The Band is a group who I managed to grow up with without even realizing it, and I wasn’t able to put it together until the last two years transpired. With my father’s wildly middle-aged interest with the Civil War I grew up with the gray and blue spines of countless volumes of mid-19th century history books, alongside the covers of his extensive LP collection to corroborate his love of folk, bluegrass, and rock music. I grew up with Bob Dylan’s painting on the front of Music From Big Pink, and the grainy black and white photograph against the murky red-brown of The Band record. And with that juxtaposition—history, the south, the north, bluegrass, folk, rock, Dylan—you have The Band.
Culled from the expansive A Musical History box set—a five-disc, 102 track retrospective of the efforts of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, and Robbie Robertson as a group simply known as The Band—Best Of A Musical History attempts to present a single disc of representative songs from an already well-catalogued, and thoroughly Greatest Hits album-laden, 15 year career. What makes Best Of A Musical History differ from previous reissues and “Best Of” collections is the 19 tracks’ exclusion of more well-known Band compositions like “Rag Mama Rag,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” or the wildly evocative “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Focusing on presenting The Band and their constant evolution we are presented with early rock ‘n roll roots with a pulsing version of “Who Do You Love?” with Ronnie Hawkins, one in which an attuned listener can already hear the unique talents of the players punching through. This, in turn, gives way to the understated and wholly original material with “Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” and the unmistakable group vocal harmonies of “I Shall Be Released,” and “The Weight.”
The Band’s revolutionary work with Bob Dylan is of course included here with “Forever Young,” but the real gems of this disc is Van Morrison’s vocals on “4% Pantomime,” and the song sketch of “Twilight,” which shows The Band’s genuine ability and dexterity in writing musical moments that are able to not only exist apart from the rest of their catalogue, but retain cohesiveness at the same time. It is this principle that has spawned the admiration of modern musicians and the recently released Band cover album Endless Highway: The Music of The Band, which includes the likes of My Morning Jacket, Death Cab For Cutie, Roseanne Cash, and Guster among others—and for all intensive purposes proved that their songs are best served when being performed by those who wrote them. |