Montreal is where Ronnie Hawkins put together, one player at a time, many different incarnations of his backing band, The Hawks. The longest-lived of those was the one that included amongst it’s members Levon Helm, J.R. Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manual, and Garth Hudson. Never liking being someone else’s employee, at a certain point Levon suggested they go it alone. And so they did, first as The Canadian Squyers, then Levon & The Hawks, then just The Hawks, working with John Hammond Jr., and ultimately Bob Dylan, as his 1965-66 world tour road band. After a motorcycle accident laid him up, cancelling the next leg of the tour, Dylan brought them up to Woodstock, where he lived.
There they found themselves a split-level rental-house with a basement in which to set-up, rehearse, and record. They spent 1967 doing all that, the recordings end up being called The Basement Tapes. Capitol Records offered The Hawks a record contract, and they spent late ’67/early ’68 recording their debut album in NYC and Los Angeles. They were also working on coming up with a new band name, The Hawks not sounding very contemporary. The were surprised when they saw the test pressings for the album, emblazened with a name someone else came up with, The Band.
The release of that album, Music From Big Pink, absolutely rocked the music world, actually changing it’s trajectory. Eric Clapton heard it, said to himself, and I quote: "Music had been going in the wrong direction for a long time. When I heard it (MFBP), I thought to myself "Well, someone’s finally gone and done it right." He disbanded Cream, perhaps the biggest band in the world, going to Woodstock to hang with The Band, waiting, as he now laughs, for them to ask him to join. It eventually dawned on him they didn’t need him, so he went looking for someone to play "real" music with, as a hired gun. He joined Delaney & Bonnie’s band, where he met all the guys he ended up picking to be in his subsequent band, Derek & The Dominoes.
It’s so funny that the whole "Americana" movement is traced back to the recording of those basement tapes, music played by a band containing four Canadians---Levon Helm is from Chicken Scratch (seriously!) Arkansas, Dylan from of course Hibbing Minnesota.
A Pass amp, or any other great piece of gear you can name, would be nice to have to listen to Music From Big Pink through, but listening to it, really listening to it, is what it takes to "get it". Getting it can be done through a boombox, it just takes a little more work!
