Springsteen and Clapton on their favorite, heh, band.

The brown album contains more of what we think of as The Band "sound" and style. I complete understand preferring it to MFBP (I myself did for years), but the point of this thread is to celebrate the impact MFBP had on the musical community in 1968. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that in 1969 the brown album revolutionized Rock ’n’ Roll music, and in a more accessible way than had MFBP. MFBP is very sneaky! ;-)

Jim Keltner still marvels at Levon Helm’s drumming on MFBP, which is absolutely brilliant. The drumming on the brown album is also marvelous, about half the songs featuring pianist Richard Manuel on Levon’s Gretsch kit. Richard is a fantastically musical drummer, and a very witty, creative one. Yes, there is such a thing an witty musicianship.

I was completely consumed by the first two albums of both Cream and Hendrix at the time of MFBP’s release (June, 1968), and didn’t "get" The Band AT ALL. It wasn’t until a year after it’s release that I had evolved to the point where I was finally capable of doing so. When the brown album came out I was ready for it, and listened to it constantly for a coupla years, absorbing not just it's music and lyrics, but the lessons they had to teach.

The brown album made almost everything else irrelevant to me, including Cream and Hendrix. Clapton was so shaken by MFBP he told Jack & Ginger that he was done with Cream, traveled to West Saugerties (the town in which the Big Pink house is located), hanging out with The Band as he tried to get up the courage to ask them to invite him to join. In the film Eric says "I thought maybe they could use a rhythm guitarist or something." ;-)

I never warmed to The Band, this despite (or perhaps because) I must have heard the Big Pink LP thousands (okay, maybe only hundreds) of times at buddies' houses through the years. I went to a special pre-release screening of the movie, as well. To my ears they were whiny, forced and slow. Yeah, I know... Dem's fightin' words!

I am lucky enough to be one of 106 people in the audience at an outdoor concert at Levon Helm's studio in Woodstock this weekend, celebrating what would have been his 81st birthday.  Chris Thile is fronting the "Midnight Ramble" band.  I have been listening to a lot of the The Band to prepare :).

Richard Thompson and the rest of Fairport Convention were another totally floored by Big Pink when they first heard it, and also their 2nd LP. It was The Band’s music that lead Fairport to dig deeper into their own English folk music roots and mix it with rock. Just as The Band did with various American roots music. Fairport may have never became what they did without that influence.

Speaking of the influence the brown album had on The Band's contemporaries:

I went to my local Barnes & Noble this afternoon to return the copy of the new John Hiatt/Jerry Douglas LP I received in the mail yesterday. Even before opening the flimsy shipping carton I could see there was a problem: the carton exhibited a severe dish-warp, so bad that there was no way the LP could be flat.

But I of course opened the carton, and not only was the LP warped, but whomever pulled the album from the rack in the B & N warehouse grabbed it by the corner of the cover, causing the cover to bend and crease around the perimeter of the LP. Cretin!

I intended to have the store order me a replacement copy (it's a B & N exclusive version of the LP: the cover is signed by John and Jerry, and the LP is pressed of black and charcoal vinyl, kinda cool), but it just so happens they had a copy in their small LP island rack, in perfect condition.

Anyway, back to The Band. After exchanging LP's, I went over to the magazine racks to see what was new. There was a new issue of Uncut with Dylan on the cover, and a bunch of pages inside devoted to him. There was also a new Mojo Magazine with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young on the cover, the story on them inside devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Deja Vu album.

I for some reason never much cared for the album, and hadn't seen a pic of them in years. This picture really caught my attention: it was sepia-hued, and Stills was wearing a Confederate soldier uniform. That reminded me that the original album had a brown textured cover, very reminiscent of The Band's brown album cover, released a year before Deja Vu. A Confederate soldier uniform, like that Virgin Caine of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" would certainly have worn? What a coincidence!

Another UK band who mimicked The Band was Brinsley Schwartz; Nick Lowe has stated they were trying to be the UK The Band, failing miserably in that effort. Everybody musician I knew completely changed his approach to making music in the wake of the brown album. Guitarists ditched their Les Paul's and Marshall stacks, replacing them with Telecasters and small combo amps (the Fender black-face Deluxe Reverb being a favorite, along with the 1950's tweed Bassman), Drummers sold their second bass drum and extra toms---returning to playing a simple 4-pc kit, and tuned the drums low and dead, to get Levon's "thumpy" sound. Being English and having the "Rock Star" look was out, being American (or Canadian ;-) and looking working-class was now cool.

Of course, this was all happening on an underground, cult level. In the real world Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were what normal people were listening to, along with all the Progressive bands my kind had no use for or interest in.