Greil Marcus
: You take a song like King Harvest (Has Surely Come). Is that a blues song? There’s a lot of blues in it, but it’s not a blues song. Is it a country song? Absolutely not. There’s a progression in there, a ‘sweep’ that country music doesn’t have. And yet there is an anxiousness, a nervousness, a sense of being alone in the singing - it’s pure country music. Is it rock & roll? Sure, it’s rock & roll. And you could go on from there… but what you don’t want to do with that song, you don’t want to take it apart, you know, separate it into its constituent elements. You want to go with it. You want that song to take you somewhere you haven’t been. Or if you know the song, you want it to take you where it took you before. You want to get lost in that song. And when you’re lost in that song you’re floating through a whole vast American story.
Levon Helm
: Some of the lyrics came out of a discussion we had one night about the times we’d seen and all had in common. It was an expression of feeling that came from five people. The group wanted to do one song that took in everything we could muster about life at that moment in time. It was the last thing we cut in California, and it was that magical feeling of ‘King Harvest’ that pulled us through. It was like, there, that’s The Band.
I remember gazing from a freezing cold Oxford Street into the windows of the HMV record store in London. The three Christmas displays in late 1969 were Abbey Road, Let It Bleed… and The Band. Not a bad year, then. The cover touched something in my imagination. A sense of longing. And I hadn’t even heard it. The first track I heard? Easy. It was King Harvest on late night BBC television, accompanied by a weird black and white 1920’s cartoon. I couldn’t believe the oddness of the sound. The great spaces in the music. The yearning keening voices; the odd stumbling arrangements. The dead slap of the drums. It was like nothing I’d heard before. Maybe it was better than anything I’ve heard since. Later - too many weeks later - I listened through the album with a sense of disbelief. It encompassed an America of the dreams. It rooted music after the dweebling sounds of Pink Floyd and the pretensions of early King Crimson. The up-and-coming Chicago seemed merely workmanlike. Half my record collection seemed as dull and well meaning as Chicago Transit Authority. The Stones were raw and tough, but oddly hairless - oddly chinless even. The Beatles were producing sublime sounds, but it was St. Petersburg 1917. On the West Coast all was mellow. But some British musicians felt that Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead had traded musical competence away for the sake of originality. They were into Alvin Lee and how fast you could play. Bob Dylan was meandering through the backwaters of his roots on Nashville Skyline. The Band had it all - rawness, competence, sublimity, experience, originality and roots.
William Bender:
King Harvest is touched with a double vision. It’s marked by an ironic interplay between the rich yet somehow threatening sound of nature and the querelous, grasshopperish whine of the farmer… Then comes the refrain, with Danko and Robertson on guitars creating a controlled hush that is just the right rustling background.
Levon plays his ultimate drum part, where the cymbals whisper like the wind through the rice, where the hard slap of the drums shove home the farmer’s plight. Robbie Robertson isolates the bass and drum on the Classic Albums video. For him the rhythm section is the whole basis of the song. Rob Bowman says that the ending of King Harvest might be Robbie’s finest moment as a guitarist, in a style Andy Gill later described as ‘death-by-a-thousand-delicate-cuts’ and Bowman goes on to quote Robertson:
Robbie Robertson:
This was a new way of dealing with the guitar for me, this very subtle playing, leaving out a lot of stuff and just waiting till the last second and playing the thing in just the nick of time. It was an approach to playing where it’s so delicate. It’s just the opposite of the ‘in your face’ guitar playing that I used to do. This was the kind of thing that was slippery. It was like you have to hold your breath while you’re playing these solos. You can’t breathe or you’ll throw yourself off. I felt emotionally completely different about the instrument.
To me, the instruments all assume distinct personalities, reflecting and commenting on the lyrics. There’s the guitar, picking, plucky, strutting and wirey, creating an argumentative extra line. Then there’s the bass, dogged, persistent. These are the farmer. The extended notes of Garth’s organ are a contrast, with the irresistible sweep of history resonating through them. Then the drums, the inexorable thump of the seasons changing, the rustle of the wind. Robbie said he’d been immersed in the novels of John Steinbeck. Ralph Gleason picked up on The Grapes of Wrath - the John Ford movie rather than the original John Steinbeck book - when he reviewed the album for Rolling Stone. We’re right in that territory - the line between independent sharecropper, the grandson of Virgil Kane, and industrial unionised worker was thin and getting rapidly thinner when Steinbeck researched the trek of the landless Okies from the dried-up homesteads of the dust bowls of Oklahoma to the wage-slavery of fruit picking in California in the 1930’s. When the story is recalled, the pejorative ‘Okies’ for Oklahomans is always remembered, because the central Joad family were Okies. If you look back to the Steinbeck book, you’ll find that the other group of farmers ruined by the dust bowl were the ‘Arkies’ from Levon’s home state of Arkansas.
What had happened was this. When settlers arrived in the former Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma, in the 1880s and 1890s, the region was enjoying a short, unusually wetter spell which supported farming, and which persisted until the late 1920s. The drought of the late 20s / early 30s was not so much something abnormal, but simply a return to the naturally arid climate of the area. The same happened in the west of Arkansas. With the top vegetation stripped by intensive farming, the whole area became literally a bowl of fine dust. The banks foreclosed on the poverty-stricken farmers. They were starving and dispossessed. They loaded up their few possessions on battered Model-T Fords and trekked west to California where they could earn subsistence wages in the burgeoning fruit plantations. They became white slaves.
But on the surface King Harvest takes place further south than Steinbeck’s Oklahoma. It never mentions the dust bowl specifically for that matter. If they’re listening to the rice when the wind blows across the water, they’re probably back down in the Mississippi Delta of Louisiana as in Cripple Creek (and most of Robertson’s Storyville solo album.) I’m sure people can tell me where else rice is grown, but that’s the primary image. Robbie Robertson has a knack for combining disparate images and getting resonance from both of them.
From: https://theband.hiof.no/articles/king_harvest_viney.html
