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Since Music From Big Pink was released during the turbulent summer of 1968, it is tempting to make the album a set of soothing sounds for troubled times. Do not believe it. The first album of the group was discreet. At a time when the musical landscape was invaded by psychedelic fantasy, their synthesis of country, blues, gospel, classic western and rock was enriching and inspiring. While Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Who separated the eardrums with an overdrive amplification, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richael Manuel dropped the volume, revealing the subtleties of their arrangements and the complexity of their lyrics. While the Beatles and Brian Wilson were looking for studio labs where they could achieve technical excellence, the group hid in a wet concrete cellar in the Catskills Desert to find their muse. Everything about their stripped sound and their style seemed to violate the fundamental rules of the industry.
"We rebelled against rebellion," recalls Robbie Robertson years later. "If everyone was heading east, then we were heading west and we never discussed it once, there was that kind of thing rooted in us: we were this kind of rebels with an absolute cause. the pack. "
The quintet managed the seemingly impossible task of escaping their Bob Dylan support group reputation solely through their writing and their play." These guys were not teenagers, they were veteran veterans whose first album was more like a band in their prime, "observed John Simon in 1993." The songs were more like treasures buried in American traditions than new songs by contemporary artists. "Those who simply listened to" I'll be released, "as well as" The Tears of Rage "and" This Wheel on Fire, "both co-authored by Dylan, were stunned by the depth of the original compositions. Robinson's "weight", which emerged as the album's standout song.
The idea of moving into the country became a rock & roll cliché, but the band did it first – and they did it better. "This album was recorded in about two weeks," wrote Al Kooper in his five-star review Rolling Stone . "There are people who will work their life in vain and not touch it. "But according to Levon Helm, Music From Big Pink did not meet universal success." By the way, our journal Local Woodstock said that the album was OK but that we could have done better. "
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the flagship album – and the A forthcoming release of an expanded cabinet featuring outtakes and other rarities – here are 10 facts that you might not have known about the band's early days.
1. Big Pink was not exactly a country property worthy of a rock-star.
The story of Big Pink really began when Bob Dylan lost control of his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle while he was driving in the suburb of Woodstock, New York July 29, 1966. All Dates of Upcoming Concerts Canceled As a rock-winning poet, he recovered from his wounds in his nearby home, throwing his support group into a state of professional void. Drummer Levon Helm had left the band (albeit temporarily) the year before, earning his living on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. For the remaining members, it began to look more and more like a good career move. "We did not know what to do," said Rick Danko in the memoirs of Levon Helm, This wheel is on fire . "We were road musicians without roads to continue, we still wanted to record, so we started looking for a place to rehearse music."
New York proved costly for an out-of-work band that subsisted with a modest supply. Their thoughts turned to the rural towns of Catskills, home to Dylan, their mutualist manager Albert Grossman, and a handful of other friends from the New York scene. Danko and Richard Manuel had ventured for the first time in February 1967 to assist Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul & Mary, another Grossman client) in a film project, and Robbie Robertson had made a similar visit for help Dylan and Howard Alk to come together. Eat the document a documentary of their recent English tour. With its pristine forests and panoramic views of the mountains, the natural beauty of the area quickly amazed the ancient warriors of the road. "That could not have been a better place," said Garth Hudson to the author Barney Hoskyns in Across the Great Divide . "There was a lot of magic in Woodstock and wherever you went, legends were reflected in the names of places and streets – Warwarsing, Ohayo, Bearsville Flats.
Danko was posted at the Woodstock motel while he was going in search of a personal base. "The idea was to find a clubhouse – a place where guys could live with space so we could make music," Robertson explained in his memoirs of 2016, Testimonial . Shortly after, the bassist just found the place, a boxy split-boxy at 2188 Stoll Road in Saugerties that looked like it had been jettisoned from the suburbs. The garish salmon-colored paint work earned the house a nickname for the local population: Big Pink. For all its aesthetic flaws, there were a hundred acres of woods and fields, views of Overlook Mountain, a pond, four bedrooms, a simple kitchen, a dining room and a living room furnished with trinkets and a neon beer sign. decoration – all for only $ 125 per month. Although not very luxurious, its most important selling point was the spacious basement. "It was my goal: to turn this underground space into what we needed from the beginning," Robertson wrote. "The goal was to use everything we could from our live show to create a setup that would allow us to discover our own musical path."
Robertson and Hudson willingly went to collect supplies for a rudimentary home recording facility, but the answer from a technologically savvy friend gave them a break. "I remembered that Robertson remembered this guy I know who was in the basement in 2011. He said," Well, it's a disaster . You have walls of breeze blocks, and you have a big metal stove here, these are all things you can not have if you are trying to record something. For your own information, you can not do that – it will not work, you will listen and you will be depressed Your music will sound so bad that you will never want to record again. "" Considering that they were already locked in the lease, the group had no choice but to continue. They equipped the cellar with a few Norelco microphones, two Altec mixers and a quarter-inch Ampex 400 tape recorder and hoped for the best.
Hudson, Manuel and Danko moved into Big Pink that spring, and Robertson found his own home next to his girlfriend, French-Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois. They quickly settled into an uncomplicated routine. "Richard did all the cooking", describes Danko in This wheel is on fire . "Garth washed all the dishes (he did not trust anyone to do them because he wanted them to be clean) and I took the garbage to the dump, personally, and kept it. the chimney with cracked logs. " Dylan, their nominal boss, became a frequent visitor, and together they made music in the basement. "The songs continued to arrive, and we all felt that there was something incredible," Robertson told Hoskyns. "Someone would find something, we would go down to the basement and save it, and a little later there would be another one.I would be in the bedroom with the guitar, Bob would be at the typewriter, and somebody else would be in the corner working on something, it was really going on and it was really exhilarating. "Of the more than 100 songs that have been recorded this year – tirelessly hacked as "The Basement Tapes" before being released as a box set in 2014 – are the seeds of Music From Big Pink .
2. The music of Big Pink was not recorded at Big Pink.
Unlike his name, Music From Big Pink was not followed in Big. Pink, and none of the many tracks of the legendary Basement Tapes. Although the timing of the Basement Tapes ad hoc sessions may be unclear, the recordings began in earnest early in the spring of 1967 at Bob Dylan's Byrdcliffe House, Hi-Lo-Ha, before moving to the famous basement at the beginning of l & # 39; summer. Once Levon Helm returned from his two-year break in October, the house began to feel cramped and the four residents of Big Pink searched for new housing. Helm and Rick Danko moved into a house on Wittenberg Road, which became the new recording center, while Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel met at Ohayo Mountain Road, and Robbie Robertson stayed at his home with his After the group teamed up with independent producer John Simon following a chance meeting at Howard Alk's birthday party in the fall of 1967, Albert Grossman secured group funding to record at A & R Studio A in New York. shaped 10,000 square feet located on the seventh floor of 799 Seventh Avenue. When the sessions started in the first weeks of January 1968, Simon asked the group how he wanted the music to sound. "Just like in the basement," Robertson replied succinctly. "Playing in the basement taught us that to go to someone else 's where it does not exceed six hours, there are union rules and everyone is watching. clock – this is not the way to make music. ] Uncut in 2015. "We said we have to make sure that the situation suits us, rather than the opposite."
Engineers first tried to use standard studio configurations with the group, looping them with sound baffles to prevent leaks. But after months playing the eyeball between the blocks, the separation was disconcerting. "We said," We can not do that, we have to put ourselves in a circle like the basement, we have to play with each other, we speak a language, it does not work "". Robertson called back. The technicians were skeptical, but the group was delighted with the fruits of these early sessions, which included "Tears of Rage", "We Can Talk", "Chest Fever" and "The Weight". The leaders of Capitol Records, who signed the band in early February, were so happy that they sent them to Los Angeles to take full advantage of the ultramodern 8-lane studio located at the famous Vine Street tower headquarters. . The album was mostly finished here, though the band made a short trip to Gold Star Studios, where Phil Spector pioneered his Wall of Sound. In his memoirs, Helm remembers cutting a Big Crown Broonzy's "Key to the Highway" version to Gold Star, but this song, and apparently all the others of those sessions, did not make the last album.
3. "The Weight" was considered a second-string song and almost did not make the album.
When Helm returned to the fold in October 1967, Robertson marked the meeting by writing a tune to show the vocal styles of his group. "I thought, Jeez, I want to write a song that Levon can sing better than anyone, because I knew his abilities," said Robertson Uncut . "He was my closest friend and I wanted to do something really special for him." Sitting in his studio, he glimpsed a label inside the sound hole of his Martin D-28 guitar reading "Nazareth, Pennsylvania" – the location of the factory. The juxtaposition of the biblical sound locality with America's heart has robbed Robertson's imagination. "In my mind, there is this mythical place in America where the storyteller lives," he said in 1987. "And he tells stories based on this place and on people who have gone through it.
A song began to take shape, based less on the Bible and more on the films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel, who used surreal images to offer critiques of organized religion. "He made so many movies on the impossibility of holiness – people trying to be good in Viridiana and Nazarin people trying to do this thing, "Robertson explained later. "In" The Weight ", it's the same thing: people like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations, but it was not necessarily a religious significance: in Buñuel, these people were trying to 39; be good and it was impossible to be good "To enrich his own para "Buñuelish" bole of a man loaded with favors for others, he drew idiosyncratic figures that the group had met throughout their common history. "Anna Lee" was Helm's friend Anna Lee Amsden, "Carmen" another name of the drummer's home town, and "Crazy Chester", according to Helm, "was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came in town on Saturday, guns on his hips and his kind walked around the city to help keep the peace, if you follow me. "All these characters were mixed in Robertson's story, which he written in one sitting.
"The next day I played the air for guys to see if it could be a competitor," wrote Robertson in Testimony . "They reacted very strongly to the possibilities of the song, but I mostly thought of it as a fallback tune in case one of the other songs would not work." The group dusted off the song at A & R Studio A especially afterwards during one day sessions. "We had tried it in different ways, but we were not very enthusiastic about it," he said in an interview in 1995 with Guitar Player . "So we were in the studio, and just to try not to be boring, we said," Well, let's give it a shot at this song "Take a load of Fanny". "A new arrangement was hastily guessed, with Garth Hudson on piano barilhouse." We recorded it, and that 's only when we listened to it as we realized: "Fuck shit, this song really has something." "
4. Robbie Robertson never managed to finish the lyrics of" Chest Fever ".
For all the complex emotions and meanings wrapped in "The Weight", one can not say as much about any other Robertson composition. "I'm not sure I know the words of" Chest Fever ", I'm not even sure there are words for" Chest Fever ", he said to Barney Hoskyns, half joking. The idiosyncratic piece, wildly oscillating between the "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" type bombast and what looks like a Salvation Army band, was born from a jam session. and, according to Helm's estimate, was recorded for the album in a semi-complete state. "Chest Fever" had improvised lyrics that Robbie had collected for rehearsals and never just rewrote, "he wrote in his memoirs. "The song arrived late in the process and was recorded before it was finished."
The band would use the song to open his set at Woodstock the following summer, drawing the attention of half a million tired flower children with Garth's imposing prelude Hudson's demonic-carousel organ, based largely on Bach's "Tocatta and Fugue in D minor". (The segment will later become its own instrumental piece, known as "The Genetic Method" – itself a reference to "fascination for nineteenth-century musical primers" by Hoskyns. "It's for God He's right there somewhere, that eccentric thing, "thinks Robertson," but that does not make any sense in words, in music, in arrangement, in whatever. "Nevertheless, the song has its fans: Paul Shaffer used it to present Bill Murray's last appearance on the TLate Show with David Letterman in 2015.
5. The Morse code helped Garth Hudson get his distinctive keyboard on "This Wheel's On Fire."
Several years older than the others and boasting the pedigree of a classically trained player, Garth Hudson has established his reputation as an eccentric teacher of the group. me the Hawks, when he charged $ 10 a week for giving music lessons to his friends. Although some members took offense at practicing ladders, they quickly saw the benefits of having such a mind in their midst. "To have Garth as a teacher was an honor," writes Helm in his memoirs. "He was listening to a song on the radio in the Cadillac and was telling us the chords as we went along, the chord structures were complicated, no problem, Garth was discovering them, and we were able to play anyway. what. More than perfecting their talent of interpreters, Hudson's skills have helped the group to flourish as writers and arrangers. "Much of our musical sophistication – if there is one – really came from Garth's background," admitted Robertson in an interview given in 1982 to Musician . "And with the kind of chord structures and harmonies we used and combinations of instruments and one on the melody and the other on the bottom – a lot of it comes from Garth, if not everything. "
As the decade progressed, Hudson became known as the band's resident technician and sound builder. He released his organ from the Lowery Festival with a variety of custom effects, including wah-wah and pitch-bending pedals, and a rotating two-speed Leslie speaker. When they moved to Big Pink in early 1967, he took the initiative to assemble the music studio in the basement, tinkering a home studio from odds and ends. . His indefatigable adjustments and experiments continued during the studio sessions for Music From Big Pink . "We called Garth & H.B." between us, "said Helm." That meant "Honey Boy" because at the end of the day, after the other instruments had been put away, Garth was still in the studio to soften the tracks, stack the strings, put some Copper, Wood, All That Was Necessary "
When it's time to record" This Wheel's On Fire, "a Rick Danko song set to music by Bob Dylan, Hudson creates an effect Unusual keyboard staccato plugging his RMI Rock-Si-Chord electric piano to an old semi-automatic telegraph key purchased from a surplus army store. "It has a reiteration function, so if you move the key in one direction, you will get a point or dash, and if you move it in the other direction, you will get repetitive points," he said. he explains. Keyboard Store . "I had a small box and I mounted quarter-inch receptacles through which you could connect the key to the instrument, then you set the reiteration rate." and you were ready to play. " Handling the on / off signal on the device has created an abrupt and punchy sound, much like Morse code. "Garth just hit that key when he wanted the sound," Helm recalls.
6. The old portrait of the album shows a nude hippie dance just out of frame.
The group resisted conventional wisdom by opening Music From Big Pink with a slow song, the sweet collaboration of Richard Manuel-Bob Dylan's "Tears of Rage." The group was just as determined to follow its own path for the sleeve art, rejecting many suggestions for world-renowned photographers to take a group portrait. "It seemed like: 'Oh my God, we're going out with some sort of ugly photo.' And, these images that I see, they do not do anything for me, "Robertson recalled, instead the guitarist was swept away by a nineteenth-century book of photographs from the western border, depicting sinister-looking workers. in rigid poses. "On the other hand, these photos do something for me." Rather than hiring "the best" cameraman, Robertson made a request for "the worse, "and it was duly passed the name of Elliott Landy, a shutterbug for clandestinely shredded paper Rat .Along Grossman first crossed the photographer while l & # 39; personally escorting at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert at Carnegie Hall in January 1968, where the band played with Dylan
despite this unfavorable start, Landy and Robertson hit him, and in late April, the group made the trip up to Bearsville House where Levon Helm and Rick Danko moved after leaving Big Pink. There, they donned hats, vests and strings of the time, which are not totally different from their everyday outfits, and they found themselves on a hill to recreate a daguerreotype at the time. Ancient. "I told them that at that time the film was very slow and people had to stay still," Landy explained. "You were asked, you took a deep breath, and you did not move … I did it about a quarter of a second, which is why it's a little blur. The group did their best to maintain their harsh expressions, but they faced an unexpected challenge. "While the photographer was focusing on his camera, Garth's young wife was dancing behind Landy, trying to make us smile," wrote Helm in This Wheel & # 39; s On Fire . "When he took the first shot, she tore up her dress and made a small, naked pout, so we were there, trying to be cool in the face of this outrageous hippie dance, I think that 's it. is the shot we used. 19659004] In addition to the Bearsville session, Landy and the group traveled further north to the small town of Simcoe, Ontario, to portray the Canadian parents of the group on a farm belonging to the brother of Rick Danko. (Helm's parents, who were unable to travel to Arkansas, were cropped in the upper left corner.) The so-called "Next of Kin" image represented another stance in the group's rebellion against the rebellion, flying in the face of rock stars like Jim Morrison, who played Oedipal fantasies every night on stage. "You know the punky attitude that has to do with music – hate your mother and stab your father, it's kind of a trend, and it was a statement that we were not there, "said Robertson Rolling Stone in 1969." We do not hate our mothers and fathers. "
7. The album cover was designed by the future graphic artist "I (Heart) NY" Milton Glaser.
"A certain mystery surrounded our beginnings," said Levon Helm in 1993. "There was no cover photo of the band, only Bob Dylan's painting of five musicians, a roadie and a Elephant.The group photo inside does not identify us by name. "In truth, Big Pink himself got a lot more recognition on the jacket than the musicians themselves. The split-level incumbent was featured on the back cover, in bold type, surrounding a small portrait, and inside it was mythified with a brief couplet written by Robbie Robertson's future wife, Dominique.
Milton Glaser, a graphic designer who created the colorful poster found in the Bob Dylan album the year before. In a sense, Glaser unleashed the whole project – it was he who took Albert Grossman for the first time to Woodstock in the early sixties. The booming impresario was hit by the idyllic landscape and purchased a rural retreat in the nearby town of Bearsville soon after, staging Dylan's own movement and the musical surge that followed.
Glaser was still living nearby when Robertson looked for him to draw the early cover of his group using Dylan's painting, Landy's Mountain View Portrait, and Next of Kin. "I told him we thought we were going to go with the title of the album Music From Big Pink ," he wrote in Testimony . He said: "What is Big Pink?" I told him about our club, from where did the music that we had created: "Can we have a photo of this house, he asked, so that we understand what is Big Pink? I said: "It's really ugly, and the house is pink . "" Okay, "said Milt," maybe it's good, and the name of the band? "We do not have a fancy name, we're simply called" the band. " 19659004] 8. The band was originally signed to Capitol under the name "The Crackers."
The core of the band had been playing like the Hawks since 1960, but eight years later the quintet needed To start, the nickname had links to their past days supporting the rockabilly barbstormer Ronnie Hawkins at the dawn of the decade.More troubling, the rise of the anti-war movement had given the term "hawk" A new definition and disillusionment fable of pro-militant activist. It was both an inaccurate representation of peaceful Canadians (plus Helm) and also a bad way to market a rock band in the late sixties. But they hardly needed a name in Woodstock, where they were literally the only group in town, and the case was postponed for a time.
The name issue was still undecided on January 20, 1968, when the band supported Dylan at Carnegie Hall for the Woody Guthrie tribute concert. "We are crashing through the back doors of the room with our gear, and an old man watching behind the scenes says," Hey, what group is that? ", Wrote Helm in his memoirs. As a joke, he returned with "The Crackers" – a self-deprecation (and not particularly PC) reference to uncultivated white Southerners – he no longer thought about it for a while, but several weeks later, while the contracts with Capitol Records were being written, the need for a name became crucial Richard Manuel jokingly proposed "The Marshmallow Coats" and "The Chocolate Subway", Floral Phrases in the Psychedelic Sgt Pepper Mussel Robertson replied with an equally jokey suggestion: "The Royal Canadians except Levon." The Dixie-born drummer offered "The Crackers", though this time he was serious. "The crackers were poor whites of the South, and as far as I was concerned, 9 was the music we were doing, "he explained in This Wheel & n's Fire (19459005). "I voted to call the Crackers and I have never regretted it."
His colleagues bought it and together they presented it to the label makers – who missed the reference entirely. "La maison de disques pensait que c'était un joli nom, au début", écrivait Robertson dans Témoignage . "Ils pensaient que nous voulions dire des biscuits soda, du Ritz, ou du miel et du gingembre – pas du tout inculte, du pays, des fanatiques, des ordures blanches du Sud." En fin de compte, le nom sur le formulaire "Déclaration d'artistes" Capitol lit "Groupe en tant que craquelins."
La raison précise pour laquelle "The Crackers" n'apparaît pas sur Music From Big Pink est sujette à débat. Comme le raconte Helm, quelqu'un à Capitol a compris la véritable signification du terme. "Quand l'album a été finalement libéré le 1er juillet 1968, nous avons été choqués de le trouver crédité non pas aux Crackers, mais à un groupe appelé … The Band", écrit-il. «Eh bien, c'était nous, c'est ce que les gens de Woodstock nous appelaient localement: le groupe Quand les gens de l'autre côté du bureau de Capitol ne voulaient pas sortir un album intitulé Music From Big Pink par les Crackers, ils sont juste allés et ont changé notre nom! " Cependant, Robertson a maintenu dans des interviews et dans ses mémoires que la décision de laisser tomber "The Crackers" était un choix conscient de la part des musiciens. "Vous savez, d'une part, il n'y a pas beaucoup de groupes autour de Woodstock et nos amis et voisins nous appellent simplement le groupe et c'est ainsi que nous pensons à nous", dit-il à Rolling Stone . Libération.
Fait intéressant, une interview que Robertson a donnée à The Eye en septembre 1968 suggère que leur sobriquet familier était en fait une absence du nom d'un prince . "Une chose que j'aimerais éclaircir, nous n'avons pas de nom pour le groupe", a-t-il insisté. "Nous ne sommes pas intéressés par la promotion de disques ou par Johnny Carson pour brancher le LP … le nom du groupe est juste nos noms chrétiens. La seule raison pour laquelle le LP est" The Band "est qu'ils peuvent le classer dans les magasins de disques, et c'est ainsi que nous sommes connus de nos amis et de nos voisins. En effet, lorsque "The Weight" a été publié pour la première fois le même mois, les critiques ont crédité la chanson à "James Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm." Les affiches de promotion ont emboîté le pas, bien que beaucoup portaient une bannière proclamant «mieux connu sous le nom de bande»
9. Un incident de grillage et un accident de voiture les empêchaient de tourner, alors Capitol planifia un concours de promo digne d'être couru.
L'incapacité de la bande à tourner ou donner des interviews après la libération de Big Pink à l'été 1968 aurait pu facilement condamner l'effort dès le début. Pourtant, leur réticence à respecter les règles du jeu promotionnel n'a fait que renforcer leur pureté musicale aux yeux du public et renforcer leur réputation d'énigmes rurales. «Les gens disaient:« Que font-ils dans ces montagnes? »Robertson raconta Uncut en 2015.« Personne ne savait trop quoi en faire. Bien qu'Albert Grossman ait eu l'habitude de persuader ses artistes de garder le silence afin de cultiver la mystique, le désintérêt du groupe pour le brio du show-business était surtout sincère. "Notre politique n'était pas de tourner si nous pouvions l'aider", a écrit Helm. "La politique consistait à continuer à faire de la musique en utilisant les méthodes et les habitudes de travail qui nous avaient permis de rester productifs à travers les cassettes du sous-sol et l'ère du Big Pink.Nous voulions simplement survivre avec notre intégrité."
Mais il y avait d'autres facteurs en jeu, y compris un danger caché de leur retraite rurale. «La maison avait une belle vue sur l'Ashokan Resevoir, et un barbecue, que Richard a tenté de mettre le feu un jour en construisant un feu d'essence dans le fond», explique Helm dans ses mémoires. Hudson se souvient que Manuel "y a versé un liquide plus léger, et la chose a explosé et la flamme s'est échappée et a brûlé sa cheville." Selon Helm, la fosse "s'est transformée en bombe, et il a fini par griller le dessus de son pied – brûlures au troisième degré … Richard n'a donc pas pu travailler pendant deux mois, une autre raison pour laquelle nous n'avons pas tourné au cours de l'été 68.
La tendance malheureuse de la bande pour les accidents de la route était aussi à blâmer pour son incapacité à prendre la route. Helm had injured his leg in a motorcycle spin-out, and Danko nearly died when he wrapped his car around a tree after being, in his words, "a little too drunk, a little too high." The crash broke his neck and fractured his back in four places, thus requiring him to stay effectively bedridden for several months. "I was in for weeks of traction," he says in This Wheel's on Fire. "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 my nec k to heal." They wouldn't perform live as "the Band" until April 17th, 1969, making their debut at San Francisco's Winterland.
With the Band indisposed, the promotions team at Capitol tried to conjure up creative ways to sell the album. Their solution was a series of contests that, in Helm's opinion, "tried to market us like some teenybopper group." A "Big Pink Think" campaign was proposed; inviting fans to "name" Dylan's cover painting. A fill-in-the-blank competition was also floated, inviting hopefuls to complete the sentence: "If I could be a Big Pink anything, I'd be a Big Pink _____." Prizes were to include pink lemonade, pink stuffed pandas, and a pink Yamaha motorbike. "They suggested getting an elephant painted pink in front of Tower Records in L.A. for the release of our record," a horrified Robertson recalled in Testimony. "Albert and I flew to Los Angeles to get on the same page with Capitol's new president, Stanley Gortikov, and to enlighten the company as to what Big Pink and the Band represented, which most certainly was not a pink elephant, nor a 'name this band' contest, which Capitol had also suggested." The ideas were promptly dropped.
10. The album helped convince Eric Clapton to split up Cream, and provided a hard-rock group with their name.
Music From Big Pink managed to catch the attention of the biggest names in rock without the help of the Big Pink Think campaign. Even the Beatles, whose studio pyrotechnics had provided a foil for the lo-fi basement dwellers, took notice of their rootsy approach. Paul McCartney can be heard launching into an ad-libbed "take a load off, Fanny" toward the end of the Beatles' promotional video for "Hey Jude," issued later that September, and George Harrison made a pilgrimage to see Dylan and the Band on their home turf in the Catskills that fall.
But few rock stars were as moved as Harrison's friend Eric Clapton, whose passion for Big Pink bordered on evangelical. A bootleg tape of the album served as a spiritual balm throughout that summer's unhappy, yet lucrative, tour with his group, Cream – then among the most popular acts in the world. "It stopped me in my tracks," he said of the record in his 2007 memoir, "and it also highlighted all of the problems I thought [Cream] had. Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz, and rock, and writing great songs. I couldn't help but compare them to us, which was stupid and futile, but I was frantically looking for a yardstick, and here it was. Listening to that album, as great as it was, just made me feel that we were stuck and I wanted out." That July, weeks after Music From Big Pink was released, he announced that Cream would disband.
Like Harrison, Clapton also paid a visit to the Woodstock, although he never got up the nerve to share his ulterior motive. "I really sort of went there to ask if I could join the band! But I didn't have the guts to say it," he admitted while inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Instead, he would try to recreate their nuanced playing and collaborative spirit in a new group, the short-lived Blind Faith, and during his stint with Delaney & Bonnie.
In retrospect, Robertson had mixed emotions about his role in shifting Clapton's musical trajectory. "Big Pink had turned him around with its subtleties and laid-back feeling," he says in Testimony. "Cream played with a much more bombastic approach and he wanted a change. That was a huge compliment coming from Eric, but I liked some of Cream's songs and wasn't sure how I felt about our record being partially responsible for their demise."
While Big Pink inadvertently took one group out of commission, it also inspired (at very least) one new one. Scottish hard rockers Nazareth, later of "Love Hurts" fame, formed in 1968, taking their moniker from one of Robertson's best-known lyrics. "We were sitting around in the place we used to rehearse in when we first got together, and we couldn't agree on a name," vocalist Dan McCafferty said in 2014. "We were listening to 'The Weight' when it first came out, and Pete Agnew, our bass player, said, 'What about Nazareth?' And that was it."
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