In July, 1968, hippies were being beaten in Chicago, Black ghettos were on fire, RFK and MLK had been killed, Paris was under siege and Prague was invaded. “Battle lines being drawn.” Rock music was the vehicle for the younger generation to rail against parents, professors, police – louder and faster and flashier, more and more strident and abrasive and combative. Get high, get angy, get laid. Up against the wall, motherfucker.
Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” had provoked nothing more than a collective “Huh?” “Sgt Pepper” had deteriorated into Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge and Steppenwolf and The Doors and Cream .
The Band painted by Bob Dylan
Then Bob Dylan’s backing band – formerly The Hawks, now the non-name The Band – released their first album. The back cover pictured a pink house (hence the title “Music from Big Pink”), and inside was a photo of five guys who looked more like the James Brothers – the gang, not the band. Even worse, they included a picture of a whole tribe of horn-rimmed honkies, captioned ‘Next of Kin’. This was in a day when everyone else was denying that they had biological parents. Didn’t these guys know anything about being cool?
But the front cover was a primitive painting of the group by The Dylan himself. Not only that, the album featured three songs by him, two of them collaborations with The Band (music for ‘Tears of Rage’ by Richard Manuel, for ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ by Rick Danko, together with ‘I Shall Be Released’). This was at a time when Dylan no more collaborated with mortals than did The Almighty Him/Herself. So “Music from Big Pink” entered the marketplace as an authoritative word from on high, if not Dylan himself speaking, then at least his angels.
But the music? It was so strange. Nary a backbeat on the entire LP. Nothing you could dance to. No electricity. It all sounded as though it had grown up through the ground. The instruments sounded as though they had been picked off a stalk and hand-fashioned. The songs talked about family, faith, and rural life. Talk about ‘Huh?’!
Its impact was subtle but immediate. Eric Clapton heard the album and decided on the spot to break up Cream. It would take us all years to absorb the music from Big Pink – the polar opposite of everything we were experiencing at the time: ensemble music, acoustic, organic. Roots music in a wholly new style. Five individuals performing as a single unit in a way common to jazz and chamber music, unknown in rock. Listening rather than shouting.
The music created a new aural palette—a rhythm piano (Richard Manuel); a “fourth-dimensional” organ providing distinctive colorings and lead voices (Garth Hudson); a guitar (Robbie Robertson) pursuing a holistic sound; and a drum (Levon Helm) taking an equal creative role in the musical pastiche. Their vocals were a wonder – Levon usually taking the lead (‘The Weight’), the authentic drawling Southerner aside four Canadians; reedy Danko (‘This Wheel’s On Fire’), simultaneously vulnerable and raucous; and the miracle of Richard Manuel’s voice (‘Tears of Rage’, ‘I Shall Be Released’ in a harrowing falsetto, gut-wrenching ‘Lonesome Suzie’ – passionate, expressive, joyous, pained, his eventual suicide already foreshadowed). Producer John Simon also played a critical role in pulling it all together, playing horns with Garth, tweaking the marvelous sounds that are as much a feature of the album as the songs and the musicianship.
It is remarkable to think that this quantum shift didn’t have to occur; it was a product of Bob Dylan’s decision to pull off the fast lane.
The Hawks had been touring Canada and the South as a heavy, funky rock/rock&roll/country-tinged rhythm&blues band for five years when they were drafted to back Dylan as the band he used to electrify his sound. They were booed nightly. (I saw one of these performances—it was so raw and raunchy the rafters literally shook; Robbie’s guitar was deafening. I refrained from joining the booing only out of respect for Dylan.) Dylan crashed on his motorcycle, and the whole group retired to the Saugerties near Woodstock, where they took their first break from the road in years. They hung out, walked in the woods, and met daily in the basement to play the old music they loved and recreate the sound and mindset of America.
Robbie Robertson: “My guitar playing was like a premature ejaculation in the beginning. I was in my early twenties with Bob Dylan. Same thing, a hundred guitar solos a night. I’d done this to death…I wanted to discover the sound of the band. ..I’m not gonna play a guitar solo on the whole record. I’m only going to play riffs, Curtis Mayfield kind of riffs. I wanted the drums to have their own character. I wanted the piano not to sound like a big Yamaha grand. I wanted it to sound like an upright piano. I wanted these pictures in your mind. I wanted this flavor. I didn’t want screaming vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and the voices coming in. This whole thing of discovering the voices…This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology. This is the record that I wanted to make. “
Drummer Levon Helm, from his autobiography “This Wheel’s on Fire”: “’Tears of Rage’” opened the album with a slow song, which was just another way of our rebelling against the rebellion. We were deliberately going against the grain. Few artists had ever opened an album with a slow song, so we had to. At the zenith of the psychedelic music era, with its flaming guitars and endless solos and elongated jams, we weren’t about to make that kind of album. Bob Dylan helped Richard with this number about a parent’s heartbreak, and Richard sang one of the best performances of his life. It had those trademark horns and organ and the moaning tom-tom style of drumming that I’ve been credited with by some observers, but I know that Ringo Starr was doing something like it at the same time. [JM: Cf the deadened tom-tom sound Ringo invented on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.] You make the drum notes bend down in pitch. You hit it, it sounds, and then it hums as the note dies out. If the ensemble is right, you can hear the sustain like a bell, and it’s very emotional. It can keep a slow song suspended in an interesting way. (John Simon heard this and started calling me a bayou folk drummer, but not to my face.)”
What is most remarkable to me today about “Music from Big Pink” in general and ‘Tears of Rage’ specifically is the way they assemble the music through mutually interdependent lines. Just like jazz at its best. Listen to the original version of ‘Tears of Rage’ from “The Basement Tapes.” Even wooden-fingered Jeff can play that guitar part, strum-two-three-four, strum-two three-four. Now listen to the opening of The Band’s ‘Tears of Rage’, the very opening of this miraculous album. What’s going on? Where is the rhythmic center? We don’t hit an identifiable marker until about the eighth bar—it’s just intertwining and floating, but all in tandem, a pas de cinq ballet of sounds. So much of what the Band invents can be found right here in this instrumental introduction—the ‘Curtis Mayfield’ guitar riff, the lead voice, but so much an integral part of the whole; the almost inaudible but crucial floating sustained organ; the interplay of the bass and the drum and the rhythm piano, together providing an implicit rhythm created as much by the gaps as by the beats, as intimate as lovers, as self-effacing as monks, as synchronized as guys who have been travelling together for six years.
“Music from Big Pink” is too weighty a work to try to deal with it in its entirety. I’m struggling to give just the first cut a fair shake. I guess I’ll just have to (get to!) revisit some of the other wondrous songs another time. Last week I tried to give an honest reading of the song as its author performed it. But that, for all the beauty and wisdom of the song, is clearly a sketch of a rendition, still in its adolescence. Here, in The Band’s treatment, it finds its full, organic expression. Manual’s voice together with Garth’s organ and the tambourine and – oh, there’s just no end to the richness of this tapestry. It can’t be plumbed, it can’t be dissected or measured. Just sit back and let it rend your heart.
In the Summer of Love, 1967, while the Beatles were busy overtracking “Sgt. Pepper”, Bob Dylan was holed up in the basement of a pink house in upstate New York with a bunch of friends, playing hokey old country and western music standards at a leisurely tempo while he convalesced from a motorpsycho-broken neck.
Fortunately, Dylan and his touring-band buddies, The Hawks (later The Band), turned on a home tape recorder. The resulting “Basement Tapes” – a collection of songs which are hilarious, wise, passionate, and pained, and include several grave masterpieces – leaked out as the very first illegal bootleg records (“The Great White Wonder”, “The Troubled Troubadour”–I owned and treasured them both), and here and there in minor cover versions. Then a year later The Band recorded definitive versions of the three most serious songs on their first album “Music from Big Pink” (‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Tears of Rage’). For an incredible, picaresque story about the house itself, see SoTW 049.
So “The Basement Tapes” had no direct impact on America when they were recorded in 1967. But they are The Watershed, the point at which the dominant aesthetic of the Western world turned from the supersonic to the simple. These recordings were seminal in shaping the way people view the world till today. They contained the seed for the mindset of the ‘organic’, the acoustic, the spiritual. “Strap yourself to a tree with roots, you ain’t going nowhere.”
June, 1966, America was exploding. Over 500 American soldiers died in Vietnam that month, the first race riots were breaking out in the Black ghettos of Chicago and other cities. Sympathizers of the nascent counterculture were listening to the new releases “Freak Out!”,” Yesterday and Today” (including the original release of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘Doctor Robert’, and ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’), “Aftermath”, “Daydream”, the debut albums of Love and the Mamas and the Papas.
But the acknowledged leader of the pack was Bob Dylan, popularly proclaimed ‘prophet of the generation’, despite all his disclaimers. He was touring at breakneck speed with his new electric band, rabidly booed by dozens, listened to passionately by thousands. “Blonde on Blonde” was released on June 27, shouting “Everybody must get stoned!” Dylan practiced what he preached, ingesting large quantities of amphetamines and “who-knows what else”. Two days later he broke his neck in a motorcycle accident and disappeared from the public eye for a year and a half, till the release of “John Wesley Harding” in December, 1967.
Critic Mike Marqusee: “At the very moment when avant-gardism was sweeping through new cultural corridors, Dylan decided to dismount. The dandified, aggressively modern surface was replaced by a self-consciously unassuming and traditional garb. The giddiness embodied, celebrated, dissected in the songs of the mid-sixties had left him exhausted. He sought safety in a retreat to the countryside that was also a retreat in time, or more precisely, a search for timelessness.”
The Basement Tapes are rough, unpolished, rehearsal recordings. That’s okay. Perhaps it’s part of their charm, their intimacy. Many of Da Vinci’s greatest masterpieces have reached us only as sketches, right?
Guitarist Robbie Robertson: “One of the things is that if you played loud in the basement, it was really annoying, because it was a cement-walled room. So we played in a little huddle: if you couldn’t hear the singing, you were playing too loud.”
Organist Garth Hudson, “We were doing seven, eight, ten, sometimes fifteen songs a day. Some were old ballads and traditional songs … but others Bob would make up as he went along. … We’d play the melody, he’d sing a few words he’d written, and then make up some more, or else just mouth sounds or even syllables as he went along…It amazed me, Bob’s writing ability. How he would come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write a song. And what was amazing was that almost every one of those songs was funny.” Well, many of them. Not ‘Tears of Rage’.
Columbia Records released a 2-LP “The Basement Tapes” in 1975, questionable both in its audio quality and in its selection. A third of the tracks weren’t connected to Dylan, and a number of the major songs were omitted. In the 1990s a 5-CD bootleg set surfaced, “The Genuine Basement Tapes”, which includes virtually all the recordings from those months.
“Million Dollar Bash”:
But my mind always goes back to bootleg where I learned the core great songs from the session. There was a series of hilarious, comic psychodelerious virtuoso romps: ‘Million Dollar Bash’, ‘Open the Door, Homer’, ‘Yeah Heavy and a Bottle of Bread’, ‘Please Mrs Henry’, ‘Lo and Behold’, ‘Tiny Montgomery’. Just one taste: “Well, I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist, I punched myself in the face with my fist. I took my potatoes down to be mashed, then I made it over to that million dollar bash.”
And there’s a series of brilliant, inspired songs flitting between the comic and the fantastic and the oh-so-serious: ‘Nothing Was Delivered’, ‘Quinn the Eskimo’, ‘Too Much of Nothing’, ‘Crash on the Levee’, ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’. The last of these is ostensibly humorous. But there was enough gravity in it to serve as a catalyst for a 180° change in my life, no exaggeration. We took our music seriously back then.
“You Ain’t Going Nowhere” (improvised lyrics):
And there’s no music more serious than the three songs from that basement that The Band would record for their first album: the cosmic, apocalyptic ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’; ‘I Shall Be Released’, Dylan’s existential meditation on that little question: ‘What is the point of living a life of such pain?’; and our SoTW, ‘Tears of Rage’, a searing cry of the pain of betrayal.
L to R: Manuel, Dylan
If ‘I Shall Be Released’ is Dylan’s “Hamlet”, ‘Tears of Rage’ is his “King Lear”. Before this, Dylan had never collaborated. But bassist Rick Danko provided the music for ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’, and pianist Richard Manuel the music for ‘Tears of Rage’.
Manuel: “He came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper … and he just said, ‘Have you got any music for this?’ … I had a couple of musical movements that fit … so I just elaborated a bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, ‘What’s this mean, Bob: “Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse”?‘”
I sure empathize with Richard. For most of my life I’ve been as puzzled by the lyrics to the song as I am moved by them. A strange thing, poetry–you can puzzle at it and puzzle at it, decade after decade, and you know you’ll never ‘solve’ it. If you could, if there were a Hidden Answer in there, it wouldn’t evoke that curiosity, that obsessive probing and plumbing and pondering.
Dylan has some great songs that can be parsed as allegory, stories directly paralleling something else–‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (a drug dealer), ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ (Elvis), ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ (a straight guy at a gay party). But most of his great, evocative works defy such ‘solutions’. What does ‘As I Went Out One Morning’ mean? Well, who knows? And we’ll only diminish it by trying to tie it down to a specific reading.
Dylan himself wrote a wonderful, wise spoof on ‘solving’ his lyrics as the liner notes to “John Wesley Harding”. I heartily recommend reading them. Nonetheless, I’m going to try to provide a running reading of ‘Tears of Rage’ not as a Cymbal symbol, but as scaffolding, a reading which will help us examine it closely, but needs to be dissembled when the work is through.
We carried you in our arms on Independence Day
And now you’d throw us all aside and put us on our way.
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun would treat a father so–
To wait upon him hand and foot and always tell him, “No?”
A father addressing his daughter. His love is total, his intentions are pure. He will carry her in his arms to take her to participate in a public celebration of communion and community. She, in turn, fulfills her filial duties–but mechanically, denying him the love he has so unselfishly bestowed on her. With the cruelty of coldness, she won’t even leave him room to complain: ‘I do what is required of me by custom and tradition. But the most important thing can’t be legislated, and that you will not get from me.’ Why? What would move her to reject his love, to turn her back on his paternal dedication, to deny requiting him his unreserved dedication to her? There is no answer provided, only the acutest of pain, that of a child’s rejection, the betrayal of unadulterated trust and unbounded love.
Tears of rage, tears of grief, why am I always the one who must be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone, and life is brief.
What is he seeking that will impoverish her? Will she be diminished by returning his love? Au contraire. So why? The father is left with no avenue for response. It is a question which can’t be asked, let alone answered. Love cannot be dictated or demanded. The pain of senseless, inexplicable rejection. The speaker can only cry, rage, grieve, pitifully plead. He has no other response available to him.
We pointed out the way for you to go and scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more than a place for you to stand.
I want you to know that while we watched you discover there was no one true
That I myself, I remember now, thought it was it was a childish thing to do.
Our narrative strains here. Who is the ‘we’? It seems to extend beyond the narrator (and the mother). The community in its role as educator? The amorphous society at large? The pointer they give her seems genuinely altruistic, if transitory. She misperceives it. It is a means, she understands it only as an end. The observers are accused of being childish—were they mockingly waiting for her to be disillusioned? Why is the loving father associating with a less-than-loving ‘we’? Albeit he distances himself from them; but he had nonetheless been party to their cynical stance.
Tears of rage, tears of grief, why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone, and life is brief.
Cry, Dad, cry.
It was all very painless when you ran out to receive
All that false instruction which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse;
But, oh, what kind of love is this which goes from bad to worse?
Is this ‘instruction’ equated with the pointer from the previous verse, or contrasted with it? I could argue either case, and neither seems conclusive or convincing to me. In any case, a pyrrhic victory has been achieved: the heart is full of gold: her dutifulness. But the heart isn’t a purse, is it? It’s not gold that we’re seeking. It’s something much more precious.
Tears of rage, tears of grief, why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know we’re so alone and life is brief
This love the father treasures so–“why is my desire for it unlawful?” he asks himself. “What is my crime? I carried you in my arms, I ask for nothing in return other than a measure of the unconditional love I by nature gave you. But it is unnaturally denied me, and life is irretrievably passing.” Just as the love the father feels is more precious than gold, so the pain he feels is sharper than any physical blade. It is the pain of his inexplicable, senseless rejection.
Let’s take down the scaffold now. I don’t see the song as an allegory. When he wrote it, Dylan had only just become a father. He was presumably happy in his new marriage. So where did this come from? It’s been said that ‘Tears of Rage’ was the first expression of the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam war veterans, or by extension many of its young citizens. Perhaps this is the rejection being expressed, that of political disenfranchisement.
Who knows? Not Richard Manuel, not me, probably not Bob Dylan. But the song is nonetheless a work of profound passion, evocative of the deepest pain I can imagine.
Next week we’ll see how The Band reworked this sketch into a treatment incomparably more crafted, and no less impassioned.
There are musics I find myself avoiding writing about out of too much respect. It’s a sort of mental stuttering mechanism, I guess – I have so much to say that it all gets choked, like seven hyperactive adolescents trying to get on a bus all at once. Nonetheless, this week we’re going to take a whack at one of our very, very favorite pieces of music from a very specific angle, hoping to avoid that logjam.
The Band, “The Band”.
I guess there are people in the world for whom those words fail to resonate. But you flash in front of any denizen of the Woodstock world, and you’ll conjure the seminal moment when modern Western culture changed direction. You had Janis Joplin tearing out her heart piece by piece, Jimi Hendrix burning and smashing, and The Rolling Stones wreaking all sorts of mayhem.
And then you had “John Wesley Harding”, “The Basement Tapes” (in retrospect), “Music from Big Pink” and “The Band”. Acoustic, introspective, holy, humble, organic. Together they whispered a hushed “Stop.” Strap yourself to a tree with roots. Unplug. Get back to where you once belonged.
Every time I go into an organic supermarket I hear ‘Across the Great Divide’. Every time I see a family wearing cotton and riding bicycles I hear ‘Up on Cripple Creek’. Every time I just stop and concentrate on breathing clean air, I hear ‘Rockin’ Chair’.
A little background for those who weren’t there: A group called The Band, comprised of four Canadians and an Arkansan, had been touring bars and clubs throughout rural North America for a dozen years as The Hawks when Bob Dylan picked them up to back his provocative shift from acoustic topical and poetic songs to raucous electrified loudness. For two entire years they ran, toured, took drugs and suffered booing from the audiences.
Then Dylan crashed and they retreated together to a Big Pink house in the Saugerties in upstate New York, playing very old and very new music in the basement. Bootleg tapes began to leak out and were released officially only years later. But Dylan recorded the seminal “John Wesley Harding” and The Band recorded their first album, “Music from Big Pink”, two albums that introduced an acoustic mindset to an entire generation.
Dylan went on to get weird (as is his wont) in “Nashville Skyline”. The Band toured extensively, now to cheers, and in 1969 stopped to record their masterpiece, one of the very finest works to come out of the greater Rock genre, “The Band”, sometimes known as ‘The Brown Album’.
Flash forward. Their next album, “Stage Fright”, had several great cuts, but was mostly strained. They recorded four more studio albums together over the next eight years, none really worth remembering. In 1978, they gave themselves a good-bye bash, filmed by Scorcese, starring the Rock Hall of Fame. It’s their best-known work. Do yourselves a favor: go back to “The Band”, listen to it a thousand times, and discover more beauty and passion and grace in every successive listening. Let it enrich you.
Much has been written about its cultural impact and aesthetic achievement. Here’s a pretty fine documentary about the album. Elliott Landy’s photo shoot at Big Pink has become an integral visual correlative of the music of “The Band”. All the photos here are his.
Levon Helm: It was a complicated record. We wanted to make one that you didn’t really get until the second time you played it. Some of the songs, like “Rockin’ Chair”, sound like folks playing accordion and mandolin on the back porch of some farm… T
here was nothing normal about it. The title we had for the record was “Harvest”, because we were reaping this music from seeds that had been planted many years before we’d even been born. But we could have called it “America” as well, because this music was right out of the air. We were saying, Listen! You can’t ignore this.
For our SoTW, we’re going to pick on one of the utter gems, ‘Rockin’ Chair’. It’s ostensibly written (like most of the album) by Robbie Robertson, though other members of the band say they had a larger role in composing the songs than is indicated in the credits. Here’s a fascinating discussion between Levon Helm and producer John Simon on the recording of ‘Rocking Chair’, especially the vocals.
The song is the narrative of an old sailor longing to retire back to Virginia, to sit on the porch with his buddy Ragtime Willie. That’s all. Nothing too profound, you might say, and you’d be right, looking at it out of context. Set against the background of Vietnam and Altamont and “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away”, it spoke loudly and profoundly in its quiet simplicity: Hey. Stop. Look. Listen. Think. Embrace the world around you.
I think of The Band as the only rock group that achieves the internal richness of jazz. Rock is based on straightforward 4/4 tempo with the backbeat (1/2/3/4) conventionally driven into your ears by the drums (underscored by a bass and a rhythm guitar both playing the 4/4 rhythm). It’s a beat that makes you dance.
‘Rockin’ Chair’ employs in the verse an acoustic lead guitar, an acoustic rhythm guitar, a mandolin, an accordion, a fretless bass and Richard Manuals wonderful lead vocal. The chorus uses one acoustic guitar, the bass, the accordion and three voices in tight harmony. It should be noted that while their standard line-up was Robbie Robertson on guitar, Levon Helm on drums, Garth Hudson on Keyboards, Richard Manual on rhythm piano and Rick Danko on bass, they frequently rotated. Manual would play drums while Levon played mandolin, etc. On this album, they all played honky-tonk horns.
If you tap your foot, you’ll have no trouble following the 4/4 rhythm. Put on your headphones and try to find what instrument is giving you that rhythm. Guess what? In much of the song, none. The rhythm is a function of the interplay between the instruments. Like in fine jazz. Music that respects space, air, silence. It’s an implicit beat that allows you to suck on your corncob pipe and watch the sun set slowly over the Shenandoah Mountains.
It’s miraculous, it’s mature. There’s no other rock music like it.
Here’s a video of a live performance of the song that shows how great the original is, in contrast. Compare the three elegant acoustic guitar riffs following the chorus in the original to Robbie’s obvious electric guitar here. Compare Richard Manual’s lead vocal, so relaxed and authentic in the original, pushing just a bit too much here. Even Garth Hudson, who so rarely displays lapses in taste, tries too hard on the accordion in the live version.
The Band’s ‘Rockin’ Chair’ grew from ‘Rocking Chair’ by Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981), one of the great composers of Standards, including ‘Stardust,’ ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ ‘Up the Lazy River,’ ‘The Nearness of You,’ ‘Heart and Soul,’ and ‘Skylark.’ Here’s his 1930 version of ‘Rocking Chair’ with his 11-piece ‘orchestra’ including Bix Beiderbecke, cornet; Tommy Dorsey, trombone; Benny Goodman, reeds; Gene Krupa, drum. Here’s his 1956 version, to which The Band’s version is much more closely akin. Just for fun, here’s Eric Clapton’s version (that’s the same Eric Clapton who testifies that he disbanded Cream when he heard “Music from Big Pink”, so overwhelmed was he by the shift inwards it presented).
Lest you miss the connection, the last line of The Band’s song is a quote from Hoagy’s. The Band wasn’t touting its own originality. On the contrary, it was touting its debt to The Tradition.
“The Band” had a profound timeliness for 1969. As Robbie Robertson said, “It felt like a passport back to America for people who’d become so estranged from their own country that they felt like foreigners.” But it also has a purity and timelessness, a music that evokes respect for what went before, a modesty and gravitas and resonance rare in popular art. The album is a gift
Hang around, Willie boy, don’t you raise the sails anymore. It’s for sure, I’ve spent my whole life at sea, And I’m pushin’ age seventy three, Now there’s only one place that was meant for me.
Oh, to be home again down in Old Virginny With my very best friend, they call him ‘Ragtime Willie’. We’re gonna soothe away the rest of our years, We’re gonna put away all of our tears, That big rockin’ chair won’t go nowhere
Slow down, Willie boy, your heart’s gonna give right out on you. It’s true, and I believe I know what we should do Turn the stern and point to shore The seven seas won’t carry us no more
Hear the sound, Willie boy, the flyin’ Dutchman’s on the reef It’s my belief, we’ve used up all our time This hill’s to steep to climb And the days that remain ain’t worth a dime
I can hear somethin’ callin’ on me And you know where I want to be Oh Willie don’t you hear that sound Oh to be home again down in Old Virginny I just want to get my feet back on the ground Oh to be home again down in Old Virginny I’d love to see my very best friend They call him ‘Ragtime Willie’ I believe old rockin chair’s got me Oh to be home again…
But the music? It was so strange. Nary a backbeat on the entire LP. Nothing you could dance to. No electricity. It all sounded as though it had grown up through the ground. The instruments sounded as though they had been picked off a stalk and hand-fashioned. The songs talked about family, faith, and rural life. Talk about ‘Huh?’!
What is most remarkable to me today about “Music from Big Pink” in general and ‘Tears of Rage’ specifically is the way they assemble the music through mutually interdependent lines. Just like jazz at its best. Listen to the original version of ‘Tears of Rage’ from “The Basement Tapes.” Even wooden-fingered Jeff can play that guitar part, strum-two-three-four, strum-two three-four. Now listen to the opening of The Band’s ‘Tears of Rage’, the very opening of this miraculous album. What’s going on? Where is the rhythmic center? We don’t hit an identifiable marker until about the eighth bar—it’s just intertwining and floating, but all in tandem, a pas de cinq ballet of sounds. So much of what the Band invents can be found right here in this instrumental introduction—the ‘Curtis Mayfield’ guitar riff, the lead voice, but so much an integral part of the whole; the almost inaudible but crucial floating sustained organ; the interplay of the bass and the drum and the rhythm piano, together providing an implicit rhythm created as much by the gaps as by the beats, as intimate as lovers, as self-effacing as monks, as synchronized as guys who have been travelling together for six years.
