The Band

i only know their self titled album but that's a real good one. will check out more of them

The Last Waltz

Yep

Huge performance innit! by a massive band tbh, more "The Band" love should endure within these pages tbh...

you know the byrds bet welching prick? if not, check them out

got it on blu ray a couple of months back.

One of the most beautiful songs ever written.

They were about a million times more powerful when they were known as The Hawks.

This ^

Spookily, the URL of this thread tells me it's number '66'. OMEN

underrated?! I think they are hailed as an essential listen for music fanatics and they hold a special place in rock history. Little Feat is an underrated band, not The Band. To tell you the truth, I agree with Rod, they were a million times more powerful when they were known as The Hawks and were a proper rock band.

I have a problem with them, which is actually a problem I have with most of the artists from Canada - they always sound a bit like hybrids. Now, this is a good thing when you think of people like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, because having hybrid roots really set themself apart from the rest of the pack and they created music that was entirely of their own. But with The Band, I always struggled to find the real beauty in their material.

Of course they have written some smashing tunes, like The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down or When You Awake - but their blend of rock, soul and american traditional music has never convinced me much. Given the potential they had (they were all wonderful musicians, and Danko and Manuel had a voice to die for) they could have done much better if they had a PROPER songwriter in the group. I can listen to them all day and think "this is good - this is very good" but there is not one song that'll make me say "This is exceptional". I appreciate the historical importance of Old Dixie and everything, but at the end of the day it has just no emotional impact on me - and it doesn't even sound like a great departure from the music that came before it. It's just what all the Greenwich Village folksingers were doing in that decade, only on a much much bigger scale. And this makes it even less appealing to me, because most of the beauty of the american folk tradition was in the intimacy of the performances...once you put it in the context of a big band, with six voices, a piano and a bloody pipe organ, all those emotions are gone!


I love The Last Waltz but if I have to be honest, the thing that stands out the most (beside Van Morrison in a purple jumpsuit!) is the performance of The Weight - and it's entirely because of The Staple Singers.
So yeah, I wouldn't call them underrated - I would just call them a very good band and a brilliant backing band.

They were the toughest band to download off napster. Thank fuck for more accurate search engines

I clapped at the end of that video.