Phones Down + Northern Lights – Southern Cross

An unexpected windfall at work today -- the hard drive of the phone system crashed and needed to be replaced. It took the technicians all day to secure a replacement drive; in fact, the phones were still down when I left at 5 PM. This meant that from about 10:30 AM on there was a beautiful, still quiet and calm in the office. It was like lounging near a cool pond in the deep forest on a hot summer day. I was able to knock out a significant amount of mind-numbing data entry of cash journals in QuickBooks.

So a good Monday after a thoroughly depressing Sunday. I finished the second half of Levon Helm and Stephen Davis' This Wheel's on Fire. The first half, up until the point where Levon ditches the rest of The Hawks who are backing Dylan on his historic first electric tour, is all good cheer and high times. And that continues through Helm's return to the boys in 1967 at Big Pink in West Saugerties to work on some of The Basement Tapes and then to Music From Big Pink (1968) and The Brown Album (1969), culminating in their appearance on Ed Sullivan, which is pretty much the zenith:

It's downhill from there. Money and drugs (heroin, cocaine, pills) and women and bad feelings over Robbie Robertson monopolizing most of the writing credit take over the book's narrative. By the evening -- I was only 15 or 20 pages from the end; Richard Manuel had already hanged himself -- I was catatonic. It felt like I had been drinking bottle after bottle of Grand Marnier and eating minute steaks cooked on an upturned electric iron, which Richard Manuel was said to have done in the days when he was living on Zuma Beach in Malibu at The Band's Shangri-La Studios. I couldn't fall asleep I was so disturbed and agitated. Finally, after midnight, I drifted off, only to have to get up at the usual rat race time of 4 AM.

I listened to a lot of Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) yesterday; it's the album that precedes the filming of The Last Waltz (Islands (1977) is knocked out quickly following the concert to fulfill The Band's contract with Capitol Records) and sounds the most like what the The Band sounds like in The Last Waltz. Northern Lights – Southern Cross is a good album. Levon Helm says it's one of The Band's best. I would definitely not go that far. The Band does know how to craft a fine song. But by 1975 their sound is tending toward the slick and soulless. You can taste the cocaine and hear the rustling of cash.