The Band, Canada’s greatest musical group, illuminates the profound fallacy of Donald Trump’s intentions toward our northerly neighbor

Editor’s note: I’m reposting this revised version of this article for greater historical accuracy, political urgency, and hopefully reader enhancement, with additional song lyrics. It also reflects my hope that more readers take the time to listen to “Acadian Driftwood,” linked here, even if such hopes stand on the ever-shifting sands of ideals.

All praise The Band!

Acadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind

they call my home the land of snow

canadian cold front moving in

What a way to ride, Oh what a way to go

It’s still hard to understand Donald Trump’s increasingly toxic and nakedly imperialistic attitude towards Canada, America’s closest ally, especially when right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham can’t even get him to pause to consider his position (See article below).

Because our own American attitudes toward Canada may be ambiguous and somewhat ignorant, I was really struck by the ongoing power, beauty and magnificence of a song composed by The Band’s Robbie Robertson, “Acadian Driftwood,” to convey the humanity of the Canadian experience, without overly romanticizing it.

The current situation with Canada brought it to mind. It is among Robertson’s indelible “history” songs, one of his true specialties.

Set at the end of the French-Indian war, it is probably my favorite song by The Band, which was Bob Dylan’s first regular backup band. The group and songwriter also recorded the legendary The Basement Tapes together. I’m amazed how the song almost always moves me to tears, even though I’m a native Wisconsinite.

The Acadians are a minority of Canada descended from the French who settled in the New France colony of Acadia in the 17th and 18th centuries.

During the French and Indian War (known in Canada as The Seven Years’ War),[10] British colonial officers suspected that Acadians were aligned with France, after finding some Acadians fighting alongside French troops at Fort Beauséjour. Though most Acadians remained neutral during the war, the British, together with New England legislators and militia, carried out the Great Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement) of the Acadians between 1755 and 1764. They forcefully deported approximately 11,500 Acadians from the maritime region. Approximately one-third perished from disease and drowning.[11] In retrospect, the result has been described as an ethnic cleansing of the Acadians from Maritime Canada. 1

It didn’t help that not even French-speaking Canadians could understand their version of the French language. Those who settled in New Orleans became known as Cajuns, an Americanization of Acadian.

So it’s a song about how that war led to their exile as a group. This parallels, of course, the experience of Native Americans, if not African-Americans, and how such groups profoundly formed and shaped our national culture and identity.

Thus, “Driftwood” eloquently helps to clarify the strong, proud and tragic bi-lingual identity of the nation — if perhaps more modest than America’s, no less deep, with a history older than ours. The illustrated YouTube version of the song shows Canadian cities dating back to the 1700s.

Reams more have been written to help assert the identity of Canada, even as this song carries the great weight of irony, in that it reflects the perhaps universal stain of discrimination against a given group of people.

To me the point is clear: That we might learn from our failures as humans. Canada seems a nation that has learned better than others. Accordingly, the notion that this nation would be receptive to being reduced to “the 51st state” of the U.S. seems laughable. Trump’s current heavy tariffs aginst Canadian imports further strains the national relationship.

About the song, Barney Hoskyns, author of Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, explains: “drawing on Longfellow’s epic Evangeline, which actually mentioned the ‘driftwood’ from wrecked Acadian ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, (Robertson) centered his saga around one uprooted family forced to sail down the East Coast in search of a new home. From the opening acoustic guitar chords, immediately reinforced by Garth Hudson’s haunting martial chorus of bagpipes and piccolos, the song carried all the weight of an ancient woe”:

The war was over and the spirit was broken.

The hills were smoking as the men withdrew.

We stood on the cliffs and watched the ships

slowly sink into their rendezvous.

They signed a treaty and our homes were taken,

 Loved ones forsaken, they didn’t give a damn.

Try to raise a family, end up the enemy

Over what went down on the Plains of Abraham…

The Band’s three lead singers, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Levon Helm, take turns narrating the verses, and provide some of their most radiant vocal harmonizing. Then there’s the group’s greatest virtuoso, multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson.

The non-pareil critic Greil Marcus observed:

“Hudson had never played with such imagination, or with deceptive anonymity…What Randy Newman got from the string section on his luminous and tragic ‘Louisiana 1927,’ Hudson gets on his own…with supreme delicacy, he wraps his sound around The Band, with a warmth of spirit that may well prove to be what this album is best remembered for.” 2

Four of the five bandmembers were Canadian. Levon Helm was from Arkansas. Hudson, the last surviving member, died in January of 2025. *

Sadly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also urged Canada to consider joining the US. “We are all too dumbfounded to acknowledge it,” but Trump is serious about annexing Canada, wrote Michael A.Cohen in an MSNBC.com column. He believes a punishing trade war will force Canadians to surrender their sovereignty, and reportedly told former prime minister Justin Trudeau that the 1908 treaty finalizing the border between the two countries must be revised.

Trump wants to go down in history as a president who vastly expanded US territory to include Canada and Greenland. Trump’s obsessive threats to annex these nations is “not a negotiated employee.” He wants these countries as trophies to satisfy “his narcissistic needs.”

Americans may or may not understand the profundity of their neighboring country’s sense of identity in all the complexity this song implies. So the emotional undercurrents of such a song should speak volumes — especially to a nation like ours which is formed with a fabric strengthened by many minorities and, despite their great suffering, their commitment to this nation.

In Canada today, Acadians are generally treated with respect and recognition, particularly in French-speaking communities where they have significant cultural and political influence, according to AI overview.

Thus the value of experiencing an authentically Canadian voice such as that of “Acadian Driftwood.” The song’s gently swaying rhythmic melody helps pull the listener into the yearning underlying the Acadians’ long, hard exodus.

I’m also deeply struck by the song’s lovely closing verse, which is sung in French. I never bothered to learn the translation until I wrote this article:

Sais tu, Acadie, j’ai  mal du pays

[You know, Acadia, I long for the country (I am homesick)]

Ta neige, Acadie, fait des larmes au soleil

[your snow Acadia, makes tears in the sun (or for the sun)]

J ‘arrive Acadie, teedle um, teedle um, teedle ohh

[I am arriving Acadia (or I am coming Acadia)]

Thus, in gradual waves, over many years, I’ve come to understand why “Acadian Driftwood” remains haunting. We are blessed to have Robbie Robertson’s poetic lyrics and music, and The Band’s beautifully timeless delivery thereof. “Driftwood” is yet another symbol of the human transience of the experience of the Americas as a continent that strives to sustain democratic wholeness of spirit and community as much as it exploits and lets it bleed. This story has played out across this nation’s checkered past. As long as we allow the imperialistic impulse to reinvigorate itself, pain and loss will follow in its wake.

The song is also the sort of reminder that might rekindle the strength of the liberal arts in our educational structures, as a renewed pathway to the long-delayed ideals of the better angels Abraham Lincoln implored us to champion.

These weary travelers were pushed along their wandering way by a “gypsy tailwind.” Like them, we can still hope, believe, and press forward with our mission.

This YouTube recording of the song includes the full lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=te7KW4K-00E.

Here’s the article about Trump and Canada: https://www.yahoo.com/…/trump-reveals-stunning-reason…

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*thanks to an article by Peter Viney, a scholar and archivist of The Band, for further insight which aided this revised version of this blog post.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

2. “Acadian Driftwood” is from the Band’s album Northern Lights, Southern Cross. Greil Marcus reviewed the album in Creem in 1975. The song is also available on The Band’s Greatest Hits though that categorizing is questionable, as it remains an underappreciated song to this day.

 

The story of Bob Dylan’s “plugged-in” drummer Sam Lay and his flying drumstick

A broken drumstick from the drummer Sam Lay, part of the famous Butterfield Blues Band that helped Bob Dylan “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This was from a concert Lay played in the  early 1970s. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Here’s a postscript story to my blog review of the popular and worthy new Bob Dylan bio-movie, A Complete Unknown. The climax of the film — and a pivotal inflection point in pop music history — is when Dylan plugged in and “went electric.” This happened in the photos depicted below, when he played with the ground-breaking Butterfield Blues Band on Sunday, July 25, 1965. At the evening concert, he played “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm” and other now-iconic songs for the first time most had heard them played live.

This loud performance electrified many but shocked as many others, who valued the acoustic nature of traditional folk music. Folk singer and Dylan champion Pete Seeger amost cut the band’s power cord with an axe. The electric style also opened up Dylan’s poetic sensibility to the possibilities of amplified music and the rock and urban blues traditions.

In the second photo below, an animated Dylan, in the polka-dot shirt, rehearses for that evening show with Butterfield Band members, including (from left) guitarist Mike Bloomfield, (whom Dylan declared “the best guitarist he had ever heard”), drummer Sam Lay, bassist Jerome Arnold.The man in white shirt at center is a Newport production person.

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Pictured are (L-R) bassist Jerome Arnold (partially hidden), guitarist Mike Bloomfield, drummer Sam Lay, vocalist and harp-player Butterfield and guitarist Elvin Bishop.

Bob Dylan rehearsing his own set at a sound check for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with members of the Butterfield Blues Band, including (L-R) Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold, with Dylan at far right. 

Bloomfield and Dylan at the controversial evening concert at Newport in July 1965.

This is a well-recounted historic story which I revisit not because I was there, I wasn’t. How does it feel? as Dylan once asked. Well, sigh, I sure as hell wish I coulda been there. You can’t let others get your kicks for you… Well, yes, but sometimes that’s the best you can do. I was just graduating from elementary school that summer, in Milwaukee.

However, I happen to own a broken drumstuck tip from Sam Lay. At one point in a concert the powerful drummer broke his drumstick and the tip went twirling into the air and landed at my feet, perhaps 40 feet away, near the front of the crowd. It was a concert he played at the UW-Milwaukee, when I was a student there in the early 1970s. 1

It’s the most authentic piece of music memorabilia that I own and something I’ve always treasured for Lay’s place in music history. Besides their playing with Dylan, the Butterfield Band was the first integrated blues band on the scene, and they brought blues and rock to new creative heights. The band was deeply influential on rock, blues and some jazz musicians.

Award-winning writer/broadcaster Tom Reney explains: “Dylan had already ‘gone electric’ in January of ’65 when he jumped down the manhole of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and scored his first chart success. ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ recorded a month before Newport with Bloomfield playing the song’s signature leads and turn-arounds, was all over the radio by the festival weekend.

“In his book-length study, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus hears in Bloomfield’s playing something ‘triumphant, like a hawk in the sky…when, out of instinct, out of desire, out of a smile somewhere in his memory, Bloomfield finds the sound of a great whoosh, and for an instant a rising wind blows right through the rest of the music.’ ” 2

Sam Lay played a six-year stint with Muddy Waters, and also with other blues and rock ‘n’ roll greats including Howin’ Wolf, Magic Sam, Bo Diddley, Junior Wells and Little Walter. Among Lay’s many credits is playing on the Chess album Fathers and Sons, which documented a concert joining blues pioneers Waters and pianist Otis Spann with artistic offspring Paul Butterfield, Bloomfield, Lay, Buddy Miles and Donald “Duck” Dunn.

Bassist Dunn, by the way, was part of the real band in the celebrated comedy film, The Blues Brothers. Coincidentally this writer happened to appear driving my car in the background of a climactic scene in that movie, a story for another day.

____________

1 To clarify, Sam Lay was not with the Butterfield Band when I saw him at UWM. Lay was the bandleader. Unfortunately this event predated my beginnings as a music reporter, so I don’t recall his bandmates.

2 Tom Reney’s extended passage is from his excellent in-depth story on Dylan, Butterfield, and Bloomfield at the historic 1965 Newport Festival (from NPR and New England Public Media): https://www.nepm.org/jazz-world/2022-05-25/paul-butterfield-plugs-in-and-bob-dylan-follows-suit

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Greil Marcus takes a fulsome measure of Bob Dylan through a seven-song “biography”

Book review: Folk Music, A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, by Greil Marcus, paperback, 2023, $18, hardcover, 2022, $27.50 Yale University Press.

Look ahoy, mariners!
For perhaps 200 years, The Humanities have sailed the crosscurrents to wisdom, enlightenment and progress. I take the oceanic view here on Greil Marcus because he’s long proven himself arguably our best writer when it comes to popular music, partly because of the breadth of this knowledge which expands the impressiveness of his depth of insight and interpretation.
Of course, interpretation is always debatable, yet Marcus invariably gives you plenty to chew on, and an imaginative and transporting voyage in the process. That’s why his recent book Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs is so valuable and not to be missed. It was published recently in paperback, even though the prolific writer just published a short hardcover memoir.

And regarding at least related recent publications, Dylanophiles and pop music lovers should be onto the maestro’s own publishing masterwork to date The Philosophy of Modern Song, still only in hardcover as of this writing. Because that is Dylan writing prose (with admitted brilliance and range) about other people’s music it runs too far afield from this review’s focus, which is Dylan’s own songwriting.
Marcus has long understood that Dylan is our cultural lodestar if you can place that mantle on any given person. The singer-songwriter’s Nobel Peace Prize in Literature is an imprimatur because no other pop music figure, (read: mere songwriter) has ever won that award.

Bob Dylan the songwriter, pausing at the typewriter in the mid-1960s. The Criterion Collection

Yet anyone who has observed Dylan’s career would probably not vociferously dispute such accolades, especially if their own observation has been accompanied by those of Greil Marcus. Not that our man Friday has ever left Bob to his own Robinson Crusoe-like devices.
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes helped Marcus put his deep stamp on Dylan’s pathfinding,
Since then he’s also given us Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), and the collection Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968-2010 (2010).
This all came after his shot across the bow, the rainbow-like Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music in 1975. No less a rock savant than Bruce Springsteen said, “(Mystery Train) gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock ‘n’ roll.”
In that book, though he didn’t dedicate a chapter to Dylan per se (The Band, “his” band crucially, did receive one), Bob was close to the most-referenced artist in the book’s index.
And to truly understand the range of Marcus’s perceptions, I highly recommend the anthology that he co-edited, the voluminous A New Literary History of America.
His own contributions to that book reach back at least to Moby-Dick, which earns him a lookout spot on the mainmast of my list of American cultural authorities.
By contrast, the comparative conciseness and range of Folk Music (239 pages of text) reveals how he’s understands a pop music readership while still challenging it.

Now, he at first undersells “Blowin’ in the Wind” as “kitsch,” then proceeds to write a long love letter, acknowledging the song’s many suitors.

However: “in Dylan’s performance, a quick measured strumming from his guitar suspends the song in the circle of its own melody in the moment it begins. Across four minutes the feeling is unearthly, a hum seems to have been in the air of history: the sound of bodies going back to dust, the hum of thousands of insects bringing people who once lived into the earth, a humming snatched out of that air and forced to hold still.”

A bit grand perhaps, but Marcus’s own poetry strives to capture the song’s, with space and specificity. And notice how he acknowledges Dylan’s instrumental prowess, which is rarely done.
He goes on: “It is one of the most powerful, early manifestations of the quality that the defines Dylan’s music in its most uncanny moments throughout his life’s work, the quality of empathy. ‘I can see myself and others’: Here he sees himself in others and more than that disappears into them…
The fictional character he has created in the performance is still living the story out. History exists only in the future, when the story can be told out loud.”

The poet Joshua Clover summed up: “a figure on the order of Picasso or Stein – sui generis, seeming to lift the entire field onto his shoulders with heroic insouciance.”
“Heroic insouciance” sounds like Dylan through and through.

How many roads must a man walk down/

before he is called a man?

…And how many times must the cannonballs fly/

before they are forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…”

The line “before he is called a man” is taken to heart by many African-Americans, as Mavis Staples claims, she who young Bob Dylan had once fallen in love with.
In this fulsome chapter, as in others, Marcus characteristically sees the song pointing to a pathway only he perhaps can see to other songs, but he lets us see it too. In certain instances even Dylan himself might be astonished by the ideas, but without necessarily discounting them.
Indeed, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Dylan effortlessly raises a long forgotten Black hotel worker to mythic status.
A man named William Zantzinger murders her in cold blood for no apparent reason. A clear hate crime as he brands her a n—–. “Having reduced the charge to manslaughter, the judge remanded Zantzinger, an aristocratic tobacco farmer, just to the county date jail, delaying this time until after the fall, so that he can oversee the harvest of his crop.”

“I wrote “Hattie Carroll in a small notebook, in a restaurant on seventh Avenue,” Dylan said in 1985. “I felt I had a lot in common with the situation and was able to manifest my feelings.”

And you who philosophize disgrace/ and criticize all fears/

take the rag away from your face/now ain’t the time for your tears”

“We listened in complete silence, as if we were holding our breath, as if we didn’t know how the tragedy would conclude –
in the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
to show that all is equal and the courts are on the level…
and he spoke through his cloak, was deep and distinguished
and he handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zantzinger with a six-month sentence –
“When you listen, it’s as if the singer can barely expel the last word. It breaks and stumbles in his mouth, as if he will never not be shocked”

Bury the rag deep in your face/ Now’s the time for your tears.” The song’s last chorus ended, but for power and dominion as those qualities gathered in the music, in the air, and public square they didn’t touch the tone of voice on the last four words of the last verse.”

Perhaps debatable, but here Marcus acknowledges another underappreciated quality: Dylan’s typically roughhewn singing, almost always a marriage of voice and song.
These two chapters — on ”Blowin’” and “Hattie” — are marvels of extended interpretation, almost worth the price of the book.
He his far more concise in his discussion of “The Times They are a Changin’ ” Such a fearless interpreter may have felt that all the 1964 song’s history had said its peace as much as he could, even if that would fully stop him, though he says “The Times they are Changin’” felt obvious, in the 1960s. Fair enough.
But now he takes the “Changin”” story to where one might hope he would: to January 6 2021.

Trump supporters swarm police in the infamous January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

 
“By then ‘The Times’ didn’t seem obvious, and history exposed how vulnerable it really was. The people flooding to the Capital, smearing feces on the marble, hoisting Confederate flags as John Calhoun and Charles Sumner looked down from the walls, smashing into the Senate chamber, beating police to the ground and kicking them where they lay, weren’t chanting ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call…’
“But they could have been. Instead they sang ‘Old Dan Tucker’ shouting get out of the way you fucking n—– at Black capital policemen – They’re saying: Trump is our rightful president. Nobody voted for Biden,’ ”

***

The placing of the author’s own name in the 2010 collection astride Dylan himself, suggests Marcus’s ego billowing in the wind.
So, not every word or thought here is golden. Full disclosure: At times I resorted to a bit of skimming, especially in his elaborations on “Ain’t Talkin,” a relatively obscure song from Modern Times, one of the longest chapters. What’s worthwhile buried within the essay is Marcus’ oddly-placed discussion of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” — an  astonishing masterpiece from 1962 — a litany of surreal poetic imagery. The singer is a cold-eyed witness: “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’/ I saw a roomful of men with their hammers a bleedin’. The song foreshadows the Cuban Missle Crisis —  when the world almost errrupted into it’s first nuclear world war — and seemed an inside-out view of the zeitgeist, “my first three-dimensional song” as Dylan told Studs Terkel. But this author, for all his cultural erudition, never comes close to persuading that “Ain’t Takin'” is comparable in any way. He even meanders through comments on the old Black folksong “Old Dan Tucker,” which perhaps he now regrets, given its bastardized appropriation at the January 6 riot.

Consider the book’s frontispiece, the photo below of Dylan and James Baldwin, which helps to underscore Dylan’s prominence as a comparable spokesperson for Civil Rights in the era, as much as Dylan disliked the role, per se.

Bob Dylan and writer James Baldwin on the occasion of Dylan receiving the Thomas Paine Award at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner celebrating the 172nd annivesary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, Dec. 12, 1963. Photo by Ted Russell/Polaris

And Marcus devotes only ten pages to “The Times They Are a Changin’” and ten more to 1965’s “Desolation Row,” Dylan’s cinematically vivid yet metaphorical tracking through the lowliest sufferers, with its lacerating opening line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.”

Marcus does get into the meat of that line’s historic legacy. Dylan was alluding to a lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth, Minn. in 1920, accused of raping a white woman, without evidence (she passed out during the alleged attack). A fourth “rapist,”  Max Mason, was imprisoned until he died in 1942. Gov. Tim Walz granted Mason the state’s first posthumous pardon in 2020, on the grounds that no rape took place.

Marcus also quotes Joshua Clover, who wrote in 2021, “Even if ‘Desolation Row’ is not his greatest song (I might make the case for 4-5 others, depending on the year) it’s where the bodies are buried.” This is great reporting but followed by some provocative speculative comment about Dylan’s grandfather, and father. Did they attend the hanging?

Ah, but perhaps Marcus wanted to devote more attention to more recent Dylan, and threw a curveball in the process, and Bob “ain’t talkin'” as has often been the case. After all, how many readers under the age of 35 think all this ancient stuff is just blowin’ in the wind?

And yet, lookout for another curveball, slow and junk-filled! We also get 46 pages on “Jim Jones.” Instead of a song about the notorious cult suicide murderer, this “Jim Jones” is about a musty old folk hero/mariner from days of yore, for what reasons as a choice I know not.

I think “Shelter from the Storm” or “Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts” or “Tangled Up in Blue,” from the mid-career summit Blood on the Tracks might’ve been better choices than “Jim Jones” or “Ain’t Talkin’.”

“Blood on the Tracks” album cover

I hope Marcus would welcome suggestions like mine, to temper his drama-queen impulses and idiosyncracies, although he could easily claim Dylan his “co-conspirator.” With a writer this good (think of both writers), you can live with some of that.

He finally leaves us swimming in 12 pages of iconic presidential blood in “Murder Most Foul” from 2020, In that final chapter, Marcus takes extended measure of the recent Dylan song that meditates on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Again, the event may be mere historical rhetoric to some, especially those many born long after it transpired. But Marcus helps us see how Dylan escorts its resonances down through history, even as its subject remains crucified on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963.

History is the most elusive of mistresses and yet we continue to pursue her siren song or just turn away and misunderstand it, often to our downfall, for her ghost fingers so often point to illumination.

And truth told, at first reading of the chapter, I felt Marcus was overcome or daunted by the historical moment. In a second reading I finally realized he had, in quotation, aligned with an eloquent review of the pioneering bluegrass group The Carter Family’s ‘Mid the Green Fields of Virginia collection — as an oblique yet apt summation of “Murder.”
It was written by John Pankake and Paul Nelson, coeditors of the 1960s folk music publication Little Sandy Review.

The editors wrote: “Certainly the Carter family intuitively understood and magnificently expressed in their songs and messages what has taken the sociologists and historians decades of thoughts to discover: that we are a nation of outcasts from Western civilization, doomed to forever devour then plunder the land we cannot cherish, to dream of fathers and kings and to love guiltily in the night. The hopeful falsehoods of our ’official’ art pale before the nightmare of our folk art, and though it speaks its truths in absurd sentimentality to balm with self-pitying tears the pain of a direct confrontation.

“Like the Carter family longing for the green fields of home, we may share these songs of lost innocence, but neither the sharing nor the innocence is the essential experience we see. It is, rather, the longing itself.”
Pankake further reflects “the more sentimental of us have difficulty facing the knowledge that when these singers are gone, they shall have taken a part of America with them, and their kind will never be seen on the face the earth again.”

It seems that sentiment of finality still abides John F. Kennedy’s martyr-like demise. May we live to honor another morning soon, of one brief, shining moment, that burns beyond the last blowin’ wind.

___________________________

“Once Were Brothers” traces the mythical saga of The Band, through Robbie Robertson’s lens

“We few, we proud, we band of brothers.” — Shakespeare, Henry V

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, a documentary film by Daniel Roher, plays at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, at the Oriental Theater, 2230 N. Farwell Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202 (414) 276-5140

__________

This story needed to be told again, on Robbie Robertson’s terms, even as it needs telling from all five. Three are gone, so Robbie the wordsmith stands best to speak here, anew and anon. And The Band started with him; it’s roots arose when he converged with Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. But this needed to be told because the Band lasted too short a time for the America it embraced and re-imagined, the nation that needed a band like this, to remind us who and what America was, and is, and might be.

For perhaps no other American vernacular band compressed more talent into one entity, like pages of a tattered book filled with dried and pressed leaves, shadows and light, and music of American spheres. It was a great North American band, comprising four Canadians and one Arkansan, who embodied “Canadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind,” as they regaled us on one of their late, great saga-songs.

We need this story because, well, as the venerable roots purveyor Taj Mahal asserts here, they are the closest we have to the American Beatles. Daniel Roher’s film provides classic and never-published photos and film footage of their life in Woodstock. N.Y. and at the house called Big Pink, on the road, and reflections from most band members, but mainly Robertson’s and those of his wife Dominique, their road manager and some celebrated others.

But Mahal’s claim begs examination, because the band’s peak years lasted less than the Beatles. Both bands emerged from, and remained rooted in, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly, blues, and country. Like their counterparts, the North Americans drew from British Isle folk sources as well. Stylistically where they diverged was when the Beatles embraced psychedelia. The Band arrived right about that time, but driven by older forces, and enamored of the rustic weirdness, oily charm, verve, wit and tragedy that would come to be called Americana, a genre they forged as much as anyone. As Robertson points out, “The rock generation revolted against their parents but we loved our parents.” They had a sprawling family portrait taken during the Basement Tapes sessions.

And yet their extraordinary quintet synergy also made for some of the bitterness that would ultimately arise, perhaps justified (more on that later).

“It was such a beautiful thing. It was so beautiful that it went up in flames,” Robertson reflects.

More on the Beatles comparison. Both had magnificent and glorious songwriting, though the Beatles were more diverse with three gifted writers, which may be their greatest claim, aside from the phenomenal impact they had on our culture. The Band had primarily Robertson writing songs, but they had that three-part harmony, probably the most fulsome and profoundly textured of any popular group, because these were also “three of the greatest white rhythm-and-blues singers in the world at the time,” as Eric Clapton comments.

“They have voices that you’d never heard before, and yet they sound like they’ve always been there,” rhapsodizes Bruce Springsteen.

Here, The Band has a leg up on the more famous British band, whose third and fourth singers were only serviceable, though George and Ringo had their moments.

The Band was also instrumentally superior, again, to almost almost any rock ’n’ roll band, especially in ensemble, given their kaleidoscopic versatility. Bassist-singer Rick Danko was capable with several horns and string instruments. Classically-trained Garth Hudson played organ, synthesizer, accordion, saxophones, brass, and piccolo. Drummer-singer Hudson also played mandolin.

Guitarist Robertson developed a style that startled and even intimidated many guitarists, even if he wasn’t the typical virtuoso pealing off chorus after dazzling chorus. Few pickers had a sharper rhythmic flair, or could make a guitar bite, sear, and jump for joy, almost at once. Richard Manuel played piano, clavinet and drums, and sang with the most soul-haunting voice of any of them. I’m probably forgetting a few axes. Clapton was so moved — “they changed my life” — that he forsook his two fellows of the psychedelic-blues-rock trio Cream at its peak, in hopes he could join The Band. “Maybe they’d need a rhythm guitar,” he says.

The band performs in the concert film “The Last Waltz.” (Left to right) Richard Manuel, piano and vocals; Garth Hudson, accordion, keyboards and saxes; Rick Danko, bass and vocals; Robbie Robertson, guitar; Levon Helm, drums; Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, vocals.

As for style, their playing and singing blended looseness and precision, defiant resolve and abandon, high humor and pooling sadness. They fully inhabited the characters dwelling in Robertson’s songs of American archetypes — dirt farmers, varmints, vagabonds, drunkards, Dixie fighters. “Virgil Cain is my name and I worked on the Danville train,” Helm sings on the forlorn, feisty epic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” “They reminded me of 19th century American literature, of Melville’s stories of searchers,” film director Martin Scorsese ponders.

Barney Hoskyns, biographer of The Band, has a similar reflection, by way of quoting the great American critic Greil Marcus: “…their music gave us a sure sense that the country was richer than we had guessed.’” Hoskyns adds: “If there was any band that could get to the heart of the mystery that pervaded rural life in America, then The Band was it. Nathaniel Hawthorne may have been right when he wrote of Americans that ‘we have so much country that we have really no country at all’,’ but The Band managed to create a sense of its adopted land that was at once precise and mythical.” 1

Courtesy Nebraska Furniture Mart

The Band’s first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, as well as Northern Lights-Southern Cross compare well to any Beatles album, as does, in its rough, eccentric ways The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan. Stage Fright and Cahoots are right in the ballpark. Rock of Ages is a masterful live recording achievement, and Scorsese’s The Last Waltz remains arguably the finest concert documentary ever made, studded with stars, and The Band’s last-ever live performance at Winterland in San Francisco, in its original incarnation, here sweaty and transcendent.

I saw them once, at Summerfest, on their last 1974 tour, and the power and glory remained, though the poisons that killed it all festered beneath the surface.

Robertson recounts his prodigious rise when, at 15, he wrote two songs recorded by Canadian rock ‘n’ roll star Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. “That band was my own personal Big Bang,” Robertson says. He soon joined the Hawks, and they reformed as Levon Helm and the Hawks.

Aside from his musical and literary genius, Bob Dylan is an astute aficionado and observer of American musical talent. When he heard The Band he knew they had to be his. He approached them and they invited to their basement studios in their communal Woodstock home “Big Pink.” Dylan was dubious at first of recording there, as they only had a small reel-to-reel, but once they got down to it, things began flowing. Dylan clacked away song lyrics on his typewriter and they rehearsed.

The Basement Tapes is among the most mythical informal recordings in pop music history, largely Dylan songs, immensely enhanced by The Band. Before long they were touring, yet this was early in Dylan’s plugged-in phase. His still-faithful-to-folk-roots fans consistently booed the electric music, for all its quality. This rejection eventually wore on Helm, who was beginning to sink into drugs and alcohol, as were several others, especially Manuel, a sensitive soul, who struggled with depression, and would soon self-destruct. In time, disillusioned Helm quit the group to become an oil rigger in the Gulf of Mexico.

Robertson soldiered on with the group though somewhat devastated by the loss of his soul brother and best friend. He addresses the nature of creativity, saying it’s often a matter of “trying to surprise yourself. For example, if you look inside the sounding hole of a Martin guitar you see imprinted” made in Nazareth, PA.” One day I saw that and thought, ‘I pulled into Nazareth, was a feeling about half-past dead.’ Then I heard these voices, ‘Take a load off Fanny,’” and “The Weight” was born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo

The Band performs “The Weight” with The Staple Singers, in “The Last Waltz.” YouTube

The Band’s Robbie Robertson (right) is interviewed about the new film “Once Were Brothers.” Courtesy The Toronto Star. 

Enter producer entrepreneur extraordinaire David Geffen. He convinced Robertson to move to Malibu, CA, and a oceanfront property, and before long he’d lured the band members out there which replenished them. The result was the 1976 album Northern Lights-Southern Cross considered by many their best album since their second. It included three classic new songs “Acadian Driftwood,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Ophelia” and no clunkers.

Robertson treads too lightly on the feud that developed between him and Helm. “Bitterness was setting in with Levon.” he muses. It had to do with the band members beginning to indulge in heroin. Robertson fortunately did not have an addictive makeup and was not chemically affected. But he does gloss Helms point of view which deeply resented all the royalties that Robertson received for their original music. Although Robertson wrote the majority of the songs, few bands could better fit the adage: The sum is greater than their parts. So there was a strong argument for all members sharing in some royalties.

Nor does Robertson address Richard Manuel’s devastating suicide in the film. So, it’s worth referring to Barney Hoskyns book Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, to give the subject some due. “The band had played capacity crowds for two shows which went well, despite the fact that Rick had complained to Richard about his drink. ‘We played a good show for good intelligent people,’ Rick said. ‘Talk was of the next show. That’s what we were all living for.’

 

After leaving the club, Richard headed back to the nearby Quality Inn and stopped by Levon’s room en route to his own. To Levon, he did not seem especially depressed. “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his bathroom.” Once in the room Richard finished off a bottle of Grand Marnier and his last scrapings of coke. Sometime between 3 and 3:30 AM on Tuesday 4, March, he went into the bathroom…

Richard Manuel. Courtesy Live for Live Music

Rick Danko was in shock, and denial. “I cannot believe in a million years that wasn’t a goddamn silly accident,” he said

“It seems much more likely that loneliness and a profound sense of failure combined to convince him of the futility of life,” Hoskyns writes.

The opening words of his prologue also address the fated artist. “Richard Manuel’s is the first voice you hear in the the first Band album Music from Big Pink (1968)…His aching baritone launches into the first reproachful line of “Tears of Rage.” As it arches over ‘arms,’ you can’t help thinking of Ray Charles, the singer who more than any other shaped this unlikely white soul voice from Stratford, Ontario… A month shy of his 43rd birthday, he could see nothing ahead but these depressing one-nighters, rehashing ‘the old magic’ in a continuing, fruitless struggle to moderate his intake of alcohol and cocaine.”

On that Tuesday morning in 1986, “he tied one end of a plain black belt around her neck, the other end around the shower curtain and hanged himself. The distance between ‘Tears of Rage’ and Richard Manuel’s lonely death at the Winter Park Quality Inn was the journey The Band traveled in their rise and fall as one of the greatest rock bands in America.” 2

Levon Helm drums and sings, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in “The Last Waltz.”

Once Were Brothers — an engrossing, touching and well-crafted film — understandably climaxes with two generous clips from The Last Waltz. The Band’s radiant final hurrah was on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, and includes Dylan, Clapton, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Dr. John, The Staple Singers, Emmylou Harris, Ringo Starr, Paul Butterfield, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, and a brass ensemble.

“Time is the most mysterious word of all,” Norman Mailer once wrote. The Band somehow traversed and encapsulated the mysteries of our time, Because “Life is a Carnival.” and because of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

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1 Barney Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, Hyperion, 1993 Quote of Greil Marcus from his book Mystery Train, 3-4 .

2 Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 384-85