Documentary / Music (2012) 114 minutes ~ Color ~ 2 Vols.
This documentary traces the potent working relationship between Bob Dylan and the members of the rock group The Band who made some iconic music during the sixties and seventies.
Stars: The Band, Bob Dylan
This documentary traces the potent working relationship between Bob Dylan and the members of the rock group The Band who made some iconic music during the sixties and seventies.
Stars: The Band, Bob Dylan
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Short filmTranscript
00:00After the release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan took the first steps towards resuming live
00:04performance and it was the band to whom he once again turned. Though they'd briefly appeared on
00:10stage together at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert in January 68, a booking to play the Isle of
00:15White festival in August 1969 would be the first time that Dylan and the band had played a full
00:20set in over three years. The festival and the reappearance of Bob Dylan was a hugely anticipated
00:26event. The Dylan that showed up at the Isle of White, he was straight off the cover of Nashville
00:32Skyline. You know, it was the country Dylan, both from the country music side and from the fact he'd
00:39come from the Woodstock country. He wasn't happy, I don't think, with the performance after the
00:47event. And it was a mixed performance. He had been in Britain for three years and it was like
00:56the second coming of Dylan. This had been so eagerly awaited and indeed, you know, it was so
01:02disappointing. He played for a little over an hour, seemed kind of detached and somewhat indifferent
01:09to the crowd. There was a sound problem before he went on and unfortunately, as it was his first,
01:21besides the Woody Guthrie event, as it was his first proper concert back, I think he was very
01:27disappointed with the end results. Following the Isle of White performance, any residual perception
01:36that the band were principally Dylan's backing group was about to change forever. In the months
01:41preceding the festival, the band had been recording their eponymous second album and with Robertson
01:46stepping forward as chief songwriter, they had abandoned the Dylan covers and basement material
01:51of Big Pink in the search for a coherent identity of their own. Well, the difference between the
01:57Big Pink album and the band's second album was that in the second album there was a sort of a
02:01concept having to do with the Civil War and the working man and this kind of thing. The first
02:09album was just a collection of songs, that's all it was. After all, they had a few Dylan songs and
02:15they were pulling very much on their old influences. Though those old influences were in play in the
02:22second album, Dylan songs were not there. It had to be much more of a band alone album, so you can
02:30say that. Even in the graphics in the back of the album it says, well you're there when the band
02:36starts playing, you know that quote from that old Dixieland song. So there was a real sense of it
02:45being them. And the album was called The Band, you know, it was not called music from Big Pink. This
02:50is it, this is who we are. You know, Robbie has stepped forward by now certainly and taken the
02:56mantle, taken the reins as the leader, the most together member of the band and the guy who who
03:04really does bother to get up in the morning and do some work and write some songs and put these
03:09songs together, write lyrics. We rented a house, so it was very much like the Big Pink experience. We
03:16were all in a house together that had a recording studio in it. Robbie was writing the songs as we
03:23went. And as he would write a song, he would pretty much cast it as to who would be the singer
03:29of it and then we would work on it and go and rehearse it and rehearse it for a couple days
03:33and then record it and rehearse it for a couple days and record it.
03:36It is one of the landmarks in sort of proto-Americana,
03:52is the second album. It's a kind of novel in song form. It's a scrapbook based on Robbie's
04:05infatuation with the American South as channeled through primarily Levon Helm. It's through Levon
04:16that Robbie discovers the South, you know, way before this. The first visits down to the South
04:22as one of the Hawks. Levon shows him around Arkansas. So Robbie really gets his face up
04:31close to the window of what it must be like to be a Southerner.
04:46The second album is Robbie's fantasy. It's a Yankees, a Canadian's fantasy of what the South,
05:01the deep South really means. The history, the romanticism of life during, since the Civil War.
05:10And he's kind of using Levon's voice in particular as the manifestation of that Southern flavour,
05:20that Southern character. It also introduced tensions into a group that had existed for
05:25years in Easy Fraternity. Given the album's themes in context of Levon Helm's personal
05:31experience, Robertson's monopoly of the songwriting credits did permanent damage
05:35to relationships within the band. You see, writing the song is just part of it. And this
05:42speaks to the big dispute between Robbie and Levon. The old school in songwriting is that
05:50the composer and the lyricist share the credit for the song, end of story. The new model that
06:02happened in a lot of rock and roll bands was that one of the members of the band shows up
06:10with a germ of an idea, kicks it around. Somebody else says, oh, I got a guitar part for it. I have
06:14a drum part for it. I have a bass part for it. I have a keyboard part for it. They change it around.
06:19I want to change the melody this way because it fits my voice better. And in the end,
06:22they've got a more collaborative piece. And so they all slap their names on the song.
06:26Robbie was adhering to the old model. Levon wanted to adhere to the new model. Levon felt
06:34that a lot of the inspiration for these songs, particularly the ones that had to do with the
06:37South, came from his personal experience and things that he'd shared with Robbie. And that
06:46a lot of what made the song come to life were contributions of his as well as contributions
06:55from the other guys in the band. Band member differences notwithstanding, the album was an
07:01enormous success. Released on the 22nd of September 1969, it quickly broke the Billboard
07:07chart top 10 and proved hugely influential in rehabilitating the sound of the rural South
07:12into contemporary American music. The band's second album is a peak for anybody. When you
07:20talk about Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper and whatever you want to talk about, you've got to
07:24throw in the band's second album. There's hardly a naff note on it. I feel there's still the
07:35Retro Rockets firing from their close association with Bob Dylan. It is a key inspiration and link
07:42for the alt country and Americana scenes today. You cannot scratch a Jayhawks or a Wilco or a
07:52Lucinda Williams or a Fleet Foxes and not find somebody that's heard the band's second album
07:59over and over and over again. It changed the way that long-haired people looked at the South. That
08:08a band who'd played behind Dylan, who'd been at the sort of forefront of the civil rights,
08:17music, this group could write a song and release a song called The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,
08:24an elegy, a lament for the South as it goes down in the Civil War. This was profoundly radical
08:36or sort of in a kind of inverted way. I think it changed the way a lot of people thought about the
08:44South. Suddenly the South started to become kind of hip again. The band's early success and creative
08:53energy proved ultimately to be unsustainable and over the course of the early 70s their star began
08:59to wane. By 1973 the group were in bad shape. In a move that suggested some nostalgia for their
09:06Hawks days, they released an album of classic R&B covers entitled Moondog Matinee. Reviews were
09:12tepid. You can see to a certain extent while there's wonderful songs on every record the band
09:18ever did, you can see and hear that the air's seeping out of their particular balloon a little
09:24bit. They partied too hard, they didn't work hard enough. By the time Dylan asked them to, you know,
09:35saddle up and go on the road with him again, and he did record an album with him again, I think it
09:41probably came as something of a lifesaver. And the reunion came at a time when Dylan's own
09:49career was threatening to drift. Recent LPs had met with mixed reviews, none of which were overly
09:55enthusiastic, and the lack of touring had toned down his profile. Having left Columbia and signed
10:01for David Geffen's Asylum Records, Dylan elected to preface his return to touring with a new album
10:06and asked the band to join him in the studio to record Planet Waves. You know, he'd been low-key
10:13for two or three years, and I mean, you know, a huge amount going on. He put out baffling records
10:19and some pretty poor records that just had everybody scratching their heads. Lots of sort
10:29of, you know, cover songs that no one would have imagined him doing on things like Soft Portrait
10:36and the Dylan album and, you know, odd good things scattered amongst all of this. But, you know, what
10:43on earth was Dylan doing? You know, where is he going? You know, are we ever going to hear
10:51important, meaningful music from this guy again? He would stagnate if he stood still, but I think
10:57his problem was that he didn't know where to go at that time. I think there was still even people
11:03looking at what had happened in the basement tapes. There was still a whole mystery behind
11:09that missing period. And, of course, from 1969 onwards, there'd been a flood of Dylan bootlegs.
11:18I mean, obviously, The Great White Wonder, which in part used demos from the Big Pink
11:24basement sessions, was, of course, the first ever rock bootleg. People still wanted to know who Bob
11:29Dylan was and what his next move was going to be. He was still very high profile.