History / Music from Big Pink (1968)

Music from Big Pink (1968)

Bob Dylan offered to sing on the Band's debut album. They turned him down. After two years of being introduced everywhere as Dylan's backing band, this record needed to prove it belonged to somebody else, and having its most famous available voice on it would have undercut the entire point. Dylan understood. Instead of singing, he painted the cover, a loose, almost childlike image showing six musicians, one more than the actual lineup, a detail critics have spent decades arguing over without ever settling whether it meant anything.

Grossman got the group signed to Capitol Records that winter, still billed to the label as Dylan's backing band rather than under any name of their own. Helm's return from the Gulf of Mexico oil rigs, promised as part of the deal, gave them a full lineup for the first time in over two years. They met producer John Simon and started recording that January at A&R Studios in New York, cutting five songs there, "Tears of Rage," "Chest Fever," "We Can Talk," "This Wheel's on Fire," and "The Weight," largely live to four-track tape with almost no overdubbing. Capitol liked what it heard enough to fly the group to Los Angeles to finish the record at Capitol Studios and Gold Star, where they cut the remaining five: "In a Station," "To Kingdom Come," "Lonesome Suzie," "Long Black Veil," and "I Shall Be Released."

Three of the eleven songs on the finished album trace back to Dylan in some form. "Tears of Rage" and "This Wheel's on Fire" both grew out of the basement co-writes with Manuel and Danko. "I Shall Be Released" was a Dylan song outright, sung by Manuel in a falsetto that AllMusic later called gut-wrenching. But the album's vocal identity belonged to the group, not to Dylan: three different lead singers, Helm, Danko, and Manuel, traded songs across the record, and Robertson, despite being the guitarist and eventually the chief songwriter, sang lead on exactly one track, "To Kingdom Come." Hudson found stranger colors than anyone expected out of ordinary gear. For "This Wheel's on Fire," Helm later explained, Hudson got its odd, warbling tone by running a telegraph key through a child's toy organ.

The packaging was as understated as the recording. Milton Glaser, who'd designed the poster that came with Dylan's Greatest Hits, handled the sleeve, and the front cover carried no band name at all, just Dylan's painting. The back was a plain, unglamorous photograph of the actual pink house in West Saugerties, shot by Elliott Landy that April. Landy also flew to Simcoe, Ontario, to photograph the four Canadian members' families together on Danko's brother's farm for an inside spread. Helm's parents couldn't make the trip from Arkansas, so their photo got inserted separately, captioned simply "Next of Kin."

Music from Big Pink came out on July 1, 1968, and by ordinary commercial measures, it barely registered. It peaked at No. 30 on Billboard's album chart. The only single to chart at all was "The Weight," and even that stalled at No. 63, the same week a competing cover by Jackie DeShannon reached No. 55. What the album got instead of sales was the kind of reaction that changes careers that aren't the Band's own. Al Kooper's review in Rolling Stone that August called it "an event and should be treated as one." George Harrison flew to Woodstock partly because of what he'd heard in it. Eric Clapton later said the record was the reason he quit Cream, chasing the same loose, communal sound with Delaney and Bonnie and eventually Derek and the Dominos. Roger Waters, decades later, called it the most influential rock album ever made, ranking it second only to Sgt. Pepper's.

Nobody was calling any of this Americana yet. The word wouldn't exist as a genre label for another two decades. But the musicians who spent the 1970s making rootsy, unhurried records indebted to old country and gospel and blues were, whether they said so or not, working somewhere in the shadow of an album that had struggled to crack the Top 30 the summer it came out.