The Band's 'Music from Big Pink': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
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

(01:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
That's a great question. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
I'm not enough of a Dylan.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Salt because he's so early in this shoh, it's lp.
I'm not I'm gonna bring it.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
So, but if you were as much of a genius
as Robbie Robertson, wouldn't you not if.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
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?

(02:50):
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

(03:11):
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

(03:34):
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

(03:55):
up against Dylan and like Dylan fans or nuts, I
say with.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Love black hole.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
So that's all conjecture on my point. On my end,
I'm Jordan.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
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

(04:42):
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

(05:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yes, this is a great show. Such a weird song.
How did that come to happen?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
So I say, don't bother to call him out for
self plagiarism. He's aware of it.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:00):
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

(07:22):
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

(07:44):
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,

(08:07):
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

(08:30):
just think that's amazing. I like, it's perfect.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
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

(08:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Uh yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
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

(09:29):
think it's better than Stop Making Sense.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
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

(10:06):
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,

(10:28):
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

(10:50):
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

(11:12):
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

(11:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
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

(12:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
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

(13:09):
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.

(13:29):
Whatever the case, Dylan's professional pause put his backing band
into a state of limbo. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
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,

(13:58):
like outlived many of the band and most of his peers.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
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?

Speaker 2 (14:14):
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

(14:38):
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,

(15:04):
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

(15:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
It was definitely Levon. Robbie would have said, Okay, you
can take me, that's fine.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
And which basically boils down to what it means to
write a song.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
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,

(17:57):
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

(18:19):
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

(18:39):
where he almost watched a man die and then proceeded
to create some of the most immortal music of all time.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
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,

(19:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
God love him, but.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
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

(19:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Oh yeah, the Marvin Gaye State drink tickets sweetwater.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
Tell us which enemy of musicians we're talking about, Heigel,
we were talking about New York real estate. Baby take
us there.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:48):
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

(21:09):
are which you eat?

Speaker 1 (21:11):
I think?

Speaker 2 (21:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Have you ever seen head? I haven't.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
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

(21:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
I think his beard attached to the moss and so
he's just part of the mountain.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
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

(22:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:16):
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

(23:38):
couldn't afford it.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
I was going to say, was not in the budget
for forty dollars a night in Brooklyn's finest dive bars.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
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.

(24:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Heigel Well, apparently a Neon beer sign of an unspecified brand,
which Levon said Richard Manuel quote liberated from a local tavern.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh yeah, especially in this era when he had the
little mustache and.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, oh yeah, he looks just like what the hell's
his name? Mandalorian?

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Oh yeah, Pedro Pascal.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
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

(26:01):
the garbage to the dump personally and kept the fireplace
going with split logs.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
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?

Speaker 1 (26:13):
I have to.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
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

(26:35):
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

(26:56):
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

(27:18):
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

(27:38):
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

(27:59):
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

(28:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
Freight train man.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
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

(29:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Of the flashier guys of the period.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
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

(29:40):
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

(30:02):
and it's just uugh love him.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Like, okay, forty nights a set, no false.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
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.

(31:07):
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

(31:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Hard time in history. Heard that in the context of
something went wrong. Yeah, Hamlet was a poodle mix.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
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.

(32:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
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,

(32:47):
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

(33:07):
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,

(33:27):
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

(33:48):
be bootlegged as the basement tapes, and these demos would
prove to be the seas of music from Big Pink.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
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

(34:17):
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

(34:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
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.

(35:06):
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

(35:27):
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

(35:50):
that correctly.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
One of the worst bastards in rock music is here.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
I guess. I've been reading a lot about Alan Klin
this afternoon, so.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
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

(36:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
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

(37:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
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

(38:11):
by Circle in nineteen sixty six, written by.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
A young Paul Simon and the band Circle spelled cyr
kl E was named by John Lemon Awful.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
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

(38:45):
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

(39:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Insane.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
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

(39:40):
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

(40:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
That would probably get greenlit. That sounds like a Pixar
movie at this point.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
That's good. Yeah, yeah, I can't write music, so I
borrowed melodies from other songs and wrote my own lyrics
to it.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
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,

(41:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
It's part of the reason it doesn't. I don't like
the sound of it.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
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

(41:55):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
I think that's the one that has uh yeah, one
voice for all echoing along the hall.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Mm hmmm, it's so good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Robbie's lyrics are not like tremendous, but he'll knock him
out of the park sometimes.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
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

(43:27):
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

(43:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
I really I.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
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

(44:30):
to talk about the band's name.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
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

(44:54):
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

(45:15):
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.

(45:37):
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

(45:58):
overcoats the chocolates way.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
I love your Richard Manuel impression he has.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Day, uh, and also more than that and also like
ghacked up.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
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

(46:40):
of a voice, though.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
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

(47:02):
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

(47:24):
of Grand Marnier. Good lord.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Anyway, Robbie Robertson counted with the jokey suggestion the royal
Canadians except for Levon.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
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,

(48:11):
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

(48:32):
Artist Declaration contract form reads group performing as the Crackers.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
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

(49:00):
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,

(49:23):
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,

(49:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
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?

Speaker 3 (50:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (50:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
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

(51:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
We didn't know what we were doing, but from the
classic albums thing here.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Oh, cutting him into the publishing rights probably would have
been nicer.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Here you highlighted this, You read the rest of this well.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
Bit kind of the bit.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
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

(52:34):
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

(52:57):
basically playlist selecting.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
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

(53:24):
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.

(53:46):
Annalie Amsden Carmen was another person he knew from his
hometown of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
Is that correctly? If so? Yeah, that's so good as
nut Bush, Arkansas or Nutbush, Tennessee.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
My favorite is Bill Withers slab Fork, West Virginia.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Oh, that's incredible. That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Those some bitches will stick you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
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

(55:05):
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

(55:29):
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

(55:50):
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,

(56:11):
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

(56:32):
before it fades to black, you just hear her go beautiful.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
It's like, yeah, it was. Do you think she was
nervous because then she had a big crush on Bob Dylan.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
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

(57:04):
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

(57:24):
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

(57:44):
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

(58:06):
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

(58:31):
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

(58:51):
closed ranks around them because you weren't really supposed to
play electric music in church.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Sam with Sam Cook too.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
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

(59:20):
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

(59:43):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
One?

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
Some of them have incredibly.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
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

(01:00:38):
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,

(01:01:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
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,

(01:01:38):
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

(01:02:00):
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

(01:02:22):
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

(01:02:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
And this, oh no, read that next line, Jordan.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
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

(01:03:20):
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.

(01:03:43):
I know it was an egalitarian enterprise, but Robbie was
probably the one that was more in control.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
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

(01:04:28):
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

(01:04:51):
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

(01:05:13):
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

(01:05:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
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,

(01:06:08):
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

(01:06:31):
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

(01:06:54):
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

(01:07:17):
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

(01:07:39):
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

(01:07:59):
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

(01:08:20):
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.

(01:08:44):
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

(01:09:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
I mean, I'm being Higel, the character Higel right now.
But does this what I'm saying makes sense?

Speaker 1 (01:09:38):
Does this wash? Like?

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
With the band.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
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,

(01:10:13):
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

(01:10:34):
stupid bronzed stratocaster.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
And he wasn't singing.

Speaker 5 (01:10:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
Oh, yeah, but I you know, but it's still all me.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
I don't know what do you think.

Speaker 5 (01:11:10):
I mean?

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
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

(01:11:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
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

(01:12:18):
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

(01:12:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:59):
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

(01:13:20):
person and just mean and how to move through the world. Man.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
Also, never forget, never forget.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
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

(01:14:06):
and a person who they in theory owed, versus Robbie
advocating for his sleazy leisure suited in coke Buddy and
his damn.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
Song Dryer Ries.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
We're in aviators on stage. Ah, alright, I'm.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
Done, move on well, Dryeres.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Has anyone ever looked more like a Quelude in Personified
than than Neil Diamond and Last Waltz?

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
I mean I would argue Van Morrison on Last Waltz?

Speaker 2 (01:14:47):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
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

(01:15:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:58):
Dun dunk, Oh, great hell of riff, great record, glat
lack of not great song.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
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

(01:16:27):
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,

(01:16:49):
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

(01:17:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
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

(01:17:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:56):
He's like, how am I going to get out of
this one?

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
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

(01:18:18):
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

(01:18:38):
in the Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
By a mile. You know. I said I was done bashion, Robbie.
I'm not done passion, Robbie.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
They all talked about how they would be sitting around
and Robbie would be like.

Speaker 1 (01:18:51):
Oh, you know, what should we do there?

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
I love his gotty plait secks.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
Oh yeah, you go go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
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

(01:19:53):
to runoff of the rock bands, which I love.

Speaker 2 (01:19:57):
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

(01:20:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
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.

(01:21:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
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

(01:21:47):
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

(01:22:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:22:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
Years before Stevie wonder Wow exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
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

(01:23:08):
just play it with one hand and use the pedals
with his other hand. Just a genius, you know, one
hell of a beard.

Speaker 1 (01:23:16):
Yeah. And he apparently also built a guitar amp.

Speaker 2 (01:23:21):
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,

(01:23:42):
but just again something he cobbled together and then they
put Robbie's guitar through it for Tiers of Rage.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
No pictures of it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Yeah, no, trust me, I looked for it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:55):
Well, speaking of tears of rage, and then you got
a lot to say about tiers of rage, especially our
beloved Richard Manuel.

Speaker 2 (01:24:02):
Richard Manuell Man, I mean that falsetto?

Speaker 1 (01:24:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
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

(01:24:45):
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

(01:25:06):
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

(01:25:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
Like, what does he mean? Oh? Also dated the woman
who was charged with the involuntary manslaughter of John Belushi.

Speaker 2 (01:26:03):
Yeah, he's a lot of darkness in Richard. Yeah, shape
I'm In was an autobiographal autobiographical song about him.

Speaker 1 (01:26:12):
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, my god.

Speaker 2 (01:26:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:26:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:26:40):
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

(01:27:02):
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

(01:27:23):
we know? Jesus Christ speaking of speaking of.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
Nudity, jes.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
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

(01:28:50):
you off of the warning this time.

Speaker 1 (01:28:55):
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

(01:29:15):
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

(01:29:38):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:29:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:06):
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

(01:30:27):
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

(01:30:48):
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

(01:31:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
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

(01:31:45):
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

(01:32:05):
photo of them on the cover and they all looked
miserable because it was just raining. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
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

(01:32:32):
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

(01:32:52):
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

(01:33:14):
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

(01:33:38):
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

(01:34:01):
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

(01:34:24):
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

(01:34:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:35:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:35:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:21):
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

(01:35:45):
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

(01:36:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:36:20):
Thing.

Speaker 2 (01:36:21):
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

(01:36:43):
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

(01:37:04):
did they bombed? Were they just not recorded?

Speaker 1 (01:37:06):
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

(01:37:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:37:37):
Figure out what exactly had happened at Woodstock.

Speaker 1 (01:37:41):
Well, they were.

Speaker 2 (01:37:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:37:53):
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,

(01:38:13):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:38:28):
Well, they went and overdubbed their voices after, right, did they?
That's what Robbie just said in the.

Speaker 1 (01:38:35):
Book Crosby Stills A Nash.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:38:48):
Oh what a bitchy, what a prick?

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
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

(01:39:15):
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

(01:39:37):
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

(01:40:01):
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

(01:40:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:40:32):
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

(01:40:55):
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

(01:41:15):
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

(01:41:38):
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,

(01:42:03):
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

(01:42:24):
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

(01:42:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:43:01):
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

(01:43:24):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:43:49):
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

(01:44:10):
agree on the name. Vocalist Dan McCafferty said in twenty fourteen,
where are they from? Glasgow, Edinburgh?

Speaker 1 (01:44:16):
I have no idea. I can't believe they've been around
since nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:44:20):
I know that's wild done, firm, lean done, firmline in Fife, Scotland.

Speaker 1 (01:44:26):
That means anything to you, nothing, not a thing. Nothing.
In my Anglophile, we.

Speaker 2 (01:44:32):
Were listening to the Weight when it first came out
and Pete Agnew, our bass player, said what about Nazareth?

Speaker 1 (01:44:37):
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

(01:45:00):
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

(01:45:23):
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

(01:45:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
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

(01:46:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
Then I'd like it. I'd like a moment of silence.

Speaker 2 (01:46:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:47:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:47:20):
June The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan
run Talk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:47:25):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Band's 'Music from Big Pink': Everything You Didn't Know