A name that is as simple as it is clear: The Band. As if they were the only band, or the most important, or the best. A name that came about after they left behind the name by which they became known, The Hawks (Los Halcones), or others they later thought to be The Honkies or The Crackers, against which the Capitol Records label entered vetoed when both referred to offensive or derogatory terms with a degree of contempt for white rural males in the Southern United States. “The Band,” as audiences dubbed the group while touring with Bob Dylan in his Electric Crusade in 1965-66, remained one of the most transcendent moments in popular music history. The name was suggested by Robbie Robertson, who died last Tuesday at the age of 80 and was an icon of American music as one of the band’s five members. His death marks the symbolic end of an unrepeatable band. Three other members left the band before him: keyboardist Richard Manuel (died 1986), bassist Rick Danko (died 1999), and drummer Levon Helm (died 2012). At 86, only accordionist Garth Hudson survives. However, Robertson, more than Hudson and almost no other, was a leader of the group in the eyes of memory due to his role as principal songwriter, vocalist and guitarist.
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Honestly, it’s like talking about the band’s leaders, like trying to figure out which came first: the chicken or the egg. An endless debate that concludes that this band, made up of four Canadians and a staunch American named Levon Helm, cannot be understood without the particular melody of its five members. Robertson himself, who featured most prominently in the song’s credits, always stressed the importance of everyone capturing the music as from a distant time, as distant as mythology. The band were such an extraordinary experiment that when they released their first album, Music from Big Pink, in 1968, it was almost impossible to place them as disruptors in the effervescence of countercultural modernism. They weren’t in the style of the Doors or the San Francisco groups, nor in the pop realm of the Beach Boys, let alone in the outsiderness of The Velvet Underground. The band was the outlaw bandit of rock’s golden age. In Robertson’s own words, “I wanted to write music that felt like it was written 50 years ago or tomorrow.” That means it had the quality of being lost in time.” Or as Bruce Springsteen put it in the Documentary about the group Once Were Brothers defined: “It’s like you’ve never heard them before and like they’ve always been there.”
Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson at a Bob Dylan and The Band concert in 1974 in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Rick Diamond (Getty Images)
The band’s music was familiar and mysterious, surprisingly captivating. Like a legend. Its five members were children of the glorious founding of the first rock ‘n’ roll school led by Elvis Presley in the 1950s, but they’d sucked the secrets of the road down as a backing band to Ronnie – pun intended, because they drank all Hawkins , a Canadian rockabilly singer who knew how to kick ass like no one else on stage. Then they became the essential support Bob Dylan needed to electrify and revolutionize the postulates of folk and rock, although Levon Helm, tired of receiving boos and boos on this historic tour, volunteered in 1965-1967 left the band.
With Dylan, they could imagine their own world outside of fads and dictates. And as they became a distinct entity, locked away in a cabin in the mountains of upstate New York, to which Dylan also fled to escape the messianic modernity that was suffocating him, the band created a sonic performance as if taken from the old writings. Music from a palette of intense and varied colors, roots sounds with youthful pride and exaggerated enthusiasm. Fabulously, the group was an extension, or effect, of the universe contained in The Anthology of American Folk Music, an 84-song compilation of early blues, country, gospel, Cajun, hillbilly or jug jazz. The revealing sovereignty of this box set marked Dylan and the band in walking them in their own footsteps and bringing them together in the essential sessions of the Basement Tapes. The band could make old New Orleans sound like a different California. In short, music with a mystical halo.
The five seemed to come from afar and down paths known only to them as outlaws of the Wild West. The band’s aesthetic accompanied these rustic, dusty, old-fashioned songs. Five exiles with their hats, their jackets, their boots, their beards and looks for having entered many taverns in towns near the railroad tracks. In the years of the summer of love, psychedelic and flowers, they were neither symbolists nor hippie luminaries, but could pass as Wyatt Earp’s new partners, the Clayton brothers, Billy El Niño or Pat Garrett. The gossip and stories about America’s construction and the so-called “Great Westward Migration” of the second half of the 19th century echoed in songs that may have originated there. Biblical references, characters from the civil war or abandoned paths with their existential charge and longing populated the universe of The Band. Compositions like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” were the creative epitome of his great evocative power.
Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young and The Band in an image from the documentary The Last Waltz (1978).
Why did this quintessentially Canadian band define American myth so well? Perhaps for the same reason that Italian Sergio Leone redefined the western. Not being American, they could not idealize too much and show in a more lurid and direct way the soul of a nation that had to reinvent itself from fundamental wounds. In the case of The Band, this form sounded like a knife with a hundred points: euphoric, sad, funny, melancholic, cynical, transcendental… Their music referred in many ways to a love for the rural world, boundless spaces and the wild countryside , so typical of the best American literature. It was as if they were setting to music both the disheveled characters of Mark Twain and the dry and violent characters of Cormac McCarthy, whose later books drew on the Frontier mythos.
Writer Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, said that “loneliness is an American disease.” And the band reproduced that disease with their own jukebox, which sparked. For that reason and for an indelible work, especially with the best farewell film ever made in The Last Waltz directed by Martin Scorsese and considered a grand celebration of the melting pot of roots and bastard swaps in the United States, was “The Band”. the philosopher’s stone of Americana, a genre recognized by American industry after years of being opposed by the American Music Association, a conglomerate of artists, labels, radio stations, and promoters who promoted the value of American roots music with an electric spirit wanted to acknowledge. Without this band, much of the sonic construction of North America over the past half-century would be incomprehensible. Artists and groups like The Long Ryders, Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Steve Earle, The Avett Brothers, Ryan Adams or Jason Isbell and many others come from there. It is therefore understood that the 2010 Grammy Awards awarded their first award in the Americana category to the solo album by Levon Helm, former drummer of The Band, now known as the band of North American bands.
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