Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 136

Record label: Capitol

Produced: John Simon

Recorded: A&R Studios, New York; Capitol Studios, Los Angeles; January–March 1968

Released: July 1, 1968

Chart peaks: 25 (UK) 30 (US)

Personnel: Jaime Robbie Robertson (g, v); Rick Danko (b, v); Richard Manuel (k, v); Garth Hudson (k, s); Levon Helm (d, v); John Simon (horns); Shelly Yakus, Rex Updegraft (e)

Track listing: Tears Of Rage; To Kingdom Come; In A Station; Caledonia Mission; The Weight (S); We Can Talk; Long Black Veil; Chest Fever; Lonesome Suzie; This Wheel’s On Fire; I Shall Be Released

Running time: 42.03

Current CD: EMI 5253902 adds: Yazoo Street Scandal (outtake); Tears Of Rage (alternate take); Katie’s Been Gone (outtake); If I Lose (outtake); Long Distance Operator (outtake); Lonesome Suzie (alternate take); Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast) (outttake – demo); Key To The Highway (outtake); Ferdinand The Imposter (outtake – demo)

Further listening: Follow-up The Band (1969) is, if anything, even better. Stage Fright (1970), Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) and live triple Rock Of Ages (1972) are the best of their other albums. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Levon Helm each subsequently released several solo albums

Further reading: Across The Great Divide (Barney Hoskyns, 1993); This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm And The Story Of The Band (Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, 1993); http://theband. hiof. no/

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

Following a gruelling period backing Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, the musicians later christened ‘The Band’ by Capitol Records (in preference to the more controversial ‘Crackers’) regrouped at their Woodstock hideaway Big Pink, where the informal sessions that resulted in Dylan’s Basement Tapes also gave rise to the material that made up their own debut album. Recorded with the imaginative young producer John Simon at sessions in New York and Los Angeles, these songs favoured the wisdom and values of a shared tradition over the transitory upheavals of the youth movement.

‘The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists,’ claims John Simon. ‘They were playing out of what I called their “Appalachian scale”, a pentatonic, five-note scale like the black keys on the piano. That was the palette from which those melodies came.’

Lyrically, the band’s main songwriter Robbie Robertson had clearly learnt much from his time with Dylan, whose hand was initially believed by many to be behind the mythopoeic single The Weight. Dylan did, however, collaborate with Rick Danko and Richard Manuel on This Wheel’s On Fire and Tears Of Rage respectively (as well as providing the surreal-naïve cover painting), while The Band’s version of his I Shall Be Released became the definitive version of this modern liberation anthem.

‘The music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years, distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country,’ believes Levon Helm. Yet for all its traditional virtues, the album featured several innovatory musical strategies, notably from inventive organist Garth Hudson.

The album kick-started the ‘country rock’ trend – a term they hated – and was an immediate critical success. Reviewers in Time, Life and Rolling Stone acclaimed it as a work which presciently articulated contemporary doubts and uncertainties about the direction of American ‘progress’, while musicians such as George Harrison and Eric Clapton also garlanded it with praise. Appropriately enough, it is one of the few recordings from its era whose power remains immune to the passage of time.