In this month's issue of Uncut, we celebrate The Band's 30 greatest songs. As a special bonus, here's another 10 songs we didn't have room for in the magazine, as chosen by Richard Thompson, Jim James, Nathan Salsburg, Amy Helm, Steve Wynn and more...
In this month’s issue of Uncut, we celebrate The Band’s 30 greatest songs. As a special bonus, here’s another 10 songs we didn’t have room for in the magazine, as chosen by Richard Thompson, Jim James, Nathan Salsburg, Amy Helm, Steve Wynn and more…
GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO
(The Basement Tapes, 1975)
TOM RUSSO, ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER: Every now and then I return to The Basement Tapes, and this song in particular. On the face of it, the character Dylan paints is kind of desperate and pathetic, but the delivery and the ragged, soulful backing The Band bring to the song elevates his longing into something religious. You can feel the self-loathing hangover he is about to crash into once the tequila wears off. Obviously having Dylan as a songwriter doesn’t hurt, but The Band do something all great backing bands do – know your role and stick to it. They get out of the way of the vocal, and only step in with the lightest touches to help it take flight. No individual is doing anything remarkable, but the sum of the parts is instantly recognisable and iconic. You can tell they’re still feeling it out, but the essence of the song is there. Doing anything more would be a bit tacky. There is a Jim James & Calexico version with soaring vocals and horns, which is great in a different way, but to me, the original version is still the best. Maybe it’s demo-itis, but there is magic in the first few renditions of a song, when the concrete hasn’t set on it yet. They’re in the zone, riding the chord changes, and we’re lucky enough to be sitting on the couch in the corner, hearing the song be born.
TOO MUCH OF NOTHING
(The Basement Tapes, 1975)
LILLY HIATT: My parents [singer-songwriter John Hiatt and film sound editor Isabella Wood] listened to The Band a lot when I was growing up, and of course I knew stuff like “Up On Cripple Creek”. But when I was in college I got into vinyl with my roommate, and I bought Stage Fright. So that’s what kind of locked in my love for The Band. Every song on there resonated. Stuff like “Stage Fright” and “The Rumour” just sounded so free.
“Too Much Of Nothing”is a very special song to me too. When I was at a turning point in my life – I think it was 2016, when I put a new band together and we went on the road – John, the guitar player, played The Basement Tapes in the van. I’d never really listened to that record before, but it just gave me a feeling of a sense of freedom and belonging again, with these new friends I had. It really hit me that I was turning a page and that everything was going to be okay.
I always liked the sad-sounding songs with forlorn melodies, and “Too Much Of Nothing” has that. Hearing that song opened up a new mindset for me. I was about to make some music of my own again and I was making these connections with new people. And I was on the tail-end of heartbreak, which takes its time. So this was just the beginning of putting that behind me. And remembering how music moves you through the difficulties of life.
I love The Basement Tapes because it sounds like they’re all just having a lot of fun. And they’re all so relaxed. Those lyrics – “Say hello to Valerie / Say hello to Marion” – are just so cool. When we were listening to it in the van, I was sitting there thinking, ‘What is Dylan talking about?’ The Basement Tapes is still mysterious to me. It’s like, ‘Where’s he going with this?’ But it seemed like his friends, The Band, were liberating that in him. Dylan sounds loose and happy, like he’s with his buddies. The combination of him with those guys seems like they’re just cutting loose.
BESSIE SMITH
(The Basement Tapes, 1975)
NATHAN SALSBURG: When I was 13 – playing Nintendo, listening to my mom’s copy of The Basement Tapes and having zero familiarity with a historical personage named Bessie Smith – the image called to mind by this song was of my grandmother’s first cousin. Aunt Bessie was a large and kindly old white lady from rural Western Kentucky who made delicious yeast rolls and lived in a tiny apartment in a grim six-storey senior-living facility with two small windows looking out over a liminal zone of auto-body shops and an interstate highway. That mental association endured long after I discovered the singer Bessie Smith – brightest star in the pre-World War II female ‘blues shouter’ pantheon – and, somewhat wilfully, it still does, as appreciating the song is made considerably easier if you can avoid associating the subject with the hugely successful recording and performing artist. If you can’t, you may find the whole conceit grating: a young white guy’s fantasy of the Empress of the Blues’ “sweet love” pining away for him down the road, suspended in history and vague circumstance, like the ‘old-time blues’ she sings. Of course, the trick may in fact be to associate the narrator with someone other than Rick Danko. He wouldn’t have had much of a chance with my Aunt Bessie, either.
LONG BLACK VEIL
(Music From Big Pink, 1968)
BILL MACKAY: There are some really potent things in The Band’s version of this song. When you’re doing a cover, there are ways to do it where you use the musical elements outside the voices, or outside the story, to accentuate the words. On “Long Black Veil”, it feels like they use certain musical elements, consciously or not, to sharpen the tale that’s unfolding. One thing that hit me was the accentuation of the piano in the chorus about the woman’s steps traipsing through the hills, in this hypnotic kind of way, like a distant staccato sound. And the organ, at various points, really seems to me to be in this ethereal area, as if supporting the idea of somebody speaking from beyond the grave. It seems like that spaciousness is in there, yet it’s subterranean too. It’s ghostly.
In the second verse, when the judge is asking for the narrator’s alibi, there’s something very low – either a trombone or organ – that really seems to push that idea of an imperious judge and the seriousness of the trial. Listening to The Band’s voices, Levon, Rick and Richard all seem to be characterised by hurt in a lot of places. And with different flavours of hurt. With Levon, there’s something about him that’s very defiant in a lot of his vocalisations, with real strength, but also anger too. In Richard Manuel there’s often a weariness and a resignation in his voice. And with Rick Danko there’s this plaintive yearning.
Beyond that, it seems to me that they harmonised on this song differently than a lot of groups might’ve done. There’s something natural about the way their voices mix, unlike The Beach Boys, who all had different vocal qualities but in harmony they could often sound like a chord. But The Band’s voices are really distinct. It seems like they’re branches from the same big oak tree – they’ve developed differently and tangle in different ways, so you hear all the different timbres of their voices. I think that yearning and that weariness kind of pulls them together. It really fits this story, which is so devastating.
IN A STATION
(Music From Big Pink, 1968)
JIM JAMES, MY MORNING JACKET: The last time I saw Richard was in a space station out near the edge of the known universe. I guess he could tell I was feeling a little lost and so, in a fatherly gesture, smiled and motioned for me to follow. We began to walk through the halls and streets of the station and up the face of a man-made mountain inside of the “Natural Surroundings” dome placed within the middle of the ship’s massive complex inner workings. This was a place built to feel just like home, where many of the plants and animals were contained – both for farming and survival, but also for beauty. The designers wanted everyone to try and maintain some sense of connection to the natural world we had to leave behind when we left earth. I could tell he was trying to show me some greater truth here, so we silently sat and gazed for a while. Off and on he would hum some beautiful melody I knew from somewhere but could not quite place. Eventually I stretched out on the ground and drifted off to sleep in the artificial moonlight of the dome’s 24-hour earth cycle. As the neon sun began to rise and bring its light to life, I drowsily came to in that strange in-between – uncertain if I was dreaming or awake. I noticed that he was already up, or perhaps had never even fallen asleep, and sat cross-legged, gazing out from our mountaintop over the green landscape dotted with people working in it far below. “Isn’t everybody dreaming?” I asked. “Then the voice you hear is real,” he whispered. Out of all the idle scheming, I was grateful he had given me something to feel.
THE UNFAITHFUL SERVANT
(The Band, 1969)
RICHARD THOMPSON: I would argue that the Band’s second album is one of the strongest in the history of rock/popular music, although it doesn’t fit comfortably into any genre, being a perfect blend of American roots – rock‘n’roll, jazz, Appalachian, gospel, R&B, blues and country. Three great vocalists, rhythm section to die for, wonderful songs, killer guitarist, and Garth as the genius behind the keys!
“The Unfaithful Servant” has biblical undertones in the title and the story, but the lyrics borrow from country and popular music, and possibly Dylan – but not to take away from their originality of style. Musically, you could say The Band pretty much invented this laid-back, four-square rhythm with songs like “The Weight”. The vocal by Rick Danko is yearning and heartfelt, but the icing on the cake are the horns. I always loved the tracks where the group played the horn parts themselves, with that slight Salvation Army creakiness. The Allen Toussaint stuff is slicker clearly, but for emotion… Apparently Garth went back in with John Simon after the track was laid down, and they added soprano sax and tuba – an unlikely blend, but they achieve something remarkable here. Note little touches like the B5 under the minor 6 chord on the bridge, and the fact the song ends each section a semitone above the tone centre of the piece. A joy of a piece of music among many joys on this album, equalled in achievement by little since.
ROCKIN’ CHAIR
(The Band, 1969)
PETER BREWIS, FIELD MUSIC: When we first started doing Field Music, The Band were very important. Me and my brother [David] and Andy [Moore], who’s still an occasional third member, listened to the brown album a lot in our 20s. That sort of looseness, the idea of The Band playing together. I remember watching a classic albums episode on the brown album, where they said they’d rehearse a song during the day, get drunk at night, then in the morning they’d try to start recording it, having learned it the day before. That’s what we ended up trying to do. We’d rehearse a song in the afternoon and then almost half-remember it in the morning. We thought it would give some mystical looseness to it, some extra Band vibes to it.
We actually recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” for our first single release. I think we did it quite well, but just thought, ‘This is stupid, I don’t know why we’ve done it.’ But we loved them so much that we actually tried to do a cover of it. Three lads from Sunderland probably shouldn’t be singing about the South rising again!
“Rockin’ Chair” is one of those songs where you can really hear the voices on it. You really hear the looseness. They’re essentially doing three-part harmonies. You tend to think of three-part harmonies as a technical thing, like The Beatles or The Eagles used to do, a homogenous thing. But The Band aren’t like that at all. The three of them – Manuel, Danko and Helm – have similar voices, but they’re also very sort of personal. They blend, but not in a homogenous way. And it makes it feel more polyphonic. So it’s their individuality, I suppose, that comes through on “Rockin’ Chair”.
Not to dismiss Robbie Robertson as a songwriter, but I think it’s the singers who make the song feel like an old one. It’s definitely got a similar feel to John Wesley Harding going in. There’s lots of rhymes in “Rockin’ Chair”, which might seem trite in the hands of another songwriter, but it never does here. And I’ve never figured out why it feels so authentic to me. I can’t put my finger on it, which is maybe the whole thing about The Band themselves. The song almost makes you believe in some kind of magic, something intangible. Even if you break it down, it still doesn’t reveal everything about itself.
DANIEL AND THE SACRED HARP
(Stage Fright, 1970)
IAN FELICE, THE FELICE BROTHERS: What I love about this song is the strangeness of it. The theme itself is not unusual, we all know countless parables about the loss of one’s soul by the pursuit of power. But there’s a theatricality to the arrangement and vocalisation of the song that gives it a unique quality. The tale is a Faustian one about a character named Daniel. There’s no defined setting in the song, although some would argue that the reference of a whippoorwill places it in an earlier, mythical America. Daniel finds a way, through deception and wealth, to acquire a sacred harp that he believes will grant him salvation or some kind of undefined power. Of course, he immediately sees the folly of his actions and confides in his brother and father who offer him little sympathy. The transaction ultimately leaves him soulless and damned. The song has two main vocalists, Rick Danko (Daniel) and Levon Helm (the narrator) and opens with a chorus they sing in harmony, bringing to mind the tradition of rural choral music that the title references. The chorus doesn’t happen again until the end, which bookends the tale with the strange image of Daniel dancing merrily through a field of clover holding the instrument that will ultimately spell his doom. The Band never played this song live. It features Richard Manuel on drums, which I always love and gives the song a special quality. I rank the trading of vocals between Levon and Danko to be one of the best examples of this classic hallmark of The Band’s style.
4% PANTOMIME
(Cahoots, 1971)
STEVE WYNN: Robbie Robertson was one lucky guy. Don’t get me wrong, he was a great songwriter and all. One of the best. You don’t need me to tell you that. But he also happened to have been blessed with three of the best singers on the planet to deliver his muse. Amazing.
On my own personal favourite Band song, “4% Pantomime”, Robbie gets dealt a lucky hand from the bottom of the deck by picking up yet one more great singer on board in Van Morrison, setting his compositional contraption into motion with Van and Richard Manuel duking it out like songbird versions of Frazier and Ali, while grousing about bad tour routing and shady poker tables.
They start out lightly trading jabs and then it’s a full flurry of fists by the last minute to a split decision, Van laying out a fierce rat-a-tat combo on “without the slightest blush” while Richard plays rope-a-dope. Then Van wildly flails on the final chorus before they hug it out in a barrage of “la-la”s at the end. It’s glorious.
With singers like that, you could put a couple of chords behind an email to your agent about a venue screwing up the hospitality rider and still have a stone classic. But this song is more than that. There’s some truth in the ‘it’s the singer, not the song’ maxim, but a catalogue of great songs makes it all work better. And Robbie’s got plenty.
ATLANTIC CITY
(Jericho, 1993)
AMY HELM: It’s not my favourite ever song of theirs, but “Atlantic City” is special because it reminds me that I got a front row seat to watch the reinvention of one of the great singers in The Band: my dad. And I got to watch it happen in real time.
My father was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 and went through treatments and lost his voice completely. He couldn’t sing a note, he could just whisper, so he focused on drumming. Then after years and rehab, he started to slowly sing again at his Midnight Rambles that he built in Woodstock at his home. At those concerts, he took these tiny steps towards reinvention. And the first tiny step that he took towards singing again was leaving the drum kit, coming up to the front of the stage with his mandolin in hand, and trying to sing “Atlantic City”.
Sometimes the notes were there, and sometimes they would fall out from under him because of the scar tissue and the damage done from radiation on his vocal chords. So I got to stand next to him at a microphone. He’d have me sing unison and hold the melody for him a little bit, because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. And I guess I include it as a Band song because it took such courage and brave commitment to serving the song that got him to that point.
I also think that choosing to cover it on one of their ‘90s albums – in their second iteration of The Band, without Robbie – is just a cool chapter in any band’s history anyway. What do you do when you’ve reached your peak and you’re trying to reinvent yourself? How do we keep moving as working musicians? How do we find the songs that fit? And where do we find that magic of those voices, twisting around on that chorus? I think the recorded version of “Atlantic City” is a beautiful testimony to them continuing to try to do that, in the midst of everything you could possibly imagine to pile on top of yourself: drugs and everything beyond, then his reinvention and rediscovery of his voice in the 2000s at The Midnight Rambles.
When I was very little, I didn’t really understand what The Band was. I thought The Band was Rick Danko’s band, and the only song I really cared about was “Stage Fright”, because that was my favourite. So when I was six or seven years old, I’d peek around the corner if I was at a show, and watch them do that song. And my dad was Rick’s drummer. That’s kind of how I thought of it in my mind. Which is as it should’ve been! Stuff like …Big Pink was never really played around the house. It was mostly Ray Charles and Muddy Waters that my dad would play around the house, not The Band’s records.
What made them unique? Three voices that are so distinctive as lead singers, but that actually blend in that harmonic overtone. That’s unusual, right? Garth added a colour and a tone to it that kicked it way out of anything else that it could have been categorised as. And Robbie’s guitar-playing alone had its own kind of grit and differentiation.
Someone gave me a bootleg of them when they were Levon And The Hawks. I was listening to some of it – I think it was Richard singing “Lucille”, or maybe it was my dad, I can’t remember – but they’re singing these Chuck Berry and Little Richard tunes. And they were all so young. I go to my dad, “How did you guys sound like that by the time you were 17? It’s not just that you could rip into those notes and sing that music with such technique and prowess, but it’s that your own voices were emerging. I don’t hear you imitating anyone. I actually hear Richard’s whole thing emerging.” And he was like, “Well, it wasn’t that we were such geniuses. It’s because we were playing seven days a week, and on Sundays, we were playing a matinee and a late show. And after we were done playing these shows, we’d go to a rehearsal space and play for another two hours.”