The Band
The Band
Capitol – 1969
Rating: 10.0
The second album from a band confident enough to simply bill itself as ‘The Band’ is an unqualified masterpiece of inspired musical interplay, rich group harmonies, and genuinely affecting songwriting.
Oh, Discogs shuffle feature, you sure are a cheeky son of a bitch. Do you really expect me to believe that it was truly ‘random’ for you to draw up the record that I’ve often referred to as “the most American album of all-time” as my last listen on the evening of the nation’s 250th birthday? And as I listen to it while my neighbors irresponsibly set off fireworks in a heavily-wooded area that—no matter how much rain we get—is always at decent risk of wildfire, I’m inclined to reaffirm that claim; at least aside from something like Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music.
And said claim has always been a source of at least some irony, as this record was crafted by a band that was four-fifths Canadian. Then again, that factoid only serves to reinforce a lot of important truths about America: first off, it has always been as much an idea as it is a place; secondly, it’s a nation whose legacy has continually been shaped by both newcomers and the perceptions of outsiders; and finally, it reminds us that the truest expressions of Americanism don’t have to come from those who were born here.
In another coincidence that will probably sound too convenient to be true, the first time that I ever listened to this album in full was on the day of the 2004 presidential election. I took the day off from work to exercise my most important right; and as someone who had undergone a pretty profound ideological shift over the previous four years—fatherhood, a career in education, and a completely unjustified war will do that to a person—the stakes of that election felt almost unbearably high to a twenty-five-year-old me.
And the fact that this record was steeped in such rich ‘Americana’ imagery (rocking chairs, lye water, magnolia trees, bourbon, and Fender guitars) felt especially poignant on that day, as what appeared to be a choice between a misremembered past and a more empathetic future seemed to lay in the balance. As such, that poignance was laced with an undeniable tension that would make it one of the most memorable album listens of my life. That it would ultimately be recontextualized by the devastating election returns that followed would only make it more so.
Nearly twenty-two years later, the concerns of that day feel practically quaint, in a way that would’ve been unfathomable to that younger version of myself. We’ve made mistakes, momentarily appear to have collectively learned from them, only to then go on to make even far more disastrous ones. And, my god, have we ever fucked up over this past decade of incomprehensible bleakness and bottomless stupidity.
And with that added context, the Reconstruction-era imagery of this album only feels more poignant all these years later. And someday, when the most immediate threats have receded, when our national king harvest has surely come, and when ‘it’ finally happens, we will still have many monumental tasks before us. We will need to start over again in more ways than we can yet imagine. And when that time comes, I genuinely hope that one of those tasks to be taken up by a new generation of ambitious, industrious, compassionate, and wizened-but-hopeful Americans will be to make more truly worthy contributions to our national soundtrack. In the meantime, this beautifully anachronistic album—made by a group of outsiders—just may help to hold us over.
