I was 17 and we’d gone to Merrimac College, in Massachusetts, on a weekend night, some buddies and myself, to meet girls. We lived nearby in the town of Reading, and the one guy who had a car drove us. The night wasn’t particularly memorable, as I recall, as far as girls were concerned, but it was for something else. I was in a dorm, alone, having gotten separated from the boys, in a room with chairs where students hung out. There was a radio playing, and the song that came over was “The Night Drove Old Dixie Down.” It was a stunning three and a half minutes, unlike any rock song, if you could call it that, I’d ever heard. This was American history writ large and small at the same time, coming out of an AM radio. I knew it was something groundbreaking, this song changed all the rules. It did something rock songs weren’t supposed to be able to do. My mind was blown, to use the phrase of the time.
I knew who The Band were, I had the first album, Music from Big Pink, and pretty much wore it out. Now here was The Band on the second album, titled simply The Band, with its sepia toned photo and their beards and jackets, they looked like they could have stepped out of the 1800’s. The photo and the name were both archetypal, like your rural neighbor walking down the road tells you he just heard some music, you ask who and he says, oh, the band. And that’s all you need to know.
It changed everything. The Grateful Dead came out with American Beauty, Elton John with Tumbleweed Connection, Rod Stewart with the acoustic based Gasoline Alley. The Band is rightly credited with creating Americana as a genre of music, and their offspring, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and others went to work in the fallow field The Band left behind them.
And though the main thing about The Band has always been their unity, oneness, their greatness being the sum of their many interlocking parts, second only to The Beatles in that regard, Robbie Robertson was the quiet architect of the band, the cool head, writing most of the songs and then turning them over to the others to sing, often written specifically for the singer. There could be no one else who would sing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” other than Levon, no one but Rick Danko singing “It Makes No Difference,” and no one but Richard Manuel singing “The Shape I’m In.”
In Scorsese’s film “The Last Waltz,” we see and heard the band swapping stories, talking like brothers indeed, and it was a bittersweet occasion. Robertson talks about the impossible life of being on the road as a band, though we could wish that in hindsight they might have just taken a nice break, and then come back in a more relaxed, orderly way. But that wasn’t how the music business was then. The music in the film is magnificent, the greatest concert film, their final testament.
For me, the very last music, the instrumental outro, the elegant, haunting “Last Waltz Theme,” written by Robertson, shows the band as true heirs of Americana, children of Stephen Foster, timeless and indelible. The authenticity of all of the songs of The Band, with their roots touching every aspect of the music that preceded it, is the lasting gift this Canadian, with his brothers, left to us, to America.