(2 of 8)
Significantly, The Band's music is quiet. They once played harddriving, ear-numbing rock. Now they deal in intricate, syncopated modal sound that, unlike most rock but like fine jazz, demands close attention and rewards it with a special exhilarating delight. When The Band plays, it is not for a trip but a musical treat. Though their newest LP, The Band, is high on Billboard's "Top LP" chart and they have sold close to a million records, this does not mean that The Band will be everybody's cup of tea. But for those who take to them—musicians, college kids who have grown tired of the predictable blast-furnace intensity of acid rock, and an evergrowing segment of the young—The Band stirs amazement and glee. Perhaps their most important accolade is the approval of scores of fellow musicians, who say simply: "The Band is where it's at."
The Band's sound is at first deceptively simple. It comes on mainly as country music full of straight lines and pure sentiments—in short, what Rock Critic Richard Goldstein has characterized as "pop nostalgia." But as you listen, new depths and distant sources emerge—and finally convince and captivate: Bach toccatas, folk tunes, commercial rock 'n' roll, Scottish reels, the sound of Ontario Anglican church worshipers raising their voices in hymns on Sunday morning. The lyrics are spiritual and timeless. In Robertson's The Weight, written for the group's first Capitol album, Music from Big Pink (1968) and heard in the movie Easy Rider, cascading lines of melody combine with mock-serious lyrics to bring an Old Testament character face to face with a 1970 rock musician:
I pulled into Nazareth,
Was feelin' 'bout half-past dead,
I just need some place where I can
lay my head.
"Hey, Mister, can ya tell me where a
man might find a bed?"
He just grinned an' shook my hand,
And "no" was all he said.
Words and music are delivered with unfashionable understatement. At four recent concerts in Manhattan's 4,500-seat Felt Forum (sellouts all), The Band showed a no-nonsense absorption in music that would have done credit to the Budapest String Quartet. Robbie Robertson's main contribution is as a composer of most of the group's songs and lyrics. But onstage he is a sedate figure who vaguely suggests pictures of James Joyce as a young man. With the bare trace of a smile visible under his mustache, his eyes often closed in what seems to be creative ecstasy, he stands punching out notes and laying out funky phrases like "the mathematical guitar genius" Bob Dylan used to say he was. Levon Helm approaches his drums with what is, in rock music, unparalleled subtlety and restraint. On bass, Rick Danko occasionally puffs his cheeks as if he were playing a horn. At the piano, Richard Manuel looks like a teen-ager masquerading as a pirate.