renewal2's Full Review: Music From Big Pink [Remaster] by The Band
The Band has pretty well passed from the scene. I never really did buy the idea of the Band as a big force in rock and roll. I have always seen it as an eccentric blend of relatively high sophistication and a sort of faux Appalachian down-homeness.
Hey, when they were in Woodstock I was not far away and there was a good deal of opportunity to define yourself without respect to where you were from. Dylan kinda did. The Band kinda did.
The first album The Band made survives and that's good because I will stand tall and call it certainly one of the best, one of a handful that a musically literate person should own, even if she/he doesn't like the Band. That's stupid, as I write it. Take it as hyperbole. This is a key moment and it is captured almost perfectly.
And the songs stand up four decades later. I said The Band was not a force in rock. I think, however, that The Band more or less deconstructed folk music and that few have looked at The Band that way. After Big Pink Joan Baez-type folk music bit the dust -- consigned to Garrison Keillorland. Peter Paul and Mary, the whole 60s ersatz movement to make simple folk music central was out the window. Even Dylan could not retire into his oldish modes.
The Band helped, then, to turn everything into non-folk, except maybe the sort of folk they were doing on Big Pink.
And what might that be?
The music on Big Pink is intensely personal -- it is about tangled psyches and situations that were not far from the truth of the transient existence of the period. I have no idea what most of it means. She reads the leaves ... I do believe ... in your hexagram ... take a load off ... put the load right back on me ... tears of rage ... why must I always be a thief?
I love the album. If I could not get around Tears of Rage when it came out, I can get around it now.
Maybe I've figured it out a bit. The narration in these songs is internal. The stories they tell are untellable apart from the sense you have from the song. We have not John Henry beating a steam drill, not the homicidal conclusion of Banks of the Ohio. We have pictures of oddly and interestingly crazy folk and of people around such people who may or may not reach out to them. The more I think about it, the more original it seems. And the less explicable.
Now let's do some demographics. I bet half the eyes that light on this monitor had not seen the light of day when the neat members of The Band
made Big Pink. What could make a Gen X person (if there is such a sort) spring for such an album?
Maybe the musicianship. Maybe because they are not too young to remember that the The Band toured sort of the way the Dead did, never as much, but within the same bailiwick culturally and musically.
I guess the best reason to have Big Pink is because it is a great album, and it also happens to be one of the ten most influential pieces of work in American popular music in the last half of the 20th Century.
If you had the album once upon a time, as I did, you will buy it yet again, because you wore out your earlier copy or lost it somewhere on the road.
Here is a neat site and if you go there, even if you decide Big Pink is not for you, you will be edified.
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