The Band Plays On or What the Brown Album Means to Me

 

(The Band from left to right: Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson & Robbie Robertson)

Among my earliest childhood memories are album covers. 

A few which comes to mind:

The Beatles Abbey Road

Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks

Bob Dylan Nashville Skyline

Simon & Garfunkel Bridge Over Troubled Water

America America

Blood Sweat and Tears Blood Sweat and Tears

The Moody Blues Every Good Boy Deserves Favour 

Gordon Lightfoot Sit Down Young Stranger (later retitled If You Could Read My Mind)

Ozark Mountain Daredevils It'll Shine When It Shines

Carly Simon Greatest Hits 

The Band The Band (a.k.a. The Brown Album)

It is this last album on which I wish to focus at this time as all five members of The Band have left our mortal coil with the passing of Garth Hudson on January 21st. 

Yet in some way when I first saw this picture as a wee lad, I thought these guys were already dead as they looked like they had lived during the Civil War. Mind you, I don't think I knew anything about the Civil War when I was four years old. Nevertheless, they looked to me as if they were from another time. 

I remember The Brown Album being played sporadically during my formative years. But it wasn't until about 1985 that I really began to listen to it in earnest. While The Brown Album is best known for "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek", my favorite track was and remains "Whispering Pines", the closing cut on side one.

"Whispering Pines" is the gentlest yet most somber song on The Band with Richard Manuel's wailing, at times faint pleading vocal which is held onto with dear life guided by Hudson's Lowrey organ. Manuel is accompanied by Levon Helm on the third verse:

Standing by the well
Wishing for the rains
Reaching to the clouds
For nothing else remains
Drifting in a daze
When evening will be done
Try looking through a haze
At an empty house, in the cold, cold sun

I could hear the anguish in Manuel's voice. A voice silenced when Manuel took his own life on March 4, 1986, a month shy of his 43rd birthday. Of all the subsequent passings, it is Manuel's which I remember the most. Aside from "Whispering Pines", the songs on this album which resonated with me most deeply are "Across the Great Divide", "Jawbone" and "King Harvest" all of which were sung by Manuel. The fact that he could not bear to share his voice for all eternity is something which has stayed with me for nearly 40 years and will continue to do so for as long as I shall live.

As life progressed, I learned about their debut album Music from Big Pink, their formative years backing up Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan and The Last Waltz. I even saw them play once (without Robbie Robertson) during Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in the early 1990s. 

Aside from that concert, the closest I came to being in the presence of The Band was when Robbie Robertson came to Cambridge in November 2016 to promote his autobiography, Testimony. Although Robertson had his share of interesting stories, he came off as a diva acting like none of his other bandmates had anything to bring to the table. 

Notwithstanding that negative impression, Robertson will always be part of The Band and The Band will remain an integral part of my musical upbringing. The Band might be gone but the Brown Album will play on for as long as I have ears to hear.