Soul sounds and rugged rock in ‘Big Pink’

Today’s refugees from formal religion are not only finding their prophets and preachers in unusual places, they are finding their parables and texts where one ordinarily would not look.

One of the places is in rock music and one of the most impressive examples of the growing importance of the lyrics of these songs (and their manner of delivery) is the huge success of “Music from Big Pink” (Capitol SKA 2955) by The Band.

Those interested in what speaks to the under 30 (and to many above 30 as well) ought to listen to this album. Since it was reviewed here last summer, it has continued to be one of the best-selling albums in the country and shows no sign of diminishing in importance. On a recent day, in four separate conversations, I discovered that a poet, a businessman, a college student and a high school student had each played the album within the previous 24 hours.

“Music from Big Pink” is by a group which has not made a public appearance in almost two years and for two years prior to that was an anonymous back-up group for singer Bob Dylan.

There are 11 songs on the album and the members of the band wrote all but two of them. Bob Dylan wrote one alone and collaborated with band members on two of the others.

The sound of the album is deceptively simple and fundamental. It rocks along the bass and drums with other instruments adding color and occasional solos and harmony. But it is the rocking rhythm which sets the feeling. The voices are unique and make a sound not available anywhere else in popular music that I know of. It is a rural sound, not on the country & western stations, yet not rural in the sense of lack of sophistication; I think it is hymnal.

In most contemporary popular music, the lead voice remains the lead throughout the song. In this album, the lead is much more flexible. Sometimes it is consistent throughout the song, sometimes it is passed around among various singers, and there is consistent use of multiple voices in close harmony.

The use of the vocal devices from church music and from folk and gospel music makes the voices on this album unusually effective instruments for the transmission of emotion.

“Lonesome Suzie,” for instance, a composition by pianist Richard Manuel and apparently sung by him, is as agonizingly personal a tragic story, though in a different way, as “Eleanor Rigby.”

Bob Dylan, whose shadow hangs over this album, or stands behind it as you will, in a serious moment once pointed out (on a KQED interview) that folk music, in general, dealt in symbolic imagery, “people with stakes coming out of their hearts” and mysterious figures appearing in visions.

The songs the band sings and plays, including Dylan’s own numbers, are cast in a rhetoric of enigma. Most of the time it can be interpreted as you will, but it always seems darkly to follow a story line which hovers just a degree beyond complete comprehension. They are Gothic Tales in song, cast in a scene that is, by implication, rugged mountain America. That quality of ruggedness is important.

By playing the album over and over — and I have personally played it more than any other album this year — the songs grow on you, change around and become temporary favorites as with the albums by the Beatles and by Dylan himself. Already there are other versions of some of them, “Tears of Rage,” “The Weight,” “This Wheels on Fire,” “I Shall Be Released,” and there will be more.

The lyric influences in the songs include, of course, Bob Dylan (I am speaking of the ones he did not write) but they almost all share the feeling of a kind of modern mythology. It is not without significance that the only song not written by either Dylan or members of the band themselves, is “Long Black Veil,” a mournful and eerie country ballad which is in the same style.

“Tears of Rage” (written by Dylan and Manuel) is an epic vision. Ostensibly dealing with the parent-daughter relationship, it is about the pain of life itself. “To Kingdom Come” (by J.R. Robertson) has a strong biblical feeling of parables and prophecies.

Richard Manuel’s “In a Station” is a plaintive love song with a haunting feeling rather like “Last Year at Marienbad.” It contains some beautiful lines such as “Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me/and I could taste your hair,” and “I could sing the sound of your laughter/Still I don’t know your name.”

J.R. Robertson’s “Caledonia Mission” seems like a nightmare love song of a TV Western set done with a rollicking kind of rhythmic pattern that gives strength to the song. “The Weight,” another Robertson song, is somewhat similar, full of parables and allusions and biblical implications.

“Chest Fever,” another Rob-

“Tears of Rage” (written by Dylan and Manuel) is an epic vision. Ostensibly dealing with the parent-daughter relationship, it is about the pain of life itself.

ertson number, is a love song in good spirits, with the most exciting instrumental passages of the album, including a wild organ solo. “Lonesome Suzie” by Manuel, is an American tragedy, the simplest song with a straight storyline.

This album I now believe is the most important album of contemporary music issued so far this year and unlikely to be challenged by any but the work of The Beatles or Dylan. The songs are going to be American classics and it will not matter if there is no second album nor if The Band ever appears in person again.

A longer version of this column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 11, 1968.