Discography / Forbidden Fruit

Forbidden Fruit

The opener of Northern Lights–Southern Cross, and one of the album's loosest, most extended showcases for Robertson's guitar playing, which by this point in the group's career had grown considerably more confident and expansive than the tightly economical style he'd used on the earlier records. Levon Helm sings lead, playing a narrator who turns up "high and lonesome out on Times Square," an unusually urban setting for a group whose image had always leaned toward backwoods and small-town Americana rather than city streets.

The lyric is generally read as at least partly autobiographical for the group as a whole, an allegory for the drug use that had become a serious problem within the band by the mid-1970s, dressed up in the song's title reference to the biblical fruit Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat. Robertson doesn't moralize about it directly; the song functions more as observation than warning, in keeping with his general preference for character and image over direct commentary.

Notable versions

• The Band, Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975), lead vocal Helm