Description
Label Review.
1969 album. New Stereo Mix. Also available on 2CD, and Deluxe Box.
Our Overview.
This seminal album came in the wake of the group’s landmark debut, ‘Music From Big Pink’, at a time when the group of four Canadians and one American were still largely an enigmatic and mysterious collective. In their eponymous 1969 release, Garth Hudson (keyboards, piano, horn), Levon Helm (drums, vocals, mandolin), Richard Manuel (keyboards, vocals, drums), Rick Danko (bass, vocals, fiddle) and Robbie Robertson (guitar, piano, vocals) furthered their exploratory and innovative development of a revolutionary style of North American roots music.
The ‘Brown Album,’ as it would become lovingly known, featured such signature songs for The Band as ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ and ‘Rag Mama Rag.’ If The Band single-handedly created Americana with their debut album, on their self-titled sophomore effort they honed everything that made Music From Big Pink so quietly epochal. Initially, the group relocated from their iconic Woodstock home to a New York studio in order to work up the 12 songs that formed their self-titled second album, but the pro facilities didn’t suit the group’s laidback, down-home approach. Packing up and heading west, they recreated the Big Pink vibe with what lead guitarist Robbie Robertson called “a clubhouse feel” in a house on 8850 Evanview Drive in West Hollywood.
Crossing the vast expanse of North America was apt: The Band was almost simply titled America, and its songs are populated with characters from the continent’s past; like the lucky hopefuls who set off west in search of the American Dream in the mid-1800s, The Band struck gold. Released on 22 September 1969, The Band would reach No.9 on the Billboard Pop Album chart and peak at No.2 in their Canadian homeland. Writing in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau, who’d been unmoved by Big Pink, praised the album as “an A-plus record if ever I’ve rated one”, and ultimately declared it to be the fourth best album of the year. Rolling Stone went one further, evoking the timeless nature of the record itself when it declared: “It has the sound of familiarity in every new line because it is ringing changes on the basic truths of life, you have been there before, and like the truths of life itself, it nourishes you.”