Music From Big Pink

Author

FOREWORD

The fact that John Niven was just two years old in 1968 – the year in which The Band’s Music from Big Pink was released – only makes his 2005 novella about the album’s inception and germination the more remarkable.

As someone who’d not only been obsessed by The Band since 1973 but had moved a young family to Woodstock largely on the strength of that obsession, I read Niven’s boldly unorthodox contribution to the excellent 33 1/3 series in a state of mesmerized disbelief that a thirtysomething Scotsman could, with such uncanny accuracy, catch the heady geist of that late 1960s zeit.

It was as if the former Wishing Stone – and future author of the caustic Kill Your Friends, the bestselling novel about his coke-crazed days as a London A&R man – had time-travelled back to Woodstock’s Tinker Street and infiltrated the ‘scene’ that coalesced around the demurring Bob Dylan and his musical henchmen the Hawks. What supernatural deal had he struck to pull this off, and which literary devil had he struck it with?

A prosaic answer would point to the telling of The Band’s near-tragic story through the eyes and ears of drug dealer Greg Keltner. This device instantly demystified the curated sainthood of the Hawks/Band as forefathers of back-to-the-land Americana – mystic bumpkins with Homburgs and mandolins. From the moment we first meet Rick (Danko) and Richard (Manuel) in Niven’s story, there’s no mistaking their priorities: drugs, girls, and music, in that order. Which takes nothing whatever away from the magical music they made.

Keltner, who hails from Ontario like four-fifths of the Hawks/Band, is a somewhat feckless but endearingly poetic soul. True, he scores his dope from ‘Fifth Floor Dave’ in the scuzzy East Village, but he quickly gets the point of Woodstock, the tiny Catskills town to which so many dropout boys and girls are beating a path in the summer of 1967. He also gets the point of the Hawks/Band, responding sensitively and meaningfully to the lovely songs he hears in the squat West Saugerties box known as Big Pink – as he does, still more incredulously, to the soulful woe and funky exhilaration of Music from Big Pink itself.

Keltner may be a rock’n’roll parasite but he is not a heinous dude. Plus we know he’s going to wind up broken and desolate in 1986, the year of Richard Manuel’s wretched death. The loose stoner flow of his narrating voice is the perfect medium for depicting the unsteadiness of Woodstock’s bucolic dysfunction in that 1967-9 period, hinting strongly as it does at Niven’s saturation in the more gonzoid strains of twentieth century American prose from the Beats to Pynchon to the so-called ‘Noise Boys’ (Bangs, Tosches, Meltzer) of 1970s rock journalism – and snaring the disorienting vibe of a time and place in which everyday hedonism is evolving a little too rapidly.

I have no idea whether Rick or Richard would have recognised their lives in these pages, but then nor do I have any idea whether Robbie or Levon or Garth even read Niven’s novella. I do know that Greil Marcus, whose chapter about them in his sacred Mystery Train (1975) framed and explained most of what I felt about The Band, was as astonished by the book as I was, rightly acclaiming it as ‘an amazing piece of work’.

Keltner, in a sense, speaks for every besotted Band fan as he seeks to understand how these five men – these musical brothers – transcended their rather quotidian apprenticeship with Ronnie Hawkins to craft two of the most special records made in the name of ‘rock’. Espousing half-hearted songwriting aspirations of his own, Greg swiftly abandons them on hearing an acetate of Music from Big Pink. Like Al Kooper and Al Aronowitz in their early Rolling Stone pieces about them – and like the group’s entranced British disciples Eric Clapton and George Harrison – he understands instinctively that The Band has tapped into something altogether deeper than rock bombast or singer-songwriter over-sensitivity. ‘Now I knew, I really knew,’ he confesses, ‘that Richard – and Rick, Levon, Robbie, Garth – they were a different order of human being from me.’

If there’s something Zelig-like about the novella’s serendipities – the chance encounters with Dylan, his crony Bob Neuwirth and his manager Albert Grossman, even with Lou Reed – they permit perfect cameos from these enigmatic characters. The drawling Arkansas poetry of Levon Helm’s speaking voice is expertly replicated; so is the aloof coolness of guitarist and principal songwriter Robbie Robertson. There’s also the gauzy presence of love interest Skye, a bewitching sprite who distils the appeal of so many liberated late 1960s girls – and who is bedded by the insatiable Rick before Greg can even get near her.

It should be no great surprise that Niven’s next work of ‘fiction’ was the lacerating black comedy of Kill Your Friends. Certainly he was under no illusion that late 1960s Woodstock represented any kind of valid countercultural utopia. ‘It seems to me it went fairly quickly from being the hippest place you could go to being almost Touristville,’ he said when I talked to him for my Woodstock/Bearsville history Small Town Talk (2016). ‘It was already becoming a caricature of what it had been. A lot of the people were quite troubled, so there was this notion that If I put myself in some kind of bucolic surrounding, things will get better. But changing your locale doesn’t change what’s going on inside you.’

Yet Niven’s remarkable book is a testament to the fact that Woodstock’s ‘locale’ did change the Hawks/Band – just as it profoundly altered the course of North American music.

Barney Hoskyns is the author of Across the Great Divide:

The Band & America (1993) and of Small Town Talk:

Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin,

Jimi Hendrix & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock (2016)

INTRODUCTION

I received the email at 2.17pm on Friday 10 December 2004. I still keep a screenshot of it on the desktop of my computer today, nearly a decade-and-a-half later. Its first sentence reads: ‘Dear John, I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that your proposal for a book in the series, on Music from Big Pink, has been approved by the Board here.’

It was from David Barker, the original editor at 33 1/3, a series of short books that devoted themselves to close analysis of classic albums. All of the titles so far (just sixteen of them at that point, David had only launched 33 1/3 the year before) had taken a journalistic approach, deconstructing the historical context, composition and recording of their chosen records. With one exception – Joe Pernice’s Meat is Murder. Joe had written a coming-of-age novella, a piece of fiction soundtracked by the Smiths’ second studio album. I thought the book was great, and Joe and I had history. We’d met in the late 1990s, in my former life as an A&R manager, when I’d signed his band the Pernice Brothers for the UK.

I’d left full-time employment in late 2001 to try and become a writer. I was thirty-five years old and I had the feeling I was leaving it all very late. Ever since I’d realised I was never going to be a rock star (somewhere around the age of twenty-two), I’d wanted to be a writer. I’d made several attempts at a novel throughout my twenties, but back then I just didn’t have anything like the self-discipline you needed to shut the door for months on end. Also, at that point, I didn’t have anything to write about. As is often the case with novelists, some life would have to happen to me first. To paraphrase Nabokov, before you can build your ivory tower to write in, you have to take the unavoidable trouble of killing a few elephants...

After university, in 1991, I’d drifted into the music industry, eventually landing a job at London Records as an A&R manager (artiste and repertoire, the people who sign new talent), in 1995, at the height of what would later be called the Britpop boom. The first few years were great – a maelstrom of travel, expense accounts, parties, gigs, booze and drugs. But, as I moved into my thirties, I grew weary of the cynicism and the viciousness of major label politics. I became increasingly aware that this hadn’t ever been what I envisaged doing with my life. I started to picture being forty and floundering around in a job I was no good at. And the hangovers were getting worse. I figured I had enough money to survive for a year or two while I wrote the great novel I had in me. (Such was the astonishing level of hubris afoot.) Anyway, I left the business towards the end of 2001, soon after the 9/11 attacks (which, bizarrely, I watched unfold on TV in a room in the Columbia hotel in Bayswater with the Pernice Brothers, who had just flown in from NYC that morning for a UK tour) and started trying to write about my experiences in the music industry.

Originally titled Unrecouped (like the lead character’s soul, I thought grandly), my novel centred on a decent young man who was gradually corrupted by his career in A&R. And it was awful. My God, I cannot tell you how much this book stank. By early 2004 I’d been struggling with the thing on and off for over two years. I’d been trying and failing to get an agent. I’d given myself forty as the absolute-last-gasp age at which I had to be a published author. It was fast approaching. I was out of money and living on the largesse of my then girlfriend and her mother (Helen, Sheila, God bless you both) when I decided to take a trip to Ireland to see some Pernice Brothers shows and catch up with Joe for the first time in a while. I confess, I had an ulterior motive. I’d read Joe’s Meat is Murder and I had an idea for a book in the same series.

While I was working in A&R I’d noticed the level of entrée and prestige drug dealers often enjoyed. You were first in the dressing room after the show. You were on the tour bus, in the limo, on the private jet. It looked like a great life when you were twenty-five. But I didn’t notice it panning out too well for any of these guys when they got older. Very few of them seemed to retire happy and rich to their country pile. They were far more likely to become broken drug addicts with the best of times long behind them and a lot of leftover life to kill. I thought this was a sad and interesting character trajectory.

The problem I kept coming up against was one common to novels set in music: when you invent a rock group it’s very easy to miss the mark and, rather than getting The Commitments, you end up with the kind of band Tucker Jenkins might put together in Grange Hill. I thought an interesting way around this might be to take my idea for a story about a minor drug dealer and wrap it around a real group, at a real moment in their history...

I’d been fascinated by The Band since the late 1980s, when my friend Bill Prince first played me their music. I’m sure if you’re reading this then you probably know their story, but, in case you’ve just liked a couple of my other books and don’t have a clue, here’s the CliffsNotes version: five Canadian (apart from the drummer) musicians spent years backing Canadian Bo Diddley impersonator Ronnie Hawkins before they became Dylan’s band when he went electric in 1965. They moved to Woodstock in upstate New York to work with Dylan in late 1966, after his motorbike accident, and wound up writing their own material and becoming a major critical and commercial success in their own right. The received wisdom about the move to Woodstock was that it was a period of quiet reflection, of woodshedding. Of getting it together in the country. Well, as anyone who knows anything about how rock and roll works could tell you, just transplanting a group of hardened touring musicians in their early-to-mid-twenties from the city to the country would never stop them doing what they were used to doing. As I dug into the research (Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, Barney Hoskyns’ Across the Great Divide and Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire were never off my desk during this period), I learned about all the drinking and the drugs and the partying and the car crashes and the pregnancies that went on in and around Woodstock while The Band were writing the songs that would form the basis of their 1968 debut album. It just seemed perfect to insert my protagonist Greg Keltner (failed musician, minor drug dealer) into this milieu. I pitched the idea to Joe in a bar in Kilkenny. Joe put me in touch with David Barker and in October 2004 I sent him a one-page synopsis and the first three chapters. After an agonising wait, that email arrived. There was only a tiny advance involved, but I felt like I’d shot the moon. If I could get it right, I reasoned, then I might have something here. Maybe we’d get some good reviews and, just maybe, the thing I’d been trying to secure for the last three years – an agent.

I wrote the book over the winter of 2004 and the first part of the following year. I’d always known that the two members of the band Greg would become closest to would be Rick Danko and, particularly, Richard Manuel. The fact that both had died tragically young (the news of Manuel’s suicide