Snapshot: The Band no. 4

The Band made their most important records between 1968 and 1971. The decade that followed was more complicated. The series of photographs from that earlier period carries a specific quality, something between the documentary and the iconic, that later photography of the group does not quite recover.

This is the fourth snapshot entry on The Band at this site. The first three covered different phases and different images. This one is from the earlier period, the years before The Last Waltz, when the group was still figuring out what it was in its second chapter.

The photograph

The image that prompted this entry shows the group in an informal context. Not a posed press photograph, not a stage shot. The kind of photograph that turns up in contact sheets and retrospective archival publications, the kind made by someone who was there rather than someone sent there.

The visual quality of these informal band photographs from the late 1960s has something to do with the film stock and something to do with the light and something to do with the fact that the people being photographed were not performing for the camera. They were doing something else, and the camera caught them doing it.

With The Band, the informal photographs often show the domestic arrangements of five people who spent an extended period living and working in close proximity, most notably the Big Pink period in West Saugerties, New York, where they lived together and recorded the Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan in 1967.

The Big Pink context

Big Pink is the house. The music made there — the Basement Tapes, the informal recordings with Dylan and among themselves — has been analyzed extensively in the decades since. What is sometimes lost in the analytical interest is the basic physical fact: five musicians rented a house in upstate New York and played music in it for months.

The photographs from that period show what a rented house looked like when five musicians were living and playing in it. Equipment against walls. Cables across floors. The domestic and the musical in the same frame, not distinguished.

The Band's first album, Music from Big Pink, was released in July 1968. The cover painting was by Bob Dylan. The sound was unlike anything that had come out of the previous three years of rock music: slower, more spacious, more rooted, more concerned with ensemble than with individual showcase. It sounded like it had been made in a house.

Levon Helm's position

Levon Helm is the only member of The Band who was actually from the South, specifically from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. The other four members — Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson — were Canadian. Helm joined Ronnie Hawkins's backing group as a teenager and eventually formed the nucleus of what became The Band with Robertson and the others.

This geography matters to understanding the music. The country, blues, and gospel roots in The Band's sound came through Helm in a way that was different from how they came through the Canadian members. Helm described later interviews as navigating a complicated relationship with Robertson, who wrote most of the songs, about who the music belonged to and where it came from.

The Snapshot: Bob Dylan and Levon Helm covers another image from the Woodstock-area period. The Field Notes: Levon Helm Rambling on the Roots has more context on Helm's later career and talking.

The Later Waltz

The Last Waltz, the 1976 farewell concert that Martin Scorsese filmed and released in 1978, is the document most people encounter first when they come to The Band. It is a useful document. But it is the document of an ending, and it has the quality that endings have: retrospective, summarizing, aware of its own significance.

The photographs from ten years earlier, the Big Pink period, the first albums, the road years with Dylan, have a different quality: forward-moving, exploratory, not yet aware that anything is coming to an end.

The Snapshot series at this site is about that difference in photographic time. Full Snapshots index: Snapshots. The Band mixtape: The Band Goes Twang.