Thursday, June 25, 2015

30. The Band - The Band


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On this work, the bottom third of the the photo on the original album cover art design was cropped off and the remaining image was mirrored. The resulting image, now about equal in
measurement on all sides was positioned to the right of the brown canvass which had already been set to measure 18x10. A smaller reproduction of the original album cover photo
was pasted at left and the album title was enlarged and pasted above it.


Here's the original album cover art design.  



No. 45, Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 45, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.


Album design by Bob Cato, photo by Elliot Landy. Album produced by John Simon. Capitol 1969.


Designed by the great Bob Cato, using an Elliot Landy photograph, this simple cover speaks volumes of what waits inside. Their first album, Music From Big Pink
did not show the members of the group on either the front or the back; you had to open it up to see the group. Here they confront you head-on, staring at you
from another time. This was the time of paisley and psychedelic design and fonts. Not this band, there were dressed as workers, laborers, as if they stepped
out of 1940’s  America. Hell, they could’ve been mistaken for hobos then. The album was sepia toned as if taken from our grandparents’ scrapbook. And
the music reflected it all, and magnificently. A masterpiece. Source


It's as if an itinerant old-time medicine show somehow skipped a few generations, pulled off a two-lane Arkansas highway in 1910, and woke up in 1968, with
its remaining potions turned to hallucinogens. Of course the time travellers had stories to tell—about the wily old South, where men with names like Virgil
and Eustace tended the land, and there was pride just in surviving.

Four Canadians and one Southern "ringer" (drummer Levon Helm, who grew up in Arkansas), the Band caught what was wild and romantic about America,
and framed it in ramshackle grandeur with a touch of a hippieera batik. The musicians first played together backing rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins,
but became cohesive backing Bob Dylan during his shift from acoustic folk to rock. When the Band moved out of the Big Pink house in Woodstock,
New York, the group of talented multi-instrumentalists discovered they had something different, but no less profound, to say on their own.
That's instantly evident in the story-songs on their first album, Music from Big Pink, and this masterpiece — a one-two punch the likes of
which rock and roll hasn't seen since. Full article


(A) Across the Great Divide - Rag Mama Rag - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - When You Awake - Up on Cripple Creek - Whispering Pines

(B) Jemima Surrender - Rockin' Chair - Look Out Cleveland - Jawbone - The Unfaithful Servant - King Harvest (Has Surely Come)


"King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" live from Robbie Robertson's studio in Woodstock NY from promised land on YouTube.