whose good intentions would turn out badly.
Levon Helm revealed that the characters in the song were based on people they knew around Woodstock. "Luke was Jimmy Ray Paulman. Young Anna Lee was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. Crazy Chester was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns and walked around town to help keep the peace. He was like Hopalong Cassidy … two big cap guns he wore, plus a toupee!"
The Weight took just one day to write and was refined a little the next day. "The chord structure is very simple," points out Robertson, "but there was kind of a joy and sadness at the same time in those chords that appealed to me." Even so, when he played it to the other members of The Band, neither he nor anyone else recognised it as a potential rock classic. "I thought it was OK, and nobody else really got it at the time either. Everybody was like, 'Oh, that sounds pretty good. We should give that a shot.' Nothing more."
In the depths of an east coast winter, they set about recording their debut album at the rate of roughly two songs a day, speedily completing The Weight, We Can Talk, Chest Fever, Tears Of Rage and Lonesome Suzie.
Capitol were so pleased with what they heard from the A&R sessions that they flew The Band and Simon out to L.A. to finish the album in their own eight-track studio.
The best-known track from the Los Angeles sessions is a speedier version of This Wheel's On Fire, previously recorded at Big Pink with Dylan. "These were lyrics that Bob had, which Rick out music," explained Helm in his autobiography, also titled This Wheel's On Fire. "Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ."
The players were pleased with this rendition but, when they returned to New York to make the final mixes for the album, its shortcomings became evident. John Simon has recalled how, "The snare drum wasn't loud enough on our four-track recording, so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare - an awful chore. When it was over, Levon growls at me, 'Don't lemme ever have to do that again.'"
Rleased on July 1, 1968, the album's initial sales were disappointing, and it barely scraped into the bottom of the Billboard Top 30 Albums chart. It was, however, immediately championed by some of the most taste-making musicians of the era. One of the first was Eric Clapton, who revealed, "I got hold of a bootleg tape of Big Pink at the end of the last Cream tour. I used to put it on as soon as I checked into my hotel room, do the gig and be utterly miserable, then rush back and put the tape on and go to sleep fairly contented until I woke up the next morning and remembered who I was and what I was doing. It was that potent!"
According to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, "After Sgt. Pepper, the next record that changed everything was Music From Big Pink, because of the way it was recorded. Particularly Levon's drum sound, and the way the drums were recorded. But also the way they harmonised ... and the way it was put together. You heard that record and went, 'Wow!'"
Gradually the album grew in stature so that by 2003 it was rated at No34 on the Rolling Stone magazine list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, and is now considered a timeless classic.