General Interest Review 00018

Music from Big Pink

"Music from Big Pink" is a rock album released in 1968 by The Band. Alternately well-plotted, shambolic, uplifting and a downer, this set picks up and runs with the great contradictions in Dylan (sound like an accident, plan like it's the shuttle liftoff), and to some extent The Beatles (so arty, yet so popular). The music and simplistic ensemble moniker is made to conjure a back to basics feel, to a time when even the facial hair felt a little more organic. In the great tradition of Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, ad naus., the listening public is supposed to believe that they just ambled down off the mountain to see what all the hollerin' was about. The inside jacket photo on the original LP features the quintet mixed in with the local townsfolk -- as if they hadn't just blown into a town a few months earlier. In reality they'd been struggling to get to this point all along. Still, at the height of psychedelia, it's easy to see how anything that didn't sound druggy, orchestrated and conceited was a nice change of pace.

The Band was content to be that simple pivot to a hazeless time during the sessions in Big Pink, with tempos that don't really get above a shuffle, and that deceiving flat production that makes all those interwoven flourishes sound like they're being played by five guys just standing around smoking and looking at their watches. Their next record, which bordered on bloated in a few spots, would pull back the curtain and show all the thought they put into their music, but as is the case for most beloved first albums, the low expectations of obscurity and technical nascency leave room to add a little bit of the swagger at the heart of what makes rock so appealing in the first place.