The classic combo tasted the American condition by stirring up the soup of its past.
In 1968, The Band released their debut album, Music from Big Pink, and rock’n’roll took pause. The (mostly) Canadian quintet had found notoriety as Bob Dylan’s backing band during his controversial 1966 ‘electric’ world tour. Subsequently retreating to Woodstock, New York, they set about crafting songs that blended myriad North American styles into a timeless music that owed nothing to the then raging psychedelic revolution.
As influential as it was, …Big Pink was a patchwork album, with multiple writers, no real lead singer and meandering narratives. Its eponymous, September 1969 successor (recorded in Sammy Davis Jr.’s LA pool house) would be a more focused affair, thanks to the group’s nominal leader, guitarist Robbie Robertson, who wrote or co-wrote all its songs within a conceptual framework of "the old, weird America". His vivid, emotion-soaked snapshots of simple lives imperilled by civil war, famine and misfortune implicitly chimed with the ambiguousness of an America then caught between Woodstock idealism and the horror of the Vietnam War.
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Source: BBC Music