Oh, and by the way.....Neil Young's Harvest album is Neil trying to sound like the Brown Album. He ditched Crazy Horse, and put together a good band with a Southern rhythm section. Drummer Kenneth Buttrey played in the same style as Levon, and also tuned his drums thumpy. The Harvest album was recorded in Neil's barn on mobile equipment, again like the Brown Album, also without the standard gratuitous electronic reverb, the mics capturing the sound of the barn, creating a woody sounding album. Everybody, Clapton and Young included, wanted to sound like and be as good as The Band. None of them succeeded, IMO! |
I'm SO happy to see other Band lovers here on Audiogon! They are very special, as you all know. Music From Big Pink was so titled because that house (and it's famous basement) is where the guys got together to work on the music that ended up being on the album. The album was actually recorded in NYC and at Capitol's studio in Hollywood (located in the, ironically, basement of the round Capitol building on Vine Street). I passed by it frequently (Professional Drum Shop is also on Vine) when I lived in L.A., and always pictured them playing in the basement of that building in early '68.
The new Band MFSL SACD's are good, as are the new LP's. I think the original MFBP had a rainbow Capitol label, but it's the next pressing (mastered by Ludwig---why didn't he do the original rainbow label version?), the green label Capitol, that Fremer recommends. I'm looking for a Mint (only) copy, if anyone has one to sell.
The master tapes for the second ("brown") album have been missing for years, so I don't know what source MFSL used for the new LP and SACD. Steve Hoffman's version on DCC claimed to use the original masters, which is not true. Shame on somebody. The sound of the album is very in-the-room "small"---there is no electronic studio reverb and echo added to the mic feeds to the recorder. The multi-track was right in the room (yes, the pool cabana of Sammy's house, which they rented for the duration of the album's recording) with The Band, operated by the album's producer John Simon. A great, great album. Both it and MFBP in my Top 10 albums of all time.
There is another "small" sounding album The Band are on, and it too is musically great---Planet Waves, they backing Bob Dylan. MFSL has had the album on it's list of upcoming SACD releases for about a year, so I asked the MFSL guy at their table at the recent T.H.E. Show in Irvine the reason for the long delay. They just hadn't gotten to it yet was the answer. There is an out of print Sony SACD of the album that I found at Amoeba (just around the corner from the Capitol building!) recently. I bought in case MFSL ends up cancelling their new version. Ya never know! |
As time goes on, I find myself liking MFBP more than the 2nd myself. Robertson's brown album songs seem a little too contrived and deliberated to me now, unlike when I was younger. But it was the ensemble playing and the singing I was listening for and to back then, whereas now it's more the song itself (the chords especially) that need to satisfy my musical longings. |
Wolf, I just saw your above posting from 6-30 (I don't know how I missed it before!), and know all too well what you mean about The Band being bad news for musicians in the late 60's, Clapton included. I've tried to help non-musicians understand just how influential, how revolutionary, how transformative The Band and their first two albums were, usually unsuccessfully. They and those two albums completely changed the approach to making music of every "good" R & R musician of that time I have ever known!
I think the sound of the brown album, which Fremer describes as muddy, is actually really cool. It's very organic sounding, very woody, the drums sounding real "thumpy", which is how the Gretsch drums (and Ludwig snare) Levon is playing were tuned. I have two sets of Gretsch myself, and have tuned them and damped the heads to make them sound as much like Levon's do on the album as possible. For Jazz fans, it's the sound of calfskin heads, like Gene Krupa's in the 30's. When Levon started playing in Arkansas in the 50's, plastic heads had yet to be invented, and apparently Levon tried to keep his plastic-headed drums sounding much as the calfskin-headed drums from his early days had.
As you said, the brown album is just insanely great. The musicianship, the ensemble playing (which remains unequalled in R & R to this day), the singing, just made nearly all other contemporary music sound, you put it right, lame. It's just amazing how different it is from MFBP, while still obviously being from the same group of musicians and singers. MFBP was recorded in proper studios, and is infused with the standard fake reverb and echo, sounding much bigger and glossier than The Band actually sounded. The brown album was recorded "dry", and is exactly what The Band sounded like live. Totally unlike any other Band/Group I have seen/heard live, and I've seen a bunch! |
The 2nd (S/T, "brown") album has less separation between instruments than MFBP because The Band set up in Sammy's cabana casually, with all the instruments in that one room, only gobos (floor-standing acoustical partitions) separating the drums, piano, organ, and guitar and bass amps from each other. So the mic(s) on each instrument captured the sound of not only the instrument it was on, but the others as well. When the multi-tracks tapes were mixed to stereo, there was no way to eliminate the "bleed" between tracks. |
I just again watched the clip of Clapton and Harrison talking about Music From Big Pink. Here's the great quote about it from Eric: "I listened to this album (MFBP), and I thought, this is it---this is where music was supposed to have gone for a long time, and it hasn't really got there. And now it's finally.....someone's finally gone and done it."
The album so effected Clapton he broke up Cream, the biggest band in the world at the time. |
Oh (not him again!), one other detail ya'll may (or may not ;-) find interesting: The distinct and huge difference in the sound of the snare drum heard on MFBP vs. the brown album is not from the room, the manner of recording, or anything of that sort. The snare drum on MFBP is a metal-shelled (either brass or aluminum-alloy) Ludwig Supraphonic with metal snare wires, the one on most of the brown album a wood-shelled snare with, perhaps, gut snares (that's what the drum came from the factory fitted with, and is what it sounds like on the album). The difference in sound between metal and wood shelled snare drums is just what you would expect, and indeed what you hear on the two albums. |
Absolutely. Over-playing was rampant in '69 (actually, it still is)---I have no doubt that's the first thing Clapton heard, the economy and taste with which all members of The Band played, the opposite of Cream (Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker may have had talent, but economy and taste were not in their vocabularies).
And then there are the songs. Bands like Cream used the "song" merely as a platform from which to take off, to display their virtuosity. The Band (and other "good" musicians of that and every era) play in a musical style, their parts created and designed to make the song sound better, not make themselves sound better. That ability is required and expected of studio musicians, but is very rare in Rock Bands.
Last, but certainly not least, is the singing. Three unique singers, all with very different voices, whose parts circle each other, weaving in and out, rather than blending into two and three part chords. Totally unlike any other Group I've ever heard. God I love The Band! |
