The Band: S/T and/or Music from the Big Pink

Oh, and by the way.....Neil Young's Harvest album is Neil trying to sound like the Brown Album. He ditched Crazy Horse, and put together a good band with a Southern rhythm section. Drummer Kenneth Buttrey played in the same style as Levon, and also tuned his drums thumpy. The Harvest album was recorded in Neil's barn on mobile equipment, again like the Brown Album, also without the standard gratuitous electronic reverb, the mics capturing the sound of the barn, creating a woody sounding album. Everybody, Clapton and Young included, wanted to sound like and be as good as The Band. None of them succeeded, IMO!

The 2nd (S/T, "brown") album has less separation between instruments than MFBP because The Band set up in Sammy's cabana casually, with all the instruments in that one room, only gobos (floor-standing acoustical partitions) separating the drums, piano, organ, and guitar and bass amps from each other. So the mic(s) on each instrument captured the sound of not only the instrument it was on, but the others as well. When the multi-tracks tapes were mixed to stereo, there was no way to eliminate the "bleed" between tracks.

I just again watched the clip of Clapton and Harrison talking about Music From Big Pink. Here's the great quote about it from Eric: "I listened to this album (MFBP), and I thought, this is it---this is where music was supposed to have gone for a long time, and it hasn't really got there. And now it's finally.....someone's finally gone and done it."

The album so effected Clapton he broke up Cream, the biggest band in the world at the time.

Oh (not him again!), one other detail ya'll may (or may not ;-) find interesting: The distinct and huge difference in the sound of the snare drum heard on MFBP vs. the brown album is not from the room, the manner of recording, or anything of that sort. The snare drum on MFBP is a metal-shelled (either brass or aluminum-alloy) Ludwig Supraphonic with metal snare wires, the one on most of the brown album a wood-shelled snare with, perhaps, gut snares (that's what the drum came from the factory fitted with, and is what it sounds like on the album). The difference in sound between metal and wood shelled snare drums is just what you would expect, and indeed what you hear on the two albums.

I think the mics "bleeding" may represent what music is supposed to sound like, as I've heard very few albums from 1969 that have the coherency or overall tone that is as appealing (to me anyway) as the Brown album. Robertson did surprise the Band by grabbing all the songwriting credit (Levon remained pissed off about that forever), but I somehow doubt the pool house had much to do with how hip the tone was…I think it was more about experienced guys paying attention to detail with the knowledge that people were going to be listening pretty close to that stuff, and a remarkable attention to precise song specific arrangement instead of the dense "everybody fill up the available space" sound of lessor bands.