The 33 1/3 series is a thing of beauty in itself, particularly tending to the needs of music obsessives like myself. Each entry focuses on a particular album in the great rock tapestry, usually a classic of some or other kind. This particular book is a bit different in that it takes a quite different approach from most of the others in the series, the standard biographical backdrop and analytical dissection of individual songs meanings and atmospheres. I've devoured it over the past few days and will do my best to explain why I got wrapped up in it now as well as urging you to buy and experience it for yourselves.
John Niven, who has since made quite a name for himself, (this was his debut and entry point into publishing fiction), takes a new road into discussing the cost of creating great art. Essentially through fiction although real people and historic factual moments are explored. Greg Keltner, the rod around which Niven organises his tale, and narrator of Music From Big Pink, is a fictionalised but a highly credible and empathetic character who comes to stand for a hundred or more narratives of those who fell by the wayside as Rock and Roll became serious and seriously troubled as the Sixties progressed and the main players proceeded to paint their masterpieces and drugs took hold. The view from the side of or at the lap of the stage.
Keltner has the fortune, or perhaps the ultimate misfortune, to enter the orbit of Bob Dylan and The Band as they land up in Woodstock in 1967 after touring Europe and The States together and proceed to draw up a whole new map of agrarian wonder and anguish musically together for a generation of musicians to explore for the best part of the next ten years. You can look at this moment in two ways. A moment where Rock either lost its way completely or else discovered the serious intent required to turn itself into a genuine artform.
The part The Band played in plotting this particular bend in the road is every bit as significant as that of Dylan himself. This is what Keltner witnesses and experiences at first hand mostly through his friendship and role as drug supplier and drug buddy for two of them in particular, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko the notable narcotic fiends of the group. It's a brilliantly conceived window on this world and Niven describes the scenes of musical and sensory abandon to such a vivid and convincing degree that you feel like you're in the room with the main players as they jack up and get wasted, play together and betray themselves and each other.
So The Band play music and party to an obsessive and intense degree. Keltner is a fellow Canadian and develops an easy going but genuine empathy for and with Manuel and Danko. His relationship with the other Band members is a little more sketchy and distant, with Robbie Robertson in particular portrayed as a remote, calculating and largely unsympathetic operator. Levon Helm and Garth Hudson play lesser roles.
The Band are obviously an incredibly important group in Rock history, in many ways, casting a vast encompassing shadow on the closing years of the decade musically. There's an argument to be made that they played a significant role in the break ups of both The Beatles and Cream. They pointed out a new path through the woods. In the words of Al Aronowitz, perhaps the first pop journalist, 'the band dips into the well of tradition and comes up with buckets full of clear, cool country soul that washes the ears with a sound never heard before.' You can still hear that sense of discovery from listening to either of their first two albums and Niven captures wonderfully what it was like hearing that new dawn first hand.
The book is not without flaws and they're very apparant ones. There's a certain amount of quite unnecessary Sixties event box ticking that goes on throughout. There's no real reason for Keltner to rub shoulders with Lou Reed and listen to and turn his nose up at the first Velvet Underground album in a grisly party downtown, or to trip at a New York cinema showing of The Graduate with the girl he's besotted with. We don't particularly need to experience the deaths of King, Robert Kennedy and the shooting of Warhol as they intersect with events of the main characters. In many ways it reminds me of my own mercifully unpublished novel which was also a kitchen sink affair. Much more so than Music From The Big Pink of course.
But, but there are moments where Niven seems to get it just right. To an extraordinary degree. With the character of Keltner most immediately, a flawed, pained and doomed but strangely sympathetic narrator. Also with the portrayal of the drug taking in that inner crcle and their camp followers and the horrific toll it wages on those concerned, which is written about to a rivettingly intense and detailed degree.Tellingly Robbie Robertson, whose portrayal as I've mentioned, is far from flattering, has said off the record that the book captures the essence of the experience to an eery, almost creepy degree.Most of all to Keltner's personal witnessing of that astonishing music being created and performed. Niven's passages, the best things in the book, need to be read, absorbed and shared.
Most of all Music From The Big Pink has succeeded in enticing me back to the music of The Band and that can never be a bad thing. I've always found them rather worthy by comparison with many of their North American contemporaries. Frankly I'd generally rather listen to The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Lovin' Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Creedence or Big Star. Music From The Big Pink, (the book of course), first and foremost makes a compelling case for The Band's importance in the scheme of things and encourages an immediate return to the source products, and in that respect it's a job very well done.
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