The Band: Music from Big Pink
Mobile Fidelity UDSACD 2044
Stereo Hybrid
Pop/Rock
"Music from Big Pink"
The Band
#34 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
In late 1965 and early 1966, Bob Dylan shattered the boundaries between folk and rock music on a controversial tour that found the generation spokesman plugging in and shocking purist audiences that reviled in horror at the sight of their hero playing electric with a bunch of ragtag Canadian mates. Then known as the Hawks, the Band was that backing group, serving Dylan not only on the road but, playing with him after his motorcycle accident, on his seminal Basement Tapes collection.
Recorded in 1968, The Band’s Music From Big Pink stems from the same locale—a pink farmhouse in upstate Woodstock, New York—as the Basement Tapes and is just as rustic, timeless, and mysterious as Dylan’s celebrated work. A debut for the ages, the album features two songs co-written with Dylan—“This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Tears of Rage”—as well as what’s universally recognized as the definitive version of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” More famously, it also includes “The Weight,” a standard covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to Weezer to Aretha Franklin. But the power of this set doesn’t lie in one song but the entire album.
A groundbreaking statement, Music From Big Pink lays bare the magnetism of the American South, Appalachian traditions, and country-rock innovations. This is the majesty of what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”
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