The way I figure it, you get one night -- Saturday -- when you're not under the gun from the work week. That's it. Hopefully you can relax and recharge your battery. I got lucky this weekend. Though I didn't sleep as soundly as I could have Saturday night, when I did my laundry Sunday morning, a pair of cotton slacks and a nice blue cotton button-up shirt with thin charcoal and white stripes emerged from the dryer good enough to wear today without having to haul out the iron and ironing board and give them the once-over. This almost never happens. It was like magic.
That's my work story.
I've been totally immersed -- I'd say submerged -- in The Band. Yesterday I spent the entire day in bed, after expediting the laundry, reading Levon Helm's memoir (written with Stephen Davis) This Wheel's on Fire. In the afternoon and evening I must have listened to The Basement Tapes four to five times in a row. Saturday night I saw a solid British documentary, Bob Dylan & The Band: Down in the Flood (2012):
But what has really got me hooked is Cahoots (1971), The Band's fourth album. It's incredible. Pay no attention to Christgau's B-minus grade; the record is a straight A. Robbie Robertson's writing and Richard Manuel's singing dominate:
Manuel even sings a song with Van Morrison, "4% Pantomime":
What's bizarre to me, a true believer in The Band, is that I had almost no knowledge of Cahoots. I knew "Life is a Carnival" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" because the former is on The Last Waltz while the latter is a Bob Dylan gem that appears on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II.
Apparently The Band shied away from performing most of the songs live because the sound of the album was too hard to replicate outside the studio, at least that's what I read in the written material that accompanies Rock of Ages (1972).
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