Given that Music From Big Pink came out in the turbulent summer of 1968, it’s tempting to frame the album as a set of soothing sounds for troubled times. Don’t believe it. The Band‘s debut LP was quietly radical. In a period when the musical landscape was overrun with psychedelic whimsy, their synthesis of country, blues, gospel, Western classical, and rock was enriching and inspiring. While Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Who split eardrums with overdriven amplification, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel turned down the volume, revealing the intricacies of their arrangements and complexity of their lyrics. While the Beatles and the Brian Wilson sought studio laboratories where they could achieve technical excellence, the Band holed up in a dank concrete cellar in the wilderness of the Catskills to find their muse. Everything about their stripped-down sound and style seemed to violate fundamental rules of the industry.
“We were rebelling against the rebellion,” Robbie Robertson reflected years later. “If everybody was going east, then we were going west and we never once discussed it. There was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. We were these kind of rebels with an absolute cause. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack.”
The quintet managed the seemingly impossible task of escaping their reputation as Bob Dylan‘s backing band purely on the strength of their writing and playing. “These guys weren’t teenagers. They were seasoned veterans whose debut album sounded more like a band in their prime,” producer John Simon observed in 1993. “The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists.” Those who tuned in simply to hear the Dylan-penned “I Shall Be Released” – as well as “Tears of Rage” and “This Wheel’s on Fire,” both of which he co-authored – were stunned by the depth of original compositions like Robinson’s “The Weight,” which emerged as the album’s standout track.
The idea of moving out to the country has become a rock & roll cliché, but the Band did it first – and they did it best. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” Al Kooper wrote in his five-star Rolling Stone review. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.” But according to Levon Helm, Music From Big Pink wasn’t quite met with universal acclaim. “Our local paper in Woodstock, by the way, said the album was OK but we could have done better.”
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landmark album – and the upcoming release of an expanded box set featuring outtakes and other rarities – here are 10 facts you might not have known about the Band’s debut.
2. Music From Big Pink wasn’t recorded at Big Pink.
Contrary to its name, Music From Big Pink was not actually tracked at Big Pink, and neither were a number of songs from the legendary Basement Tapes. Though the timeline for the ad hoc Basement Tapes sessions can be hazy, the recordings began in earnest around the early spring of 1967 at Bob Dylan’s Byrdcliffe home, Hi-Lo-Ha, before shifting to the famous basement at the start of summer. Once Levon Helm returned from his two-year hiatus that October, the house began to feel cramped and the four Big Pink residents sought new accommodations. Helm and Rick Danko moved into a home on Wittenberg Road, which became the new center of recording operations, while Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel shacked up at a place on Ohayo Mountain Road, and Robbie Robertson remained at his own homestead with his soon-to-be wife.
After the band joined forces with freelance producer John Simon following a fortuitous meeting at Howard Alk’s birthday party in the fall of 1967, Albert Grossman secured financing for the group to record at A&R’s Studio A in NYC – the barn-shaped 10,000-square-foot facility located on the seventh floor of 799 Seventh Avenue. When sessions began in the early weeks of January 1968, Simon asked the band how they wanted the music to sound. “Just like it did in the basement,” was Robertson’s succinct reply. “Playing in the basement taught us that going into somebody else’s place, where they don’t go past six o’clock, there are union rules and everybody is watching the clock – that’s not the way to make music,” Robertson told Uncut in 2015. “We said we need to bring the situation so it fits us, rather than vice versa.”
Engineers initially tried to use standard studio configurations with the group, cordoning them off with sound baffles to prevent leakage. But after months of playing eyeball-to-eyeball among cinderblocks, the separation was unnerving. “We said, ‘We can’t do this. We’ve got to get in a circle like the basement, we’ve got to play to one another. We’re speaking a language. This doesn’t work,'” Robertson recalled. Technicians were skeptical, but the band were thrilled by the fruits of these first sessions, which included “Tears of Rage,” “We Can Talk,” “Chest Fever,” and “The Weight.” Executives at Capitol Records, who signed the band in early February, were so pleased that they sent them to Los Angeles to take full advantage of the state of the art 8-track studio located at the famous tower headquarters on Vine Street. The album was mostly completed here, though the group would make a short excursion to Gold Star Studios, where Phil Spector pioneered his Wall of Sound. In his memoir, Helm recalls cutting a version of Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” at Gold Star, but this song, and seemingly all others from those sessions, did not make the final album.
From: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-bands-music-from-big-pink-10-things-you-didnt-know-666161/
