It’s time for another end of the month blog cleanup, and we here at introgroove are not happy with ourselves I’m not too happy with myself. There are definitely some items here that deserved dedicated posts during the course of this month, but I just didn’t get it done. I’ll let you decide which ones they are. Let’s do this and move on to September, where slightly cooler temps and another batch of classic album anniversaries await.
8/10/70: Mothers of Invention – Weasels Ripped My Flesh
This was the Mothers’ seventh album. It’s a mix of studio and live recordings, and is chock full of Zappa improvisation. Retrospective reviews are quite positive. A contemporary review in Billboard called it “far out.” It’s in my collection, and while I enjoy it and find it more accessible than, say, Freak Out!, it has yet to fully click with me.
8/14/70: Hawkwind – Hawkwind
Hawkwind released their self-titled debut on the 14th, and the album is considered a pioneering recording in the space rock genre. It was recorded live in studio. I own the album. I like the album. I think I know what is meant by “space rock,” but I couldn’t really begin to explain it. I mean, like, you know? Yeah. Spacey. As with the Mothers cover above, this one is also far out. Lemmy would appear on their second through fifth albums.
8/17/70: The Band – Stage Fright
We continue with our colorful August 1970 album covers with The Band’s third release, Stage Fright. If not for the legendary status of their first two albums, this one would most likely be thought of in the same light. As it is, Stage Fright is highly regarded to this day, regardless of the fissures that were beginning to appear within the group. The title track and The Shape I’mIn are its most well known songs.
8/28/70: The Jackson Five – Single: I’ll Be There
This was the Jackson Five’s first single from their third album (Third Album). It was their fourth number one single in a row, making the group the first to have their first four singles reach the top of the charts. I think Motown was on to something. Great track.
8/26-8/30/1970: Isle of Wight Festival
At the time, this was the largest music festival in history. Estimates range from 600,00-700,000 attendees, dwarfing Woodstock. Some of the many notable performers included Taste (Rory Gallagher), Chicago, Procal Harum, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Ten Years After, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, ELP, The Who, Sly & the Family Stone, Kris Kristofferson, Donovan, The Pentangle, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Richie Havens, and a brand new group, Supertramp, among many others.
This was the third consecutive year for the festival on the island, and by that time many of the locals who were opposed to the event taking place there had become organized to the extent that the only location made available to festival planners was at Afton Down, with its large hill overlooking the festival ground which created various issues. The festival spawned a number of individual album and concert documentary releases over the years. For the 75th anniversary perhaps I should do a proper write up of the event.
8/31/70: The Beach Boys – Sunflower
The Beach Boys have been a nice surprise in my music appreciation evolution. There was a time when I assumed all I “needed” was Pet Sounds, Smile Sessions, and a definitive greatest hits compilation for the earlier stuff. I enjoyed those releases for some time before discovering the group hadn’t exactly become passé by the turn of the decade. Well, perhaps they had to the masses, but critically speaking, no. This is a critically acclaimed, very enjoyable album which features songwriting by the entire band, still including Brian Wilson. Its followup a year later, almost to the day, has also aged very well. But for now, yeah, Sunflower.
August 1970: Neil Diamond – Single: Cracklin’ Rosie
Cracklin’ Rosie was Neil’s first number one song on the Billboard Hot 100. It was also his breakthrough in the U.K., where it reached number three. It was written by Diamond and recorded with the Wrecking Crew. I’ve no problem acknowledging the greatness of Neil Diamond’s earlier work. The man can write a song, and he still sells out arenas. I also like his latter day albums that were produced by Rick Rubin.
August 1970: Sugarloaf – Single: Green Eyed Lady
I’ve aways liked this song, particularly the longer version that sometimes reaches the airwaves. It reached number one in Canada and number three in the U.S. It’s a good song to have on while driving down the highway.
There it sat upon my bookshelf, mocking me in the same way other books I’d intended to read but hadn’t yet gotten around to had done in the past. “What’s the matter lad, reading stream of consciousness sound more craic than the reality of plodding through it?” barked my copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. “You like Monty Python and the Holy Grail so much, when are you going to pick me up and learn about the real thing? You’re one remarkable would-be student of history, Stephen” scolded historian Barbara Tuchman from the binding of A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Then they formed an evil axis with a book on a shelf across the room, Greil Marcus’s rather astounding study of the roots of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, titled Invisible Republic (Picador, 1997) and perfectly re-titled The Old, Weird America in 2011.
While I did end up digesting the former two works, the Marcus volume, much briefer and presumably about a topic I’d be more readily enthusiastic about, remained with a bookmark about 95 pages in. I think at the time I originally picked it up I was more interested in a chronicle of Dylan and the group soon to be known as the Band’s time at Woodstock in the fall of 1967 as they recorded mostly in the basement of the house known as Big Pink. This book ain’t that. With my first attempt I thought this Greil Marcus guy was kind of full of himself, to the point of feeling pissed off because I had difficulty following him. There’s a ringing endorsement of the author and this book by His Bobness right there on the cover, so why am I not “getting it?”
I’m not a fast reader, but I’ve been reading a lot during this rather bizarre moment in our future history, mostly music-related topics. While waiting for my next selection to be delivered by an omnipresent Amazon van and not ready to jump back to fiction, it dawned on me that this is a perfect time to dig back into The Old, Weird America while giving a closer listen to the Basement Tapes, expanded since my first attempt at reading this book as part of the Bootleg Series (I bought the two-disc highlights set when it was released in 2014, which I thought at the time was more than I would ever want to hear of those interesting but sonically poor and hard to understand songs.). I knew better what to expect this time around, and it synced perfectly with the other books I’d recently read on the musical and cultural history of the blues in the Deep South.
We see little mention of Dylan after about page 85. The majority of the book discusses various aspects of American cultural history from the Puritans to 1920’s Appalachia, including the West Virginia Mine War of 1920-21 to moonshiners and gangsters and those who wrote and sang songs about it all. Specifically those whose songs were originally issued from 1926-1933, and were assembled by collector and self-taught anthropologist Harry Smith on his enduringly important six album, 84 track Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) which became a major resource during the American folk music revival of the 1950’s and 60’s. Some of these long lost performers were rediscovered – in some cases searched for and found after decades of obscurity – and put on stage at Newport in the early/mid 60’s.
I’d never heard of most of the artists on the Anthology who were given biographical treatment by Marcus, folks such as Dock Boggs, Buell Kazee, and Frank Hutchison. He doesn’t have much to say about the ones I had heard of, including the Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt, Charlie Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. I don’t own the Anthology, but being able to dial up on YouTube any of the songs mentioned made this a fun and fascinating experience. The point of it all, of course, was that Dylan had heard of them, and ultimately incorporated their themes, fragments, and reworkings of whole songs along with his and the Band’s own originals – all maintaining that old, weird vibe – into what would come to be known at the Basement Tapes. The vibe is one of lives in poverty, of lawlessness and survival, and the masks worn by such a society in hardscrabble times and places which made up the Invisible Republic or Old, Weird America. The characters seems tragic, but Marcus explains that they aren’t since there’s an absence of guilt or shame in how they lived. It’s all they knew.
Marcus describes the 78 rpm recordings made by early 20th century banjo pickers and blues men (and women: check out Geechie Wiley’s haunting blues linked at the bottom of the page) as a “democratic event” because they gave a voice to those Americans who weren’t previously heard. Those voices were thrust back into the national consciousness during the Civil Rights Era as they were heard on college campuses and at festivals (as seen on Murray Lerner’s Festival!, which documents the Newport Folk Festivals from 1963-66). Critical to the topic at hand, Bob Dylan, a cultural icon from the 1960’s-onward, is old enough and was in the right place to witness personally the last musical citizens of the original Old, Weird America, and in him they found a major new champion of their tradition.
The Basement Tapes are his and the Band’s interpretation of that world, a time and place that are the origin of song characters and titles such as Stagger Lee/Stagolee/Stacker Lee, Frankie and Albert, Casey Jones, John Henry, the Coo-Coo/Cuckoo Bird, etc. Dylan’s Clothesline Saga, a song where we don’t really find out what has happened, just that something probably really bad has happened, I learned was an answer to Bobby Gentry’s 1967 hit Ode to Billie Joe, a song I hadn’t really paid much attention to but which I discovered to also be constructed in the spirit of that old time and place after a ten minute trip down that rabbit hole. The recordings also spawned the bootleg industry as it came to be known. Dylan originally made the recordings for the purpose of giving them to other artists to do proper recordings of, which they did. But this only increased the demand of his hardcore fans for the originals, rough as those recordings were. Thus the first major bootleg release, The Great White Wonder.
There was a spooky alchemy that took place with Dylan and the Band in Woodstock in late ’67/early ’68, and to me the context is simply surreal. Just a year prior, he was an amphetamine fueled, checkered skinny suit wearing rock star who had recorded two of the greatest albums of all time in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, who went to battle every night against much of his so-called folk purist audience in the U.S. and Europe, burned out, crashed his motorcycle, took a breather, and re-emerged with a completely new sound and, yes, appearance, first in the “Red Room” of his Woodstock house, then in the basement of Big Pink. All at a time when his contemporaries had gone psychedelic, even the Rolling Stones.
Besides on the Basement Tapes, that modern version of the Invisible Republic or Old, Weird America can be heard on Dylan’s next official recording, John Wesley Harding, as well as the first two albums by the Band, Music from Big Pink and the self-titled album. From there it blossomed into what we today call Americana. It’s really that big of a deal. Visually it can be seen in basically every one of those great photos – black & white and color – taken at Woodstock with Dylan and the Band by Elliott Landy. It’s in the clothes they wore and the way they posed for pictures.
Elliott Landy photoElliott Landy photo
It’s also evident in the setting of Richard Gere as Billy the Kid’s portion of Todd Haynes’s 2007 biopic I’m Not There, based on Dylan’s various personas over the years. Further, Dylan and the Band were a major influence on George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Think about that: It can be argued that Dylan and the Band’s residence and output at Woodstock played at least a small part in the breakups of the Beatles and Cream (or at least sped up the inevitable). This stuff is a bottomless pit I’m happy to get lost in, and now that I’ve made it through Greil Marcus’s book I’m going to read the one I probably meant to find the first time around, Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes.
The masks were out in fictitious yet old and weird Riddle, MO in I’m Not There.Some crumbs, if you’ve read this far:
-I wasn’t aware that the Basement Tapes as finally officially released in 1975 contains quite a bit of added overdubbing to make the tracks more commercially appealing.
-It turns out I really do like these songs, crudely recorded as they may be.
-I just watched the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band on Prime. Whether you’re a Robbie person or a Levon person (or neither), it’s very well done.
And from the “it all ties together” files:
-I recently read Alan Lomax’s book on the origins of the blues (The Land Where the Blues Began), and in the Marcus book it’s mentioned that it was Lomax, along with Pete Seeger, who attempted to cut the electric chords when Dylan plugged in at Newport in ’65, and,
-Regarding that crazy Dylan 1966 tour of the UK when Levon had quit before they left because he didn’t want to deal with the hostility every night and was replaced by Mickey Jones: Last night my wife and I revisited National Lampoon’s Vacation, which, like many of my generation, I have seen numerous times. I hadn’t in a long while, and I noticed during one scene that a bit part actor strongly resembled either any number of folks I’ve seen in the news lately spewing saliva at medical mask wearing cops in the continuing scenes from our current Bizarro World, OR Mickey Jones. Sure enough, it was Mickey Jones.
Mickey Jones (center) as the mechanic getting over on Clark W. Griswold
Now we’re talkin’! Fifty years ago today, the Band made their debut with Music from Big Pink, an album that continues to influence artists and earn new fans. In the heart of the psychedelic era, these five extremely versatile musicians were the rock antidote to the dayglow paisley scene. Four of the five members were Canadian, but they created a uniquely American sound which is generally referred to today as Americana. Nobody sounded or looked like them.
L-R: Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson
The group, originally known as the Hawks, had been hired away from Ronnie Hawkins by Bob Dylan, and they backed him on his combative 1966 UK tour. During Dylan’s subsequent post-tour exile at Woodstock, he summoned the Hawks and put them on retainer to record the songs which finally surfaced as the official release, TheBasement Tapes, in 1975 (the recordings were heavily bootlegged until then). Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson moved into a pink house nearby in West Saugerties, with a basement where they and Dylan recorded dozens of somewhat bizarre Dylan originals and cover songs.
When they realized how interesting the material was with or without their boss, they convinced former band mate Levon Helm to leave the oil rigs he was working on and head to the northeast to rejoin them and record their own songs. Helm had left the group early in the ’66 Dylan shows when it became apparent that they would be playing before hostile audiences wherever they went due to Dylan “going electric.” He was replaced for the rest of the tour by Mickey Jones, who passed away this past February at 76.
In the yard at Big Pink, Levon back in the fold.
At the behest of their (and Dylan’s) manager Albert Grossman, the band – at this juncture known as the Crackers – was signed by Capitol Records and they shifted to A&R Studios in New York City where they recorded five songs before moving the project to L.A. where they finished the album. By the time it was released, they had (thankfully) changed their name to simply the Band. Two songs, Tears of Rage and This Wheel’s on Fire, were co-written by Dylan, and Bob was solely credited on the final track, I Shall Be released. He also painted the picture used on the album cover. In his original 1968 Rolling Stone review of the album, Al Kooper referred to the record as a hybrid concoction of “White Soul.” He wrote:
I hear the Beach Boys, the Coasters, Hank Williams, the Association, the Swan Silvertones as well as obviously Dylan and the Beatles. What a varied bunch of influences. I love all the music created by the above people and a montage of these forms (bigpink) boggles the mind…This album was made along the lines of the motto: “Honesty is the best policy.”
Big Pink today, available to rent for overnight stays at $550 per night with two night minimum, basement not included – see link at the bottom of the page for current photos and descriptions.
The Band’s muse (along with Dylan’s at the time) seemingly came seeping through the dirt of the cotton fields of Arkansas, the coal mines of Appalachia, and the basement floor of that pink house from bygone days of the early/mid 20th century, or that “Old, Weird America,” to lift a favorite term of mine coined by author Greil Marcus in describing Dylan’s and the Band’s Basement Tapes recordings as the often otherworldly amalgamation of country, blues, and folk music from that period, much of which is featured in the Anthology of American Folk Music.
This record and this group inspired Eric Clapton to leave Cream and George Harrison to move toward the songwriting that was later featured on his All Things Must Pass album. Meeting the group also made Harrison long for the camaraderie he saw them enjoying which he no longer felt in the Beatles. “Timeless” is a somewhat overemployed word used to describe various recordings, but that’s what this album (and their follow-up a year later) is. As with many great bands, their energy and creativity was fairly short lived for many of the usual reasons, but what they gave us made a large and lasting impact. And with Music from Big Pink they were just starting to come into their own as recording artists.
The Band in the basement of Big Pink. Elliott Landy photo.
![I'm Not There – FILMGRAB [ • ]](https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/thumb/54%20(457).jpg?bwg=1547221879)
50th Music Anniversaries and Other Musings 