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"I'm glad to pay those union dues," the farmer sings. "Just don't judge me by my shoes." But then comes the refrain. With Danko and Robertson on guitars, creating a controlled hush that is just the right rustling background, Manuel and Helm sing in low unison:
Corn in the fields,
Listen to the rice when the wind
blows 'cross the water.
King Harvest has surely come.
Music fans who turned up at record stores to buy The Band's first album, Big Pink, were confronted by a rather odd but decidedly cheerful slip case. On one side were some pastel-colored creatures purporting to be The Band. Though it seemed clear that they had been created by somebody's gifted kindergarten son, the credit line truthfully assigned the artistry to Bob Dylan. On the inside cover, a phalanx of figures appeared—some 35 in all—who turned out to be The Band, backed by most of the members of their respective families. It is characteristic of our age that many people thought the family bit had to be a put-on. It was not. "We don't see our people all that much," Robertson says. "But we get sick and tired of all these whiny rock groups who are always bitching about their parents."
In Dylan and their parents, the group had paid respects to two of the major forces in their musical lives. All five took to music young, and they were brought up singing and playing hymns and folk songs with their families. The only American, Levon, was playing mandolin, drums and guitar in his early teens, and once won first prize at a county fair, accompanied by his sister on a homemade washtub bass. Rick Danko, whose father is a Simcoe tobacco farmer, was given a mandolin at five and soon joined his three brothers at Saturday night musicales.
Garth, the son of a World War I pilot turned agricultural inspector, went farthest in formal study, getting through his first year in music at the University of Western Ontario before taking to the road. Before that he had helped his father rebuild two pump organs and worked through much of Bach's keyboard music (The Well-Tempered Clavier, some 300 chorales). He also briefly played sepulchral organ in his uncle's funeral parlor. "It was terrible," he recalls. "A terrible business."
Robbie was the only big-city boy. He lived with his widowed mother in Toronto and played serious guitar at twelve. Richard was the only reluctant musician in the group. His father, a Chrysler mechanic in Stratford, saw to it that he had piano lessons. But he hated practicing—until he learned he could attract girls by playing in a band.
The Rabelaisian Life
One result of all that music is that four of the five members of The Band can and do sing professionally, and the group actively plays 15 different instruments among them. In the cashless, lean and hungry days, that kind of versatility helped keep them employable. In particular, it made them attractive to Ronnie Hawkins, the stormy but curiously attractive personage who first beat them into shape as a playing unit.