When I was 14, in 1969, my 16-year-old brother, John, was in a band with a few friends from high school — including future Grammy nominee Tom Cochrane and future record company executive Deane Cameron. The band practised in our basement and I would often fool around with the equipment — guitars, amps, a full drum kit — when they weren’t around. I had been schooled on what’s cool in music by John, who introduced me to artists like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Johnny Winter. But this band John was in was into a different kind of music. They played songs by Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash and the Band, as well as some originals written by Tom. They were most influenced by the Band, even naming themselves “King’s Harvest,” after the song from the album “Music From Big Pink.”
There was a copy of “Big Pink” in the house, and, I confess, the first time I heard it I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. At 14, I had just been drawn in by distorted guitar solos, fuzzy power chords, bluesy harmonica and screaming vocals as the new vocabulary of contemporary music. These Band tracks were just songs — well written, well played and well sung — but songs, with lyrics and melodies and without the sensationalism of driving hard rock.
Meanwhile, I spent that summer teaching myself how to play an acoustic guitar by learning the chords to every song on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” I forced myself to finger-pick every chord, knowing that picking was more difficult than strumming, and the technique would make me sound like a better guitar player, sooner. It worked. I was invited to join John’s band two years later.
On that night in 1969, John, Deane and Tom went to Massey Hall to see the Band in concert. I was home alone, with a copy of the Band’s second, eponymous album and our living-room General Electric console stereo. I played that album for maybe the eighth time but suddenly heard it for the first time. I was hooked. I played it again and again that night. While John and is friends were witnessing a live Band performance, I was learning to love their music at home.
Without knowing it I developed an ear for the stylized nuances: the rootsy touches of accordion and fiddle, boogie-woogie piano combined with the funky drum beats, the heart-tugging vocals and the witty, colourful lyrics, the beautiful pain of “The Unfaithful Servant” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The photos on the album cover completed the impression. These guys were reaching back to 19th-century America (even though they were mostly Canadian) and all its rustic, romantic appeal. They all managed to look the part, of rural homesteaders, with their beards, cowboy boots, work shirts and beat-up felt hats, displayed in grainy black-and-white photos. One member, whom I deduced was Jaime Robbie Robertson (as credited on the album), had distinctive eyebrows, wire-rimmed glasses and a dark moustache, making him look like some sort of university intellectual.
Liking the Band (and Dylan and the Byrds) set me apart from my friends at school (although I still liked Hendrix). Most guys my age had albums by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in their record collections. I hardly knew any Band fans, which made being a fan feel like a personal distinction, as if I was a fan of this artist nobody else had heard of.
The first time I saw the Band perform was at a weekend-long festival in suburban Toronto (on this day, Aug. 21) in 1971. They shared the bill with Edgar Winter and White Trash, Sha-Na-Na and others. By that time, I was a member of my brother’s band, whose name had been reduced to "Harvest," and who played mostly original songs written by Tom. We didn't do any Band covers, but we were still influenced by them in style and outlook.
Deane was a bit of a dictator about our aesthetic style. He was adamant that we not only eschew psychedelic and hard-rock music. We also had to dress accordingly. No mod clothes. No bellbottoms. No flowered shirts. We were to dress like farmers, as the Band did. Leather vests, jeans, cowboy shirts.
We all attended the Band show as if it was a school field trip. We were sitting on the grass, fairly close to the stage. When the Band came on, Robbie Robertson appeared wearing a bright purple velvet suit. The round spectacles were there, the thin dark beard and the cream-coloured Fender Stratocaster. But the outfit, complete with velvet cap, blew Deane's aesthetic sensibility all to hell.
Deane called out: “Hey, Tom, that’s not Robertson, you know! That’s not Robertson!” Other people in the crowd must have heard, many of them wondering who "Robertson" was.
Deane was in denial. He refused to accept that the mainstay of the band that served as his aesthetic template would violate every sartorial rule he had enacted.
A minute later, the Band opened with “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” from their “Stage Fright” album. I remember because the first notes of that song — both on the record and in this performance — were the searing, choppy guitar riff that Robertson played as the song’s intro. On stage, Robertson’s face expressed a sense of self-conscious delight as he connected with the audience and with his bandmates, these two bars of unaccompanied guitar riffs serving as the count-in for the song.
Despite the crappy, open-air venue, it was a great show, and Robertson’s, grinding rockabilly riffs and ringing harmonics pierced the air through every song, confirming his identity as surely as a fingerprint.
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