A SHORT CLIP FROM THE ENTRY ON THE BAND
This is a short sample: a brief extract from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia's entry on THE BAND:
"The whole of the amazing 1966 tour took place without Levon Helm. On the early North American dates, from February 5 at White Plains NY through to March 26 in Vancouver, Canada, the drummer was Sandy Konikoff; after that, and so for all the tumultuous Australian and European dates, including the historic Manchester Free Trade Hall concert in May, the drummer was Mickey Jones.
Drummer aside, however, this blazing, transcendent music was by the Hawks, which is to say The-Band-in-waiting. So loud and badly reproduced in the halls, so smudgily filmed yet mercifully so well recorded, this was the most radical, oceanic and storming electric music ever played live. How was it that Dylan, a solo performer who until Newport 1965 hadn’t played live with a group since he was a schoolboy, and The Hawks, whose earlier music was undistinguished bar-room blowing, coalesced so incandescently well, that they could go on stage in Liverpool in May 1966 - the city that had so recently been the center of the musical universe - and hurl at their audience rock music a thousand times more sublime, challenging, multi-layered and exciting than anything Liverpudlians had ever heard before? Impossible to say, but easy to prove. Play that night’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. By this point Dylan’s cawing voice and searing harmonica were both perfectly integrated instruments in amongst those of the Hawks, whose hard-won knowledge of each other’s playing freed them all to ride each moment, in a ceaseless interchange of fiery, creative levitation.
In extraordinary contrast, in the calm of the countryside and after Dylan’s long post-motorcycle crash unwinding, their next co-operative project was the informal Basement Tapes sessions. But what about all the time in between the two - between the end of May 1966 and the spring of 1967? The group, supposedly such a hard-working, on-the-road unit, played not a single live date that anyone has been able to discover.
What’s more, Levon Helm was out of the picture all that time - and still missing when the Basement sessions began."
"The whole of the amazing 1966 tour took place without Levon Helm. On the early North American dates, from February 5 at White Plains NY through to March 26 in Vancouver, Canada, the drummer was Sandy Konikoff; after that, and so for all the tumultuous Australian and European dates, including the historic Manchester Free Trade Hall concert in May, the drummer was Mickey Jones.
Drummer aside, however, this blazing, transcendent music was by the Hawks, which is to say The-Band-in-waiting. So loud and badly reproduced in the halls, so smudgily filmed yet mercifully so well recorded, this was the most radical, oceanic and storming electric music ever played live. How was it that Dylan, a solo performer who until Newport 1965 hadn’t played live with a group since he was a schoolboy, and The Hawks, whose earlier music was undistinguished bar-room blowing, coalesced so incandescently well, that they could go on stage in Liverpool in May 1966 - the city that had so recently been the center of the musical universe - and hurl at their audience rock music a thousand times more sublime, challenging, multi-layered and exciting than anything Liverpudlians had ever heard before? Impossible to say, but easy to prove. Play that night’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. By this point Dylan’s cawing voice and searing harmonica were both perfectly integrated instruments in amongst those of the Hawks, whose hard-won knowledge of each other’s playing freed them all to ride each moment, in a ceaseless interchange of fiery, creative levitation.
In extraordinary contrast, in the calm of the countryside and after Dylan’s long post-motorcycle crash unwinding, their next co-operative project was the informal Basement Tapes sessions. But what about all the time in between the two - between the end of May 1966 and the spring of 1967? The group, supposedly such a hard-working, on-the-road unit, played not a single live date that anyone has been able to discover.
What’s more, Levon Helm was out of the picture all that time - and still missing when the Basement sessions began."
posted by Michael Gray | 6:58 pm
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