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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS., AUGUST 1995 -- The last few years have seen a flurry of activity surrounding The Band, the most since the group seemingly broke up for good in 1976. Two major books providing the first in-depth look at the legendary Canadian-American rock group were published in 1994. A long-promised retrospective, 3-CD box- set, ``Across the Great Divide,'' was finally released by Capitol Records in the fall of 1994. The spring of 1995 saw the release of a CD culled from the group's legendary performance at the Watkins Glen festival of 1973. The current group touring under the name The Band took part in three of the highest-profile concert events of the 1990s -- the 30th anniversary all-star tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1992, President Clinton's inaugural ball in 1993, and Woodstock '94, the 25th anniversary of the original festival at which The Band performed.
But perhaps the most important development for longtime fans of The Band was the release in 1993 of the album ``Jericho,'' the first recording of new music billed to The Band since ``Islands'' in 1977. Stephen Davis aptly characterized the significance of this event in the liner notes to ``Jericho'' when he wrote, ``a new album by The Band should be a cause for national rejoicing.'' Indeed, for a long-time fan and professional observer of The Band like myself, this should be a glorious time, as we are now witnessing what appears to be a virtual resurrection of the greatest rock band of all time.
Why then do I feel like mourning instead of rejoicing?
The story of how Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson came together as The Band is a piece of Americana worthy of one of the group's songs. It encompasses the history of Canada and the American South, the rise of popular music in the postwar era, and the explosion of rock music in the 1960s. It is a tale typical in how it embraces the travails of fame and the dark side of the music business and unique in that in spite of the forces working against it, the hero of the tale transcends mere entertainment and commerce to make truly lasting and resonant music, what some might even call art.
It is a story told in great detail and authentic flair in both Levon Helm's autobiography, ``This Wheel's On Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band,'' written with Stephen Davis (William Morrow), and in ``Across the Great Divide: The Band and America,'' by English journalist Barney Hoskyns (Hyperion). Both volumes are must-reading for fans of The Band or students of American popular music, and Hoskyns' volume in particular breaks ground as a serious, conventional treatment of the history of a rock band. Read side-by-side, the books are even more illuminating than singly, as they speak to one another in their contrasting portrayals of the same events and of the tensions within The Band that contributed to its ultimate breakup, tensions that inform the group to this very day, tensions that these books reveal publicly for the very first time.
The Band began life as The Hawks, fate having brought the five musicians together, one at a time between 1959 and 1961, into the rock 'n' roll finishing school that was Ronnie Hawkins' backup band. With Hawkins, they established a reputation as the best bar band in the world. By 1963, they were too good to play second- fiddle to a limited, second-rate talent like Hawkins, and they struck out on their own as Levon and the Hawks, uncertain about what path they were about to take.
Floundering in the obscurity of a long-term gig in a New Jersey nightclub, they were subsequently drafted into the key supporting role of Bob Dylan's great heretical experiment of the mid-'60s, which combined serious, literate songwriting with electric rock 'n' roll. With Dylan they travelled around the world, absorbing new ways of thinking about the possibilities of rock music.
When the dust settled from their fiery collaboration with Dylan, which spawned the legendary recordings collected on ``The Basement Tapes,'' the Hawks had been magically transformed into their own, self-contained unit with their own, utterly unique sound and approach. With the release of the landmark ``Music From Big Pink'' in 1968, they were no longer merely the Hawks, the Crackers, the Honkies or the Canadian Squires. They were the one and only, The Band.
The group's first two recordings, ``Music From Big Pink'' and ``The Band,'' were instant classics, rich, deep musical statements that stand to this day as two of the greatest albums of the rock era. The lesser efforts of The Band's middle period, including ``Stage Fright,'' ``Cahoots,'' and the '50s tribute, ``Moondog Matinee,'' each boast moments of greatness while hinting at the group's lost promise. The band's live recordings -- ``Rock of Ages'' and the 1974 collaboration with Bob Dylan, ``Before the Flood'' -- gives listeners who never saw them a taste of what made them such a compelling concert act, always pushing the envelope emotionally, spiritually, and musically, to the point that it all threatened to come undone (sometimes it did).
Their backup work on Dylan's ``Planet Waves'' -- ostensibly a studio recording but in reality one that serves as a document of how the group worked as an improvisational ensemble -- has always been underrated to these ears. The two final studio recordings, ``Northern Lights/Southern Cross'' and ``Islands,'' showed that The Band still had considerable powers to draw upon even while offstage and off-record, as the books vividly illustrate, they were spiraling toward oblivion. ``Northern Lights'' was a painterly display of the group's cultural roots and influences; ``Islands'' was an eloquent farewell. The soundtrack to ``The Last Waltz,'' of course, was as much a tribute to the music of an entire generation as it was to the group itself, and set the standard for tribute efforts, concert films and classy endings.
The recent box-set, ``Across the Great Divide,'' includes selections from most of these recordings and offers previously unreleased tracks dating back to The Hawks that every fan will want to have. The collection does not substitute, however, for the complete, original albums, of which there were only nine (11 including the Dylan collaborations ``The Basement Tapes'' and ``Before The Flood''). Another disk or two would have allowed for the inclusion of all The Band's officially recorded material. The group and its fans deserve such a package no less than those of The Police and Steely Dan, which have been the recent subjects of such complete, retrospective sets. Chalk it up as another missed opportunity by the marketing department at Capitol.
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