What was really enjoyable was when Bob and
I would get locked into all of these things and
sometimes we went into our own world. And
with the rest of the guys too. We had these signals
with the eyes, or maybe with me bracing the neck
of my guitar at a certain point. When we got
locked into our own space, we could feel the
magic in that. And it meant we had a barrier
around the booing and all of this other stuff going
on in the outside world. We were just in such
a musical sanctum that we were unstoppable.
Musically, we were
bulletproof. So we had
wonderful times, doing what
we did. We knew that this
was a tremendous rebellion,
but we thought we were
right. And time has
proved that we were on
to something.How crucial was it to find the
right conditions for recording
Music From Big Pink?
I had this idea, this dream, and
we just needed to find a place.
It didn’t matter where, but onething led to another and eventually we ended up in
Woodstock because of Bob and [Dylan’s manager]
Albert Grossman. When we got there we found
this house, this sanctuary, and started to put Music
From Big Pink together. It was like a clubhouse,
where we could shut off the outside world, and it
was my belief that, because
I knew these guys, something
magical would happen. I knew
their capabilities, I knew them
inside out. And I thought
I knew what was best
for us. And some true
magic did happen.Can you remember
the first time the
magic happened?
It wasn’t so much of
a moment, it was a growing period. In
the back of my mind I was thinking
about Les Paul. He had his own
studio, he had his own place of
creation where he had these tools.
When you first hear records by Les
Paul and Mary Ford you think:
“Nothing sounds like that! This thingmust be an interesting idea, because you’re not
doing what you do in a formal atmosphere.” It was
a matter of going inside a cave and doing
something that has nothing to do with anything
except your own creativity. We had this basement
down there at Big Pink, and an engineer friend of
ours came in. He said: “This is
going to sound terrible. You’ve
got cinder-block walls and
concrete floors and there’s
a furnace over here. This is an
awful place for sound.” And
again, like we were saying
earlier, it made me feel like:
“Oh yeah? Really?” We’d been
working with Bob Dylan, so
breaking the rules wasn’t
anything new. We’d been
breaking rules all of our life,
where we’d played and the way we came up. I took
Bob out there and showed him our little set-up
and he got it in a second. He gravitated to it. So it
was this procedure of making our own sound in
there, first as The Basement Tapes and then Music
From Big Pink. It proved my theory that it could
work. And at that time, with the exception of Les
MA Paul, nobody was doing that.
IN^ P
HO
TO
©^
ELL
IOT
T^ LA
NDY
/^ W
WW
.EL
LIO
TTL
AND
Y.CO
M
“If I hadn’t got so
addicted to music
at such a young
age, I would’ve
ended up in
movie land.”
The Band rehearsing in Woodstock,
New York in 1968: (l-r) Richard
Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Levon
Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko.CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 59