Born in 1955 I missed most of the sixties despite growing up in swinging London. The Beatles broke up in 1970 when I was fifteen. When the Band gave their ‘Last Waltz’ closing concert in 1976 I was entirely unaware. Although I must have heard it many times before, the first time their classic hit ‘the Weight’ hit me was when watching 1983’s The Big Chill which tells the story of a bunch of people who grew up in the era of Dylan and The Band but are now heading into their late thirties early forties a decade later spending a slightly awkward weekend together after one of their group had committed suicide. A ‘hippies to yuppies’ story some say. So just like their final concert, that song in the movie both recalls and marks the passing of an era.
I spent a few hours yesterday listening to their music and watching both the Last Waltz concert film and the Once Were Brothers documentary and learned how important other musicians of the era regarded their sound, their skill and their togetherness.
A few months ago I spent a day or so going through some reaction videos on Youtube, watching young people today reacting to music from my era, including songs I found stirring at the time, especially Genesis, Yes and various other songs (like Whiter Shade of Pale) and bands (like Jethro Tull, Traffic, the Beatles), though the artist who looms by far the largest from that era over all others is – for me at least – Bob Dylan, as much poet as musician. Like any true master of poesis1, he created not just his own songs, but in so doing the spirit of the era in which they arose. First he interlaced folk music with the magic spells of inspired poetry (and marijuana from the black community who had been taking it since the days of Louis Armstrong). The song Tangerine Man is a masterpiece of this genre; its authentic purity of artistic expression cuts far deeper than any surface psychedelic influences. But later Dylan wanted to move into the more gutsy, electric, urban and restlessly provocative realm of rock. He ended up touring America and Europe with The Band, then known as The Hawks, doing split sets: the first half featured only the solo troubadour’s standard guitar, harpsichord and voice but the second electric amplified set featured less familiar songs played at high volume with The Band. For months on end everywhere they went they were booed during those second sets, but Dylan insisted they keep going. Enduring this universal rejection, indeed hatred, the Band formed an unusually tight bond that kept them together making quintessentially American rock music until Robbie broke away in 1976, though I gather the remaining band members continued playing together as The Band thereafter. The ostensible reason for the break according to Robbie, the leader and composer, is that since the mid-60’s he had a wife and children whereas none of the other guys did and he simply couldn’t hack the sybaritic partying ‘on the road’ lifestyle any more. He had been more or less on the road since the late 50’s, a long time. Unfortunately, despite their deep mutual friendship, after the Last Waltz concert there was bitterness involving money and credits which is a pity, but that is not the subject of this Article.
What I found interesting reviewing his life and their work was revisiting that era which I belatedly and so only somewhat lived through myself. When they broke up I was only twenty one and had just moved to America a year or so earlier, ending up by chance in Syracuse, a junior league college in upstate New York, where I felt completely out of place both academically and culturally, then dropping out almost choicelessly in confusion, spending a few lost months in a Hindu ashram recommended by a friendly faculty member who saw I couldn’t hack it there, albeit finally a only few months later in early 1976 ending up at a brand new Buddhist and Liberal Arts College called Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado. Presumably I heard the Band on the radio many times during all this, but they never figured in my mind like many other bands or artists; they must have blended in with so much other music I heard all over all the time, though mainly all I remember from that mid to late 70’s period is Kool and the Gang and other funk music which I liked best of all for both driving and dancing, which I loved to do. The white-man stuff always felt weaker and more cerebral to me. I am listening now to the 1985 concert linked above and it feels that way.
Listening to the songs and watching the documentaries yesterday I tried to recall my experience of that era and also understand why the music felt so seminal, so powerful, so rich, so dangerous, so quintessential. I know it to be so, I felt it at the time, we all did, but now I cannot for the life of me bring it back – it just doesn’t come. Indeed, when I listen to some of the songs, for example the progressive rock (‘prog rock’) of Genesis and Yes which I listened to before moving to America around 1971 to 1974 it sounds both brilliantly original and also infantile, silly and structurally disjointed; in contrast, the Band’s compositions are more gritty, less airy-fairy – but also more kitchen sink ordinary in a good down to earth way despite their being highly innovative and different at the time. Combining country, blues and rock in way with such depth and bite was a creatively generous cultural expression, plus since the Band spent a year or more with Dylan in Woodstock recovering from their long ordeal on the road, Robbie ended up learning from the Master how to summon lyrics reaching deep into the personal and national psyche resulting in iconic masterpieces – not as many as Dylan perhaps, but still: no small thing.
And they are indeed masterpieces not so much because of how well the lyrics and music were blended together in creative new ways, but because of how they both fit and shaped their generation’s culture. The iconic performance of The Weight during the 1976 concert with guest black singers the Staples is a marvellous snapshot of America at that time, with black people being both decidedly different and also part of a joyful, forward-moving adventure into the collective unknown, yet rooted in shared past skeins coming through in various chords, twangs and rhythms grounded in bedrock rural and urban American culture. The song is a veritable feast.
What the documentaries made clear is that these young men spent thousands of hours honing their talent as ensemble musicians, hard work which comes through in their music. Listening to a seventy-something Robbie Robertson reminisce about those times and reflect on various lessons learned and suchlike it is clear that he had a rich, full life and developed substantive wisdom. But still: nothing really grabs me; and I briefly listened to some of his recent compositions: the same.
Perhaps the times indeed have ‘a-changed’ and you have to be in them in the moment to feel them. In which case we are talking about a cultural gestalt, aka ‘realm’ or ‘mandala.’ The songs provide a medium for people sharing a sense of time and being, encapsulating whilst transmitting that feeling, that time, that sharing. Songs create community, just as they have done since time out of mind long before the civilizations we now dwell within mushroomed forth.
When I arrived in Boulder Colorado in early January 1976 to undertake studies in improvisational theater at Naropa Institute it was around 9 o’clock at night with a few inches of snow on the pavements. Not only was I entirely unprepared for the snow, I also didn’t have a plan for where to sleep that night, having just made a transatlantic flight from a family get-together near Killarney, Ireland. I was attired as an artsy-hippy type with a top hat, a tie-dyed shirt, baggy pants and Indian sandals without socks. I had a backpack and a beat-up guitar which I didn’t know how to play, but I looked the part – or so I guess I thought. Anyway, there I was out of the airport bus in the middle of a strange town in a strange new State with no notion of where next to go – and with naked toes rapidly freezing. Reality was starting to bite – hard.
Out of the harsh alternating darkness and glare of passing traffic on an unfamiliar hilltop crossroads, a small car swerved over, its lights washing over me soon followed by a friendly young woman’s welcoming smile through a rolled-down window. With few words, we quickly determined that I was lost with nowhere to go so she invited me to her home. Turned out she lived in Denver from where I’d just come so back we went to her place and soon thereafter slept together – though I was still extremely inexperienced. We didn’t talk much; we didn’t need to. She saw my outfit and decided I was a brother-of-the-times or some such (though she was dressed like an ordinary citizen, no doubt because she had to work for a living) and so spontaneously pulled over to invite me home. In those times in America and Europe, two young people together of a certain age slept together as a matter of course if they were of the youth culture tribe – or whatever it was. I believe she would have felt uncomfortable if she hadn’t offered me her bed and body just as I would have felt uncomfortable refusing them, though the thought had never crossed my still English public schoolboy mind that in her bed is where we would end up.
The next morning, she helped me find another bus to Boulder where I found the school whose receptionist told me where to find my rented room. Soon thereafter I stopped pretending to learn how to play the guitar, cut my hair and left the hippy costume days behind – for I was never one really, just dressed in a psychedelic style for a few months after someone had given me LSD in Florence one time. But I did get to live in 1970’s America and so was immersed, for a while, in the music of those times.
But now when I listen, I do not hear it as powerful and iconic; and the same goes for the Beatles or any other songs from those times – except early Dylan. I can listen, even enjoy, but I find the compositional structures lightweight and most of the lyrics frivolous. Or something. Frankly, I prefer the Brandenburg Concertos. Right now, after the Band concert from 1985 finished, and on the recommendation of Iain McGilchrist, am enjoying a little Tallis.
So is it me? Or was it the times back then which are no more?
Maybe some questions are best left unanswered…
1 In continental philosophy and semiotics, poiesis (/pɔɪˈiːsɪs/; from Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is the process of emergence of something that did not previously exist.
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