The Band Goes Twang: A When You Awake Mixtape

The Band is the act that most directly demonstrates what the Goes Twang format is trying to find. The twang was not underneath the rock presentation. In The Band's case, the rock presentation was built on top of the twang, and the country, gospel, and folk roots were always the foundation.

Music from Big Pink, released in July 1968, is the inaugural exhibit. The record sounds like nothing that had been released in the previous three years of rock music. The Sgt. Pepper's era had pushed toward orchestral complexity and studio invention. Big Pink pulled in the other direction: toward simplicity, ensemble playing, and an American sound that was not rock and roll but was not traditional country either. It was something in between, or something that preceded the categories.

The sources

Levon Helm's Arkansas roots brought the country, blues, and gospel tradition into the group from the inside. The other four members were Canadian and had learned American music from records and from playing behind Ronnie Hawkins, a Canadian-based Arkansas rockabilly act whose band was the training ground for what became The Band.

Hawkins's repertoire was built from American roots material: rockabilly, country, early R&B. The musicians who played for him and then became The Band absorbed those forms through years of performance rather than through academic study of them.

The difference shows in the records. The Band play the roots music they play not as a style choice but as the music they know.

The listening sequence

The Goes Twang sequence for The Band moves through several clusters.

The Big Pink period is first: The Weight, I Shall Be Released, Tears of Rage. These songs have a hymnal quality that comes from the gospel tradition and a narrative directness that comes from country songwriting.

The second album, The Band (1969), goes deeper into American sources. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is a Civil War song from the Confederate perspective, a remarkable piece of historical imagination from a group of Canadians and one Arkansan. The song is not historically neutral — its perspective is the Confederate perspective — but it is emotionally precise and musically authoritative.

Stage Fright (1970) and Cahoots (1971) extend the catalog with less cohesion but consistent musical quality.

After the road

The Basement Tapes recordings with Bob Dylan in 1967 are the other primary exhibit. These recordings — informal, exploratory, covering American folk and country forms and originals in the same register — are the sound of five musicians using American traditional music as a working language.

The formal Band records are built from that language. The Last Waltz concert in 1976 brought it to a public ending, though the music itself continues in Levon Helm's later work and in the ongoing influence of the catalog.

For related Goes Twang essays: Neil Young Goes Twang and Bob Dylan Goes Twang Part Two. Full Mixtapes index.