It’s a wicked life
But what the hell
Everybody’s got to eat.
—‘GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO,”
FROM THE BASEMENT TAPES
“Levon and his friend Kirby had come to Memphis and lived with me,” Mary Cavette remembers. “We were like Three’s Company, but I was the only one with a job. At the time—this was 1967—I was trying to straighten Levon out, because he’d been a musician for eight years and didn’t even live in the daytime world the rest of us inhabited. So I wanted to find him a real job—like an eight-to-five?—but he wasn’t about to do that. Then I sent him out for a haircut, ‘cause his hair was so long that he was unemployable, and he came back scalped. We all had a good laugh over that until his hair grew out again.
“Levon was biding his time and resting. I could see what he was doing. He slept all day and watched TV in between. I said to him, ‘You better watch out, Lavon; they’ll send you to Vietnam.’ And he said, ‘Forget it, I’m not going. I’ve watched the six o’clock news every night for six months, and I haven’t seen one Pepsi machine in Vietnam. No way am I going over there.’”
Then Rick called and said to come to Woodstock. They were all in the room, and I spoke to everyone. I couldn’t believe that my band was going to get back together. Everyone sounded a little older and wiser. Garth told me they had a dog, and the woods were right outside the front door. It felt great when I heard him say, “See ya soon, Levon.”
I took the Cavette sisters to the Mid-South Fair and then flew up to New York, where the boys picked me up in Richard’s black, fourdoor, slick-as-hell ’47 Olds—the one with the long back. We drove north on the New York State Thruway for a couple of hours. During the ride, Rick told me the whole story: six months on the road with Bob, meeting people, Bob’s motorcycle accident, Peter Yarrow’s movie, moving to the country, working on songs in the basement. And I had to tell ’em about the adventures Kirby and I had been through, from Louisiana to California and back again.
We got off at an exit marked Saugerties. Then west on Route 212 until we turned right onto Pine Lane. It was late on an autumn afternoon, the maples and oaks were glowing orange and red, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Overlook Mountain and the rolling terrain. We’d driven by the Catskills a few times on the way to the Peppermint Lounge, but this was my first time in the Woodstock area. From that first day, the Catskills reminded me of the Ozarks and the Arkansas hill country. I had a shock of recognition. Going to Woodstock felt like going home.
We got to the house. The boys were renting it for $125 a month. It was furnished, with a knickknack shelf in the living room and lots of pictures on the wall, plus a neon beer sign Richard had liberated from some tavern. Garth had set up a music room downstairs in the cinderblock basement, with an upright piano, a stand-up bass, a drum kit, amplifiers, and some microphones connected to a Revox tape recorder through an Altec Lansing mixer, so they could record in stereo. Garth had positioned one of the microphones on top of the hot-water heater. I think there was also an oil furnace in the room.
Well, I found a place to bunk, and we went out to dinner at Deanie’s, a wood-burnin’ Woodstock institution “Known From Coast to Coast,” as the sign said. The place was full of musicians, artists, writers—it was the local watering hole. There was a line of people waiting to eat, but when we walked in the boys were greeted like old friends, and we got a good table right away. By the way we were welcomed at Deanie’s, you could tell that music was more in favor in Woodstock than in other places.
Woodstock proper was a picturesque town with a white steepled church, a village green, and a flagpole. At night the only sign of life was the red neon sign that flashed DRUGS in the window of the Colonial Pharmacy. We thought that was pretty funny, that sign.
At some point they broke the news to me that Richard had become the band’s drummer during my absence. And the thing about it was, Richard was an incredible drummer. He played loosey-goosey, a little behind the beat, and it really swung. (Later, when we were playing shows, Richard would hit the high-hat so hard the cymbal would break.)
Knowing Richard, I shouldn’t have been surprised at this, but I was amazed how good he’d become. Without any training, he’d do these hard left-handed moves and piano-wise licks, priceless shit—very unusual. So I was coming back into a situation where I heard what Richard was accomplishing and had to say, “Hell, Richard plays drums better than me on this one. We better leave it that way.” That’s how we got to have two drummers in the band. I just realized that my mandolin playing was going to have to improve if I was to have anything to do onstage while Richard played drums.
It’s late 1967. The boys told me that they’d been working with Bob on songs and demos since March. He started coming over as soon as he’d recovered from his injury, usually at the same time every afternoon, and they’d all go downstairs and play. “Like going to work,” Richard said. In the morning they’d go to Bob’s house because he was churning ’em out—ten songs a week for months—writing for his next album. Bob had taken up painting, and all over his house there were canvases of musicians playing guitars. In the afternoons and evenings they’d go back to Big Pink and play for fun in the basement, writing songs for other musicians to cover. Garth’s Revox was used to record these demos, which were sent to Bob’s music publisher in New York.
Some of the songs already cut had been cowritten by Bob, Richard, and Rick. They had a typewriter set up in Big Pink’s kitchen, and Bob might sit down and type a few lines. Then he’d wander off, and Richard would sit down and finish the verse. Dylan and Rick Danko wrote “This Wheel’s on Fire.” Richard Manuel and Bob cowrote “Tears of Rage.” They played me some of these tapes, and I could barely believe the level of work they’d been putting out. The demos they cut with Bob included “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Nothing Was Delivered,” and “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo).” There were a bunch of little songs that Bob had written that were kind of funny, like “Tiny Montgomery,” “Please Mrs. Henry,” and “Open the Door, Homer,” which became “Open the Door, Richard” when they got around to recording it. I could tell that hanging out with the boys had helped Bob to find a connection with things we were interested in: blues, rockabilly, R&B. They had rubbed off on him a little. There was a great rock and roll song called “Odds and Ends,” and “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” had Bob duetting with Garth’s organ. Garth even sang on a couple of songs called “Even If She Looks Like a Pig, Pts. 1 & 2.”
The boys had also discovered how to write songs. Bob Dylan had opened it up for ’em. When I reported for duty in the basement the day after I arrived in Woodstock, they were working on “Yazoo Street Scandal.” Richard was playing drums. It was the first time I’d heard him, and I was just in awe. It was like a force, and he immediately became my favorite drummer. I played some mandolin and sang the vocal. That’s how I started to work my way back in. I was uptight about playing, because I’d been away from it for so long, but soon they had me working so hard, there wasn’t anything else to do.
Richard was writing and singing up a storm. We cut his “Orange Juice Blues” (also called “Blues for Breakfast”), with Garth playing some honky-tonk tenor sax. Richard sang and cowrote (with Robbie) “Katie’s Been Gone,” and Garth overlayed some organ. Rick and Robbie did a great song called “Bessie Smith.”
Around this time we started to work on our vocals. One of the things we’d always loved about soul music was the way groups like the Staple Singers and the Impressions would stack those individual voices on top of one another, each voice coming in at a different time until you got this blend that was just magic. So when we cut a song called “Ain’t No More Cane” in our basement, we tried to do it like that, with different voices. I’d heard this song all my life: My daddy taught it to me, and the legendary bluesman Leadbelly had also recorded a version of it called “Go Down, Hannah.” Our version started with me singing the first verse. Then Richard did the second, Robbie sang the third, and Rick brought it home. We all sang harmony on the chorus, and Garth layered his accordion over everything. Richard played the drums, so I played mandolin. That recording of “Ain’t No More Cane” was a breakthrough. With those multiple voices and jumbled instruments we discovered our sound.
That Thanksgiving a few of us were invited to the Traums’ house for holiday dinner. Happy and Artie Traum were keystones of the Woodstock music family and warm, hospitable people. I’ll never forget my first Thanksgiving in Woodstock, one of the best dinners I’ve had in my life.
There was contract fever in the air. Bob had recently signed a new five-year deal with his label, and now it was going to be our turn. Bob had left town in October to record his next album in Nashville. When he came back after Thanksgiving we cut “Nothing Was Delivered” and “Long Distance Operator,” which Richard sang. I sang “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” and we all worked on an unfinished song by Richard and Robbie called “Ruben Remus.”
So we had this body of work, music from Bob’s house and music from our house. The music from Bob’s house had been cut in Nashville with session players there. It was supposed to be overdubbed by Robbie and Garth back in Woodstock when he came home, but when they heard the tapes they declined the opportunity to enhance the already perfect tracks. The music from our house... well, maybe you know the story. Bob’s demo tapes leaked out from his publishers and the musicians they sent them to, and began to be widely bootlegged, initially under the title Great White Wonder. It had been eighteen months since Dylan’s last album, and his fans were happy to hear what their idol had been doing during his rural exile. Garth Hudson’s funky two-track tapes became the “basement tapes” of legend and renown. (No one I know except Garth knows exactly how many songs were recorded, but Rick believes the best of the material hasn’t even begun to surface.)
There was another recording session in our basement around this time. The Bauls of Bengal were a family of itinerant street troubadours that Albert Grossman had met on a visit to India. These Bauls and their late father had played for him all night in Calcutta, so Albert invited them to Bearsville. They were put up in an apartment he reserved for guests in a converted barn down the road from Albert’s house. They were real gypsies and real players, happy to get high and sing all night about rivers and goddesses and play their tablas, harmonium, and fiddles. They eventually made an album and even opened for Paul Butterfield—by then living in Woodstock and a client of Albert’s—at Town Hall in New York City. I remember Butterfield laughing about that show, because these crazy Bauls sat down and played for three hours, and Paul said that Albert was very upset.
Anyway, we invited ’em to Big Pink one night. The Bauls had long black hair braided to the waist and were wearing cowboy hats they’d picked up on the drive east from California, where they’d arrived direct from Bengal. (Before heading east in a beat-up old van, they’d played the Fillmore West on a bill with the Byrds.) They loved the bubbling beer sign over our fireplace, and I played checkers with some of ’em, and we were laughing pretty hard. I was smoking a chillum with Luxman Das, and I said, “Man, that’s some good weed.”
He smiled and said, “Very good, but nothing like my father used to smoke—little hashish, little tobacco, little head of snake.”
I said, “Wait a minute. Did you say ‘snake head’?”
And Luxman laughed. “Yes, by golly! Chop off head of snake, chop into tiny pieces, put in chillum with little hash, little tobacco. Oh, boy! Very good—first-class high!”
“Snake?” I pressed him. “Are you sure you mean snake?”
Now they’re all laughing. “Yes! Very good! Head of snake!”
Charles Lloyd was visiting—I think his 1966 album Forest Flower had just passed the million mark in sales—and he came over with his saxophone. The Bauls wanted to jam, Garth wanted to record, and Rick and I were maybe gonna sit in. So we moved the cushions from the living-room sofa downstairs, and the Bauls sat in a circle so they could hear one another and began to play their Indian soul thing. A minute later, they were already wailing in their own language; in their own world, Bubba. Charles and Rick and I looked at one another and thought, No way. So we got up and let the Bauls play. Hours later, Garth’s tape machine was still rolling. These tapes were released, years later, as Bengali Bauls at Big Pink.
Everybody around Woodstock in those days loved the Bauls. They were close to the bone of what music should be all about: ecstatic, unrelenting. They told us they loved Woodstock too because there was all this forest and no tigers to eat the children and goats. Their presence can best be felt if you look at the photo of two of them—the brothers Luxman and Purna Das—posing with Bob Dylan on the cover of his new album, which came out the following month: John Wesley Harding.
In early 1968 Rick Danko—our best businessman—was really pushing Albert to get us a record contract. It was do or die for us. We’d finished our work on Bob’s movie Eat the Document, which was then rejected by ABC-TV. We were retired as a road band and were focused about what we wanted to do with our time. We signed a management contract with Albert, and a lot of paperwork happened. I had an attorney in Arkansas who negotiated for us, but Albert had a lot of power, and we didn’t really have much leeway. Not all of it went the way I’d wanted it to, but it was so great the band was getting back together.
On January 20, 1968, we drove down to Manhattan and played behind Bob at a memorial tribute to Woody Guthrie at Carnegie Hall. We’re crashing through the back doors of the hall with our gear, and an old man guarding backstage says, “Hey, what group is this?”
“The Crackers,” I told him off the top of my head.
Then we noticed that Bob and Albert weren’t speaking to each other.
There were two shows, matinee and evening, and the crowd gasped when we all walked onstage. Bob’s hair was cut short and combed, and we were all dressed in gray western-cut suits and cowboy boots. This time there wasn’t any booing. It was Bob’s first public appearance in two years, and during this time his image had grown to legendary proportions. We’d rehearsed three Woody Guthrie songs at Bob’s house the day before—“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” “The Grand Coulee Dam,” and “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore”—and we performed all three after Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Judy Collins had played and actor Robert Ryan had read from Woody’s autobiography. It was the first time I’d ever played a dramatic show like that. People were performing in sections with one another, then we stretched out around Bob and helped him do his songs. I don’t think Pete Seeger was too thrilled to see us at first, but the audience was warm, and our evening show brought down the house. Bob tore it up!
Playing Carnegie Hall proved to be good for our impending record deal. Things speeded up after that. I recall one meeting at Big Pink where we actually had to come up with a name for the band.
Rick said, “Let’s have some real pretentious bullshit name.”
“How about the Chocolate Subway?” Richard suggested. “Or the Marshmallow Overcoat.”
Laughter. I said, “Tell it like it is. Tell ’em who we are: the Honkies!” I always was the provocative type.
I had suggested we could modify it to the Crackers. Crackers were poor southern white folks, and as far as I was concerned, that was the music we were doing. I voted to call it the Crackers and never regretted it. That’s how Capitol signed the band, in any case.
Our names aren’t on Capitol Records Contract No. 4325, dated at Los Angeles on February 1, 1968. This contract was actually between Capitol and Groscourt Productions, Inc. Instead we’re listed on an “Artists Declaration” as “Group performing as the Crackers.” Albert was furnishing our services to the record company. The deal called for twenty-four master recordings a year for two years; roughly two albums a year. In addition we granted Capitol three one-year options to renew the deal at the same rate. It was basically a ten-album deal, and we took it. We had to.
“Life, with an option.”
At our insistence, we retained our exclusive rights as Bob Dylan’s band. Paragraph six of the contract stated: “Artists shall have the right to perform and record... as joint artists with Bob Dylan for any recording company, television program, motion picture, or legitimate stage production for which Bob Dylan is then rendering services. Such activities shall be deemed exclusive from the agreement.”
But the irony was that Bob Dylan split from Albert Grossman around this time. “Dear landlord,” Bob had sung on his new album, “don’t put a price on my soul.” The litigation from that parting of the ways back in 1968 is still in the courts as we write this.
So just as Bob was leaving Albert’s stable, we were arriving. I guess the joke was on us.
This is where John Simon comes in.
Now that we’d committed ourselves to making an album, we needed someone who actually knew how to go about it. None of us had any idea how to work a recording console or a four-track tape machine. We’d hardly been in a studio in three years. And here was John: young, clean, up-and-coming, ready to roll. He joined forces with us, produced our first album, and became a lifelong friend.
John Simon was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1941. His father, Louis Simon, was a country doctor and musician who founded the Norwalk Symphony. “I had piano lessons,” John says, “and became a jazz fan at fourteen or fifteen. I had a little group in high school, and we got to play various strip joints and lesbian clubs. I was playing baritone horn and brass instruments in the high-school band, then went off to Princeton, where I joined the Triangle Club. We did the usual drag musicals and took them on the usual tour of Christmas balls and debutante parties. In my senior year I wrote a big-band concerto that was favorably reviewed by Martin Williams in downbeat—my first good review.
“I got out of college in the early sixties. I dug progressive jazz, hated rock and roll, liked R&B, especially Louis Jordan. I landed a job with the classical-music division of Columbia Records before switching to the company’s pop and jazz departments. There was a senior producer named George Avakian, with whom I worked on a lot of projects. In 1965 George and I coproduced an album called Of Course Of Course by a young jazz musician: Charles Lloyd. He’d been in Cannonball Adderly’s band and was making a name for himself. He was working in the studio with a quartet, including [drummer] Tony Williams, [bassist] Ron Carter, and Gabor Szabo on guitar. One day Charles says to me, ‘You gotta meet this far-out guy. He’s coming tonight to sit in with us.’
“The far-out guy was Robbie Robertson. I guess he’d met Robbie in Toronto, and here in New York they had the same connection, a guy who lived on the third floor of Charles’s building. So Robbie came to the studio, and we cut this track called “Third Floor Richard” in honor of this dealer. That’s how I met Robbie.
“Later that year I get a call from Nat Weiss, then the self-described American representative of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. Nat says he has a group that could be the American Beatles, and sends me a tape of three Lafayette University alumni who call themselves the Cyrkle. They were OK, so we cut a single called “Red Rubber Ball,” which immediately went to No. 2. It was the cleanest record—which meant it suffered the fewest returns—the company had that year. So at Christmas they gave me an eleven-thousand-dollar bonus and an office with windows and some plants.
“Now the rock era hit. It’s the mid-sixties pop explosion. Recording technology became incredibly important because most of the bands we signed were without discernible evidence of any talent. They had great hair and looked right in the clothes, but they had no talent. Producing this kind of record is a nightmare. I didn’t want to do it, so they gave me quality musicians like Leonard Cohen and Blood, Sweat, and Tears with Al Kooper, and Mike Bloomfield. Al Kooper saw I was frustrated and urged me to go free-lance, so I did.
“Around this time I met Albert Grossman on the street. I saw him in midtown and went up and introduced myself, because he was the most powerful guy in the business. That’s how I got to produce Janis Joplin for Columbia, because Janis was Albert’s client. But there was another connection to be made first.
“Peter Yarrow hears from Ed Kleiban [who later wrote the lyrics for A Chorus Line] that I was just the guy to supervise the music for his film You Are What You Eat. This started out as a documentary about the Hell’s Angels by Barry Feinstein, Mary Travers’s ex-husband and a friend of Peter’s. Then the summer of ’66 happened, and suddenly the Hell’s Angels concept vanished, and we had a lot of wild footage—cans and cans of film—of love-ins and drug-ins, without any focus. Meanwhile, I’d just finished a Dada-esque montage album based on Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message. In June 1967 I was at the Monterey Pop Festival with Janis, when I get a message to meet Peter Yarrow, who’ll stop in San Francisco on his way to Japan with Peter, Paul, and Mary. I played him the McLuhan record on a little portable turntable in the airport lounge, and he figured I was perfect for his movie. So we arranged to meet up in Woodstock, where this movie was being worked on.
“By this time I was starting to smoke a little, get high, expand my consciousness, blow my mind. It was good for me at the time. It got me off automatic pilot. I went to Woodstock and met a film editor named Howard Alk. He was one of the original members of Second City, the Chicago comedy troupe that spawned Saturday Night Live years later. He was a funny and clever guy, and he and I holed up in this house in Bearsville with all these cans of film and a couple of moviolas, trying to make a film out of this sucker. Barry Feinstein’s contribution was a barrel of marijuana. The soundtrack consisted of Butterfield, Bloomfield, and Tiny Tim, who was in the movie. Tiny had these musicians working with him...
“Halloween 1967: Alk and I are beavering away in this house, when I heard this ghastly sound outside. It turned out to be Howard’s birthday, and the guys in the band are serenading him, playing badly on crazy instruments: horns, washboards, squeezebox. There were only four of them: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson. They’re wearing old-looking clothes and masks; the whole thing was totally surreal in that flashing sixties way.
“We get to talking, and I learn that this is Bob Dylan’s band, and Bob is paying them to live there while he’s recuperating from the motorcycle accident. Suddenly the connection was made. Howard knows me, he knows the band because of a song called ‘Even If She Looks Like a Pig Pt. 2,’ on which Garth sings. Howard said to us, ‘Here’s a marriage made in heaven.’ He figured wacky music, wacky producer. He promoted the whole concept.
“Want to know what that first serenade I heard from the band sounded like? Check the bridge of ‘Chest Fever’ sometime.
“Anyway, I loved them from the word go. Musically, I was locked into their thing the second I heard it. I went back to New York—I was living on Perry Street in the Village—when I got a call to come back to Woodstock and talk to Robbie about working with them. We talked for a long time at the house he shared with his lady, Dominique, on Rick’s Road, and he played me a lot of records and discussed the record deal they were going to do with Capitol. Robbie talked and talked, and I kept thinking, Put your music where your mouth is, because all we did was talk.
“Finally he says, ‘Well, Levon’s here now. He’s our drummer, and he left but now he’s back. Let’s go on over to Big Pink, where most of the boys are living.’
“So we drive over there, and the first thing we see is Levon walking out of the woods with his friend Kirby. He was just off an oil rig in Louisiana. We shook hands and looked each other in the eye, and Levon said, ‘C’mon, ah wanna show y’all somthin’.’ We hiked a half mile into the woods until we came to a cleared patch and a foot-high marijuana plant that Levon showed off like a 4-H ribbon winner.
“So I saw my first rehearsal in the basement of Big Pink, the first time I got a real impression of the boys. Robbie functioned as the point man, the leader. Garth was into horns and equipment and could play rings around everyone. Rick was hyper, funny, business-oriented, with a lot of girlfriends. Levon was an extremely unusual and gifted drummer with a funny, syncopated bass drum and an independent right-foot thing. Very much his own man in every respect.
“And Richard. A sweet, sweet guy. Very drunk, into pills: Tuinal and Valium. Always pushed the envelope beyond where it would go. Drove one hundred fifty miles an hour in his driveway; faster on the road. The first time I met him, there was a terrible raw scab on his right arm. Really grisly. I said, ‘My God, Richard, what happened?’
“He says, ‘You know that table lamp in our bathroom with the bare bulb? One afternoon I got up, went to the bathroom, and I leaned on the light bulb to look at my eyes in the mirror, and I started to smell something burning, and it was me!’
“So we started rehearsing together at Big Pink. This was before the record deal. Dylan would come by almost every day. Levon was always trying to get Bob to throw a football with him—kind of a silk purse-sow’s ear trip, but it was funny. Big Pink was a wonderful clubhouse, with good meals and beer and pot and laughter and hard, focused work.
“While we were working on songs Albert got us some seed money to go into studio A at A&R Sound: the famous studio at 799 Seventh Avenue that Phil Ramone had bought from CBS. We recorded in the barn-shaped seventh-floor studio that had been built on top of the building, where a lot of the famous party records had been recorded. The acoustics were just the best. We did a reel of the songs we brought down from Big Pink: ‘Tears of Rage,’ ‘We Can Talk,’ ‘The Weight,’ ‘Chest Fever,’ and maybe ‘Lonesome Suzie.’ And this is what’s so important about The Band: Everybody played something that was meaningful and that meshed. There were hardly any solos, and nothing was gratuitous. The studio had four tracks. We recorded everyone live on two tracks. The horns—Garth on soprano, me on baritone—went on the third track, and the fourth was saved for vocals and tambourine.
“We took this reel over to Albert’s office and played the songs for Dylan’s friend Bobby Neuwirth. ‘These are really great,’ he said, and that was the first validation we had, because this was a very cynical guy who would not bullshit us. Anyway, Albert took the tapes and sold them to Capitol.
“Now it’s winter 1967-68. Capitol loves the tape we made and sends us out to L.A. for a month to record in their eight-track studios there. We move into the Chateau Marmont, a crazy person’s paradise. Levon and I discovered sushi together at the Imperial Gardens restaurant across the street and have been raw-fish addicts ever since. At Capitol Studios we worked with an older engineer named Rex Updegraft, who told us our music was ‘damn cute.’ So we went over to Gold Star—home of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—and did several things, including Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘Key to the Highway.’
“All told, it took us a month to finish the album, and by April 1968 we were back in New York mixing the album at A&R.”
We wanted Music From Big Pink to sound like nothing anyone else was doing. This was our music, honed in isolation from the radio and contemporary trends, liberated from the world of the bars and the climate of the Dylan tours. We’d grown up with Ronnie Hawkins, playing that quicker tempo of tunes. Now we cut our tempo, our pulse, right in half. The sense of teamwork and collaboration was incredible. Robbie was writing stuff that evoked simple pictures of American life. Richard was writing beautiful songs like “In a Station” and “Lonesome Suzie.” Garth took a great song like “Chest Fever” and composed an organ prelude. Rick’s playing and singing were amazing, and that blend of the three voices—Richard, Rick, and me—sounded really rich after we’d worked with John Simon for a while.
We cut upstairs in that big studio on top of A&R, which had a very live sound. I’d set up in the middle of the room. There was a sound-booth against the wall, which is where Garth placed some of his speakers, so it would be a little muffled, the way he liked it. The piano’d be there, and Rick and Robbie would sit on folding chairs, with their amps beside them. That was the way we did it. There were sound-baffles around the drums, and John would kind of lean over them to discuss different drum ideas and strategies because he took it seriously and wanted a solid, professional record. That was the way it worked.
When I think about that album, I still have to laugh about how close the songs were to our lives. The characters that appear in the lyrics—Luke, Anna Lee, Crazy Chester—were all people we knew. The music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years, distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country. There was a whole movement toward country values in America in those days, as young people searched for different ways of surviving during the Vietnam era. That’s in there too.
The main thing was the spirit. We worked so hard on that music that no matter what the song credits say—who supposedly wrote what—you’d have to call it a full-bore effort by the group to show what we were all about.
“Tears of Rage” opened the album with a slow song, which was just another way of our rebelling against the rebellion. We were deliberately going against the grain. Few artists had ever opened an album with a slow song, so we had to. At the zenith of the psychedelic music era, with its flaming guitars and endless solos and elongated jams, we weren’t about to make that kind of album. Bob Dylan helped Richard with this number about a parent’s heartbreak, and Richard sang one of the best performances of his life. It had those trademark horns and organ and the moaning tom-tom style of drumming that I’ve been credited with by some observers, but I know that Ringo Starr was doing something like it at the same time. You make the drum notes bend down in pitch. You hit it, it sounds, and then it hums as the note dies out. If the ensemble is right, you can hear the sustain like a bell, and it’s very emotional. It can keep a slow song suspended in an interesting way. (John Simon heard this and started calling me a bayou folk drummer, but not to my face.) As a matter of fact, I found the tuning I used in “Tears of Rage” by tuning to the fluorescent lighting in the studio.
“To Kingdom Come” was Robbie’s song, and he sang it—the last time he sang on one of our records for years. Robbie didn’t sing, wasn’t a singer, didn’t like to sing, but he sang on this one.
“In a Station” is Richard’s song about Overlook Mountain and the relative peace we were all feeling after those long years living on the road. He used to laugh and call it his George Harrison song, by which he meant it was spiritual.
Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep till the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair.
I’ve heard this song described as “visionary,” and I agree with that assessment.
Isn’t everybody dreaming!
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel.
“Caledonia Mission” was Robbie’s, and Richard sang the lyrics that alluded to the little problem we’d had with the law a few years earlier.
“The Weight” closed side one. We had two or three tunes, or pieces of tunes, and “The Weight” was one I would work on. Robbie had that bit about going down to Nazareth—Pennsylvania, where the Martin guitar factory is at. The song was full of our favorite characters. “Luke” was Jimmy Ray Paulman. “Young Anna Lee” was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. “Crazy Chester” was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips and kinda walked around town to help keep the peace, if you follow me. He was like Hopalong Cassidy, and he was a friend of the Hawk’s. Ronnie would always check with Crazy Chester to make sure there wasn’t any trouble around town. And Chester would reassure him that everything was peaceable and not to worry, because he was on the case. Two big cap guns, he wore, plus a toupee! There were also “Carmen and the Devil,” “Miss Moses,” and “Fanny,” a name that just seemed to fit the picture. (I believe she looked a lot like Caledonia.) We recorded the song maybe four times. We weren’t sure it was going to be on the album, but people really liked it. Rick, Richard, and I would switch the verses around among us, and we all sang the chorus: Put the load right on me! I read somewhere a few years ago that Robbie said “The Weight” was about the impossibility of sainthood. Well, I’ve sung that song enough times to agree with him.
Richard’s “We Can Talk” opened side two. It’s a funny song that really captures the way we spoke to one another; lots of outrageous rhymes and corny puns. Richard just got up one morning—or afternoon—sat down at the piano, and started playing this gospel music that became this song with its famous line, “But I’d rather be burned up in Canada/Than to freeze down in the South.”
“Long Black Veil” sounded like an old southern ballad, but it was actually written in 1958 by M. J. Wilkin and Danny Dill. We knew it from Lefty Frizzell’s version and liked the story of the young man who goes to the gallows for a murder he didn’t commit because his alibi was that he was “in the arms of his best friend’s wife.” I guess we thought it was funny. Anyway, that’s Richard Manuel playing a Wurlitzer electric piano on that track.
“Chest Fever” had improvised lyrics that Robbie put together for the rehearsals and never got around to rewriting. The song came kinda late in the whole process and got recorded before it was finished. Garth put together an introduction from J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor with that Lowrey organ and a good solo in the middle. The bridge has this funny, tuneless Salvation Army band feel: Rick on violin, John Simon on baritone, Garth on tenor.
“Lonesome Suzie” was like a miniature portrait that Richard sang in his squeezed-out falsetto, really expressive, with horns and organ. Years later he described “Suzie” as his attempt to write a hit record. It was a quiet song that told a story and was pretty typical of Richard’s general philosophy, which was to be kind to people. Richard was complicated and felt things really deeply, more than most people. Everyone who knew him would tell you that. His attitude, often expressed to me, was that you might as well live tonight, because tomorrow you could get run over by a truck.
Rick sings “This Wheel’s on Fire.” These were lyrics that Bob had, which Rick put to music. Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ. Garth just hit that key when he wanted the sound. I thought we’d cut a pretty good take on it, but when we got back to New York from California there were problems. “The snare drum wasn’t loud enough on our four-track recording,” John Simon recalls, “so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare; an awful chore. When it was over Levon growls at me, ‘Don’t lemme ever have to do that again.’”
“I Shall Be Released,” which closed the album, was the third song Bob had written with us. (For that reason, we declined his generous offer to play on the album. We didn’t want to appear to be trading on Bob’s name any more than we had to. We did, however, ask him to paint the album cover, which he kindly did.) It’s a prisoner’s lament that Bob had sung on the basement tapes and Richard sings in his falsetto voice. Richard cut another version in his regular voice that was just as good. The drum sound was me playing the snares of an upside-down drum with my fingers. The windlike sound is Garth playing organ with one hand and manipulating the stops with the other.
And that, to the best of my recollection, is the way we made Music From Big Pink. The record was meant to describe our take on the crazy times we were living in. The year 1968 was like a civil war, a time of conflict and turmoil in the United States. There was tension in the air, sometimes so thick you could barely wade through it. Here’s an example. On our way to California to cut the tracks, Robbie had gone ahead with Albert, who needed to talk big business at the Capitol Tower. Garth, Richard, Rick, and I brought up the rear. Cash was still scarce, so Rick bought us plane tickets with a credit card he’d gotten somehow. During a stop in Chicago the man from the airline came aboard, called our names, and asked us to follow him. He told us the credit card was over its limit, and we owed him money. I called our banker in Arkansas, and Paul Berry helped us straighten things out with the airline. While we were waiting for our new tickets, we ducked into the snack bar, which was occupied by a hundred or so airborne troops on their way home from Vietnam to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They’d been celebrating and were in a jovial mood, at least until we walked in. They got on our case immediately.
“Shit, man, is this what we fought a damn war for, to eat with a bunch of hippies?”
“They need a damn haircut.”
I’m thinking these boys are about to kick the hell out of us. They all had these big ugly walking sticks with the words “Khe Sanh” carved on top. It got real quiet in there. I figured that when it started, I’d try to run one of them through the door, land on top of him, and start yelling for the cops. Just as the taunting started again, our flight was called. We got up and left, slow as we dared, and I heard Mama Nell’s voice saying, It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.
All this time we were settling deeper into Woodstock. We all had that hometown feeling about the area. The town took in the band and treated us like favorite sons. If someone asked, “Is the band in town?” they could be talking only about us. That’s how the town actually gave us our name. And, of course, they tolerated us.
Richard Manuel and I enjoyed taking a couple of rent-a-cars out in the big, flat field next to Big Pink. We liked to see what our cars were made of. We’d do figure eights and dance with each other at top speed. Then I’d get at one end of the field, he’d get at the other, and we’d run at each other. We’d get right beside each other, cut the wheel, a little leg on the gas, and both cars would just sashay, break off, and bow to each other. Swing your partner, do-si-do! We’d go around again, then stop in at Deanie’s for dinner and a few drinks. Richard might sit down at the piano around midnight, and maybe Paul Butterfield would sit in and play. There were many nights like that.
Richard and I were in Deanie’s one night, not too long after my arrival in town. We left around two in the morning, feeling very little pain. We were headed back to Big Pink in separate cars to see what they were made of out in the field there, have a little more fun. Richard was a couple of minutes ahead of me on the road out of Woodstock. I was telling the people in the car with me that my leg was still a little stiff because I’d just gone down to Arkansas for a few days and had fallen off my friend Paul Berry’s Triumph 250 motorcycle and scraped my leg, leaving a pretty good scab.
The road heading toward Saugerties out of Woodstock has this curve to the left, and it also drops down. You lose some altitude, and it’s a bad spot even when it’s dry. That rainy night, Richard took the curve too fast, skidded in some gravel, and caught the last fence post with his rear wheel, which threw him over into the ditch, nose first, ass end up in the air. Richard walked away from it. It was a tendency of his to walk away from car wrecks, which was good because he had of lot of them. He was a hell of a good driver, but real nervy.
The police came next, stopped in their lane with their lights on, and pronounced Richard OK. I was five minutes behind all this and determined to catch him. When I hit that bad corner I was doing it as fast as I thought I could and still keep the car on the road. I hit my flashers and dimmed a couple of times, didn’t get an answer, so I was gonna take that curve and keep smokin’ over that next big hill and past Zena Road, where you could really go down those flats there at a high rate of speed. But bless my soul, as soon as I cleared the curve, I saw a bunch of people in the middle of the road and the police lights.
“That’s Levon,” a dazed Richard said to the Woodstock police chief, Billy Waterous, as I barreled down on top of ’em.
“Oh my God!” Billy exclaimed. “He’s going to kill us all!”
I went off the gas and hit the brake a little, but then decided to zigzag through the people and cars. It was the only way to avoid a high-speed collision. So I zigged, and that was good. Then I zagged, but missed by three inches. An inch and a half of my right nose caught an inch and a half of the police car’s left rear. It was that close.
And so we kissed. I demolished both doors of the police cruiser, spun three times, and ended up stopped in the middle of the road, facing the opposite way as Richard. It was a scary scene. My car was wrecked, the police lights were flashing, people were running. If they hadn’t jumped out of the way, I’d have killed them all.
I had a girlfriend and a passenger in the car. As soon as I made sure they weren’t cut up by the glass, I jumped out of the car and ran to Richard. We grabbed each other by the arms. “Are you all right, man?” “Yes, brother. Jesus Christ! What a fuckin’ mess. Are you OK?”
All of a sudden a cop came out of the ditch, where he had jumped to save his life. We didn’t know him. He was a county deputy from another town, and helping Billy because they were shorthanded. He was as scared as we were. I turned to go back to the car and check on my friend Bonnie, and the cop said, “You’re not going anywhere.” I ignored him, sat down in the car, left the door open, and was making sure she was OK when the cop grabbed my jacket and tore the pocket off trying to get me out of the car. This was a new leather jacket I’d managed to buy myself—good-lookin’, cut like a suit jacket with good lapels—and he tore the damn pocket right off! I really liked this jacket, so I decided, Here, let me help you. I let him help me out of the car, then reached up and got me a handful of his galluses. That was the move he’d been waiting for, so he went for his blackjack.
And I went for speed. I had him above me and was trying to run him backward with my knees in a bad place for him. He was trying to give ground so he could connect with that blackjack. We were doing a pretty good dance backward when Billy Waterous and Richard saw us coming their way. Billy saw the blackjack waving in the air and was going to intervene, but Richard grabbed him around the neck, and they started dancing in circles! Then we all hit the slippery gravel and went down in one writhing pile. Billy had my jacket now, and the other cop was hitting me across the shoulders with the blackjack. That old boy swung again and hit Billy across the back of his right hand with the blackjack! I thought, Boy, this is a hell of a good idea! How did we let it get this far?
This other cop swung one more time and caught that little bone that sits right behind the ear. I thought someone had shot off a firecracker, but it was my head. It made everything rock, like you’re playing a show and get that electric squeal in the air that makes you woozy, and you think your drum seat is falling over.
Of course, the fight was over, and I was damn glad of that. I didn’t want to get hit like that again. I realized I’d torn up a police car, beat on a deputy, and the police chief was worse off than anyone, because the whole back of his hand was swollen into a goose egg. They put handcuffs on me, which was probably a good thing. I’d certainly been drinking too much, and when your blood gets fired up like that and you’ve got that alcohol in you, that’s when people end up killing themselves.
They took us to the station. Some guy came in and looked at me and yelled at the deputy, “Search his boots! He might have a knife in there!” So I reached down and pulled up my pant leg. The scab from the Arkansas mishap had rubbed off in the gravel during the fight, and my leg looked raw and bloody. I said, “Put that in the goddamn report,” and the guy looked at the cop who’d arrested me, like, “You didn’t have to do that to him, did you?” Of course Albert Grossman was right there in a flash and had us cut loose that quick. The next day we showed up before Judge Joseph Forno, Sr., also the town pharmacist. He was stern with us, as he should have been, but we managed to stay out of jail and eventually made a friend of the judge, who has been a mentor to me ever since.
In May 1968 we posed for our album picture at a house I was sharing with Rick Danko in Wittenburg, which is west of Bearsville. We’d left Big Pink by then because we all needed more room. This house of ours had a long view of the hills. The photographer was Elliott Landy, who worked for a New York underground paper called The Rat. Albert Grossman had discovered Elliott while he was personally ejecting him from Janis Joplin’s Carnegie Hall show a few months earlier. Richard brought along some funny hats from his collection, which all of us wore except for Garth. While the photographer was focusing his camera, the young wife of a friend of Garth’s was dancing behind Landy, trying to make us smile. As he snapped the first shot, she tore off her dress and did a naked little grind. So there we were, trying to be cool in the face of this outrageous hippie dance. I think that’s the shot we ended up using.
As for the way some of us looked in those days, once, Robbie was driving down to the city a little too fast on the Thruway, and a state cop pulled him over for speeding. The officer checked out Robbie in his beard, wire-rim glasses, and porkpie hat and said, “I’ll let you go this time, Rabbi, but try to slow down from now on, OK?”
Then we took Elliott up to Ontario to shoot a picture called “Next of Kin.” This was more rebellion against the so-called revolution, when it became fashionable to hate your families and repudiate their values. Hell, we loved our families! We’d gone on the road when we were still boys, and we missed our families and would talk about them all the time. So we gathered everyone on Rick Danko’s brother’s farm near Simcoe and did a group shot with our people gathered around us. That’s Robbie’s mom on the far left with Garth and his parents. I’m the guy with the hat and a cig hanging out of his mouth. Then Richard’s folks, Richard, Robbie and Dominique, Rick’s dad with his finger in his ear, Rick, and his brother Terry. Little Freddie McNulty, our beloved mascot, is between Rick and his granddad, who stands with his wife and a bunch of grandchildren. John Simon stands behind in a floppy hat and blue shirt, with Rick’s mother and her brothers. Rick’s uncle Rick Smith in that group was a famous chicken judge. People would fly him all over the world to judge birds. He showed me how to hypnotize a chicken while we were on that mission. My mom was feeling ill at the time and couldn’t make it to Ontario, so Elliott was good enough to go down to Springdale and take a separate picture of her and Diamond, which we inserted in the upper left corner. We also told Milton Glaser, who designed the album jacket, to include a photo of Big Pink with these lines written by Dominique Robertson:
BIG PINK—A pink house seated in the sun of Overlook Mountain in West Saugerties, New York. Big Pink bore this music and these songs along its way. It’s the first witness of this album that’s been thought and composed right there inside its walls.
I guess that’s how we thought of the place: like it was Mother.
When the album was eventually released on July 1, 1968, we were shocked to find it credited not to the Crackers but to a group called...
The Band.
Well, it was us. That’s what Woodstock people called us locally: the band. When the people on the other side of the desk at Capitol didn’t want to release an album called Music From Big Pink by the Crackers, they just went and changed our name!
You know, I thought the Crackers was a funny name, and still do. I was shocked when I first heard about “The Band.” Calling it The Band seemed a little on the pretentious, even blowhard, side—burdened by greatness—but we never intended it that way. I voted for the Crackers, though.
John Simon reflects: “Music From Big Pink came out that summer and was an underground sensation, if not exactly a commercial smash. I can honestly say that I loved the music and was enormously proud to be associated with these men. And that’s the point. These guys weren’t teenagers. They were seasoned veterans whose debut album sounded more like a band in its prime. The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists. The reason for that is they were playing out of what I called their ‘Appalachian scale,’ a pentatonic, five-note scale like the black keys on the piano. That was the palette from which those melodies came.
“Big Pink was like nothing that came before it. Nothing like what they were before it. A lot of it was Robbie’s writing and the pictures he evoked. A lot of it was Levon and Rick’s playing and the blend of the three voices, plus Garth’s trip. It was just so rich. People wanted to copy it, and did. Look at Elton John.
“Of course, the Dylan connection helped. The funny thing was, when Capitol sent out a blank-label acetate of Big Pink to press and radio people, everyone assumed ‘The Weight’ was the Dylan song on the album. The Band fooled everyone except themselves.”
Music From Big Pink entered the American charts in early August. Competing against the Doors, Procol Harum, Janis Ian, Cream, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, sales were disappointing, and I think it eventually sold a quarter-million copies that first year or so. At the same time, many people regard that record as one of the defining moments of the decade. People have been telling me ever since that Big Pink changed their lives.
A certain amount of mystery surrounded our debut. There was no cover shot of the group on the record, only Bob Dylan’s painting of five musicians, a roadie, and an elephant. The group photo inside didn’t identify us by name. There was no lyric sheet, so you couldn’t tell who was singing, and most people couldn’t understand the words. We didn’t do any interviews, there wasn’t much publicity that summer save for a few reviews, and we had to quash Capitol’s promotional campaign that tried to market us like some teenybopper group. They were going to ask fans to name Bob’s cover painting. Prizes were pink Yamaha motorbikes, pink pandas, and pink lemonade. So we told Capitol to just leave it alone, and they did.
We didn’t tour either. My leg was still in bad shape from the motorcycle accident, and besides, our policy was not to tour if we could help it. The policy was to keep making music using the methods and work habits that had kept us productive through the basement tapes and the Big Pink era. We didn’t care about being stars. We just wanted to survive with our integrity. Even if we wanted to tour, it would have been hard because Richard also had a little accident that put him out of commission. As Jane Manuel recalls: “We had actually broken up the year before, but Richard and I stayed in touch, because he was my first love. In the spring of 1968 he called me; one of his brothers was getting married, and he asked me to drive him up to Stratford, Ontario, for the ceremony. He couldn’t rent a car because they’d taken his license away for speeding. So we went to the wedding, to get me in the mood, because Richard proposed, and we got married the next weekend. He was very pleased about this and used to tease me about this total manipulation.
“We went back to Woodstock and lived with Garth in a house on Spencer Road on Ohayo Mountain. Robbie and Dominique were already married and living on Glasco Turnpike. The band rehearsed in our living room, so there were always people trying to get a party going.”
This house had a nice view of the Ashokan Reservoir, and a barbecue grill, which Richard tried to fire up one day by building a gasoline fire in the bottom. But he used so much fuel, it turned into a bomb, and he ended up grilling the top of his foot—third-degree burns. So Richard couldn’t work for two months, another reason we didn’t tour behind Big Pink in the summer of ‘68. And, boy, we were hot. Albert was turning down offers of twenty thousand dollars a night.
We got pretty good reviews, though. Al Aronowitz, in Life: “With Big Pink the band dips into the well of tradition and comes up with bucketsful of clear, cool country soul that washes the ears with a sound never heard before. Traditionalists may not like it because it’s too original. Pop faddists won’t like it because it’s too traditional.”
“I have chosen my album for 1968,” Al Kooper wrote in Rolling Stone. “Music From Big Pink is an event and should be treated as one.” He finished his review: “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks. There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”
According to Time, “The band from Big Pink plays the best, boneclean ‘white soul’ anywhere. Along with their musicianship, a lack of self-indulgence plays a large part in the beauty of their sound.” All reviewers noted that this was not a guitar album, which is what people expected from a so-called rock group. But Robbie had soloed himself to death on the Dylan tours, and we were consciously writing songs without much space for solos. This was something that people who liked us picked up on. This group without a name was an ensemble.
Al Aronowitz again, this time in Rolling Stone: “What the band plays is country rock, with cadences from F. S. Wolcott’s Original Rabbits Foot Minstrel Show and music that tells stories the way Uncle Remus did, with the taste of Red River Cereal and the consistency of King Biscuit Flour. Robertson himself calls it mountain music, ‘because this place where we are—Woodstock—is in the mountains.’... the kind of album that will have to open its own door to a new category, accompanied by all the reasons for the burgeoning rush to country pop, by the exodus from the cities and the search for a calmer ethic, by the hunger for earth-grown wisdom and a redefined morality, by the thirst for simple touchstones and the natural law of trees.”
Our local paper in Woodstock, by the way, said the album was OK, but we could have done better.
Writers were always stuck when they tried to find a label for us. On Sunday, August 4, 1968, The New York Times’ critic declared, “Fortunately, we needn’t wait for the Byrds to understand what the country-rock synthesis is all about. Already, the movement has its first major album, Music From Big Pink by The Band. You can tell right away this is country music by its twang and tenacity. But you know it’s also rock, because it makes you want to move.”
Country rock was the label that finally stuck. We hated it.
When Albert Grossman’s office finally got tired of turning down interview requests, Robbie was deputized to talk to the press. “One thing I’d like to clear up,” he told Eye magazine that September, “we have no name for the group. We’re not interested in doing record promotion or going on Johnny Carson to plug the LP.... The name of the group is just our Christian names. The only reason the LP is by ‘The Band’ is so they can file it in the record stores. And also, that’s the way we’re known to our friends and neighbors. Another thing, we’re not Bob Dylan’s band; he doesn’t think of us that way; neither do we.
“See, we don’t freak out anymore; that was seven or eight years ago. We wanted the album to be loose and easy. There was a lot of instrumental swapping—everyone took turns. It was a very drunken LP. We had a good time.”
Around this time we got a letter from George Harrison, who complained that EMI released Music From Big Pink in England in a single sleeve instead of the double-fold jacket of the American version. They printed the title and name of the group over Bob’s painting and threw out the “Next of Kin” photo. George was a big advocate for us, being quoted in the British press about how Music From Big Pink was the new sound to come from America and everybody better pay attention. His friend Eric Clapton was quoted in the British paper Melody Maker as saying Big Pink had made his group Cream, the contemporary kings of so-called acid rock, obsolete. The power trio announced its disbandment that summer.
George Harrison came to Woodstock that fall. We’d appreciated what both he and Eric Clapton had been saying about us in print. It was encouraging to have the Beatles say they were fans of ours. At one point there was discussion of recording with George and Eric, who came to see us a little later on. We talked about doing a fireside jam, real informal, with American and British players and a lot of beer, but nothing ever came of it. Bob and Albert were fighting pretty good by then, so that might have had something to do with nothing like that happening for us.
“Hi, I’m George. Nice to meet you.” That’s what he was like. Very quiet. I think he was with us for Thanksgiving at Bob’s house, and we jammed a little bit and swapped some songs. George and Bob wrote a couple of things together, and there was much talk of us being in a rock western called Zachariah that Apple Films was promoting. We were maybe going to do the music with George, but in the end the script was silly—MTV fifteen years ahead of schedule—and it didn’t happen.
A lot of people came to Woodstock to hang out with us that fall. My memory is that everyone wanted to know Richard Manuel and just hang out. Albert’s office fielded quite a few movie queries for Richard.
It took a while for word about The Band and Big Pink to get around, but by the end of 1968 people like promoter Bill Graham were offering us serious money to get out and play. I was content not to tour and just to make records. We had another album due to Capitol, and the beauty of that autumn in Woodstock was inspiring our writers—Richard and Robbie—to turn out some good songs. We already had a working title for the next record: Harvest.
Then Rick broke his neck in a car accident, late at night, and our choice of whether or not to tour was taken away.
“Levon and I were living in a house in Wittenburg,” Rick recalls, “and I was heading to this house Garth and Richard had, where Van Morrison later lived while he was making his album Tupelo Honey. I was driving a 1953 Bristol, a beautiful English car with an aluminum body, which belonged to my girlfriend’s older brother. I was a little too drunk, a little too high. I’d just climbed a mountain and took the S-curve and felt the car sliding. I put my brakes on and hit a tree. I was knocked out but had a lot of flashbacks until I regained full consciousness three or four days later.
“A few minutes later, I’m out of the car, really bleeding, when Bill Avis and his wife come along on their way to Richard’s house. I started screaming and yelling, ‘Just get me home—back to the house!’ I somehow walked into the house, into the bedroom, lay down on my bed, and that was it. I didn’t get up for three or four months after that.
“Flashbacks: Suddenly there’s people in my room. There’s a state trooper, and he’s asking for my driver’s license. Levon’s standing there, naked, because he’s been rudely awakened, and there are now six or seven people in the room, and Levon was telling this trooper, ‘Now’s no fuckin’ time to be asking for his goddamn license! Call an ambulance, for God’s sake!’ Levon, Richard, and Bill came to the hospital, and when I woke up again I’m on the examining table, feeling a lot of pain, and I hear Richard telling the doctor, ‘If I hear him scream one more time, I’m gonna break your neck.’
“It must’ve been the weekend. He must have had a couple of drinks.
“In the recovery room, I wake up in excruciating pain. I had to scream to wake up the nurse. They got me to my own room, but they didn’t know my neck is broken, didn’t know my back is broken in four places. I’m asking them, ‘Why can’t I get up?’ Someone gave me a shot.
“When I woke up again, Albert Grossman was in the room, talking with a neurosurgeon. I was in for weeks of traction. I told Albert not to tell the press I’d had an accident, and decided to suppress all my hyper instincts and lie perfectly still for the time it took for my neck to heal. Nobody thought that I could do it, but I managed, and that’s how it grew back into place.
“The second time Albert came to see me, he said the group was getting offers of four thousand dollars a night. He was saying, ‘Can’t I tell the press something? Can’t the band go out and play?’ I said, ‘I don’t want you to tell the press nothing about my accident, because I saw what Bob Dylan went through, and it was ugly; people saying he was finished.’ I didn’t want to go through that. Next time he comes, Albert goes, ‘They’re offering seven thousand dollars a night, eight thousand dollars a night.’
“‘Tell ’em to go out on the road,’ I said. ‘I’m not the leader of the band.’”
Well, of course we didn’t go out without Rick. How could we? The Band was a team. But it was real quiet in Woodstock that winter, believe me. We might’ve gotten into some mischief because of it.