Too Much InformationThe Band's 'Music from Big Pink': Everything You Didn't Know
Jordan and Alex commemorate the recent loss of Robbie Robertson by taking a load off, Fanny, and revisiting The Band's iconic 1968 debut, 'Music from Big Pink.' They trace the group's path from Canadian bar-band hellraisers to woodsy Woodstock balladeers and the album that launched 1,000 Americana bands. Also featuring patented TMI detours that include Alex getting way too excited about Rick Danko's use of the fretless bass and a meditation on the very nature of what collaborative music making means in a capitalist society that demands having the least amount of people on the paperwork. And hey, why not let Alex get a little too angry at a recently deceased icon whose creative output he'd never be able to surpass if he worked ten lifetimes...as a treat? Also, Jordan brings up the Beach Boys at least twice! It's Too Much Information: Tears of Rage edition!
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Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We're your two Woodstock weirdos of wonderful facts. I'm Crazy Chester. No, that's not right. We're all the other dumb names that he uses on there.
I'm the Miss Moses of my Nusia, the bearded brethren of banality. There you go, the fannies of facts, and I will fix your rack if you'll take old Jake my dog anyway.
For those of you not steeped in the bizarre minutia of the band, we are here to talk about the band and their debut music from Big Pink. With the passing of iconic guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson, we thought this would be a great time to go ahead and take a look back at the debut album that shook the world. Maybe one of the most influential LPs of all time if you consider it's influence on Clapton and Harrison, and also the fact that, along with Like the Birds, it launched folk rock as a as a thing. It's like the template for folk rock and then onto that Americana as a genre.
You know. So here's a question for you. No, who do you request to know? I think that obviously Dylan influenced the band. Do you think the band influenced Dylan Moore? Yeah, that's a great question.
That's a great question. You know.
I'm not enough of a Dylan.
Scholar to know what he was putting into his stew around the same time, but I do know, at least according to Robbie Robertson, who God Rest his soul, everything he says must be taken with a carton of Malton's.
Salt because he's so early in this shoh, it's lp. I'm not I'm gonna bring it.
I'm going to keep back some of my Robbie bile out of respect for the dead. But he is inarguably one of rock's greatest hagiographers, that he and Jimmy Pek. Yes, he loves talking about himself and how much of a genius he is, and that is anathema to me.
So, but if you were as much of a genius as Robbie Robertson, wouldn't you not if.
I spent my entire life having Levon drama. I you know, I feel like there's with the other people in the band. I feel like that would keep you in check if you weren't Robbie Robertson. That's the level of self regarden ego you need to have to not be humbled by the rest of your band. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, so okay in either cause I just brushed up on Wheels on Fire and the Hoskins biography, which the barn Across the Great Deal, Arnie Hoskins biography, which we're gonna cite both of them in this. But I was just brushing up on it. And I can't remember if it's Robbie or Levon talking about, but like when they were hanging out with Bob Dylan, they were like trying to get him away from the speed ad old like beat poetry, you know, rock, electrified blue stuff, and they were like, no, listen to Percy Sledge, like listen to the impressions, Like so yeah, I do think there was some cross pollination happening there, But you know, I think it might have been inevitable because didn't he cut a bunch of stuff in Nashville, so he was probably getting for blonde blanc yeah at that Yeah, so around the same time he was pretty steeped in country music culture at least. So yeah, anyway, God, we're gonna there's so many I am even hesitant to wade into I was hesitant to even get into this because it's brushing up against Dylan and like Dylan fans or nuts, I say with.
Love black hole.
Yeah, you better say well here, yeah, so I will hear yeah, by which I mean like there are there are people who are as steeped in that as like biblical scholars, and I'm not.
So that's all conjecture on my point. On my end, I'm Jordan.
By the way, we didn't actually introduce ourselves. I'm Alex Higas Jordan run Talk. I keep forgetting to do this. I am at Alex underscore Higel on the sinking ship of Twitter. You are I am just my name, Jordan run Talk all one word? Are you in t A G H. Yeah, we've said that's really lovely comments on on Apple Podcasts whatever that app is called, saying we've been we haven't been able to find you on social media. I'm so sorry about that I know that we don't have a Twitter page for the show, which I've gotten a lot of flak for and I'm sorry about that. That's too late now, But we are there and and are are always down to to be chatty and always down for for show request ideas and all that kind of stuff. We love talking you. Thank you so much for reaching out. But yeah, this album, the band in general, I kind of came to relatively late. I mean, obviously I knew The Weight and some of their other big hits, notably this Wheel's on Fire thanks to its inclusion as the theme to my beloved brickcom Absolutely fat.
Yes, this is a great show. Such a weird song. How did that come to happen?
I have no clue because it's it's so it's the cover by Julie Driscoll. Okay, it's funny. Get a British psychrol.
It's funny because when, like in his later era, Rick Danko has talked about like, yeah, it's great to get a check for this Wheels on Fire every year from ab fab or from like the BBC or whoever it is.
Wait. I love the thought of Rick Danko watching ab Fab makes me so happy. Oh wow. But yeah, I band, I just I didn't connect with really until about five years ago when I was working on a fiftieth anniversary piece for this album for Rolling Stone, which I'm gonna be borrowing liberally from.
So I say, don't bother to call him out for self plagiarism. He's aware of it.
Yes, I don't know, probably because I mean You've said this about me a number of times. Is that I'm so steeped in the hole like Brian Wilson, Phil Specter broke pop world. So the whole down home basement approach is really anethetical to Stop, I Love at Sounds, Revolver, Odyssey, an Oracle. So it took me a little bit to warm to this. But in a way the band that was kind of the point. They were a reaction against that kind of stuff. Robbie Robertson would later say, we were rebelling against the rebellion. This is a great quote. If everybody was going east, then we were going west. And we never once discussed it. There was this kind of ingrained thing from all of us all along. We were kind of the rebels with an absolute cause, an instinct to separate ourselves from the Pack again, world class hagiographer, but hell of a quote machine. Yeah, and you know it's true. I mean, if you hold Big Pink up against everything else that came out around the same period in the summer of sixty eight, it's really stunning how separate it is. You've got the over driven amps of Cream and The Who and Jimmy Hendrix. The bands focused on clean acoustic instruments with very quiet arrangements that revealed musical intricacies and all the complexities of the lyrics. And then you've got bands like you know, the Beatles and the Stones doing their satanic Magici's Requests and Sergeant Pepper and the Kinks, and they're all doing this very English tinge psychedelic whimsy. The first Pink Floyd album, the band was so resolutely American, which is hilarious because three fifths were Canadian, just so steeped in country, blues, gospel and Western classical music. And you know, this is the eron. Brian Wilson and Pete Towns and the Beatles are doing the whole studio as an instrument thing. And the band were doing their demos in a basement in upstate New York, I mean, drawing on their years on the road to create musical telepathy of the highest order. And that's not even getting into the songs. And I think my favorite quote about the music on Big Pink comes from its producer John Simon, who described the songs in a nineteen ninety three interview as quote more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists. And I just think that's amazing. I like, it's perfect.
Yeah. I mean I also came to them relatively late. I like you, I grew up reading Rolling Stone and I would always just see their name and and then like the last Waltz and I was just like, no, I have Dead Kennedy's to listen to. Like, I'm not listening to a band. Honestly, the name did half of it. I was like, what the is this? And it was like that and the the Yeah. I was like, I don't need your gimme, I don't, Yeah, come on, yeah, this is obnoxious. But then I would go and listen to a band called the Crucifix.
Uh yeah.
And then this is so funny because like that, you know, eighteen months or whatever I spent working at a Blockbuster in Fairfax, Virginia when I was at college. Were so formative to me because I saw so many great movies. And that's where I saw The Last Waltz. I finally pulled it off the shelf and brought it home and was blown away. It is one of the greatest. I think it's better than Stop Making Sense.
I wow, Yeah, I mean Stop Making Sense is maybe better as like a piece of art, but Last Waltz is a better band portrait and a better film.
Like you get so much of their personality, and you get so much of like it's just like a world that you're immediately like, I want to live there. I want to crawl into that and live there. And they rotoscoped a coke booger out of Neil Young's nose. You just don't get that with Stop Making Sense anyway. So I finally watched that. We got that in every contractually obligated to do it every episode. Yeah, And so I went backwards from there. So I didn't even get to Big Pink until like much later with that, and you know, having started with the live stuff and then some of the seventies stuff like Cahoots and Islands and Stage Fright, it sounds like primitive to me, we were talking about this before we started recording, but like the Brown Album, to me, the self titled on the second album is one of my favorite records of all time, and it just has it. I think really marries the kind of basement clubhouse literal clubhouse, poolhouse ambiance that they were shooting for with Big Pink, with just a much clearer vision of their musicality. You can just hear everything better. There's kind of this like miasma swirliness to Big Pink, but it's so God. It's that basement tapes are like the shots heard around the world, is like launching, like low fi recordings and like Murky Americana. As genres, you know that they are just like I don't know, dude, are they more influent? I think they're more influential than some of the Beatles records because like, I don't think you can the Beatles records are like part of the monoculture. But I don't know how many bands you can directly point to and be like, or genres that you can directly point to and be like they are doing Abbey Road, they are doing the White Album, they are doing I mean you can you can say, oh, big star power pop like you can say that, but like you get modern folk rock and Americana and so many branches of what is considered modern country. You get that from basement tapes and big Pink. I agree with you to a point. I don't know if i'd go that far.
I would say that it's probably as influential as some of the Beatles records because it was a reaction to what the Beatles would do in terms of using all the technology that the studio offered to make these new sounds that couldn't be played live. I think maybe that's the point.
Well, yeah, sure, but I mean then you've got a factor in the fact that Harrison and Clapton's next influential records were directly as a result of their love of the band, So that might edge them over to me. Anyway, That's neither here nor there. This episode is going to be like five hours long, and you have to edit it on a plane ride. From the album's roots in Bob Dylan's motorcycle Crash, to the bitter rivalry at the heart of the strongest creative voices in the band, to the extreme fandom that they picked up from two of the biggest British rock stars at the time. Here's everything you didn't know about Music from Big Pink.
The story of Music from Big Pink really begins the moment that Bob Dylan lost control of his Triumph Tiger one hundred motorcycle while riding through the outskirts of Woodstock, New York, on July twenty ninth, nineteen sixty six. All upcoming concert dates were canceled as he recovered from his injuries. That was nearby home. At least that's the official version. That's what they want you to think. They don't want you to know. There are some who believe that this crash was just a cover story put around to do one of the follow Either allow Dylan to detox from pills or heroin, or he just simply needed a break after years of exhaustive toying around the world, and a crash was a good cover story to take some time off. Whatever the case, Dylan's professional pause put his backing band into a state of limbo. Yeah.
I mean, this whole timeline is well trodden and originally we didn't have this in here, but it's something to bear in mind. The short story of The band's bio is that they were put together in Canada by an Arkansas singer and hell raiser by the name of Ronnie Hawkins, who miraculously died last year, just last year. I mean, like outlived many of the band and most of his peers.
But he didn't get to experience Barbenheimer. I wonder what he would have said. Do you think he would have seen Loppenheimer or Barbie first? Oh? Great question. Do you think the man who did Hoodie love with? I?
Yeah, you know, Ronnie Hawkins is so fascinating anyway, So he was playing. He was sort of a rockabilly singer, right, and he put them together from their assorted other bands in Toronto somewhere in Canada, and their home base was kind of Toronto. And it's really funny because in this Wheels on Fire, Levon talks about like, oh yeah, by like the the you know, the sixties. The kind of like rockabilly stuff that we were playing was almost out of fashion in the States, but in Canada, where they're five years behind, we were hot. So but they ground it out. They were not only in the US Chitlin circuit, like the kind of South pre Highway roadhouse bar scene, but they were also in the Canadian equivalent of that, which is, you know, the same environs, but populated by more wild people and also cold, the Tim Horton circuit, and Dylan came across them via Blue singer John Hammond Junior, who recorded with drummer vocalist Icon Levon, Helm, keyboardist Wizard Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson on his vanguard album So Many Roads, and then Bob Bob Dylan invited Helm and Robertson to join his backing band, and then after on the sixty six tour, right, I think it.
Was sixty six tour. Oh, we're going to get some notes for this. I'm pretty sure they came on on the UK tour, Yeah, I think so. It was the Judas to.
Yes, Yes, the tour when he went electric and people the British didn't appreciate that, but only after two shows they told him we'll only keep doing the if you bring on the other guys in the band pianist singer Richard Manuel and bassist vocalist Rick Danko.
I love both Levon and Robbie would say that each was the one who told Dylan, you either take all of us or none of us.
It was definitely Levon. Robbie would have said, Okay, you can take me, that's fine.
How much in this episode are we going to get into the Robbie's thorny legacy and the Robbie versus Levon? Uh oh, we'll get into it. Okay, all right, good.
I mean, look, I'm not gonna shot on him too much. But like I am a firm believer in the notion that loving something means seeing it warts and all, especially when it comes to art and artists, and you absolutely cannot talk about the band without talking about their dissolution and without talking about Levon versus Robbie so.
And which basically boils down to what it means to write a song.
Yes, yeah, yeah, which is why it's so endlessly fast to me in a way that like a lot of band rivalries aren't, because it comes a lot of band rivalries come down to like hey you slept with my wife or I just don't like your face, But this one truly gets at the heart of what it means to be in a collective, creative unit, and that is just endlessly fascinating to me.
I've heard a bit about music rivalries. Well, by the time a Dylan's motorcycle accident, Levon had left the band. He preferred to go work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico rather than endure the booze that Dylan and the Hawks were getting from people who didn't appreciate Dylan's move into the electric realm.
He saw a dude get hit in the face by a crane hook on that oil on that oil rig because the winds were choppy that day, and he talks about he was like, and after they, you know, airlifted that guy off, I looked over and saw the body bags hanging on the wall. It's like, holy shit, that is so metal that he went and did that. That's like, that's like a Bruce Springsteen song. Irl. You know, it's even funnier how he got there, because I was just I don't know, those wheels on fire. Well, so he basically went and spent all of his money from that tour in Florida, ran out of money. And did you know about like this thing. I didn't know that. In the middle of the century, they had what was called driveaway cars, where basically a car needed to get to another city, so you could go to the dealership and be like or whoever and be like, oh, I'll drive it there, and they'd be like, Okay, here's the car. And so he was flat broke in Florida and got a drive away car and drove it to New Orleans and then from there went into the Gulf of Mexico where he almost watched a man die and then proceeded to create some of the most immortal music of all time.
For years, when you were unhappy at your job, he used to always tell me that you were going to go work on an oil rig. And it's a long time until I realized what the reference was. By the way, this was in August of nineteen sixty five that Levon went off, So this was in They started with him in the summer of sixty five tour right after he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in sixty five, So just want to get the timeline right on that. And he was way from the bands for two years. He worked on an oil rig for two years. Almost that's insane.
God love him, but.
Honestly, Levon going to work in the oil rigs started to kind of look like a good career move after Dylan's accident. As far as the rest of the bands were concerned, Rick Danko said in Levan's memoir This Wheel's on Fire, we didn't know what to do. We were road musicians without a road to go on. We still wanted to record, so we started looking for a place to rehearse some music. And this brings us to one of the most common enemies of musicians, aside from David Geffen and Mike Love and who else? Who else is an enemy of musicians? Katzenberg doesn't count copyright law.
Oh yeah, the Marvin Gaye State drink tickets sweetwater.
Tell us which enemy of musicians we're talking about, Heigel, we were talking about New York real estate. Baby take us there.
Well, this must have been outrageously affordable by New York standards. I mean, I think in the Velvet Stock that came out two years ago, leu Read and John Kell's New York City apartment was like sixty dollars a month. Anyway, it was too expensive for the band to hang out in New York City. I think they were staying in the Chelsea actually time, but they were on retainer from Albert Grossman and Dylan, so they decided to move to Woodstock in the rural cat Skills in upstate New York, and Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman lived there in addition to a couple of other members of the New York City music steam. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary was their connection to the place. He had a family cottage there. I think it was his aunts that he used to go and visit growing up. And he was the first person who brought Rick Danko and Richard Manuel upstate in February of nineteen sixty seven to work on this film document. There's all of these there's these cizar counterculture films. Tarantulo was one of them, right, Tarantula, eat this document, Eat the document. There's another one you are which you eat?
I think?
And yeah, it's all this thing of like I blame Andy Warhol that all these musicians like saw all these experimental Warhol films in the mid sixties and be like, I can do that. That's how you get the Monkeys film among the Rules.
Have you ever seen head? I haven't.
But Robbie Robertson had also gone up there to help Dylan and a filmmaker named Howard Ulk assemble eat the document, which was about the sixty six tour. The band, who had been on the road for most of the decade, fell in love with the slower pace and the unspoiled forests, the beautiful scenic mountain view. Garth Hudson, who I don't think ever left after the last Waltz and a couple of doors. I think he's just been esconced in his Woodstock mansion for like two to three decades now.
I think his beard attached to the moss and so he's just part of the mountain.
He told Barney Hoskins in the band Bio Across the Great Divide. It couldn't have been a better place. There was a lot of magic in Woodstock. Everywhere you went. The legends were reflected in the names of the places and the streets. War Worsting, Ohio, Bearsville Flats.
God Blessed Garth Huts and a beautiful grandfather. Twilight of a man, a gentle soul. I love him. Rick Danko was enlisted to find a suitable clubhouse for the bands when they decided to make the move up the Woodstock and he found the perfect place at twenty one eighty eight Stole Road in Sogerty's. It was a boxy, split level home that looked like it had been trucked in from the suburbs. The bright salmon colored paint jobs supposedly earned the drisive nickname from locals Big Pink, which is funny to me because it's not that big, and it's also not something that can really be seen from the roads, so I think that's all apocryphal.
It's funny how how out of place it looks, because you hear you hear the songs and you see sech stuff happened. Yeah, you hear some of the stuff about woodstock and you're like, oh, this looks like a big slate a slate fronted mansion or something. And it's like got gross siding, it's got like a drive in garage.
It's just an ugly house. Yes, and it can be yours for like seven hundred dollars a night on Verbo. I believe, I can't believe we didn't do that. I was Higo and I for for new listeners who don't know we're in a we're in a band for a number of years together. I was in Heigel's band, and I was trying to get a stick a band trip up there and rent it all together, but we probably couldn't afford it.
I was going to say, was not in the budget for forty dollars a night in Brooklyn's finest dive bars.
No, and you couldn't. You can't go into the basement there, which, as we'll talk about in a moment, is one of the most of the point. I know. Yeah, they don't let you go in the basement.
It's like not being able to go into the basement of the Buffalo bill House, which we've also talked about. We should be getting kickbacks from these sons of bitches.
Yeah, yeah, he should be. Absolutely should, or at least a free stay, which I would happily take from the guy who runs the Airbnb of the Buffalo bill House from Sounds of the Lambs or whoever has Big Pink on Verbo. Yeah. But, as you probably have guessed given our not so flattering description, Big Pink was not especially luxurious. But despite its aesthetic shortcomings, the property boasted hundreds of acres of woods and fields, views of overlook Mountain, a pond, four bedrooms, a simple kitchen, dining room, and a living room furnished with nick knacks and what else.
Heigel Well, apparently a Neon beer sign of an unspecified brand, which Levon said Richard Manuel quote liberated from a local tavern.
All this was theirs for just one hundred and twenty five dollars a month. So Garth, Richard, and Rick Danko moved into Big Pink in the spring of nineteen sixty seven, while Robbie Robertson found his own home bedrooms there, right, I don't know, I find that strange that already then he was found in his own place.
Well, he moved in with his girlfriend at the time, so understanding, Well the other ones, I don't think we're shacked up at that time. I think they met girlfriends or developed relationships in in Big Pink. Leave them with Libby Titus and.
Richard was married with like a model. I think, hell yeah he was. Danko was the cutest though. Danko was the heart throb in the band.
Oh yeah, especially in this era when he had the little mustache and.
Yeah, oh yeah, he looks just like what the hell's his name? Mandalorian?
Oh yeah, Pedro Pascal.
Yeah, just like them. Yeah right, yeah, and so their homie routine at Big Pink, it's like something that Again, not to keep harping on the monkeys, but it seems like something of a monkey's episode. Rick Danko described it thus in this Wheels on Fire, Richard did all the cooking, garth, washed all the clothes. He didn't trust anyone else to do them because he wanted them clean. And I took the garbage to the dump personally and kept the fireplace going with split logs.
It's like cute, yeah, I and we're gonna do little sidebars on the different members of the band because we just because why not?
I have to.
Rick Danko is incredible. I was thinking about how to articulate this earlier. The band as a musical unit is so fascinating to me because they're like a collage or like a Sarah painting. Like the closer you get and start zooming in on what each one of them is doing, it's harder to identify what makes it so cool. And I say this as someone who is googled Rick Danko bass and Levon Helm drums like way too much. I mean with Robbie, there's different things you can point to. You can be like, oh, well, you know, he's got the pinch harmonics, he's got the you know, the the tremolo picking, like he's got these different guitar licks and everything. But like the way that the rhythm section works and the way that Richard plays rhythm piano and all of garth additional textures is all so unique and so fascinating. But it's hard to point to their different things that they're doing specifically, So I've endeavored to do exactly that. Rick Danko is one of the first people to actually play fretless in a rock band context, and he played an Ampeg fretless bass. Ampeg was one of the first commercial makers of fretless basses, and I think they send him some stuff because you can see him first. You can see pictures of him playing a baby bass, which is a weird hybrid upright electric model that they produced, and an electric fretless and this is years before fretless broke through with Jocko Pastoriusho's probably the most famous bass player of the twentieth century. He's a guy who brought legitimized the electric bass as a jazz instrument. Essentially but you can hear Rick playing fretless, and because he started on upright, he has this fantastic sense of pitch. But what he does is he does a lot of glissandos or slides into a note, by which I mean he if he's going to land on a D, he will slide into it from a C or a C sharp from a half or a whole step below. But the thing that's great about what he does is that he never not never, but he rarely lands on that target note on the beat. He starts his slide on the beat that he's supposed to land on, so that the actual target note is delayed ever so slightly, and it contributes to this really like loose but tight sense of their groove. And especially in these live records like the Academy of Music shows, they sound like a.
Freight train man.
It is so out of control but still so zoned in because they're like gacked up. Wake of the Flood is another great one that has like just some of the best live rock band interplay, and he is such a great part of it, especially while singing too, and he's great at varying the length of his note to get different feels and work with with Levon for the rhythmic feel of the song, and also doing all of this while singing, and also doing all of this while switching back and forth between pick and fingerstyle. I mean, he's just I don't think he gets really mentioned enough as some.
Of the flashier guys of the period.
But he's absolutely one of the greatest bassists of the era, and again the fact that he was also a singer, a great singer. He's it's really funny because he has he often sings close to the same register that Richard does, and the identifying how you can tell one of them apart is that Rick Danko had asthma when he was a kid, so he always has this wheeze in his vocals, so even when they're singing in the same register, you can kind of hear this like gasping for air, which is why he sound it's so endearing and why he has this fantastically sincere quality of his voice. You know, when you think crazy chest Or followed me like, it's because he literally can't get enough air in his lungs and it's just uugh love him.
So little Blink Win eighty two right there, though, Spiders I think we've had, I think before we started rolling tape long passionate discussions about King Harvest. And I think that's a great example of his bass playing where he slides into it on all those Yeah, it's just so swampy and.
He's fast too, man Like there's live there's live stuff where he's playing some fills that are just like what the is this? Like just again, dude, like sixteen years on the road, And I think the thing when people hear that they were on the road for sixteen years, do you think of like modern bands where you're.
Like, okay, forty nights a set, no false.
From like the fifties to the mid sixties, if you were banned, that was three hours a night was your set and you would place two sets. So that's like chops and material and just like like ten thousand hours. He probably had ten hours before he could drink anyway. And also we have to mention Hamlet, Hamlet the Dog. If you're a nerd like we are, you've definitely seen a big old cute dog in basement tapes and band photos and that is Hamlet, who is gifted to Rick Danko because Bob Dylan couldn't handle him in this Wheels on Fire. Danko explains, Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan had paid about a grand apiece or ten thousand dollars in today money for these pedigree German dogs that had come from the most illustrious bloodlines in the world. But something went wrong. Hamlet was more like a standard poodle mix than Hamlet was more like a standard poodle mix with a German shepherd and giant short haired terrier. Bob is having a.
Hard time in history. Heard that in the context of something went wrong. Yeah, Hamlet was a poodle mix.
Bob was having a hard time with the dog. One day when I was over at his house. The dog was bigger than Bob, and Bob I've already had a Saint Bernard pulling him around. I stayed out of that one, but Hamlet and Bob were having some trouble. Bob said, please, Rick, take this dog back to the house with you. I insist. I didn't want anything bad to happen, and Bob had kicked Hamlet out of the house so he was living outside. So I took him back to Big Pink. He slept on the carpet by the stove through most of the basement tapes music and most of the Big Pink rehearsals as well. That dog heard a lot of music.
This brings us to Big Pink's most famous feature, It's basement. Robbie Robertson wrote in his twenty sixteen memoir testimony, that was my focus turning that subterranean space into what we'd needed all along. The goal was to use whatever gear we could from our live show to create a setup that would let us discover our own musical path. So they began to gather equipment for a home studio facility, but the response from a technologically savvy friend royally bummed them out. According to Robbie, this unnamed friend surveyed the scene and said, well, this is a disaster. This is the worst situation. You have a cement floor, you have cinderblock walls, you have a big metal furnace in here. There are all these things that you can't have if you're trying to record something, even if you're just recording it for your own information, you can't do this. It won't work. You'll listen to it and you'll be depressed. Your music will sound so bad that you'll never want to record again. But by this point they had already signed the lease on Big Pink, so they were sort of stuck with it. So they threw up some Mourlko microphones, two l Tech mixers, and a quarter inch AMPEC four hundred tape recorder and more or less cross their fingers. Bob Dylan, who was still sort of obstensibly their boss, would sometimes stop by and together they workshop new music, and within a year they would demo. The number I've seen quoted is over one hundred songs which would endlessly be bootlegged as the basement tapes, and these demos would prove to be the seas of music from Big Pink.
Yeah, they did this by playing super quietly. The whole thing about them and their studio sound at this time was like the guitar solo in King Harvest is recorded with the amp set on one, which is insane because he does these pinch harmonics on it, which are traditionally something that you really only like you get speaking with a lot of volume and distortion. But he got those from Roy Buchanan. I think I remember him saying in an interview it was a fantastic blues guitarist yet another tragic figure as well. But yeah, they played everything really really quietly, and a lot of that was because they didn't have a pa down there, and they were doing all these harmonies and vocal parts, so it was all volume and dynamics, you know, that's what carries into the studio.
Yes, and contrary to its name and it's sort of romantic reputation, music from Big Pink wasn't actually recorded at Big Pink, which I was kind of depressed to learn that. I admit it's a rock myth that I very desperately want to believe. Neither were a lot of the basement tapes either, they weren't recorded in the Big Pink basement. The timeline for these sort of ad hoc sessions are a little hazy, but it's generally agreed that they began at Dylan's house in nearby Birdcliff before shifting to the basement of Big Pink in the summer of sixty seven, and then when Levon Helm returned to the bands after his two year oil rig hiatus in October of sixty seven, Big Pink began to feel a little cramped and to remedy this, Levon and Rick Danko moved into a nearby home on Wittenberg Road, which became the new center of recording operations. Well, Garth Hutsuit and Richard Manuel shacked up at a place on Ohio Mountain Road, and Robbie stayed at his own place with his girlfriend soon to be wife, Dominique. I think this means that they moved out of Big Pink at the fall of sixty seven, if I'm understanding that correctly.
Yeah, the official Basement Tapes release I think was pretty controversial because it's a lot of post studio overdubs and stuff. The basement tape it's the raw.
Yeah. No, But these basement tapes, these were just the demos. The tracks themselves for music from Big Pink were recorded in extremely professional studios in New York and Los Angeles, which again I find very disappointing. This was largely thanks to manager Albert Grossman, who was Bob Dylan's manager who then became the band's manager, and he got them a deal with Capitol Records.
One of the worst bastards in rock music is here.
I guess. I've been reading a lot about Alan Klin this afternoon, so.
Well, grading on a Curve. But yeah, I've heard I've heard not good things about him. I mean a lot of people basically peg Robbie's sort of dissolution into egomania on hanging out with Dylan and specifically Grossman, there was I forget it was maybe their first manager. I forget the guy's name, but he's talking in across the Great Divide where he was like, Yeah, Robbie got a lot more standoffish once he started really growing out with Albert and Dylan, And at one point he turned to me unprompted and was like, you never liked me as much as you liked Levon, didn't you. It's just like, okay, Robbie.
It seemed like he had a very good gift for convincing very cool people that he was also cool, from Ronnie Hawkins to Bob Dylan, the Martin Scorsese. Yeah, very very good at that, just saying, just saying. But anyway, this bastard, Albert Grossman got the band the deal with cal and I say that with love, got the band the deal with Capitol Records, and he teamed them up with producer John Simon, who is best known to me for recording cheap tricks with Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin doing that amazing version a Piece of My Heart around the same time that he was recording music from Big Pink. Yeah.
Simon's really cool. He grew up playing fiddle in piano from the age of four in Connecticut, was writing his own songs before he was ten. He wrote a couple of musicals in high school and then three more while at Prince. He joined Columbia as a trainee producer. After he graduated, assisted on a bunch of stuff and then got his first pop success with the Red Rubber Ball by Circle in nineteen sixty six, written by.
A young Paul Simon and the band Circle spelled cyr kl E was named by John Lemon Awful.
And John Simon was also involved with the U Are You Eat project, which is Peter Yarrow and the aforementioned Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul Mari and Barry Feinstein, and that was how he was introduced to the band. He was a super talented piano player. I think he tried to join the band at one point and they were like, keyboards are the thing we have enough of. But he also played horn. He plays baritone sacks in that breakdown and chest Fever. But he also had never played the tuba before, and when they did rag MoMA Rag, because Danko's playing fiddle and not bass, he picked up a tuba and did the bassline for Ragmama Rag, which is wild to me. Can you imagine looking at a tuba and being like, I can play that. It's probably a marching tuba or a susophone, but yet just looking at it and being like, yeah, yeah, I got that, and then playing like a competent bassline on it.
Insane.
John Simon actually met Robbie Robertson when he was working on an album by iconic jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Charles Lloyd started in Cannonball Aderley's band. Keith Jarrett got his start playing with Charles Lloyd. Charles Lloyd was one of the jazzers who was really beloved by the hippies. I think he played at Monterey and some stuff, and yeah, they were he was working on a session with them and they were like, yeah, this guy, Robbie Robertson's gonna come by and hang out. That was how he met him, and the rest is history. And then another great quote from Across the Great Divide. When they were making the second album, Robbie Robertson was like, I'm gonna watch you do this so that we don't have to hire you again. No, he didn't, because Garth is the one who engineered the basement tapes, recorded all the basement tapes. Garth was the gearhead in the band, and uh yeah, and so Robbie wanted to start doing it himself. So he just learned everything he could from John Simon and then summarily never called him again, which, as we will see, is a theme.
I wrote a musical in high school. Oh yeah, I did. Yeah, it's called Happy ever After. It was about a good, honest man who gets sent to hell and a wacky afterlife mix up and he falls in love with a demonus whose only sin was she never loved You know.
That would probably get greenlit. That sounds like a Pixar movie at this point.
That's good. Yeah, yeah, I can't write music, so I borrowed melodies from other songs and wrote my own lyrics to it.
Hey, if you want to scab right now, there's a strike, we'll do it. I don't give a fuck. I have nothing left, I have no morals left.
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So sessions for music from Big Pink began at the very famous and our Studio A in New York City, which is this born shaped ten thousand square foot facility on the seventh floor of a building on Seventh Avenue. For some reason, it being I can't imagine, just like making all that soulful music in was essentially a skyscraper.
It's part of the reason it doesn't. I don't like the sound of it.
Yeah, no fair. The session started in January nineteen sixty eight, and John Simon, the producer, asked the band how they wanted the music to sound, and Robbie Robertson told them just like it did in the basement. And this sent the engineers into something of a tizzy because it quickly became apparent that traditional studio configurations with each member cordoned off with sound baffles to prevent leakage, which is how you make records, wasn't going to work. After months of these guys playing eye to eye in a cinder block basement and Robbie recalled telling the engineers, we can't do this. We got to get into a circle like the basin. We have to play to one another. We're speaking the language. This doesn't work. And the technicians were really skeptical, but the bands were thrilled by the fruits of these early sessions in New York, which yielded tears of rage, We Can Talk, chest Fever, and the Weight. I remember there was a great description of the way the vocals in We Can Talk were done was like a really great pickup basketball team passed the ball to one another. They all just trade lines seamlessly, like there's nothing phone. Because you know, that could sound really phony when like each member of man sings a line or something and just really grating and cute. But there's something so cool about how they do that in that track. I love that song.
I think that's the one that has uh yeah, one voice for all echoing along the hall.
Mm hmmm, it's so good. Yeah.
Robbie's lyrics are not like tremendous, but he'll knock him out of the park sometimes.
I get the job done. Yeah, we'll talk more about that. Executives a Capital who signed the band in early February nineteen sixty eight, were so pleased that they actually sent the band to Los Angeles to take full advantage of the state of the art eight tracks studio. That's hilarious that that was state of the art located at the famous Capitol Tower headquarters on Vine Street. I imagine was that the same studio that Like Sinatra and that King cole A those guys were recorded. Wow, that's nuts to think that that music was made, more like Stardust was recorded. That's crazy. And yeah, the album was mostly completed in La at Capitol Studios, though the group would make a short excursion to gold Star Studios, where I'm legally obligated to mention. Phil Spector pioneered his Wall of Sound with the Ronets and the Crystals and all of those great groups, and Brian Wilson recorded a lot of his best Beach Boys tracks. You a Beach Boys fan A little bit, Okay, I didn't know that about you.
I really I.
Would love the tally of like your Beach Boys mentions the seven things I'm interested in and how many times I mentioned them in each of the one hundred and twenty something episodes. Yea, and while we're talking about the band's deal with Capital, we have to talk about the name of the band. The band, Higel, do you want to talk about the band's name.
I would just paraphrase the entirety of Richard Manuel's speech in Last Waltz and he's like, well, first, we want to call ourselves the Crackers. They performed as the Hawks since nineteen sixty because Ronnie Hawkins' name, but eight years later it was a little dated, primarily because they were no longer backing Ronnie Hawkins, but also by nineteen sixty eight, hawk had come into vogue as a term for the pro war contingent of the US. You know, hawks and doves, doves, one piece, blah blah blah uh. Bad way to market a rock band in the sixties, as it turns out, so they needed a new name, and while up in Woodstock that was not really an issue because they were the only band that was there, literally, and they all kind of talk about in Last Waltz and in the different books. They just talk about everybody being like, oh, that's Dylan's band. They're with the band, they're the band, even to the point where they would be like, I'm short on I'm short on cash for this grocery store transaction. And they'd be like yes, and they're they're, they're they're in the band, send the build a Dylan or whatever. But when they were getting signed, they needed a name because you'd need one to put out a record, or maybe you don't, as it turns out, and in the last Walt Richard Manuel talks about he's like the marshmallow overcoats the chocolates way.
I love your Richard Manuel impression he has.
He is the best in that movie. It's so sad because he was. I think it's I think at that point he was drinking like a bottle of Grand Marnier a.
Day, uh, and also more than that and also like ghacked up.
I think it's in Across the Great Divide where they talk about like during the when they were making the second album, the like Absolute Squalor, he was living in where they like went to go pick him up into the apartment or whatever, and it was like it was littered with Grand Marnier bottles and the only food he was eating were steaks that he cooked with an iron, clothes iron, and his radiator. A hell of a hell of a voice, though.
I have I have a when the they were living out in California at Shangri Law, the famous Ballibuu studio that Rick Rubin no owns. I think Richard Manuel was living in like a bungalow down the hill that had formerly been the stables for the horse that played Mister Ed and I guess they converted it into some kind of like small shack and he lived there. And supposedly when they were cleaning out the place after he moved out, in like seventy six seventy seven, they found I have a quote for this from I can cite this somewhere two thousand empty bottles of Grand Marnier. That's a lot of Grand Marnier. Good lord.
Anyway, Robbie Robertson counted with the jokey suggestion the royal Canadians except for Levon.
That's good. I like that. Everybody loves a Guy Lombardo joke, do they I do, okay, almost as much as I love a joke.
Levon himself offered the Crackers, which was a name that they joked about when they were backing Bob for his comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in January of sixty eight, but Levon tried to justify it to Capitol Records by saying Crackers were poor Southern white folks, and far as I was concerned that was the music we were doing, I voted to call the band the Crackers and never regretted it. That's in this Wheels on Fire, and they, the Capitol Records was getting ready to go with it. They thought it was a like Ritz Crackers reference or like Saltines. They were like, that's cute, Robbie wrote in his memoir Testimony. They didn't realize we meant uneducated country, bigoted, southern white trash. And so the name on the Capitol Artist Declaration contract form reads group performing as the Crackers.
Ah.
According to Levon, someone at Capitol eventually wised up to the real meaning, writing in his book, when the album was eventually released on July first, nineteen sixty eight, we were shocked to find it credited not to the Crackers, but to a group called it the band. Well, it was us, That's what Woodstock people called us locally, and the people on the other side of the desk at Capitol didn't want to release an now called music from Big Pink by the Crackers. They just went and changed our name. But Robbie, as is his wont, has reverse engineered the explanation in various accounts and various tellings over the years. He told Rollingstone the band story about Woodstock, everyone just called them the band. But earlier than this, in September sixty eight interview with an outlet called The I, he insisted that the band didn't have a name. He said, one thing I'd like to clear up. We have no name for the group. We're not interested in doing record promotion or going on Johnny Carson to plug the LP. The name of the group is just how Christian names. The only reason the LP is by the band is so they can file it in the record stores. And also that's the way we're known to our friends and neighbors in across the Great Divide. Barney Hoskins right. Indeed, when The Weight was released as a single in September, many reviewers listed the five names as the name of the band. One British writer complained, this is even worse than Dave, d Dozy, Beekey, Mick and Titch. I don't know what that means.
They were a pop group and instead of having a name, they just add everybody's name in the band, and they recorded in Studio two at Abby Road, where the Beatles recorded. I just read a reference to that today.
Well, Promo pictures did in fact have the all five members named out, Yes, Jamie, Robert Robertson, Rick Danka Richard, Manuel, Garth Hudson leave On Helm in larger letters than it reads, better known as the band.
So that's fun. What do you think was the real explanation. Did you think that they really wanted to be known as the Crackers and the record company changed it, or do you think that they just went with the band on purpose?
Yeah?
I do think that that was probably someone at Capital caught up to them, But I think it probably the paperwork came through to Albert Grossman and Robbie Robertson and he was like, okay.
And now we got to talk about the standout track on the album, The Wait, the standout track of the band's entire cannon really, and as with many classic things we discussed on the show, nobody recognized it for what it was and it was very nearly given the acts. Robbie Robinson wrote the song soon after Levon Helm rejoined the band in October of nineteen sixty seven, supposedly as a way to give him something that suited his distinctive vocal style. Robbie told Uncut every time I read Robbie's quotes, I want to do his like his voice, a very distinctive way of telling stories.
We didn't know what we were doing, but from the classic albums thing here.
Please please read this quote, read the rest of them. No, don't put his words in my mouth. I thought, geez, I want to write a song that Levon can sing better than anybody, because I know his abilities. He was my closest friend, and I wanted to do something really special for him.
Oh, cutting him into the publishing rights probably would have been nicer.
Here you highlighted this, You read the rest of this well.
According to Laura, Robbie was in his music workshop when he noticed a late inside the soundhole of his Martin D twenty eight guitar, reading Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the location of the guitar factory. He was intrigued by the juxtaposition of his biblical name and Heartland Americana, which is more or less the band's whole.
Bit kind of the bit.
Robbie has said that the song borrowed less from the Bible and more from the films of Spanish director Lewis Bunell. Intriguingly, one of my favorite bits in Across the Great Divide is when Robbie and Martin Scorsese are both extremely divorced and extremely doing a lot of cocaine and living in a mansion together watching nineteen twenties and thirties Spanish surrealism films until like six am with blackout, curtains drawn. And that's the reason why Robbie is so heavily focused, and that, you know, and why has he's gone on to work on all these Scorsese music, not I might add, composing that much like Randy Newman, but just supervising, which is basically playlist selecting.
Anyway.
But yeah, it's really funny to me because there's no way he would have name checked that without someone like Dylan guiding him to new heights of pretentiousness. Anyway, he said, the people in the song were trying to be good, and it's impossible to be good. Bunelle used surreal imagery in his films to offer critiques of organized religion. In movies like Verded Diana and Nazaren. Neither of us have seen these movies. No, absolutely not No. So Robbie began writing a song about a man who becomes bogged down with favors for other people, most of whom were actual figures from the band's past. Anna Lee was Helm's friend. Annalie Amsden Carmen was another person he knew from his hometown of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.
Is that correctly? If so? Yeah, that's so good as nut Bush, Arkansas or Nutbush, Tennessee.
My favorite is Bill Withers slab Fork, West Virginia.
Oh, that's incredible. That's incredible.
Helm would later say that Crazy Chester was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips, kind of walked around town to help keep the peace.
If you follow me. I did until he said if you follow me, And now I think there's some meaning that I don't know for keeping the peace.
Yeah. Man, all of Levone's quotes are so good. You've seen am in it for my health. When he talks about he's talking about he's like super high and talking about how tripped out platypuses are. He's like they got a vamous spur on there.
Those some bitches will stick you. Yeah.
So all of these characters got mixed into Robertson's story, which he wrote in a single city. He wrote his memoir testimony the following day. I played the tune for the guys to see if it might be a contender. They reacted very strongly to the song's possibilities, but I mostly thought of it as a fallback tune in case one of the other songs didn't work out. They only attempted it in the studio at the end of a session for something else. They attempted a bunch of different arrangements of the past, and it didn't really stick out until Garth actually switched over from organ to piano and plays those that amazing octave octave line, sort of barrelhouse piano style that he would. Another great part from the classic album's documentaries when Levon pulls up his soloed Garth's solo piano track from I Think It's Rag Mahma Rag and just pulls the faders all the way up in the end and he his brother Garth, Ain't it easy when you know how the man was a Southern aphorism machine. Robbie later said, we recorded it and it wasn't until we listened back to it that we realized, holy shit, this song's really got something. I think the best explanation that I've heard for this song is actually in this Wheel's on Fire, where Levon quotes Robbie is saying, it's a song about the impossibility of sainthood, which is such a better, shorter way of saying all that I just said. Anyway, the song's famous stacked call and response vocals and the chorus where deliberate nod to the staple singers and this reference. Yeah, and this would be made literal in the last Waltz when they performed the song with the staple singers. One of the best musical performances ever committed to film. So much to love there, my person. My favorite part is at the end when Mavis does this incredible I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. She does this incredible like run. At the end, they land on this harmony and just before it fades to black, you just hear her go beautiful.
It's like, yeah, it was. Do you think she was nervous because then she had a big crush on Bob Dylan.
That I don't not I think by that time. You know, she told me when I interviewed her that that their whole Dylan thing was like mid sixties when the story that she gave me was when they were performing at some NBC folk thing because the staple singers were Staple singers are amazing. They and they're really interesting history of how gospel music became really popular in mid century America because they grew up on Pop Staples. The patriarch grew up on Dockery Farm, which is the plantation in Mississippi work farm camp, whatever Southern euphimistic term they called for paid slavery at the time following reconstruction. But this is like the well spring of where American blues music basically comes from because Charlie Patton was there. I think it's also Holland Wolf, Robert Johnson, like all of these guys orbited Dockery and Parchment Parchman. No, Parchman was the penitentiary, Dockery was the was the work farm. So Pop Staples was from there and he's so he's a direct link to the first generation of American bluesmen. But when the Great Migration occurred, he moved his family up to Chicago. Chicago is such a huge obviously blues hotbed, you know, John Lee Hooker lived there for a while, the Chicago Chess Records, Muddy Waters, the Chicago Blues is a sound little Walter Howland Wolf. But it's also a huge gospel hot you know. Sam Cook started with the Soulsterers in Chicago and the Staple singer started singing Chicago, and their early stuff is basically just like him on electric guitar, playing this beautiful tremlo leaden guitar. The tremlo is such a great part of their sound. And his kids, Mavis Cleora Purvis, I think is I'm just I'm really fishing for him, but singing these beautiful family harmonies. And they cut records down at stacks I'll Take You There and sort of crossed over onto the pop charts with stuff like heavy makes You Happy and I'll Take You There. And they actually got a lot of backlash from this from the gospel community, Like the gospel community kind of closed ranks around them because you weren't really supposed to play electric music in church.
Sam with Sam Cook too.
Then they get like, yeah, they they would try and go back and play church services, and people woul kind of turn their noses up at them anyway. They are so exemplary of the gospel vocal kind of tradition when when you think of harmony singing, there's broadly divided into two things. There's a really precise, close voiced harmony stuff that you get in Beach Boys recordings, more white gospel, true like what they call Southern gospel, like quartet singing. That's the kind of stuff that filters down from Appalachia into modern rockabilly, and that's where kind of the Beatles picked up on it. And then you get the sort of almost choral vocal blend that filters into folk music with guys like Simon and Garfunkle. Gospel singing is a little more ragged, a little more that the phrasing is kind of overlapping, rather than everyone singing syllables precisely the same way. And a great example of that is not just the staple singers, but a lot of people obviously a lot of stupid stuf. A lot of people have seen Oh brother, where aren't that good?
One?
Alex the Fairfield Four, who are the Gospel Quartet who sing uh They're the Grave Diggers at the end of that movie and they sing Lonesome Valley is such an incredible example of the style of singing because their vibratos are not even syncd up.
Some of them have incredibly.
Wide vibratos, and their their phrasings kind of slipping the slide and all over the place. They're they're bending in and out of pitches, but it still hangs together so beautifully, and that's how the band did it, you know, they frequently they Richard Manuel has an incredible voice. He has really low baritone, but he also has this beautiful falsetto that you famously hear on I shall be released, So that frequently meant that he would be taking the top part, Levon would be singing the bottom, and Rick would be bounced around in the middle. But it was a lot of space between the three voices, more just like like spread spread out chords on a piano, rather than these tight, kind of locked voices that you hear in other harmony bands around the top harmony singing bands around the time, and that was directly from bands like the Staple Singers and gospel music influence I.
Always think of just the sound that I always hear when I think about Southern black gospel, which is embarrassing because this is such a poppy not to mention white example, but is Paul Simon Loves Me Like a Rock with the Dixie Hummingbirds, incredible black gospel vocal group, and just that opening the um. They're all just doing these hummed notes, but as you say, their vibratos are all out of whack, but it just it sounds so good. The blend Dixie Hummingbirds are interesting because they actually start in the twenties with what you call Jubilee quartets, which is like the real clean Polish college guys who were tore in like the Fisk College and Jubilee singers. And then as sort of soul music picks up, the other more like raw edged kind of stuff comes in. This is all I'm getting all this from a great book by Anthony Hellibut called The Gospel Sound, which is pretty much required reading for anyone who's interested in gospel music throughout the twentieth century. This has been your gospel corner of this episode. Yeah, sorry, so all those No, that was incredible. All this to say that the weight is awesome, but the waight is also a prime example of the troubling dynamic between Robbie Robinson and Levon Helm I'll read this part and then you hop in whenever. It's frequently pointed out that the Canadian born Robbie Robinson discovered the American South through Levon and turned it into hit songs that he was frequently the only songwriter listed on. Thus he exploited Levon's own heritage and made a buck off of it.
And this, oh no, read that next line, Jordan.
But yeah, but uh, Robbie's part Cherokee, so maybe he has a comment. But yeah. When Robbie first joined up with Ronnie Hawkins back in the early sixties, it was Levon who was there first and showed him the ropes. Levon was the first guy to join up with Ronnie, and then the group that we know as the Band joined one by one. And then after Levon quit after they went on tour with Bob Dylan and he just didn't like that life and went to work in the oil rig. Robbie took over. Basically, he took the lead on writing the songs and they landed the record deal based on those songs, And my point being that when Levon rejoined the band after they got signed to Capitol Records, he was no longer it was no longer. Yes, it was now slight edge to Robbie as being the leader. I know it was an egalitarian enterprise, but Robbie was probably the one that was more in control.
Robbie's narrative has always been that as the everyone got more and more drugged out, they stopped wanting to contribute. And it is sort of born out in the records. You know, like you, I mean sorry, I'd cut you off like the right. Talk about the writing credits right on the on the on per per record basis.
Yeah, Big Pink. Robbie's credited on writing less than half the songs, and on the group's second album was so called Brown Album, a self titled album, he wrote two thirds of the songs, and on the group's third album, Stage Fright, he wrote all of them. And you could say this was because the other members of the band were too strung out to work, or they were too strong out to notice that their names weren't showing up on credits. And Levon has a great line in his memory. He says that he was quote pencil whipped and didn't realize that he wasn't credited on the Brown album until he had the final record in his hands and looked at the label. But even Ronnie Hawkins, who again was sort of the band's mentor and wasn't afraid the bust Robbi's chops or anybody's chops in the band, said in the very Robertson centric documentary Once We're Brothers from twenty twenty, Levon was great at arranging, but Robbie was the one who wrote all the songs. Robbie himself talks about Levon nodding out during sessions for Stage Fright and Richard Manuel refusing to do a show after he lost his hero and stash. But in Levon's autobiography, he suggests that Robbie joined with the band's management to persuade the other members of the band to sign away their individual publishing rights, which is, you know where the real money is in the music industry. But this really just brings us into the whole forty matter of what what does it take to write a song? Like what? Like you? Later on you use the example of chest Fever on this record, which I mean the thing that you remember about it is that organ part, and I don't believe Garth is credited on that song.
Well, so the you know, quick primer for anyone who isn't familiar with the sewage of the record industry. Songs are credited for music and lyrics, not arrangements, which is why you get a lot of people nowadays have been airing their grievances over co writing with a lot of famous songwriters. Father John Misty has this famous quote where I think he was talking about He didn't name anyone, he said he'd been offered the opportunity to co write with a lot of prominent female pop stars, so I think triangulating the sort of people who he might have been talking about, My bet would be Adele or Lady Gaga. But he basically said, you dash off, You dash off a tune and send it over to them and they make changes to it. And if your part original composition is your words are highlighted in blue and theirs are in red, you get a piece of paperback with an ocean of blue and two dots of red, and that entitles them to fifty percent of the lyrics, and that are in fifty percent of the publishing and that the more the shorter way of explaining that. As a music industry aphorism called change a word, get a third. And you know, this is a big thing as rap and hip hop became a sendant because you would get people once you get like a bunch of different rappers on a song, that counts as writing. So you get someone phoning like Lil Wayne, who famously would just record a feature on anything you asked him to do from his tour bus on cough Syrup, suddenly getting publishing rights to something that he was not even in the same state or country for when it was being created, which is obviously issues of race and all of these other issues aside understandably rankles the people who do the bulk of creating these songs. And this is when I say bulk, especially back in this day, that meant being and making the music, being in the room writing the music, you know, and and you know Robertson has talked about he said when they were doing the basement tape sessions, he learned, he said, he learned how to write songs a different way from Bob Dylan, which was at the typewriter. And it is very instructive because he talks about Dylan would come over to the house, amble down the stairs, listen to what everyone was doing, go up to the ground floor, write a bunch of lyrics out, and then come downstairs and kind of free associate them until they had a song. So that's a very literal, you know, way of thinking music plus lyrics equal song. But that doesn't really hash when you are working out group arrangements, man, And it doesn't hash when you are relying so heavily on other people to execute your vision. I especially take issue with it with Robbie because if he was such a fucking genius, where's the rest of his damn career. Name me a single Robbie Robertson song, do it now? He probably couldn't. I mean you can't now, But name me a single Robbie Robertson song, Like you can't do it? Man. It's not like John Fogerty where like you know, John Fogerty and credence, Like the whole big thing was how John was a dictatorial controller who even told the drummer what drum beat to play for songs, right like told everybody what to play. And that to me bears fruit because John Fogerty had a career after CCR. The did Robbie do other than pick the playlist for Scorsese movies after Well, he did write The Way That You Use It, which is a song that whips from Color of Wedding Yeah with Clapton. But also that song sucks, like it's some of the dumbest lyrics possible.
I mean, is it about what I think it's about his dick? Probably okay, but no, it sounds like as long as like a defense of a size you know.
I mean, I'm being Higel, the character Higel right now. But does this what I'm saying makes sense?
Does this wash? Like?
I feel like it's not like the Beatles, where it's like, oh yeah, all of these guys have, with the exception of Ringo, have these incredible careers afterwards, demonstrating the fullness of their original talent.
With the band.
You have Robbie who's spent his entire career since they broke up going well, no, I actually wrote all these songs and then people are like, cool, do you have any other ones? And he's like no, And especially because he wasn't a singer, man, they never let him sing on this stuff and the whole thing that's the one, the only song, and on those Kingdom and on last Waltz, he's singing into a turned off mike, which is another big thing that pissed leave on off because he's like, seventy percent of that movie is in Robbie's face, loving close ups, opera scarf, bidecked pancake makeup, caked face is stupid bronzed stratocaster.
And he wasn't singing.
You have three incredibly talented people who you had sing all of these songs, including one guy whose identity you hijacked wholesale, and you're like.
Oh, yeah, but I you know, but it's still all me.
Like what the fuck does that make any I broke a pan on my desk just getting so worked up about this because it makes me so angry.
I don't know what do you think.
I mean?
As somebody who spent much of his high school career being the good lab partner with a bunch of not good lab partners, I have tremendous sympathy for Robbie for being stuck with people who are in the throes of addiction and really unable to keep the momentum going on this incredible thing that they'd built. Yeah, I don't know how much of it was his place to advocate for other people. Sure, I mean it's it's honestly, at the end of the day, it's it's the big Lebowski law. You're not wrong, Robbie, Yeah, just as Yes, it's especially galling to me too, because it's like, I don't know, man.
Bring him in on a fucking soundtrack like he like when you look at it, and I was just looking at this when you look at their wiki pages, they did not The other guys did not work a lot. Levon was in the Ringo All Star Band and you see like they're like, oh yeah, Richard played on a song on the King of Comedy, which Robbie was music supervisor on, but he sure wasn't the music supervisor. Like it's just like if you guys were you named the documentary once we're brothers, and like every single one of them, Levon almost lost his house, you know, really, like it's just it really rankles me. And I know, you know, you don't speak ill of the dead or whatever, but I think more people, I don't know, man, people should know about it. It's it bothers me because it gets to the heart of what it means to be a creative person versus what it means to be like a manager, you know, and I don't respect managers.
No, I mean, that's why I found this discussion so interesting. I mean, yeah, I know it may seem tasteless or attacky or cruel to go in on a recently departed millionaire musical legends and millionaire, but it is. It's a fascinating debate about what it means to be a creative person and just mean and how to move through the world. Man.
I mean, like, you know when Pink Floyd can't sid they paid for his life afterwards, you know, Robbie moved to Hollywood, didn't talk to anyone catching my big fat Marty checks.
Also, never forget, never forget.
That the whole reason Neil Diamond is in the Last VAULTZ is because Robbie produced his record and they were gonna cut muddy damn Waters for time until Levon threatened to walk from the entire thing. If you need a starker illustration of the dynamic between those two men, Levon advocating for one of the biggest influences on their music and a person who they in theory owed, versus Robbie advocating for his sleazy leisure suited in coke Buddy and his damn.
Song Dryer Ries.
We're in aviators on stage. Ah, alright, I'm.
Done, move on well, Dryeres.
Has anyone ever looked more like a Quelude in Personified than than Neil Diamond and Last Waltz?
I mean I would argue Van Morrison on Last Waltz?
Oh no, sweet little Van. Actually I was gonna talk. Did I talk about this later when I talk about Richard Manuel. One of my favorite outtakes from Last Waltz is Richard Manuel and Van doing turolu Laura. Oh have you heard that?
Yeah?
It's beautiful man, sweet sweet Van Morrison as they as someone once referred to him, the band's drunken mascot because he could just bum around Woodstock with them, just waste him. And then he comes on, comes on Last Waltz and gets his little moment in the sun with his kicking his little feet up. That's one of the best. Oh my god, I love that scene so much. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.
Well, the Weight is a stellar instance of Robbie Robertson's musical brilliance. But now we're gonna look at the other extreme chest fear.
Dun dunk, Oh, great hell of riff, great record, glat lack of not great song.
No, it's a weird one. Yeah, it's somewhere between Inegata Da Vida and drunk Salvation army brass bands, which are kind of two of my interests, I have to say. But yeah, it's kind of an outlier on the album. Came out of a jam session, and everybody generally agreed that it was recorded in a semi complete state. Levon later said in his memoir chess Fever had improvised lyrics that Robbie put together for the rehearsals and never got around to rewriting. The song came kind of late in the process and got recorded before it was finished. And Robbie pretty much said the same thing when talking to Barney Hoskins for his book Across the Great Divide. I'm not sure I know the words to chess Fever, he said, I'm not even so sure there are words to chess Fever. He would later elaborate in a way that kind of makes it seem like he doesn't really like the song. If you like chess Fever for god knows what reason, it's just this quirky thing, but it doesn't particularly make any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything, but apparently Bill Murray is a fan. Paul Schaeffer played it as his walkout music during his final appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in twenty fifteen. Yeah, and once again, what do you remember about that song? That insane orgon intro? Talk to us about the orgon intro and just our beautiful honeyboy.
Garth Hudson, Oh, sweet Garth, the professor. Professor Hudson I think leveland calls him Professor Garth. Yeah, Garth. His dad was a musician. Garth started playing at a real early age. He was the house organist at his uncle's funeral parlor, which is incredible. He was in a bach nerd when he studied at the University of Western Ontario. In the Classic albums for the Brown Album, there's some great moments of him just sitting and improvising at a keyboard and like talking it.
He's like, how am I going to get out of this one?
And like modulates to a different key and like SOLOI You're doing all this really ridiculous. But they need an intro, so he just he does the butanah, He quotes Takata and Fugue in D minor, the famous Phantom of the Opera bach piece, and then just goes nuts and then just riffs on it. And that eventually became a separate keyboard show piece called the Genetic Method that he would go up to like twenty minutes in concert on Rock of Ages. I think it's like fifteen minutes. They only show a snippet of it in Last Waltz. But yeah, and just such an incredible probably the best pure musician in the Yeah.
By a mile. You know. I said I was done bashion, Robbie. I'm not done passion, Robbie.
They all talked about how they would be sitting around and Robbie would be like.
Oh, you know, what should we do there?
What should I do? You know, what should I do here? What should I do there? And Garth would be like try this. Try that doesn't come across in the credits, you know, or voicing chords different ways, so you know, just a real and he played sacks too.
I love his gotty plait secks.
Yeah, what's the what's the Uh? It makes no difference. And it makes no difference that he takes a little soul. It's really really pretty stuff. I'm last waltz, makes no difference. Got that song so good? Sorry what were you talking about?
Uh?
Oh yeah, you go go ahead.
So he was a few years older than the other guys in the band, and he had a classical background, and he supposedly would only join the Hawks in the early days and they were backing Ronnie Hopkins in the early sixties if they agreed to pay him a ten dollars a week retainer as the music tutor for the group. And this was apparently in an effort to satisfy his parents, who were annoyed that he'd thrown away his music education to runoff of the rock bands, which I love.
He also another great He was a apparently a head of a negotiator because when he joined the Hawks, he was like, I'll do it if you buy me an organ, and he's in. He's notable if you're a nerd like we are, because he was one of the few keyboards in the mid sixties to not use the Hammond organ. He used the Lowry and you know, one of the craziest things that that had at the point was a pitch wheel which lets you microtonally bend notes. The Hammond didn't let you do that. So some of the weird synthy sounds on the band records are him with the Lowry organ's pitch wheel.
And yeah, like you mentioned, he was the band's resident gear head, and he tricked out this Lowry organ with a whole variety of custom effects, including a wah wah pedal and an early two speed rotating Leslie speaker cabinet, which could you describe that just gives it kind of a washy wooshy sound, very sound.
The Leslie is is it's two speakers that are mounted sort of back to back and they it's spin on an axis in a giant cabinet signs to piece of equipment. Yeah, and it gives that washy, kind of washy, washy wushy yeah. And so much of the of the organ sound is you can change the speed of it to change that spinning quality. But that's not even I mean just the ridiculous. He would also put on the songs.
Yeah. I mean he was the one who was really responsible for cobbling together a home studio in the basement, a Big Pink out of basically electronic odds and ends. And he was the one who after everybody went home after a session, would stay behind in the studio and try to sweeten the tracks, which led to the band referring to him privately as hb or honey boy because he was standing behind sweetening the tracks, which I love is stacking up chords, putting on brass, woodwinds, whatever was needed to make the music sing, as Levan said, and one of the most unique experiments that he undertook during sessions for Big Pink can be heard on this Wheels on Fire, one of my favorite tracks of the album of Rick dank Otoon put to Bob Dylan's lyrics. Garth created that really weird staccato keyboard effect by hooking up his electric piano to an old telegraph key that he purchased from an Army Navy surplus store, and he by manipulating the on off signal on this he was able to create this very percussive morse code like sound. Yeah.
I mean the other big thing for him is the in Cripple Creek that in the post chorus. Thing is that's a clavinet ah.
Years before Stevie wonder Wow exactly.
Yeah, and it's it's supposed to sound like a jawhart the I always assumed it was. Yeah, Yeah, And I think that was something that he kind of put together himself. He had two wah pedals that he had on the console of the keyboard so he could manipulate it with his hand rather than his feet, and so he would just play it with one hand and use the pedals with his other hand. Just a genius, you know, one hell of a beard.
Yeah. And he apparently also built a guitar amp.
Yeah, so you know, they talk about the guitar tone on the on some of the pink stuff. The only thing that I've been able to ask that I keep reading. They call it the black box that Garth built. So my bed is that it's some kind of a speaker cabinet that was supposed to be a kind of Leslie ripoff, and maybe a pre amp in there of some kind, but just again something he cobbled together and then they put Robbie's guitar through it for Tiers of Rage.
No pictures of it.
Yeah, no, trust me, I looked for it.
Well, speaking of tears of rage, and then you got a lot to say about tiers of rage, especially our beloved Richard Manuel.
Richard Manuell Man, I mean that falsetto?
Is it? Eric Clapton who said he sounds like he has a tear in his voice. I think it was like holy mad man, I believe was the Yeah. And his wife was his second wife. Wife was married to him when he died, said that his voice sounded like a hug. Yeah.
And he you know, everyone compared it to Ray Charros. I think, doesn't he do? George on my mind on one of the records. It was just like a live thing that he's done. Yeah, but you know, a great keyboardist player too. One of the things in Wheels on Fire that Levon talks about is is how the piano was a rhythm instrument in those early bands because the only thing that could get above the sound of the din of everything else was a sax guitar or organ. So the piano was I don't they didn't have a sophisticated pa at that point, so the piano was rarely miked, So Richard in the Hawks was just doing a piano. But then he would come out on stage and do all of these ballads in that falsetto voice. They would do these Ray Charles tunes and he could just bring down the house with it. He's also a drummer, you know, he became the band's drummer when they didn't have Levon. He's drumming a lot of those original demos, and he's also drumming on Ragmama Rag because Levon's playing mandolin, I believe, and his drum feel is wacky, but it's great. Suits them well. And he also has my favorite joke in Last Waltz when they're all talking about groupies and the relationships that they've had on the road. Richard just Richard goes, he cracks I'm just trying to break even, which is one of those you'll get that on the way home jokes like it just when the first time I saw it, I was.
Like, what does he mean? Oh? Also dated the woman who was charged with the involuntary manslaughter of John Belushi.
Yeah, he's a lot of darkness in Richard. Yeah, shape I'm In was an autobiographal autobiographical song about him.
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, my god.
When they in the Last Walls, when they're like they're playing the intro of that song and the spotlight hits him and he's just.
Like, ah, it's so so rough. That's so rough. He looks like a skeleton. Wait, there's a description of him. It's sad too, because his voice.
Was really out of shape by that point, from just from drinking and coke, and so his falsetto was really not the best shape for it.
Richard was thin, but drank like a fish, with a fish's distended belly and a fish's pension for being eaten by sharks. When he vacated his Malibu beach house in nineteen seventy six, they found two thousand empty Grand Monnier bottles. He had to take Placidyl, a potent downer, in order to sleep naked. He looked as if his liver were bald out of his abdomen. He was so saturated with alcohol that even his skin seemed to sag off his bones. That is by Martin Levin from the Canadian magazine Toronto Life in March nineteen ninety six article The Lonesome Death of Richard Manuel. Oh, that article's rough. Yeah, I remember that one. I didn't. Yeah, it's real, real bad. Where are we going? Get us out of here? Where are we know? Jesus Christ speaking of speaking of.
Nudity, jes.
Yes, Well, the whole arrangement of Big Pink bucked trends at this time, and this was even the case sonically. The album opens with Tears of Rage, which is this gently soulful ballad. I mean, it's a beautiful song, but it's not exactly like the traditional explosive album opener.
It's anything. It's just a it's a completely counterintuitive it's a dirge. You know, more than one person has compared it to She's Leaving Home, because it was the sort of the rare rock song of the time that sympathized with the parent being distraught over their wayward child.
Well, that's you know what. I was gonna talk about this later, but this is a good point for that. I mean, they used that whole mentality of rebelling against the rebellion as part of the design on the album cover and the inner sleeve. You've got I think three members of the band I think Rick, Richard and Garth maybe. I think it was those three posing with their parents up in Canada and.
Yeah, Leons couldn't make it, so they they overdubbed the Yeah, it's so funny how they were dressing at that time too. I think it's in Across the Great Divi where he talks about Freakin' Robbie was driving his Jaguar from from Woodstock to New York and got pulled over for speeding and the cop was like, all right, Rabbi, I'll let you off of the warning this time.
Yeah, I mean Capitol. When they were putting this album together, they wanted the band to you know, get a slick cover portrait, and instead, Robbie had become fascinated by a book of nineteenth century photographs depicting grim faced laborers from the Western Frontier walked in rigid poses because back then, you know, took thirty seconds or something to get like a single shot. So everybody stood stock still so that they wouldn't screw up the exposure. And they decided to take a group portrait that your inspiration from that, and they also chose the least glamorous photographer they could find a man named Elliot Landy, who worked at the time for the very ragged underground paper Rat, which I'm not super familiar with, but the name is evocative enough, and I believe our former bandmate his aunt worked for him. Oh interesting, Yeah, but what stuck? Yeah?
Yeah. People were telling us about the best photographer, so I asked who was the worst photographer in New York. Robertson told Barney Hoskins. Someone said, there's this guy, the staff photographer for Rat magazine. I don't know if he's the worst, but he works for this magazine, which is unquestionably the worst.
Landy, the photographer, actually cross paths with the band's organization when they were backing Bob Dylan at his concert at Carnegie Hall in January nineteen sixty eight, when Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman literally escorted him out of the theater for taking unauthorized photos during the concerts. But despite this, he and Robbie Robertson became friendly, and in late April nineteen sixty eight, the band asked him to take a group shot for the album cover for the album art at least not the cover at the Bearsville Home or Levon and Rick Danko had moved after leaving Big Pink, and they all donned period hats and vests and string ties and you know, like you said, not very dissimilar to their everyday attire. And they trooped out to a grasshill to recreate an old fashioned derrego type. Does any say that Garrett French derro typepe Dugueryo type, the aristocra, Yeah, that one. Landy later explained. I told them that in those days, film was very slow, and people had to stand very still. You were pose, You took a deep breath and you didn't move. And the band did their best to maintain their stern expressions, but this was made difficult by naked people. Heichel tell us about the naked people.
Yeah, well, friend of the pod, naked, friend of the pod, nudity. The band did their best to maintain their stern and dour countenances, but there was a naked hippie couple dancing behind the photographer, friends of Garth's. Unusually enough, yeah, Levon wrote, and this wheels on fire. While the photographer was focusing his camera, the young wife of a friend of Garth's was dancing behind Landy, trying to make a smile. As he snapped the first shot, she tore off her dress and did a naked little grind. So there we were trying to be cool in the face of this outrageous hippie dance. I think that's the shot we ended up using. It's like on the second album, the Brown album, that photo of them on the cover and they all looked miserable because it was just raining. Yeah.
I think was also landy. I think so. Yeah. It looks like the artwork on the album, despite getting the self proclaimed worst photographer in New York, has quite the pedigree. The cover featured a painting by Bob Dylan, which I didn't realize until recently, featuring six musicians which a lot of people think are the five members of the band and himself, a roadie who I don't know who that is, and an elephant who I'm going to guess is Albert Grossman. And the sleeve design itself was done by a man named Milton Glazer, who later designed the iHeart New York graphic, and he'd gained notoriety in the band's circle for creating the colorful poster of Bob Dylan found in Dylan's Greatest hits album the previous year. It's very famous. It's his hair and all the curls are a different color, and he looks like a kind of it's like a gumball machine, which I'm into in a sense. Milton Glazer actually sparked this entire project because I read that he was actually the one who first took Albert Grossman up to visit Woodstock in the early sixties, and then Bob Dylan, his client, would come up and visit him a lot. He fell in love with the area, and then he bought a place up there, which led to the whole musical influx that followed, or at least led to the whole Big Pink project, and Glazer still lived near the band up in Woodstock when Robbie Robertson sought him out to design the cover for the group's debut, using Dylan's painting Landy's Mountain view portrait and the next of kin photo of the band members with their families. Robbie wrote in his memoir Testimony, I told him we were thinking of going with the album title music from Big Pink. Milton said, what's Big Pink? I told him about our clubhouse where the music we were making had originated. Can I get a photo of that house? He asked, so we understand what Big Pink is. I said, it's really kind of ugly and the house is pink. That's okay, said Milt, It may be good. What about the group's name. We don't have a fancy name. We're just called the band and yeah, adding to that very nondescript name, The bands were pretty much an enigma. When music from Big Pink was released on July first, nineteen sixty eight, they more or less refused to give interviews, which could have very easily doomed the band commercially, but instead, the refusal to play the whole promo game made them seem more real and authentic and enhance their musical purity in the eyes of the public and Albert Grossman. He was kind of famous for persuading his artists to remain silent in order to cultivate mystique. He did that with Bob Dylan a lot, but the band's disinterest in show business glitz was pretty much genuine. Levon wrote in his memoir our policy was not the tour if we could help it, The policy was to keep making music using the methods and work habits, so that had kept us productive throughout the basement tapes and Big In era. We didn't care about being stars. We just wanted to survive with our integrity, and.
This mystique was also helped by the fact that they didn't tour for a time. According to Levon, this wasn't because they didn't feel like it, but because Richard Manuel grilled himself or seared himself an accident that happened at home Michael Scott's style.
Yeah.
The house had a nice view of the Ashokan Reservoir and a barbecue grill which Richard tried to fire up one day by building a gasoline fire in the bottom. Hudson recalled Manuel pouring some lighter fluid in it. The thing exploded and the flame shot out and burned his ankle. According to Helm, the pit turned into a bomb and he ended up grilling the top of his foot third degree burns. So Richard couldn't work for two months, and that was another reason why they didn't tour. Behind Big Pink, there were some truly harrowing moments that the band got themselves into in Woodstock. Mostly just vehicles, Yeah, pretty much just cars. Really Helm injured himself riding a motorcycle, and Danko furnished an all time quote when he nearly died after wrapping his car around a tree because, in his words, he was a little too drunk, a little too high. He broke his neck and fractured his back in four places, confining him to a bed for three months. In like a halo.
Thing.
Halo brace, is that what they call it? I was in for weeks of traction, he said in this Wheels on Fire. I told Albert not to tell the press I'd had an accident and decided to suppress all my hyper instincts and lie perfectly still for the time it took my neck to heal. They wouldn't perform live as the band until April of nineteen sixty nine, making their debut at San Francisco's winter Land, also the venue for their final gig, The Last Waltz seven years later in nineteen seventy six. Robbie got sick beforehand, and they had to hire a hypnotist to get him into performing shape, which the song stage Fright is at least personally about. They did not have lot a great success with live performances around this time. Famously they bombed at Woodstock, Right did they bombed? Were they just not recorded?
I mean, speaking of all those car accidents, there was some quote from Robbie where he was like, I think his girlfriend was riding with one of the other guys in the band during one of them many times they crashed their car, and Robbie would say, yeah, it kind of pissed me off when like, they almost killed my girlfriend. So this is when you start to feel a little more like, oh, he's stuck with these guys who were struggling to the point of being, you know, not responsible people. I'm trying to.
Figure out what exactly had happened at Woodstock.
Well, they were.
Between ten years after and Johnny Winter. Oh yeah, And what happened was Grossman didn't let the band Janis Joplin or Blood, Sweat and Tears be filmed.
But there's footage of Janis, isn't there. Yeah, maybe he reversed course for uh Janice. Yeah. I would say I'd barely seen any footage of the band at Woodstock. Oh they look boring. And David Crosby would always say like, because Crosby, Stiels and Nash were playing, I think their second gig ever at Woodstock, and he was always saying like, yeah, we were really all that scared about the four hundred thousand people in front of us. We were scared about all of our peers behind us, especially the band. Did I mention the bands? And he was like, the band are the ones that really freaked him out that he had to perform from?
Well, they went and overdubbed their voices after, right, did they? That's what Robbie just said in the.
Book Crosby Stills A Nash.
Yeah, our tapes were the best of any of the group, said Robbie, but we didn't like the setup and the album seemed pretty shoddy. Crosby Still's Nash Young had to go back into the studio and dub over their voices.
Oh what a bitchy, what a prick?
With the band essentially ghosts in the public eye, the PR team at Capitol did their best worst to come up with a series of ways to promote the album. God awful, man, the record industry. I have some friends in PR, but man, it was always terrible. It's terrible now when you try and make like Amy Man come up with a TikTok dance to promoter record, and it was terrible. Back then, they developed a series of contests, in Levon's opinion, that tried to market us like some teeny bopper group. A Big Pink Think campaign was proposed, inviting fans to quote name Dylan's cover painting. A fill in the blank competition was also pitched, inviting hopefuls to complete the sentence if I could be a big pink anything, I'd be a big pink blank, oh prizes would Prizes were to include pink lemonade, pink stuffed pandas, and a pink Yamaha motorbike. Can you imagine that contest hit the internet? Now you have everything ranging from like the entire Western canon of slang terms for Genitalia, to like, I'd be a big pink Holocaust survivor. They suggested getting an elephant painted pink in front of Tower Records in LA for the release of our record. A horrified Robertson recalled in testimony, Albert and I flew to Los Angeles to get on the same page with Capitol's new president, Stanley Gortakov, and to enlighten the company as to what Big Pink and the band represented. Which most certainly was not a Pink elephant, nor a name this band contest, which Capital had also suggested.
But ultimately the band didn't need these corny gimmicks to be successful. Music from Big Pink caught the attention of the biggest names in music. Even the Beatles, whose studio Pyrotechnics on Sargent, Pepper and Revolver had provided a foil for the lo fi basement dwellers, took notice of their rootsy approach. Paul McCartney can be heard launching into an ad libbed version of take a Load Off, Fanny towards the end of the Beatles' promotional video for Hey Jude, during the not an off part, which was recorded that September, and George Harrison actually made a pilgrimage to see Dylan and the band on their home turf and the Catskills that fall in nineteen sixty eight, and you could make the argument that the stripped down White album bore the influence of Big Pink. But if you listened to the single Lady Madonna, which came out in February in nineteen sixty eight, or was recorded recorded in February nineteen sixty eight, it kind of seems like they were already head in that direction anyway, but still the band really crystallized it. Unfortunately, when it comes to discussing famous admirers of Big Pink, we have to talk about Eric Clapton. His fandom for the band was evangelical. He first discovered them via a bootleg tape when he was on a very unhappy summer tour with his then group Cream. He wrote in his two thousand and seven memoir, it stopped me in my tracks speaking about the bootleg, and it also highlighted all the problems I thought Cream had. Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz, and rock, and writing great songs. I couldn't help but compare them to us, which was stupid and futile. But I was frantically looking for a yardstick, and here it was. Listening to that album, as great as it was, just made me feel like we were stuck and I wanted out. And so that July, weeks after music from Big Pink was released, Clapton announced that Cream, which were then one of the biggest groups in the world, with disband when Robbie Robertson was informed of this. He said he had mixed emotions about his role in killing Cream. He said Big Pink had turned him around with its subtleties and laid back feeling that's him writing and his memoir testimony, Cream played with a much more bombastic approach, and Eric wanted a change. That was a huge compliment coming from him. But I liked some of Cream's songs, and I wasn't sure how I felt about our record being partially responsible for their demise.
I think it was just because they got blown off the stage by the MC five when they came here to tour. Oh did they Yeah?
WHOA? And when Eric Clapton inducted the band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in nineteen ninety four, he admitted on stage that he also took a pilgrimage to the Woodstock in a half hearted attempt to be welcomed into their ranks. He said, I really sort of went there to ask if I could join the band, but I didn't have the guts to say it. Instead, he would try to create their nuanced playing and collaborative spirit in a new group, the short lived Blind Faith, and also probably more accurately during his stint with Delaney and Bonnie, but while Big Pink indvertently took one group out of commission, but also inspired at very least one new one. Hig tell us about the band that the band inspired with music from Big Pink, must I hurt?
Scottish hard rockers Nazareth later of Love Hurts, Fame, Love Hurts? That song does go It formed in nineteen six took their moniker from Robbie Robertson from the Weight, pulled into Nazareth. We were sitting around in a place we used to rehearse him when we first got together, and we couldn't agree on the name. Vocalist Dan McCafferty said in twenty fourteen, where are they from? Glasgow, Edinburgh?
I have no idea. I can't believe they've been around since nineteen sixty eight.
I know that's wild done, firm, lean done, firmline in Fife, Scotland.
That means anything to you, nothing, not a thing. Nothing. In my Anglophile, we.
Were listening to the Weight when it first came out and Pete Agnew, our bass player, said what about Nazareth?
And that was it and with that we have the least appropriate ending could ever imagine for this episode. We can't We cannot end it there. Music from Big Pink was generally met with universal praise when it was released in the summer of sixty eight. Al Cooper gave it a five star review in Rolling Stone, writing, not inaccurately, this album was recorded in approximately two weeks. There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it, and that is true. But according to levon Helm, there was one dissenting note our local paper in Woodstock. By the way, I said the album was okay, but we could have done better, he later said. And I don't remember where I read this. I was going through some old notes of mind, some just like braw research notes when I was working on putting this together, and I couldn't tell where I got it from. So apologies for not properly citing and possibly plagiarizing, but Music from Big Pink has been described as the closest that rock and roll has come to pure socialism, which is hilarious considering the fact that the band's next album would be recorded in the pool house of a Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to Sammy Davis Junior. And it's also hilarious given all the stuff of a capitalist nature that would basically spell the end of the band within the next seven years. Yeah, yeah, we got a positive note.
I mean nothing, gold can stay. Hey, Jordan, let's go downtown. You say, well, I gotta go, but my friend can stick around. And that friend was Satan, That friend was Doctor John, that friend was Neil Young's cokebooker. That friend was Robbie Robertson's bronzed stratocaster. That friend that friends the old Diamond. I'm gonna pull up I'm gonna pull up a song here that I think we should actually use as the outro for this.
Then I'd like it. I'd like a moment of silence.
Well, folks, as Robbie Robertson once said, it's in the way that you use it. Thanks for listing. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.
And I'm Jordan Runtogg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalg. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder.
June The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.
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