The Band by The Band

"I'll be down to get you in a taxi honey

You'd better be ready around half past eight
Ah baby don't be late I want to be there when the band starts honey"

I had always been intrigued by the quote on the back cover. Was it from a film, was it made up...if I had looked closer, I would have seen from the footnote that it was actually a lyric taken from "Darktown Strutters' Ball", a song published over 50 years before The Band appropriated it. A jazz standard written by Shelton Brooks, it had been recorded many times, and by a wide variety of artsists including Fats Domino (his version seems to be the lyrics used by The Band), Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys.

 The back cover continues the theme from the front; rustic, straightforward, not of its time. A reaction to the psychedelic and explicitly multicoloured music that preceded it; the quote from the early part of the century fits. No surprise that The Band's eponymous album was also dubbed the 'Brown Album'. The subjects and styles all looked backwards, but as Pitchfork put it, both The Band, and its predecessor Music From Big Pink, managed to "sound simultaneously experimental and traditional, irreverent and respectful...blues, folk, jazz, rock, funk, soul, r&b;, and country and western all synthesized into twin monuments to the American music they'd been playing for nearly a decade in clubs, roadhouses, and honkytonks."

A 1971 profile of the band in Melody Maker made a similar point: "Their second album was titled simply The Band, and was a masterpiece, shooting Robbie straight up into the forefront of contemporary composers. 'King Harvest' and 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' reflect sure grasp of the feeling and scope of pan-American music, and the voices of Helm, Danko, and Manuel sounded as old as the hills. The instrumentation was more idiosyncratic than ever; accordion, mandolin, wheezing saxes and grunting tuba made telling appearances."

It was recorded in the pool house of a rented house in the Hollywood Hills once owned by Sammy Davies Jr. The equipment for recording therefore had to be shipped in. As John Simon, who co-engineered the album, recalled in an interview with Sound-on-Sound, "When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like. This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album that had a song with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."

The overlapping voices and the fact the most of band members regularly swapped instruments, gives the album a great feel and despite some overdubs, the basic tracks were indeed laid down as an ensemble. The organic way the voices and instruments intertwine, it can't help but qualify as a great 'feel' album.

Photography was by Elliott Landy (see also Allman Brothers feature), with the design by Bob Cato. The New York Times described Cato, art director and the vice president of creative services for CBS-Columbia Records, as "a ground-breaking graphic designer who helped turn the record album cover into an important form of contemporary art". It goes on to note that he "created or supervised some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960's. It was his idea to put the work of the underground illustrator R. Crumb on Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills.'' He also designed the cover for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.