The Band
The Band was a Canadian-American rock band formed in Toronto, Ontario. It consisted of Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson and American Levon Helm. The Band's music combined elements of Americana, folk, rock, R&B, jazz and country, which influenced artists including George Harrison, Elton John, the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton and Wilco.
Between 1958 and 1963, the group were known as the Hawks and were the backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, based in Toronto, Ontario. In the mid-1960s, they gained recognition for backing Bob Dylan on his 1966 concert tour as Dylan's first electric band. After leaving Dylan and changing their name to "The Band", they released their 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink, and its succeeding album, 1969's The Band, to critical acclaim and commercial success. Pink Floyd's Roger Waters deemed their debut the "second-most influential record in the history of rock and roll", and music journalist Al Aronowitz called it "country soul... a sound never heard before". The Band's most popular songs include "The Weight", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and "Up on Cripple Creek". The Band later released Stage Fright, Cahoots, the live album Rock of Ages, the covers album Moondog Matinee, and Northern Lights – Southern Cross.
The Band performed a farewell concert on November 25, 1976. Footage from the event was released in 1978 as the concert film The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese. After five years apart, Danko, Hudson, Helm, and Manuel reunited in 1983 for a tour without Robertson. Manuel died in 1986, but the remaining three members continued to tour and occasionally released new albums of studio material until Danko's death in 1999, after which the Band broke up for good. The Band was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked them 50th on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. The Band received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and were inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2014.
History
1957–1964: The Hawks
The future members of the Band first played together as the Hawks, the backing group for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, based in Toronto. Levon Helm began playing with the group in 1957 and became their fulltime drummer after graduating from high school in 1958. Helm journeyed with Hawkins from Arkansas to Ontario, where they were joined by Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and finally Garth Hudson. Later-Band member Stan Szelest was also in the group at that time. Hawkins's act was popular in and around Toronto and in Hamilton to the south, and he had an effective way of eliminating his musical competition. When a promising band appeared, Hawkins would hire their best musicians for his own group; Robertson, Danko, and Manuel came under Hawkins's tutelage this way.In the late 1950s, with Helm and Robertson in his band, Hawkins performed regularly at Pop Ivey's Summer Garden Pavilion in Port Dover, Ontario. In May 1961, he recruited Danko after watching the Simcoe native, who was 17, playing at the Pavilion. At the same venue, Hawkins and other members of the Hawks happened to see Richard Manuel's group Revols perform for the first time. That led Hawkins to take on management of Manuel's band. In September 1961, Hawkins convinced Manuel to leave the Revols and join the Hawks.
While most of the Hawks were eager to join Hawkins's group, getting Hudson to join was more difficult. Having earned a college degree, Hudson planned on a career as a music teacher, and was only interested in playing rock music as a hobby. The Hawks admired his wild, full-bore organ style and asked him repeatedly to join. Hudson finally agreed, under the condition that the Hawks each pay him $10 per week to be their instructor and purchase a new state-of-the-art Lowrey organ; all music theory questions were directed to Hudson.
With Hawkins, they recorded a few singles in this period and became well known as the best rock group in the thriving Toronto music scene. Hawkins regularly convened all-night rehearsals following long club shows, with the result that the young musicians quickly developed their instrumental skills. In late 1963, the group split from Hawkins over personal differences. They had grown tired of playing the same songs so often and wanted to perform original material, and they were also wary of Hawkins's heavy-handed leadership. He would fine the Hawks if they brought their girlfriends to the clubs or if they smoked marijuana.
Robertson later said:
Eventually, built us up to the point where we outgrew his music and had to leave. He shot himself in the foot, really, by sharpening us into such a crackerjack band that we had to go on out into the world, because we knew what his vision was for himself, and we were all younger and more ambitious musically.
The group was briefly known as the Levon Helm Sextet, with a sixth member, saxophonist Jerry Penfound after leaving Hawkins. Then it became Levon and the Hawks after Penfound's departure. In 1965, they released a single on Ware Records under the name the Canadian Squires, but they returned as Levon and the Hawks for a recording session for Atco later that year. Also in 1965, Helm and the band met blues singer and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson. They wanted to record with him, offering to become his backing band, but Williamson died not long after their meeting.
Later in 1965, American musician Bob Dylan hired the group as his backing band for his U.S. tour in 1965 and world tour in 1966. After the 1966 tour, the group moved with help from Dylan and his manager, Albert Grossman, to Saugerties, New York, where they made the informal 1967 recordings that became The Basement Tapes, the basis for their 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. Because they were always referred to simply as "the band" to various frontmen and the locals in Woodstock, Helm said the name "The Band" worked well when the group came into its own. The group decided on it as their official name and began performing under it from 1968 onward. Dylan continued to collaborate with The Band over the course of their career, most notably in a joint 1974 tour.
1965–1967: With Bob Dylan
In late summer 1965, Bob Dylan was looking for a backup band for his first U.S. "electric" tour. Levon and the Hawks were recommended by blues singer John P. Hammond, who earlier that year had recorded with Helm, Hudson and Robertson on his Vanguard album So Many Roads. Around the same time, one of their friends from Toronto, Mary Martin, was working as secretary to Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. She told Dylan to visit the group at Le Coq d'Or Tavern, a club on Yonge Street, in Toronto—though Robertson recollects it was the Friar's Tavern, just down the street. Her advice to Dylan: "You gotta see these guys."After hearing the Band play and meeting with Robertson, Dylan invited Helm and Robertson to join his backing band. After two concerts backing Dylan, Helm and Robertson told Dylan of their loyalty to their bandmates and told him that they would continue with him only if he hired all of the Hawks. Dylan accepted and invited Levon and the Hawks to tour with him. The group was receptive to the offer, knowing it could give them the wider exposure they craved. They thought of themselves as a tightly rehearsed rock and rhythm and blues group and knew Dylan mostly from his early acoustic folk and protest music. Furthermore, they had little inkling of how internationally popular Dylan had become.
With Dylan, the Hawks played a series of concerts from September 1965 through May 1966, billed as "Bob Dylan and The Band". The tours were marked by Dylan's reportedly copious use of amphetamines. Some, though not all, of the Hawks joined in the excesses. Most of the concerts were met with heckling and disapproval from folk music purists. Helm was so affected by the negative reception that he left the tour after a little more than one month and sat out the rest of that year's concerts, as well as the world tour in 1966. Helm spent much of this period working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
During and between tours, Dylan and the Hawks attempted several recording sessions, but with less than satisfying results. Sessions in October and November yielded just one usable single, and two days of recording in January 1966 for what was intended to be Dylan's next album, Blonde on Blonde, resulted in "One of Us Must Know ", which was released as a single a few weeks later and was subsequently selected for the album. On "One of Us Must Know", Dylan was backed by drummer Bobby Gregg, bassist Danko, guitarist Robbie Robertson, pianist Paul Griffin, and Al Kooper playing organ. Frustrated by the slow progress in the New York studio, Dylan accepted the suggestion of producer Bob Johnston and moved the recording sessions to Nashville. In Nashville, Robertson's guitar was prominent on the Blonde on Blonde recordings, especially in the song "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat", but the other members of the Hawks did not attend the sessions.
During the European leg of their 1966 world tour, Mickey Jones replaced Sandy Konikoff on drums. Dylan and the Hawks played at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on May 17, 1966. The gig became legendary when, near the end of Dylan's electric set, an audience member shouted "Judas!" After a pause, Dylan replied, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" He then turned to the Hawks and said, "Play it fucking loud!" With that, they launched into an acidic version of "Like a Rolling Stone".
The Manchester performance was widely bootlegged. In a 1971 review for Creem, critic Dave Marsh wrote:
My response is that crystallization of everything that is rock'n'roll music, at its finest, was to allow my jaw to drop, my body to move, to leap out of the chair... It is an experience that one desires simply to share, to play over and over again for those he knows thirst for such pleasure. If I speak in an almost worshipful sense about this music, it is not because I have lost perspective, it is precisely because I have found it, within music, yes, that was made five years ago. But it is there and unignorable.
When the concert finally saw an official release as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in 1998, critic Richie Unterberger declared the record "an important document of rock history."
On July 29, 1966, while on a break from touring, Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident that precipitated his retreat into semi-seclusion in Woodstock, New York. For a while, the Hawks returned to the bar and roadhouse touring circuit, sometimes backing other singers, including a brief stint with Tiny Tim. Dylan invited the Hawks to join him in Woodstock in February 1967, and Danko, Hudson, and Manuel rented a large pink house, which they named "Big Pink", in nearby West Saugerties, New York. The next month they commenced recording a much-bootlegged and influential series of demos, initially at Dylan's house in Woodstock and later at Big Pink, which were released partially on LP as The Basement Tapes in 1975 and in full in 2014. A track-by-track review of the bootleg was detailed by Jann Wenner in Rolling Stone, in which the band members were explicitly named and given the collective name "the Crackers". While Helm was not involved in the initial recording, he did perform in later sessions and in overdubs recorded in 1975 before the album's release.