Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 3, Music From Big Pink

Tonight caps a work week where I was put fully in mind of the Hobbes quote "that Man to Man is an errant wolf." In my case, a wolf, perched atop an ergonomically correct chair, trapped in a carpeted, air-conditioned pen, transfixed by a flat screen. Granted, no one is lighting me up with mortar fire -- it's not truly a "war of all against all" -- but it is, after a fashion, a hell realm.

Fortunately I can still sprint. I sped across six busy of lanes of International Boulevard traffic to catch the bus to the train station, and then I sprang up four flights of stairs and jogged over a skybridge and up an escalator to enter the train car just as it was about to depart. A miserable work week gives way as a promising weekend begins.

Last weekend I kept thinking that it was June. But it's not. It's already August. The light here is already starting to recede ever so slightly. What a joy it was on Saturday night to be alone -- a bachelor at home -- cooking a sirloin and listening to Music From Big Pink (1968):

It was as if after nearly 50 years of existence I have arrived at some sort of dialectical synthesis. The past sublated into a healthy, relaxed, unitary present free of man-woman conflict. For a musical accompaniment I could ask for nothing more than "Tears of Rage," the first track Richard Manuel/Bob Dylan masterpiece:

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse

When Levon Helm died last year I received a request from my mother, who is a resident in an assisted-living facility, for a copy of Music From Big Pink. Under the impression that I had a copy in my iTunes, I assured her that I'd have it in the mail right away. To my surprise it turned out that I was mistaken. All I had on my computer was The Band (1969) and The Best of the Band (1976). I promptly went online and downloaded the 2000 digital remaster and burned the old gal a copy.

All my other recordings of The Band were on magnetic tape. The copy of Music From Big Pink that I thought I had was actually a used cassette that I purchased the first summer I lived in the Emerald City 23 years ago. If you don't count Planet Waves (1974) and The Basement Tapes (1975), which are Dylan and Band collaborations that were staples of my university days, it was the first album of The Band's that I owned. For me it will always be the best. It is linked in my mind with my first run at being a bachelor.

In 1990 I left my wife in New York City and flew to San Francisco. From there I took a Greyhound to Southern Oregon where I purchased a used Jeep Gladiator pick-up manufactured in the late 1960s. It was a "high, rat-colored car" (which is Flannery O'Connor's description of Hazel Motes' automobile in Wise Blood), and I drove it north up I-5 to Seattle, entering the city the morning after Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter against Detroit.

I worked construction that summer and jogged the ribbon of greenery that I run to this day and listened to Music From Big Pink, Sonic Youth's Goo (1990), The Lemonhead's Lovey (1990), Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's The Good Son (1990) and plenty of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975). I drank Midnight Dragon malt liquor and slept on the floor and read about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the national edition of the New York Times. I was a young man alone, estranged from his wife, but okay with it. Rick Danko's cover of "Long Black Veil" spoke to me.

At the beginning of fall that year I traveled back to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up with the wife. It was then that The Last Waltz (1978) -- that end-of-the-line love song to arena rockers -- became my manifesto, my lifeline. But my first love is Music From Big Pink. It's my bachelor's anthem, a perfect organic whole of funky, folksy, iridescent, soulful, regenerative music that occupies a timeless space -- a triumphant tribute to the Hippie wisdom contained in Timothy Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out."  -- It can done! The Band proved it at Big Pink.