The Band, outside of Rick Danko’s 1949 Hudson Super Six in the yard of his Chestnut Hill Road home, Woodstock, NY, 1969.
In 1965-66, the group got to work backing Bob Dylan on his world tour; afterwards, they (and Dylan) found refuge in the basement of a home in West Saugerties, New York. The house, with its salmon-pink siding, became known as "Big Pink."
When Bob Dylan wasn't around Big Pink, The Band began to flesh out its own sound and, in 1968, went to a studio in New York City — and later, studios around Los Angeles — to record their first album, Music from Big Pink.
Robbie Robertson: It was very unimpressive visually. It was like a cellar — any cellar was a big dream of mine, to have a place like this; to have a workshop, a clubhouse, a creative space. We got this basement and we set up the equipment — and I thought: "Wow, my dream has come true."
“Everybody was in this circle of creativity and experimenting was going on,” says Robertson. “Garth Hudson, our amazing keyboard player, was building musical instruments and Richard Manuel was writing ideas, and he wrote ‘Tears Of Rage’ with Bob.”
Meanwhile, Robertson was polishing his own songwriting abilities, penning future classics like ‘Chest Fever’ and the band’s career-defining single, ‘The Weight’.
“I wanted to be a storyteller”, explains Robertson. “I didn’t want to be a writer that says, ‘I got up this morning and I had a cup of coffee and then I went outside.’ Some people could do that quite well. It felt like if I could write fiction that you couldn’t tell if that wasn’t real, that would be interesting to me.”
"We took a left turn away from the psychedelia movement," Levon Helm said, explaining the Band's unique sound. "Those long jams — we didn't really like that. We liked short, kind of precise songs with a little bit of story to it. And we always tried to put a good chorus in that could be sung along with."
In 1970, the Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine.The accompanying piece hailed them as "the one group whose sheer fascination and musical skill may match the excellence of the Beatles." But various members of the group began to succumb to drug and alcohol abuse. As Rick Danko would later recall, "Suddenly we had all the money we needed and people were falling over themselves to make us happy. Which meant giving us all the dope we could stand."
The feeling of brotherly love was further dissipated by Helm's growing belief that Robertson was claiming more songwriting credits than were rightfully his. "The Band was doomed from the start," he told me. "We actually taught ourselves how to grab songs out of the air and get them recorded and figure out how to sing them and play them. And by the time we learned how to do that, it was over. By the time we'd done that and learned how, then we found out the songs didn't belong to us anyway."
Photo: the legendary Elliott Landy
