Roger Waters and Graham Nash on The Band.

@crustycoot: My intent in mentioning Abbey Road was not to diminish that album, but rather to draw a distinction between The Beatles and The Band, relating back to Graham Nashes holding those two bands up as the two best in the world.

Prior to eventually getting The Band (it wasn’t until the s/t "brown" album. I had to work backwards to Music From Big Pink), I too may have considered The Beatles about as good as it gets. By the time Abbey Road appeared, that was no longer the case. They sounded like the past to me, I had moved on. Everyone is free to disagree with that sentiment, of course.

When I saw and heard The New Buffalo Springfield live in the summer of ’69 (see my above post), I had already seen and heard live The Beach Boys (my first concert, summer of ’64), The Beatles (summer of ’65), Cream (twice), The Jimi Hendrix Experience (twice), The Who (twice), The Jeff Beck Group, Procol Harum, The Kinks, Them (with Van Morrison), The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fritz (the local San Jose Garage Band whose members included Lindsey Buckingham and little Stevie Nicks) and maybe a hundred more (including San Jose’s own Chocolate Watchband, The Syndicate Of Sound, Stained Glass, People, a bunch more you’ve never heard of.). By the time TNBS had finished their set, I considered them "better" than all the above. Well, except for The Kinks ;-) .

I had become a man ;-) .

I was a young working musician when Big Pink arrived and pretty much everybody I knew in the biz was stunned. I'd seen "Bob Dylan and the Hawks" live and was blown away as a Dylan fan...just miles ahead of any other live band in 1966. Saw the Band a couple of years later and again was impressed at how powerful they were...Procul Harum were great live (Gary Brooker was an incredible voice)...for me the Lowell George led Little Feat were the best live band from the 70's.

@tostadosunidos and @wolf_garcia: Love Procol Harum! With organist Matthew Fisher at least. Those first three albums are astoundingly good. I didn’t see them live until the Home album tour, after Matthew had departed. I didn’t like that album at all; gone were Matthew’s majestic classically-influenced organ parts, replaced by Robin Trowers blues-based guitar parts. Live Gary Brooker was in fine voice, and drummer B.J. Wilson was of course just fantastic.

Beside both The Band and Procol harum having identical line-ups (drums, bass, piano, organ, one guitar), each had an organist with a classical music education, singers owing a great debt to Ray Charles (Richard Manuel of course), and a history of playing R & B music.

I somehow missed out on Little Feat, but did see The Electric Flag in ’68, with Mike Bloomfield and Buddy Miles (and four sax players!). Awesome! I also feel very fortunate in having seen Big Joe Turner backed by The Blasters, mid-80’s. Big Joe Turner---now THAT’S a man! In The Blasters at that time were Lee Allen (a member of Little Richard’s 50’s band) on tenor sax and Steve Berlin (soon thereafter to leave to join Los Lobos---another great band!) on baritone. I just saw Steve live with NRBQ, both sounding fantastic. NRBQ, one of my favorite live bands.

I have two friends who saw Dylan & The Hawks at The San Jose Civic Auditorium, a show I would kill to have been at (though in ’65-6 Dylan was way too odd for my suburban teenage mind to comprehend). I also somehow never saw Moby Grape or The Byrds. Can’t see ’em all!

@stevewarton: And shortly after that Dylan learned Grossman had cut himself into Bob's songwriting publishing. That was the end of Grossman. Greedy bastard!

Here’s some miscellaneous, not so close encounters with The Band and The Byrds both. I attended the upstate NY State University College at New Paltz in the early seventies. My girlfriend and I had a friend then who commuted to school from Woodstock, not too far away. She invited us up to visit one weekend, and while there drove us right past the Big Pink house. There was nobody there, but still.

That summer, ’71, my girlfriend got a job working as a TWA ground hostess at Kennedy Airport in Queens. I stayed up at school that summer working, while she stayed with her folks. She called one day to say she met The Byrds, who were boarding a flight back to Los Angeles. And not only that, Roger McGuinn had propositioned her, asking her go back to L.A. with him.

I’ve borne McGuinn a grudge ever since, even though my she declined his entreaties. and missed her chance at becoming a groupie. Now that I’m thinking about this fifty years later, I’d still like to punch him in nose.

Mike

.