The Band on the Rilly Big Shew

I'd say I was trying to kill two birds with one stone with this post, but I just spent part of the afternoon being distracted from my reading by a flock of blackbirds feeding in my front lawn--rustling the grass like a larger animal, all taking off at once because of some danger I can't see, softly plummeting back to earth, one by one, myself fascinated by their individual flights. So no killing of birds, even metaphorically.

First: By 1969, the presentation of rock on television in America had gotten fairly sophisticated. No more lip-synching, no more stupid props (the Byrds singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in a tableau of female models dressed as duckhunters), and a sensitivity to the mood of the song and who was singing it. This clip of the Band from The Ed Sullivan Show shows that evolution. I hadn't previously seen it before its appearance on YouTube, not even when it originally aired, and I was impressed with the shot selection and moving camera. The sound is another matter. The performance sounds entirely live, even the instruments, but it sounds thin, and not until 2:01 does the sound engineer remember to bring up the levels of all of the group on the soundboard.

The second subject: the Band, former backup group to rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins and more famously to Bob Dylan on his infamous electric tour, where, in response to folkies who were booing him for the sacrilege of playing electric, turned to the group and said, "Play f*cking loud" before breaking into a majestic rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." The group who made the Basement Tapes in Woodstock, New York, with Dylan, after he "broke his neck" in a motorcycle accident. The group who released the album Music from Big Pink (a house in Woodstock) with "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released" and "This Wheel's on Fire," and whose second album, the self-titled The Band, assured the group's place in rock immortality.

And, of course, as noted at the time, this album, a loving--yet never nostalgic--evocation of American history and themes ("Up on Cripple Creek," "King Harvest," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down") was chiefly written by a Canadian, Robbie Robertson, and performed by a group consisting of three other Ontario natives (Garth Hudson, Windsor; Rick Danko, Simcoe; and Richard Manuel, Stratford) and one American, Levon Helm.

What I find interesting about this performance is that it contains the only instance I can remember of Garth Hudson's actually looking at someone else in the group (he usually appeared to be inhabiting his own astral plane at the organ), and how young they look compared to their appearance in The Last Waltz, Matin Scorsese's documentary of their last concert in 1976. And are they tight at the start. Even Levon doesn't settle in until the second line.



At the end, Ed introduces the band members, and his elision of "they came" from "from upstate New York" makes it sound like he means Levon came from there. He was mocked for his woodenness, but now I see he was trying to be a nice guy. For his willingness to present (even sometimes censored) rock music, I can forgive him Topo Gigio and Senor Wences.