Music from Big Pink, the Band's debut album, was released 55 years ago today
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Music from Big Pink, the Band's debut album, was released 55 years ago today
Music From Big Pink was released on July 1, 1968 — 55 years ago today
“These are fiery ingredients and results can be expected to be explosive. The chord changes are refreshing, the stories are told in a subtle yet taut way; country tales of real people you can relate to (the daughter in "Tears of Rage") the singing sometimes loose as field-help but just right. The packaging, including Dylan's non-Rembrandt cover art, is apropos and honest (there's that word again). This album was recorded in approximately two weeks. There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.
— Al Kooper, Rolling Stone, 1968
Album cover by Bob Dylan
Music from Big Pink was the debut studio album by The Band. Released this day in 1968 — 55 years ago — it employs a blend of country, rock, folk, classical, R&B and soul.
The music was composed partly in "Big Pink," a house shared by Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson in West Saugerties, New York.
The album itself was recorded in studios in New York and Los Angeles in 1968, and followed the band's backing of Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour (as The Hawks) and time spent together in upstate New York recording material that was officially released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, also with Dylan.
The laid-back feel of the album attracted the attention of other major artists. For example, Eric Clapton cites the album's roots rock style as what convinced him to quit Cream, and pursue the styles of Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, Derek and the Dominos and his debut album.
George Harrison was also impressed by the album's musicianship and sense of camaraderie, and Roger Waters has called it the second "most influential record in the history of rock and roll" after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and that it "affected Pink Floyd deeply, deeply, deeply."
The original LP record issue included a gatefold cover in 1968, duplicated 40 years later in 2008 as a remastered 180 gm LP. On compact disc, it was remastered as a gold CD in 1989, as a DVD-audio in 2001 and as a remastered numbered edition SACD in 2009.
On August 29, 2000, it was reissued by EMI Records as a standard compact disc with nine bonus tracks as listed below.
"Big Pink" is located at 56 Parnassus Lane (formerly 2188 Stoll Road). The house was built by Ottmar Gramms, who bought the land in 1952. The house was newly built when Rick Danko, who was collaborating with Bob Dylan at the time, found it as a rental.
It was to this house that Bob Dylan would eventually retreat to write songs, play them and experiment with other songs, in its large basement. The two-track recordings made by them, as a sort of audio sketch book, in the basement itself, came to be known as The Basement Tapes.
These tapes were circulated among other musicians at the time, and hits were made of "Too Much of Nothing" and "Mighty Quinn" as recordings by other artists, Peter, Paul and Mary and Manfred Mann respectively. The house became known locally as 'Big Pink' for its pink siding.
Members of Dylan's band (with Dylan himself writing one and co-writing two) wrote most of the songs on Music from Big Pink at or around the house, and the band then adopted the name The Band. The cover illustration for the album is by Dylan.
The house was sold by Mr. Gramms in 1977 to M. Amitin, who rented the house to Parnassus Records, a label specializing in classical music which used the basement as its headquarters.
In 1998, Amitin sold the house to Don and Sue LaSala, who maintain the house as a private residence and keep the creative tradition alive by creating music in the basement with friends from the Woodstock area and beyond.
Writer David Kinney interviewing Don LaSala in the basement studio of Big Pink, 2011
Photo by Frank Beacham
Willie Dixon was born 108 years ago today.
A blues musician, vocalist, songwriter, arranger and record producer, Dixon was proficient on both the upright bass and the guitar and as a vocalist. He was one of the most prolific songwriters of his time.
Next to Muddy Waters, Dixon is recognized as the most influential person in shaping the post-World War II sound of the Chicago blues. His songs have been recorded by countless musicians in many genres as well as by various ensembles in which he participated.
A short list of the his most famous compositions includes "Little Red Rooster," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Spoonful," "Back Door Man," "I Just Want to Make Love to You," "My Babe," "Wang Dang Doodle" and "I Can't Quit You, Baby."
These tunes were written during the peak of Chess Records, 1950–1965, and performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter. They influenced a worldwide generation of musicians.
Dixon also was an important link between the blues and rock and roll, working with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley in the late 1950s. His songs were covered by some of the biggest artists of more recent times, such as Bob Dylan, Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Dixon’s mother, Daisy, often rhymed the things she said — a habit her son imitated. At the age of seven, young Dixon became an admirer of a band that featured pianist, Little Brother Montgomery. Dixon was first introduced to blues when he served time on prison farms in Mississippi as a teenager. He later learned how to sing harmony from local carpenter, Leo Phelps.
Dixon sang bass in Phelps' group, The Jubilee Singers, a local gospel quartet that regularly appeared on the Vicksburg radio station, WQBC. He began adapting poems he was writing as songs, and even sold some tunes to local music groups.
Dixon left Mississippi for Chicago in 1936. A man of considerable stature, at six and a half feet and weighing over 250 pounds, he took up boxing. He was so successful that he won the Illinois State Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championship (Novice Division) in 1937.
Dixon turned professional as a boxer and worked briefly as Joe Louis' sparring partner. After four fights, Dixon left boxing after getting into a fight with his manager over being cheated out of money.
Dixon met Leonard Caston at the boxing gym where they would harmonize at times. Dixon performed in several vocal groups in Chicago, but it was Caston that got him to pursue music seriously. Caston built him his first bass, made of a tin can and one string. Dixon's experience singing bass made the instrument familiar. He also learned the guitar.
In 1939, Dixon was a founding member of the Five Breezes, with Caston, Joe Bell, Gene Gilmore and Willie Hawthorne. The group blended blues, jazz and vocal harmonies in the mode of the Ink Spots.
Dixon's progress on the upright bass came to an abrupt halt during the advent of World War II when he resisted the draft as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned for ten months. After the war, he formed a group named the Four Jumps of Jive and then reunited with Caston, forming the Big Three Trio, who went on to record for Columbia Records.
Dixon signed with Chess Records as a recording artist, but began performing less, being more involved with administrative tasks for the label.
By 1951, he was a full-time employee at Chess, where he acted as producer, talent scout, session musician and staff songwriter. He was also a producer for Chess subsidiary, Checker Records.
His relationship with Chess was sometimes strained, although he stayed with the label from 1948 to the early 1960s. During this time, Dixon's output and influence were prodigious.
From late 1956 to early 1959, he worked in a similar capacity for Cobra Records, where he produced early singles for Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. He later recorded on Bluesville Records. From the late 1960s until the middle 1970s, Dixon ran his own record label, Yambo Records, along with two subsidiary labels, Supreme and Spoonful.
He released his 1971 album, Peace?, on Yambo, as well as singles by McKinley Mitchell and Lucky Peterson.
Dixon is considered one of the key figures in the creation of Chicago blues. He worked with Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Rush, Bo Diddley, Joe Louis Walker, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Koko Taylor, Little Milton, Eddie Boyd, Jimmy Witherspoon, Lowell Fulson, Willie Mabon, Memphis Slim, Washboard Sam, Jimmy Rogers and Sam Lay.
Dixon appears on many of Chuck Berry's early recordings, further proving his linkage between the blues and the birth of rock and roll. He is remembered mainly as a songwriter. His most enduring gift to the blues lay in refurbishing archaic Southern motifs, often of magic and country folkways and often derived from earlier records such as those by Charlie Patton.
British R&B bands of the 1960s constantly drew on the Dixon songbook for inspiration. In December, 1964, The Rolling Stones reached #1 in the UK Singles Chart with their cover version of Dixon's "Little Red Rooster.”
By the late sixties, Dixon's songwriting and production work began to take a back seat to his organizational abilities, which were utilized to assemble all-star, Chicago-based blues ensembles for work in Europe.
In his later years, Willie Dixon became a tireless ambassador for the blues and a vocal advocate for its practitioners, founding the Blues Heaven Foundation. The organization works to preserve the blues’ legacy and to secure copyrights and royalties for blues musicians who were exploited in the past.
Speaking with the simple eloquence that was a hallmark of his songs, Dixon claimed: "The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It’s better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues."
In 1977, unhappy with the royalties rate from ARC Music, he and Muddy Waters sued the Chess-owned publishing company. With the proceeds from the lawsuit, they set up Hoochie Coochie Music.
In 1987, Dixon received an out-of-court settlement from Led Zeppelin after suing them for plagiarism, in relation to their use of his music for "Bring It On Home" and his lyrics from his composition "You Need Love" (1962) for their track "Whole Lotta Love."
Dixon's health deteriorated increasingly during the seventies and the eighties, primarily due to long-term diabetes. Eventually one of his legs had to be amputated. Dixon was inducted at the inaugural session of the Blues Foundation's ceremony, and into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980.
Dixon died of heart failure in Burbank, California on January 29, 1992.
Bob Dylan credited Willie Dixon for the music of the song, "My Wife's Hometown," on his album, Together Through Life, and gave special thanks to Dixon's estate.
Here, Dixon performs “Rock Me, Shook Me” in Montreal
Sony’s Akio Morita with his prototype portable music player
The transistor radio was a technological marvel that put music literally into listeners hands in the mid-1950s. It was cheap, it was reliable and it was portable.
The transistor radio created “Under the Pillow Clubs” by separating radio from a family listening experience in the living room. Yet, these small radios could never even approximate the sound quality of a record being played on a home stereo.
The portable radio was the only technology available to on-the-go music lovers until the Sony Corp. sparked a revolution in personal electronics with the introduction of the first personal stereo cassette player.
A device as astonishing on first encounter as the cellular phone or digital camera would later be, the Sony Walkman went on sale for the very first time on July 1, 1979 — 44 years ago today.
The Sony Walkman didn't represent a breakthrough in technology so much as it did a breakthrough in imagination. Every element of the Walkman was already in production or testing as part of some other device when Sony's legendary co-chairman, Akio Morita, made a special request in the late 1970s.
Morita was a music lover who traveled frequently, and he was already in the habit of carrying one of his company's "portable" stereo tape recorders with him on international flights. But the Sony TC-D5 was a heavy device that was in no way portable by modern standards, so Morita asked audio-division engineer, Nobutoshi Kihara, if he could build something lighter and better.
Working with the company's existing Pressman product — a portable, monaural tape recorder that was popular with journalists — Kihara had a playback-only stereo device rigged up in time for Morita’s next trans-Pacific flight.
Even though this proto-Walkman required large, earmuff-like headphones and custom-made batteries (which, of course, ran out on Morita midway through his flight), it impressed the Sony executive tremendously with its sound quality and portability.
Many objections were raised internally when Morita began his push to create a marketable version of the device. The biggest objection was conceptual. Would anyone actually buy a cassette device that was not for recording, but only for playback?
Morita’s simple response: "Don't you think a stereo cassette player that you can listen to while walking around is a good idea?" It proved to be one of the great understatements in business history.
After a breakneck development phase of only four months, Sony engineers had a reliable product ready for market at about $150 in 1979 dollars and available before the start of summer vacation for Japanese students — both critical targets established at the outset of development.
The initial production run of 30,000 units looked to be too ambitious after one month of lackluster sales (only 3,000 were sold in July, 1979). But after an innovative consumer-marketing campaign in which Sony representatives simply approached pedestrians on the streets of Tokyo and gave them a chance to listen to the Walkman, the product took off.
Available stocks were sold out before the end of August, signaling the beginning of one of Sony's greatest success stories. The original Walkman was marketed as the Walkman in Japan and the Soundabout in many other countries, including the U.S. It was called the Freestyle in Sweden and the Stowaway in the UK.
I was one of the first buyers of the Sony portable — called a Soundabout in this country — that summer in 1979. The next year, I took the device to China, when the country was just opening to Americans. I will never forget the look of joy on the Chinese faces as they lined up to hear my new Sony toy.
James Cotton, New York City, 2007
Photo by Frank Beacham
James Cotton was born 88 years old today.
A blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, Cotton performed and recorded with many of the great blues artists of his time as well as with his own band.
Although he played drums early in his career, Cotton was famous for his work on the harmonica. He began his professional career playing the blues harp in Howlin' Wolf's band in the early 1950s.
In 1965, he formed the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet, utilizing Otis Spann on piano to record between gigs with the Muddy Waters' band. In the 1970s, Cotton played harmonica on Muddy Waters' 1977 album, Hard Again, produced by Johnny Winter.
Cotton became interested in music when he first heard Sonny Boy Williamson II on the radio. He left home with his uncle and moved to West Helena, Arkansas, finding Williamson there.
Williamson mentored Cotton during his early years. When Williamson left the south to live with his estranged wife in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he left his band in Cotton's hands. "He just gave it to me,” Cotton said. “But I couldn't hold it together 'cause I was too young and crazy in those days an' everybody in the band was grown men, so much older than me."
Cotton made his first recordings as a solo artist for the Sun Records label in Memphis in 1953. In 1954, he recorded an electric blues record "Cotton Crop Blues," which featured a heavily distorted power chord-driven electric guitar solo by Pat Hare.
Cotton began to work with the Muddy Waters Band around 1955. He performed songs such as "Got My Mojo Working" and "She's Nineteen Years Old," although he did not appear on the original recordings. Long-time Muddy Waters harmonica player Little Walter was utilized on most of Muddy's recording sessions in the 1950s.
Cotton's first recording session with Waters took place in June, 1957 and he would alternate with Little Walter on Muddy's recording sessions until the end of the decade until he left to form his own band.
In 1965, he formed the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet, using Otis Spann on piano to record between gigs with Muddy Waters' band. Their performances were captured by producer Samuel Charters on volume two of the Vanguard recording Chicago/The Blues/Today!
After leaving Muddy's band in 1966, Cotton toured with Janis Joplin while pursuing a solo career. He formed the James Cotton Blues Band in 1967. They mainly performed their own arrangements of popular blues and R&B material from the 1950s and 1960s.
Two albums were recorded live in Montreal that year. In the 1960s, Cotton formed a blues band in the tradition of Bobby Bland. Four tracks that featured the big band horn sound and traditional songs were captured on the album, Two Sides of the Blue.
In the 1970s, Cotton recorded several albums with Buddah Records. He played harmonica on Muddy Waters' 1977 album, Hard Again, produced by Johnny Winter.
The James Cotton Blues Band performed Live From Chicago: Mr. Superharp Himself!, and a second for his 1987 release, Take Me Back. Deep in the Blues.
Cotton battled throat cancer in the mid-1990s, and his last recorded vocal performance was on 2000's Fire Down Under the Hill, but he continued to tour, utilizing singers or his backing band members as vocalists.
Cotton died of pneumonia on March 16, 2017, at the age of 81, at a medical center in Austin, Texas.
Here, Cotton performs “Slow Blues (Blues in My Sleep)”
Leslie Caron, French film actress and dancer, is 92 years old today.
Caron appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. In 2006, her performance in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit won her an Emmy for guest actress in a drama series. Her autobiography, Thank Heaven, was published in 2010 in the UK and U.S., and in 2011 in a French version.
Caron is best known for the musical films, An American in Paris (1951), Lili (1953), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), and for the non-musical films Fanny (1961), The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Father Goose (1964).
Caron received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. She speaks French, English and Italian and is one of the few dancers or actresses who have danced with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev.
Born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Seine (now Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine), France, Caron is the daughter of Margaret, an American dancer on Broadway, and Claude Caron, a French chemist. She was prepared for a performing career from childhood by her mother.
Caron started her career as a ballerina. Gene Kelly discovered her in Roland Petit Company "Ballet des Champs Elysées," and cast her to appear opposite him in the musical, An American in Paris (1951), a role in which a pregnant Cyd Charisse was originally cast.
This role led to a long-term MGM contract and a sequence of films which included the musical, The Glass Slipper (1955), and the drama, The Man with a Cloak (1951), with Joseph Cotten and Barbara Stanwyck. Still, Caron has said of herself: "Unfortunately, Hollywood considers musical dancers as hoofers. Regrettable expression."
She also starred in the successful musicals Lili (1953), with Mel Ferrer; Daddy Long Legs (1955), with Fred Astaire, and Gigi (1958) with Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier.
Caron has continued to act, appearing in the film, Chocolat, in 2000. She is one of the few actors from the classic era of MGM musicals who are still active in film. Her other recent credits include Funny Bones (1995) with Jerry Lewis and Oliver Platt; The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000) with Judi Dench and Cleo Laine; and Le Divorce (2003), directed by James Ivory, with Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts.
Here, Caron dances with Gene Kelly in a famous scene from “An American in Paris” in 1951
Dan Aykroyd is 71 years old today.
A Canadian actor, comedian screenwriter and singer, Aykroyd was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, an originator of The Blues Brothers (with John Belushi) and Ghostbusters. He has had a long career as a film actor and screenwriter.
In 1990, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Driving Miss Daisy.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Aykroyd grew up in the Canadian capital, where his father, Samuel Cuthbert Peter Hugh Aykroyd, a civil engineer, worked as a policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His mother, Lorraine Hélène, was a secretary.
Aykroyd was born with syndactyly, or webbed toes, which was revealed in the movie, Mr. Mike's Mondo Video, and in a short film on Saturday Night Live, "Don't Look Back In Anger." He was also born with heterochromia – his right eye is green and his left eye is brown.
Aykroyd was raised in the Catholic Church, and intended to become a priest until the age of seventeen. He attended St. Pius X and St. Patrick's High Schools and studied criminology and sociology at Carleton University. However, he dropped out before completing his degree.
Aykroyd worked as a comedian in various Canadian nightclubs and ran an after-hours speakeasy, Club 505, in Toronto for several years. He developed his musical career in Ottawa, particularly through his regular attendances at Le Hibou, a club that featured many blues artists.
Aykroyd described these influences:
“...there was a little club there called Le Hibou, which in French means 'the owl'. And it was run by a gentleman named Harvey Glatt, and he brought every, and I mean every blues star that you or I would ever have wanted to have seen through Ottawa in the late '50s, well I guess more late '60s sort of, in around the Newport jazz rediscovery.
“I was going to Le Hibou and hearing James Cotton, Otis Spann, Pinetop Perkins, and Muddy Waters. I actually jammed behind Muddy Waters. S.P. Leary left the drum kit one night, and Muddy said 'anybody out there play drums? I don't have a drummer.' And I walked on stage and we started, I don't know, Little Red Rooster, something.
“He said 'keep that beat going, you make Muddy feel good.' And I heard Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett). Many, many times I saw Howlin' Wolf. As well as The Doors. And of course Buddy Guy, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. So I was exposed to all of these players, playing there as part of this scene to service the academic community in Ottawa, a very well-educated community. Had I lived in a different town I don't think that this would have happened, because it was just the confluence of educated government workers, and then also all the colleges in the area, Ottawa University, Carleton, and all the schools — these people were interested in blues culture.”
Aykroyd's first professional experience at the age of 17 was as a member of the cast of the short-lived Canadian sketch comedy series, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour with Lorne Michaels. He was a member of the Second City comedy troupe in 1973 in both Toronto and Chicago.
Aykroyd gained fame on the American late-night comedy show, Saturday Night Live, where he was a writer and the youngest cast member for its first four seasons, from 1975 to 1979. He brought a unique sensibility to the show, combining youth, unusual interests, talent as an impersonator and an almost lunatic intensity.
While Aykroyd was a close friend and partner with fellow cast member John Belushi and shared some of the same sensibilities, Aykroyd was more reserved and less self-destructive.
Federico Fellini casting for Casanova in Paris, 1975