Down Home with the Band

f in the world view of rock in the late 1960's the Beatles were the dreamweavers and the Rolling Stones the Satanic urge; if Joplin was the soul and Hendrix the genital thrust; if Blood, Sweat and Tears were the technicians and Dylan the tortured conscience, then The Band was the memory. This group has a sense of historical roots that yields nostalgia without sentimentality, humor without biting satire, and a diversity of styles without a superficiality of skill. They concern themselves with ideas, people, settings, and a view of time unlike almost anyone else in the rock field. Country-western music, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States, was, with the blues, part of the original inspiration of the first rock and roll of the 1950's. Elvis Presley was a country-western and blues singer long before he broke new ground with his rock songs. Innumerable rock performers have been influenced by country-western styles, but few have actually identified with or at least expressed a deep-felt respect for the people and subculture that produced this musical tradition. The Band, however, is an outstanding exception. The Band's songs, usually in a loose narrative form, rarely concern urban experience. Instead the farmer, the cross-country trucker, the small town carnival or medicine show of years past are their most typical subjects. From album to album, their point of view about these topics has evolved. In The Band (1969) their approach is generally through the memory of various fictional narrators. followed after nearly a year of touring; it reveals the group's increasing feeling of confinement in the roles of performers. In the title song Stage Fright the entertainer seems almost lost in time because he is caught in a spotlight trap that functions like a treadmill. Then came Cahoots in which we hear the line away, run away, it's a restless age. John Landau sees this impulse not as an index of social irresponsibility but of future shock. Many of the songs in the album (and elsewhere in their

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