The Big Pink and Me: Some Thoughts on The Band

It's trite to say that a specific artist's music shaped your life... but The Band shaped my life.

When I was a child, my parents kept their CD collection on a shelf in the kitchen. They sometimes asked me to pick an album to play during dinner. The collection was a mix of my mother's tastes (Paul McCartney, Alison Krauss) and my father's (The Rolling Stones, Santana). I don't know who The Band's Greatest Hits belonged to, or why I gravitated to it again and again. All I knew was that I loved their music. I still do.

Earlier this year, Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, passed away. That's probably why I've been thinking about them lately, and revisiting their catalog. Doing so has given me an understanding of the music, and the men who made it, that I didn't have as a child. It's given me an appreciation and literacy that I formerly lacked even in my love.

The Band's best work filtered tradition through the sieve of abstraction. The music they played was rooted in the past, but distorted by the present. On one hand, you had American history and culture – the Civil War, expansionism, the frontier. On the other, you had the times America found itself in – the Vietnam War, counterculture, Beat poetry. The sounds, and stories, that The Band created were seated in the vibrating center of that long, tense spectrum. There, they found harmony in dissonance.

The music was American (one could argue that it basically created modern Americana), but 4/5ths of the musicians were Canadian. Three were incredibly gifted vocalists. All were master instrumentalists. Our cast of characters:

• Rick Danko. The closest thing they had to a frontman, at least on stage. Charismatic, a lightning rod, moving like a Muppet even when heroin was making him nod off on his feet.

• Levon Helm. Arkansas native son, provider of the earthy roots that inspired The Band's best songs. Often regarded as one of the best drummer-singers of all time.

• Garth Hudson. Quiet, with the voice and looks of a mountain man. His first language was music, and he had a gift for it that few others, including his bandmates, shared.

• Richard Manuel. Beautiful, fragile, doomed. Almost uncanny in how well he embodied the "addict with the voice of an angel" cliche.

• Robbie Robertson. An intellectual and a fabulist. The king of Bullshit Mountain, but with good reason: as full of himself as he was of inspiration and ambition.

I'm not sure if you can call The Band underrated. There's a reason so many other artists, including Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, showed up to support them in The Last Waltz. Most people nowadays have at least heard "The Weight" on a classic rock station. However, I think it might be fair to call The Band underremembered. Few people speak of them in the same breath as The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Few people would react to hearing the name "Rick Danko" as I do.

I am, to this day, caught in the sway of this group's music. How did these five people come together to create what they did? It almost beggars belief to think of a song like "It Makes No Difference," – to think of how fortunate it was that Robbie Robertson should write those lyrics, that Rick Danko should sing them, that Garth Hudson should give us that saxophone solo, and Levon Helm and Richard Manuel those harmonies. It's a song of heartbreak, and there are many of those, but it has an incredible sweep and scope and scale. It is, like "Across the Great Divide" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Acadian Driftwood," intimate, heartbreaking, and epic.

That is the other spectrum The Band stretched across: the heart and the horizon. Their songs were the songs of a country. They were also the songs of characters susceptible to sorrow and joy alike. Sorrow and joy form their own spectrum. You get the idea.

It's oddly fitting that every member of The Band died in America, even if four of them weren't born there. Manuel succumbed to alcoholism at the age of 42; Danko to various addictions at 55. Helm came back from extreme debt to build a respectable solo career as a folk artist, only to be struck down by throat cancer at 71. Robertson, while a successful film composer (most notably of Scorsese's late work), never again reached the heights of his time with The Band, condemned by Helm and undefended by the others. Hudson, who desired privacy and quiet, went bankrupt following a house fire, and lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity.

The Band is gone. The music remains. I hear it, driving across the Ohio River Valley ("Try to raise a family, end up an enemy / Over what went down on the Plains of Abraham") and kayaking in Utah ("Across the great divide / just grab your hat and take that ride"). I hear it, scattering my father's ashes ("I can feel you standing there / But I don't see you anywhere") and thinking about the kitchen where I ate dinner as a child ("Goodbye to that country home / So long, lady I have known").

I heard it then, and I hear it now, and I will hear it for the rest of my life. One day I will be old, and then I will be gone, and even then, I will hear the music. It is not so much the soundtrack of my life as it is the medium that has spoken my personhood into being. Music itself is created through various mediums, like vibrating strings and percussive waves. The Band is one of the mediums through which God speaks to me.

One question that has strangely captivated me of late was whether Garth Hudson was a Christian. This makes a kind of sense – I myself am Christian, and therefore concerned with the salvation of others' souls. My father was an atheist, and I have often worried about his salvation since he died earlier this year. That he died the same year as Hudson is a coincidence. That I have since worked to understand him, in much the same way I've simultaneously worked to understand the group who animated my childhood, not so much. I hear a song, and I am once again sitting at the kitchen table, listening to my mother and father speak lovingly, all of us unaware that later years would bring the dissolution of our family.

Whether or not Hudson was a Christian, he was certainly inspired by gospel music. (One of his most famous quotes: "There is a view that jazz is 'evil' because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work.") I feel semi-justified in ending, then, with this couplet:

"When you believe, you will relieve the only soul / That you were born with to grow old and never know."