![]() ![]() Danko can’t come up with an answer and finally says, “Just trying to stay busy.” I’ve seen it 20 times and still get a lump in my throat at the part when Martin Scorcese asks Rick Danko what he’s doing now that The Last Waltz is over. Robertson was stiffed on royalties for the film, which-like a lot of their recorded music-is bursting with energy and also terribly tragic. Robertson look like the group’s centerpiece (he produced the movie) and said it was “the biggest rip-off that ever happened to The Band.” Reportedly, everyone but Mr. Robertson was lovingly filmed by Martin Scorcese in The Last Waltz. They went on to play Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, released two perfect albums, one good album, and then a bunch of scatter-brained, hit-or-miss music until they broke up. That’s a very American problem-wanting everything to go your way and being devastated when it doesn’t-that is more slight than, say, the Civil War, which The Band writes about in their later masterpiece, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but it is treated with equal gravity. ![]() Take “Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)”: Greil Marcus called this music a document of “The Old Weird America,” mining the inexplicably eerie vibe of recorded music’s formative years in the American South, and that’s true, but less because the music sounds like old-timey folk and blues and more because it takes that mood and transposes it onto suburban restlessness. There’s a song about planning a vacation (“Going to Acapulco”), a song about doing the laundry (“Clothes Line Saga”), a song about daydreaming about your hypothetical future wife (“You Ain’t Going Nowhere”). It was recorded at The Band’s rented home near West Saugerties, N.Y., and it’s really the first-and maybe, with the exception of “TV Party” by Black Flag-only sustained narrative in pop music about being bored at home. Not nothing in the “Desolation Row,” “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood” esoteric but vaguely interpretable sense, but in a literal nothing sense. ![]() The Basement Tapes is incredible for being a collection of songs mostly about nothing. (Helm had, by that point, left the tour because, as he once wrote, “I wasn’t made to be booed.”) Dylan became a kind of mentor, and The Band recorded a huge repertoire of music with him that was later released under the title The Basement Tapes. Famously, at a 1966 concert at London’s Free Trade Hall, one audience member shouted “Judas” at them. They backed up Bob Dylan-who discovered them in a club either in New Jersey or Canada, depending on the account-on his first electric tour, which means they were booed by whole arenas filled with diehard folk fans. There’s a remarkable objectivity to their work-they were telling stories about a mythologized America, rather than trying to be a part of it. Everyone but Helm was Canadian, but people didn’t question that they sang songs about sharecroppers and going to the horse races. They once turned down a gig with Glen Campbell because he wanted them to sit on a flatbed truck and lip synch their songs. The Band is the template for the standard of authenticity by which we judge musicians today. There’s a lot of history, too, most of which has ended in tragedy. Robertson as lead guitarist when The Band reformed in the ’80s, but that was good enough for me: there’s enough of a legend to The Band that simply being in the same room as the man who played accordion on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” feels downright significant. ![]() Hudson was sitting in on a set with Jim Weider, who replaced Mr. This reunion, at the Iridium Jazz Club last Friday night, would be no exception. Robertson are the only surviving members and, aside from an appearance at the 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the two have rarely played music together since the Band’s full line-up performed their final show in 1976. (CBS Photo Archive)Įarlier in June, two months after the death of Levon Helm, the drummer and strongest singer in The Band, I received an email with the subject line, “The Band Reunion.” This was curious because they were a five-piece-Rick Danko, Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson-and there’s very little left of them now. ![]()
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