MOG

Okay, here's my new habit. Lately I have taken to driving aimlessly, especially on any open road and listening to the Band. There is something enriching in this little ritual and in the end I feel free, content and even redeemed.

Of course, I haven't actually driven aimlessly purely for that motive. That would be weird, right? But I want to.

I can't really understand why I've been sucked in by this band NOW. I've certainly heard their material before and always brushed it off like they were just a collection of extraneous hippies that churned out nostalgic, stylized versions of C&W jams. The worst part of the hippie perspective on this particular band is that this bands' body of work is treated as the holy grail of post-60's rock and roll. And to tell you the truth, I always prejudged their music based on their base: those self-praising, aggrandizing burnouts; so proud to have been a part of something that anyone would have been fortunate enough to be a part of if only they had been BORN soon after WWII.

For the past 10 years or so I have come into contact with the Band's catalogue a few times, in limited contexts, and I always came away with the same conclusion: this is music hugely lacking dynamic and is written and performed for guys who were too depressed to do anything but check out during the 70's..

I mean, until recently I couldn't even imagine this music to be stimulating even on the right drugs (prescription, of course ).

Obviously I have turned a corner on this. Yes, it's true: I must be a burnout.

The Band began in Toronto in 1967, but prior to that they performed in earlier incarnations as The Hawks and performed as Bob Dylan's backing band for some time, recording on the landmark "The Basement Tapes". Originally a straight-up rock and roll band, they were influenced heavily, among other things, by their employer, Mr. Dylan. The resulting aesthetic is one that is a somewhat muted rock and roll sound that is more accurately described these days as "Americana".

I've only obtusely understood the term "Americana", but have always felt that as obtuse as it may be, I still understood it. This term has been used more recently to describe bands such as Son Volt, Wilco, the Jayhawks and more accurately, Uncle Tupelo.

After listening to a lot of this 'Americana' I feel that the term is really just short for 'country for rock fans.'

You know, more like Hank Williams Sr. than Hank Williams Jr.

Or if you don't get that, perhaps a better analogy is "Music that is way more George Jones than Garth fucking Brooks."

Anyhow, the real irony with The Band is that they perform music that espouses this aesthetic yet hails from Canada.

You may have heard "The Weight" from The Band's "Music from Big Pink". Of course, no one knows it from the actual album, "Music from Big Pink". Most know the line "Take a load off fanny/Take a load for free/Take a load off fanny/and put the load right on me", but most probably know the line from "The Big Chill" or the Woodstock movie. But if nothing else, quite a few folks know the song from the 1969 film "Easy Rider" starring Peter Fonda & a walking quaalude named Dennis Hopper.

Perhaps it is because of "Easy Rider" that I refer to this music in a conditional context. I will say that when I hear "Up On Cripple Creek" or "The Weight" or really any given Band tune, I set the scene in terms that go something like this:

I wake up in a dingy apartment. It is hot. It is somewhere around noon. I am hungover, sweaty and certainly involved with the wrong woman. I poke through the place looking for perhaps some breakfast, but at the very least a cigarette. Finding neither I nose my way to the front window and see a graying Chevy Nova. Yep, it's mine. By scanning the place I can tell that the aforementioned she-devil is gone - for now. I take another look at the Nova and I know what I have to do. Start over. Hop in that sack of Chevy shit and keep whipping her until she gets me to another time zone. I hit the road, stopping only for smokes and a sixer - fuck the map. I'll land wherever God puts me. As I drive off on a mean highway into an oppressive heat, The Band's "Life is a Carnival" plays thusly: "You can walk on the water, drown in the sand/You can fly off a mountaintop if anybody can/Run away, run away - it's the restless age/Look away, look away - you can turn the page."

Nice, huh? Now I don't aspire to any of this really. I have certainly spent too much time of my young life in the throes of a hangover or two, and I certainly have been involved with a few women that could be described as "wrong". But I've never been in a position that would involve a map-less trek that involved drinking whilst driving, much LESS in a graying Nova.

However, such is the sensibility of "Easy Rider".

So it must be this that I see in the music of The Band: Irredeemable Freedom. That starting over type of freedom that is completely selfish yet very, very necessary.