On July 1, 1968, the arrival of the debut album from a curious new group hit the music community with a resounding impact, its waves of influence felt almost immediately. Music From Big Pink was an enigma, sounding rawer and more rustic than the lysergically layered, overblown rock of the day, and feeling entirely out of step with the current fashion.
Its exotic blend of country, gospel and R&B would prove explosively consequential. An enamoured Eric Clapton broke up the virtuosic power trio Cream to pursue similarly down-home ambitions. George Harrison, evangelical with his love for the authenticity of the songs, steered The Beatles back to live studio performances. The Rolling Stones ditched their psychedelic posturing to re-embrace their blues roots. The Who considered its authors bona-fide geniuses. “Music From Big Pink,” Roger Daltrey told this writer, “was one of the best albums ever made.”
From their mountain retreat in upstate New York, this inscrutable collective of four Canadians and one American had inadvertently re-channelled the course of music history. And they didn’t even have a name.
"It came out looking like we were rebelling against the rebellion,” the band’s former guitarist Robbie Robertson told me in 2005. “And perhaps that’s true, but I don’t remember anybody saying: ‘Let’s rebel against the rebellion.’”
At that time, Robertson was one of three surviving members of the group, which would come to be known as The Band, and the sole curator of their legacy, having just produced the comprehensive career-spanning box-set It was a role he’d got used to – as the group’s main songwriter and spokesman, Robertson had,
