The Band: Greatest Hits

The Band, erstwhile musicians at Bob Dylan's court and everyone's favourite sharecropper lookalikes. They, almost single-handedly, launched the whole Americana sub-genre in music before it took off hugely as the sixties became the seventies and everyone sang a few country numbers and reminisced about the good old days farming the land. The Band took it further, though, growing their beards and dressing as if it were 1875, even as glam rock was all around. Strange, I have to say. Despite that, their music was hugely influential, particularly on artists with a taste for Americana such as Elton John. 

I have reviewed five of their albums in more detail - click on the blue label link at the bottom of the page. 

The Band were not really a "greatest hits" outfit, were they? There are many other songs that should have been included (arguably) but, as a taster of what they were about, this is a pretty good album's worth of material. 

In the meantime, let's roll into Nazareth.....

We start with the absolute best, The Weight, still the group's most famous song. This is where the imagery of the old rural mid-West and the Americana thing really kicks in. It is a great country-ish piece of rock blues. What was it about? Who were the characters? Fanny, Anna Lee, Crazy Chester and so on. Who knows, it was all highly evocative, though. I love it. It remains one of my favourite songs of all time, by anyone. 

Tears Of Rage, co-written with Bob Dylan, is a mournful number, with a bluesy sound and some great guitar. Chest Fever begins with some madcap Deep Purple-esque psychedelic organ - as if Jon Lord has muscled in on the sessions - before it launches into a slow burning, bassy, rhythmic, pumping blues rocker. It is one of their most "1968" songs on the Music From Big Pink album. That organ sound is most foreboding, like something out of a Vincent Price horror movie. 

I Shall Be Released is a Dylan song I first knew due to The Tom Robinson Band's cover of it on the 'b' side of their 1977 2-4-6-8 Motorway single. Actually, I prefer their version, but the Band's one is suitably bleak and sombre in its timbre. 

There is a bluesy feel to the shuffling Up On Cripple Creek, a really catchy song that I can't help singing along to. I love the funky drum, organ and clavinet backing to it. We even get a bit of yodelling on the vocals too, for some reason. 

By 1969's eponymous album, the songs are delivered sensitively, observationally and with a little humour at times. They talk of the US Civil War, of getting through the winter snow, of tending crops, of life in the Tennessee backwoods and so on. They were quite unique at the time. The music often had lyrics about life in that period, and often the US Civil War, such as the evocative tale narrated by the character of Virgil Cane in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (although I have always preferred Joan Baez’s version). This physical and lyrical imagery is far more prominent here than on the previous years's far more psychedelic (in places) debut album, Music From Big Pink. The music is full, with a big drum and bass sound, Robbie Robertson’s guitar and Garth Hudson’s swirling, instantly recognisable organ sound dominating things. 

The bluesy thing is there again on the upbeat, rollicking Rag Mama Rag. Bernie Taupin must have been so influenced by this album, lyrically, in its Americana aspects, and certainly Elton John uses a lot of the musical style and vocal delivery in so much of his early seventies material. Tumbleweed Connection has a real feel of this album to it, both lyrically and musically. Check out that piano break in the middle.

King Harvest - which closed the 1969 The Band album - was an atmospheric organ-driven rocker about a union worker. Lyrics abound about “a dry summer”, “please let those crops grow” and how "Jethro, he went mad". There is a soulful feel to this one, almost funky in parts, a bit like Cripple Creek, but slower and chunkier.

The next two tracks have become well known ones over time - the archetypal organ-powered and lively Band rock of The Shape I’m In and Stage Fright, another organ-dominated and melodious number, written autobiographically by Robertson about his own unfortunate affliction. Both of these songs are classic Band, exemplifying their sound perfectly. 

Time To Kill is a country-influenced, highly enjoyable good-time typically-Band bar-room romp and Life Is A Carnival is another muscular, brassy and attractively funky one. The group's cover of Dylan's Greek reminiscences When I Paint My Masterpiece is extremely attractive. Also a fine cover is the one of Clarence "Frogman" Henry's rollickin' and rumbustious Ain't Got No Home - it is just pure fun from the first note.

It Makes No Difference is a plaintive, rustic ballad with a solid backing and an overall feeling of sadness to it. It reminds me a bit of Van Morrison it its structure, its emotions and overall sound as opposed to the voice, which, of course, is nothing like him. 

Ophelia is lively, brassy and funky with a jazzy sort of ragtime feel to it. Very retro in its sound. 

Acadian Driftwood is a nostalgic, historical and extremely moving narrative song about the forced expulsion of the Acadians by the British from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada. Many of them emigrated to Louisiana and became Cajuns. The event is regarded as a crime against humanity. Near the end of the song, the group sing in Cajun French.

The album ends with the enjoyable, organ-powered rustic tale, The Saga Of Pepote Rouge. I am not sure what it is about, though. It may be allegorical. It's probably about Native Americans or Canadians though.

So, there we are - a trip from the 1970s back to the 1870s.

I'm off on my way now - to keep Anna Lee company.....