The Band
Album # 52 The Band – The Band
“Standin’ by your window in pain.”
I don’t agree with famed essayist and music journalist, Robert Christgau, on anything.
The Band’s second album, The Band, released in 1969, is a good ol’ slice of home-country cooking, courtesy of the South. It sounds like grits, nostalgia, and sepia. I hear that sweet southern sun risin’ to the sound of fiddles and ashy wooden planks in that hunker-down, square-dance shuffle: ol’ tunes of ol’ times.
But no, this album is not better than Abbey Road.
The Band
Despite having southern roots, way down in the music capital of Nashville in point of fact, I never developed any great love for the sounds of country. Sure, the Band is by no means a country group, they’re country-rock; but they have all the fiddling,’ leisurely root-note bass, twang-suggestion of steel string guitar, and storytelling drawl that typifies true country. But the thrust is rock. Those drums ain’t country, for damn sure, and the stories are curtailed by careful, tight songwriting, and an ear for popular common time rhythms.
Still, it’s hard for me to get behind.
My southern roots have never gleamed quite as brightly as my more cynical northern half. I’m too grounded in pessimistic realism to overlook the problematic glorification of Robert E. Lee in the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” or the reference to the confederacy as “rebels.” My relationship to the South is as an outsider. Something made evident by my general indifference to The Band.
I hear that sweet southern sun risin’ to the sound of fiddles and ashy wooden planks in that hunker-down, square-dance shuffle: ol’ tunes of ol’ times.
Nostalgia literally means “pain of home” and indicates a longing for a return. It also doesn’t exist. It’s the illusion that times were better at one point and gives you a good excuse to not like where you are. This album with all its rockin’ n’ rollin,’ catchy rhythms, and tight compositions can be a physical pleasure to listen, but it’s obsessed with a past that never was.
When this record was released, Robert Christgau loved it, and thought it was superior to Abbey Road, another top contender for the year. Most critics loved it, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
Maybe it’s just sippin’ on some of that sweet malt-brown nostalgia, lookin’ at the good ol’ days.
Until I’m up on cripple creek.
