avatarTerry Barr

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Rockers Going Country

How The Band Shaped Me

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Photo by Beth Rufener on Unsplash

I was thirteen years old when I heard The Band for the first time. I wish I could honestly say I had heard of them before that day in late 1969 when their biggest AM radio hit, “Up On Cripple Creek” shouted at me through the airwaves. Maybe someone told me that they were Dylan’s back-up band, but that wouldn’t have mattered to me so much given that all I loved of Dylan began and ended with Nashville Skyline, which had also just been released that fall.

I didn’t know at first what to think of “Cripple Creek.” Should it be taken seriously, for it sounded a bit hillbilly-ish, a bit jug-band like: a song about gettin’ off that mountain and going to find that sweet little Bessie gal. For god’s sake, there was a mouth harp (played by Richard Manuel) and a beat I had difficulty classifying. The organ: Did it help or hurt? Was this Southern music? Honky-tonk music?

Or…was it Country?

The allusion to “Spike Jones on the box” made me wonder if this was a spoof of something I didn’t understand and never would.

I still don’t know how “Up On Cripple Creek” rose to #2 on our local AM radio station’s charts, but it did, and it stayed there for a few weeks. I didn’t buy the single, and I deeply wondered who did since none of my friends admitted to doing so.

I didn’t know then that most of The Band was Canadian or that Levon Helm was from Arkansas, though if you had identified him for me as the singer of this hit, I would have known immediately that he was a southern man.

When the LP with “Cripple Creek” came out, I looked at it once or twice in my record store, but again, I didn’t understand at my innocent age who these guys were, much less who they purported to be.

And when they released the next single, I felt even more mystified:

The violin that begins the tune, played by Rick Danko, felt country, as in I could imagine being in a bar way out on some rural road, where the doors are always open, at least to some, and where you take your whiskey shots along with your Sterling big mouth beer and try not to think about tomorrow.

“Rag Mama Rag” wasn’t as big of a hit as “Cripple Creek”, so The Band’s string of AM singles dried up. But then, they were never a singles band.

Three other songs from that album still make me wonder: “Rockin’ Chair,” with its reference to “ol Virginny,” puts me in mind of music from 200 years ago, or of what I think that music could have been. I almost expect that right after it, someone will launch into Virginia reel tunes, and we all might line or square dance to our heart’s content.

And then there’s “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Folk? Blues-ish? Gospel-tinged? Country-flaired?

Who ARE these guys — This is a question I was asking well into my later teen years.

The third song was something I heard when it, too, was released as a single, though not by The Band. Joan Baez made a hit out of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and whichever version you like best, again, is this a folk ballad? A mournful hymn to loss? A sad refrain about what it means to be on the losing, wrong end of civil strife?

As first-person narratives go, it’s compelling, rich, and its protagonist calls to me even if I can’t share his defiance at the end. Levon’s voice, especially on the version embedded in The Last Waltz, makes me want to drive home myself, but only through the back roads where I know I’ll see that flag and wince in that way that only home can do to us.

Or the way it can undo us.

So here’s where my own stereotyped thinking proved most limiting. I kept associating back then, and for a few decades after, country music only with people from the South. Sure, I knew Dylan came from Minnesota, Neil Young from Canada, and The Byrds from California, more or less, and that’s excepting Gram Parsons, of course.

Why were they all choosing to delve into music, a sound, that I identified with redneck Okies or whining/glittering polished Nashville Sound crooners? I would come to learn that many artists wanted (and still do) to discover the roots of it all — the people, the sounds that came before. Storytelling isn’t exclusively a Southern thing, but somehow, being from this region is a major boon to anyone wanting to tell stories wedded to indigenous instruments or at least pieces that have marked our long past.

Maybe we had too much porch time before the days of central air, or maybe it’s defeat itself that causes us to want to explain what it is we have and to use a violin and mouth harp to enhance the tale.

And then, there are those hymns themselves that we all heard and once sang — a yearning for that final trip to the Promised Land, though doing so only in a segregated coach. Complexity, duality, hypocrisy — yep, we got it all.

The Band, then, played to authenticity, and even if everyone didn’t understand what going back to the country meant, listening to them might explain it all, or at least provide the right instruments for epiphany and later, catharsis.

So, eventually, when I became a wiser man — and I’m still working on it, trust me — I pulled out the premiere album, the one directly preceding The Band. This is, of course, Music From Big Pink (1968).

The best-known song is the Robbie Robertson (RIP) composition, “The Weight.” A spiritual? A dirge? A Bluesy hymn?

Sometimes I forget about the song, but when I hear it, I wonder how I could ever keep it out of my pantheon of Top Ten-ever tunes?

Two of my other faves from the album, almost too predictably, are “Tears of Rage” (co-written by Dylan and Manuel) and the true Dylan cover, “I Shall Be Released.” Mournful and soulful, they make me want to be better, and if I could be more articulate about what and how they make me feel, I would do so.

“You know we’re so alone, and life is so brief…”

Dear daughter, dear father.

Why does this song lead off the entire album? What are we to think, to make of this even now, some 55 years later? Think of the album executives going

“Noooooooo, you can’t do that! It’s sales suicide.”

Maybe it was, but now, who’s right? We can surely talk about it, at least.

As I listened to the album again, I wondered if I’d find anything that made me think in that more country vein I’m after. I listened, I waited, and then…

I suppose you can hear whatever you want, whatever style you want. The imagery summoned comes from deep within, but for me, I hear something that Johnny Cash could cover (and maybe he did). Perhaps this song anticipated Outlaw or Americana Country music. Still, it’s one of my new favorites, and on the first album from this band of backups, we all should have known then that transcendence is a word we don’t understand until it happens.

And it just did.

As a weird coda, later on, The Band would show it could play a mean Swing/Dixieland tune, too. I put this song on a mixtape for my Dad as he began his late-life traveling salesman career. I put it at the end of the mix, after his own faves: Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and then Pete Fountain:

Thank you all (hey there Steven Hale) and to Kevin Alexander here at The Riff for publishing.

Music
The Riff
Country Music
Pop Culture
The Band
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