The Fat Angel Sings

The Band emerged in the late sixties as part of the roots movement that would come to counter the psychedelic influence that had taken a grip on popular music. This group of four Canadians and one Arkansas musician, who once backed Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, exploded onto the scene with arguably two of the greatest albums of all time – Music From Big Pink and the self-titled second album The Band. Rustic and encompassing various genres, performed with musicianship of the highest order and with a great trio of vocalists in Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the albums are like timeless storybooks, documenting a long-gone era with nostalgia, bitterness and regret.

Flanked by a guitarist of the highest order in Robbie Robertson and the almost mythical layer-adding Garth Hudson, these are soundscapes like no other. Songs like The Weight, Whispering Pines, Lonesome Suzie, The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down and King Harvest represent a group in full mastery of their abilities and are rightly regarded as classics.

The problem with The Band is that they peaked too early. The dirty habits of the rock and roll life style set in, drugs and alcohol the corrupting influences that saw the group decline after the third album Stage Fright. In addition to this, Robertson has also alluded to the pressures of being on the road that only served to exasperate the issues facing these talented musicians. By the early seventies, Manuel, once the main songwriter for the group, could no longer pen material. His voice remained entrancing but onstage he could barely perform beyond a few numbers.
The Band would continue to show sparks of their former selves throughout the remaining seven years they spent together. Moondog Matinee, a covers album, is pretty fine and there are a few nuggets to be found on Northern Lights-Southern Cross, one of the original setup’s final albums. By the time they called it quits following the Last Waltz they were burned out. Robertson could no longer tour and Manuel would tragically take his own life in 1986. A reunited Band in the nineties (minus Robertson) was unable to capture the magic, with very little new original material penned. Here are some of their classic songs.

The Weight

Gram Parsons might have coined the phrase “cosmic American music”, but has any piece of music ever sounded so cosmic, or indeed so American, as the Band’s signature track? By the time Levon Helm’s road-weary traveller has pulled into Nazareth – not in biblical Galilee, but eastern Pennsylvania, where CF Martin founded the oldest guitar company in the US in 1833 – he’s already “feeling ’bout half-past dead”, with light years on the clock, and no end to his journey in sight. So ingrained is The Weight’s sense of the mythological and metaphysical that even after you learn the more prosaic truth behind its cast of characters – that “Luke” refers to their former Hawks bandmate Jimmy Ray Paulman, “Anna Lee” was a childhood friend of Helm’s and “Crazy Chester” was an eccentric club owner from North Carolina – it still feels as esoteric and inscrutable it did on your first listen. It’s a song that doesn’t sound like it was written, so much as divined – a nugget of gold panned from the riverbed of American musical tradition, even if four-fifths of the group who happened upon it were Canadian.

Chest Fever

According to guitarist Robbie Robertson: “If you like Chest Fever, it’s for god knows what reason … it doesn’t make any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything.” Yet it’s hard to see how the reason could be any more obvious: if you like Chest Fever, it’s because of Garth Hudson. The multi-instrumentalist didn’t sing, and his songwriting credits were scarce, but his peerless ability and technical know-how were a huge, if often overlooked, asset to the Band. Ophelia – on which he almost single-handedly constructs a Dixieland-jazz wall of sound – is perhaps the greater testament to his musicality and versatility, but personal preference means Chest Fever sneaks on to this list ahead of it. Sure, the lyrics were ad-libbed and largely meaningless, but Hudson’s extraordinary Lowrey organ intro (improvised from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor) and the heaving, inexorable groove of the song’s central riff elevates what might have been a throwaway number into a thing of indomitable power and majesty, which for many years served as the centrepiece of their live set.

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

In later life, drummer Levon Helm began to dabble in acting, appearing in movies such as Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Right Stuff and, bizarrely, the Steven Seagal eco-thriller Fire Down Below. His greatest performance, however, will always be that of Virgil Caine, the defeated but stoically defiant protagonist of what is possibly the Band’s finest track. Helm inhabits the role of a forlorn Confederate veteran so completely that when he sings – in that high, lonesome, cigarettes-and-rye rasp – about how the last days of the US civil war are “a time I remember oh so well”, you find yourself believing him. In writing it, meanwhile, Robertson displayed remarkable nuance: the lyrics are not an expression of sympathy or support for the Confederacy, much less slavery; they’re the lament of an ordinary man who knows he’s on the wrong side of history, aware that his own suffering – and the excesses of the victors – has already been written out it.

Whispering Pines

Much of the Band’s early magic lay in their rejection of clearly defined roles. Each member had a primary instrument but would chop and change as the music required; songwriting duties were mostly shared between Robertson and nominal lead vocalist Richard Manuel, but there was no de facto leader; they were adaptive, instinctual, egalitarian; a band – the band – rather than a vehicle for individual talent. That began to change after their self-titled second album, as much because of Manuel’s drug-induced inertia as the bitter disputes over Robertson’s royalty shares, but the heartrending Whispering Pines stands out as perhaps the greatest collaboration between the group’s two main songwriters. Manuel composed the melody – so haunting it would have given Brian Wilson shivers – on an out-of-tune piano he kept at home before tasking Robertson with finishing the lyrics; the guitarist responded with a poetic meditation on loneliness that Manuel’s fragile falsetto managed to wring every last ounce of pathos from. It was no accident, as Robertson later explained: “Richard always had this very plaintive attitude in his voice, and in his sensitivity as a person. I tried to follow that, to go with it and find it musically. We both felt very good about this song.”

Up on Cripple Creek

There’s an argument for 1969’s The Band – also known as The Brown Album – as a loose concept album about the people, places and shared experiences of an older, more innocent and fast-vanishing America, an idea not entirely dissimilar to what Ray Davies was doing on the other side of the pond with The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur. The Band’s worldview, however, was decidedly more blue-collar: they gravitated towards earthier tales of stricken sharecroppers, down-at-heel outlaws and charismatic drunkards. Up on Cripple Creek is the epitome of that, the story of a sanguine, free-wheeling hobo’s cross-country adventures with his “little Bessie”, and likened by the critic Greil Marcus to Harry McClintock’s Big Rock Candy Mountain as “a place where all fears vanish beyond memory”. Underpinned by the bright, sure-handed bounce of Helm’s drumming and Hudson’s funky, undulating wah-wah clavinet, it’s possessed of a roguish, irresistible charm that never fails to have you reaching for the nearest bottle.

Stage Fright

All five members of the Band had cut their teeth as working musicians in the 1950s, when the concept of success was very different to what it would be a decade later when they finally achieved it for themselves. “If you’ve never made a million dollars overnight, like we did, you have no concept of what it can do,” reflected bassist Rick Danko. “Suddenly, we had all the money we needed and people were falling over themselves to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand.” Stage Fright was the sound of the Band choking on fame’s poisoned chalice, a theme that ran through the album of the same name – see also WS Walcott Medicine Show’s mockery of showbiz artifice, or Daniel and the Sacred Harp’s Faustian parable about a musician selling his soul – and yielded some of its strongest material. In this case, the creeping anxiety and psychosis – “Your brow is sweating and your mouth gets dry / Fancy people go drifting by / The moment of truth is right at hand / Just one more nightmare you can stand” – belonged to Robertson, whose writing was taking a darker, more personal turn, but the song is brought to life by Danko’s twitchy, nervous vocals.

The Shape I’m In

By 1970, the shy, sweet-natured Richard Manuel had started down the self-destructive path that would ultimately consume him. A heavy drinker since his teens, Manuel subsequently developed a fondness for hard drugs that made him unreliable and accident-prone, and he seemed content to let his considerable songwriting gifts wane – after that year, he never wrote again. Robertson would later recall: “I begged him, I pleaded with him, I offered to become his partner in songwriting, I’d pull him into a song I was working on just to get him in the mood or give him a taste of it, thinking he would go on to follow it up. But he didn’t.” It’s tempting to wonder if The Shape I’m In was one of those songs. It was certainly written about the pianist’s physical and psychological deterioration, and not withstanding the mischievous twinkle in its eye or the Stax beat in its step, the lyrics – “Out of nine lives, I’ve spent seven / Now, how in the world do you get to heaven?” – have the air of an intervention. Manuel sings it with a gruff, haggard charm, but the real stinger comes close to the end, when he lays out the dilemma his bandmates were wrestling with: “Save your neck, or save your brother / Looks like it’s one or the other.” Manuel took his life in a Florida hotel room 16 years later.

When I Paint My Masterpiece

Cahoots, the group’s misfiring fourth album, brought to an end to one of rock’n’roll’s most febrile creative streaks, containing what Rolling Stone would later (and to these ears unfairly) call “Robertson’s first truly awful song”, the unloved The Moon Struck One. Yet it still had its moments, principally this one – a song written by their former paymaster Bob Dylan, but which belongs, in the broader sense of the word, to the Band, and to Levon Helm in particular. The drummer’s characterful vocal captures the essence of a Yankee outsider’s odyssey through Europe – romancing “a pretty little girl from Greece,” dodging lions in the Coliseum, navigating a near-riot in Brussels – far better than Dylan’s own sub-par version, released a couple of months later. Special mention must also go to Garth Hudson’s sparkling turn on the accordion, which lends the song a discombobulating layer of faux-continental sleaze.

It Makes No Difference

Though it might seem like the kind of song more suited to Richard Manuel’s wheelhouse, Robertson wrote It Makes No Difference with Rick Danko in mind, and the bassist knocked it out of the park, out of the neighbourhood, and several area-codes down the road. Simply put, this is one of the rawest, most devastating vocal performances committed to tape, by this band or any other: a seemingly straightforward torch song about the void left by an absent lover, Danko’s high, keening delivery amplifies it to levels of hurt and desperation that are almost as uncomfortable for the listener to hear as they were for Danko. It’s a song that you can’t turn away from, an apocalypse-by-melancholy, whose heartsick protagonist is ceaselessly pursued by low-hanging storm clouds, torrential rains and – just when you think things couldn’t possibly get any worse – a herd of stampeding cattle.

Acadian Driftwood

This list concludes in 1975 with the release of Northern Lights – Southern Cross, after which the original lineup would record only one more studio album, the contractually obligated (and how it showed) Islands. Yet their penultimate effort – discounting those of their latter-day iterations, which featured neither Robertson nor Manuel  was a welcome return to form, and even fitful greatness. Acadian Driftwood, the album’s big moment, tells the story of the Great Upheaval of the 1750s, when tens of thousands of Acadian colonists were forcibly deported from Canada by the British, who “signed a treaty and our homes were taken / Loved ones forsaken, they didn’t give a damn”. As a meticulously researched song of historical record, it shares some DNA with The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, but it’s arguably even more ambitious. Though it’s never made explicit, once Manuel, Helm and Danko start intuitively trading verses, there’s a sense that this story is not being told from a single perspective, but several, with each man expelled from his home into an uncertain future. It was the last time the group’s three lead vocalists would share a song between them, and they couldn’t have chosen a better or more quintessentially Bandish one for the occasion.

• Rick Danko – bass, vocals, double bass, fiddle, trombone
• Levon Helm – drums, vocals, mandolin, guitar, percussion
• Garth Hudson – organ, keyboards, saxophone, accordion, pedalboard, woodwinds, brass
• Richard Manuel – piano, organ, vocals, lap steel guitar, drums
• Robbie Robertson – guitars, vocals, percussion