History / The Band (1969)

The Band (1969)

By the spring of 1969, the Band had never played a single show under their own name. They'd backed Ronnie Hawkins, backed Dylan, spent a summer in a basement with him, and cut a debut album that critics were already treating as a landmark. But nobody outside their own circle had ever seen them perform live as the Band. That changed in April, at Winterland in San Francisco, and they showed up already knowing exactly what they didn't want: when the venue's light-show crew set up the usual psychedelic projections, Helm's instructions, by his own account in his memoir, were blunt. Hold the psychedelia. Robertson put it more bluntly still in his own memoir decades later: it made him nauseated.

They wrote and recorded the follow-up somewhere stranger than a basement. A New York studio didn't have the right feel, so they flew to Los Angeles and rented a house in the Hollywood Hills that had previously belonged to Sammy Davis Jr., at 8850 Evanview Drive, big enough that whole families could move in with them. Capitol Records, baffled that a band with access to state-of-the-art studios down the street wanted to record in a converted pool house instead, paid to ship the equipment across the country anyway. Getting an upright piano up the hillside driveway turned into its own ordeal, and the pool house had to be soundproofed from the outside in a residential neighborhood, which reportedly made for a strange sight on an otherwise quiet street.

John Simon came back to co-produce, but Robertson took over most of the actual engineering this time, hungry, in Simon's later description, to learn the technical side of making a record rather than just writing one. The pool house gave them tricks Big Pink never had: for "Jawbone," they got the vocal echo they wanted by having Manuel sing from the bathroom. "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" was the last song finished there, cut just before the group had to leave for three nights at Winterland. The final three tracks, "Up on Cripple Creek," "Whispering Pines," and "Jemima Surrender," along with an outtake called "Get Up Jake," got finished afterward in New York at the Hit Factory, with a different engineer handling them. The group wasn't fully confident in Robertson and Simon's technical work on those last songs and wanted someone else at the board.

Something else had shifted since Big Pink, less visible in the grooves but audible in the paperwork. The debut had spread its songwriting credits across several members, Manuel especially. This one didn't. Robertson wrote nearly all of it alone, including "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a Civil War ballad he started composing quietly at the piano not long after his wife gave birth to their first daughter. Helm sang it, and sang it like he'd lived it, but Robertson's name was the one on the publishing. Money followed the credit, and years later Helm didn't bother softening how that felt: "Robbie and Albert get all the money, and the rest of us get all the leftovers," he told an interviewer in 1998. "And he was supposed to be one of us, and was."

The album, sepia-toned, unnamed on its own cover apart from lyrics borrowed from a 1917 standard called "Darktown Strutters' Ball," came out on September 22, 1969, four days ahead of the Beatles' Abbey Road. Robert Christgau had disliked the debut enough that he'd planned a column tearing the follow-up apart before he'd even heard it. Instead he called it an A-plus record, better than Abbey Road, and named it the fourth-best album of the year. Rolling Stone's Ralph Gleason described it as a twelve-faceted gem, geometrically larger than the sum of its parts. It reached No. 9 on the Billboard album chart and No. 2 in Canada, the group's best-ever chart showing at home. "Up on Cripple Creek," released as a single that November, hit No. 25, the highest any Band single would ever climb, and the group played it on The Ed Sullivan Show that same month.

None of that early acclaim faded into the usual critical footnote. In 1998, Q's readers voted it the 76th greatest album ever made. In 2009, it entered the National Recording Registry. In 2017 it won the jury's Heritage Prize at the Polaris Music Prize. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 45 on its list of the 500 greatest albums in 2003, held that spot in 2012, and still had it at No. 57 in the 2020 revision. Sometime in between the album's release and their next one, the group landed on the cover of Time magazine, the first North American rock act ever to do so. A band that hadn't played a single show under its own name until a converted pool house in the Hollywood Hills gave them somewhere to record was, within a year, being treated as the most serious thing happening in American music.