![]() Their thoughts turned to rural towns in the Catskills that were home to Dylan, their mutual manager Albert Grossman and a handful of other friends from the New York City scene. New York proved expensive for an out-of-work band subsisting on a modest retainer. We still wanted to record, so we started looking for a place to rehearse some music.” “We were road musicians without a road to go on. “We didn’t know what to do,” Rick Danko said in Levon Helm’s memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire. ![]() To the remaining members, this began to look more and more like a good career move. Drummer Levon Helm had departed the group (albeit temporarily) the previous year, earning a living on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. All upcoming concert dates were cancelled as rock’s poet laureate recovered from his injuries at his nearby home, casting his backing band into a state of professional limbo. The story of Big Pink really began the moment Bob Dylan lost control of his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle while riding through the outskirts of Woodstock, New York on July 29th, 1966. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack.” We were these kind of rebels with an absolute cause. There was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. “We were rebelling against the rebellion,” Robbie Robertson reflected years later. “If everybody was going east, then we were going west and we never once discussed it. ![]() Everything about their stripped-down sound and style seemed to violate fundamental rules of the industry. While the Beatles and the Brian Wilson sought studio laboratories where they could achieve technical excellence, the Band holed up in a dank concrete cellar in the wilderness of the Catskills to find their muse. While Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Who split eardrums with overdriven amplification, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel turned down the volume, revealing the intricacies of their arrangements and complexity of their lyrics. ![]() In a period when the musical landscape was overrun with psychedelic whimsy, their synthesis of country, blues, gospel, Western classical, and rock was enriching and inspiring. Given that Music From Big Pink came out in the turbulent summer of 1968, it’s tempting to frame the album as a set of soothing sounds for troubled times. ![]()
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