Trivia / The Band

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• All-Star Cast: The Last Waltz.
• Chart Displacement: They had two Top 40 Billboard hits, but neither of them was "The Weight", which only topped out at #63 (their Top 40 songs were "Up on Cripple Creek" and "Don't Do It"). On the album side Stage Fright was their highest charter (#5), but Music from Big Pink and The Band are more famous and acclaimed.
• Creator Backlash: Levon Helm hated The Last Waltz when it happened, and he didn't grow to like it any better in the years that followed.
  Levon Helm: Rick worked himself to death. And the reason Rick had to work all the time was because he'd been fucked out of his money. People ask me about The Last Waltz all the time. Rick Danko dying at fifty-six is what I think about The Last Waltz. It was the biggest fuckin' rip-off that ever happened to The Band - without doubt.
• Fake American: They were considered to be an American band and Robertson's lyrics in particular reveal a fascination with Americana, but only Helm was American; the rest being Canadian.
• He Also Did:
  • Besides all his music work with Martin Scorsese, Robbie Robertson also produced, co-wrote and co-starred in the 1980 film Carny.
  • One of the odd intersections of the group minus Robertson reuniting in The '80s and Levon Helm sustaining a career as a character actor at the same time was when Helm played an Arkansas sheriff in an oddball 1987 indie Southern Gothic Thriller called Man Outside (starring Robert Logan as a backwoods recluse with a tragic past who gets wrongfully accused of kidnapping a young boy, and Kathleen Quinlan as an anthropologist who befriends him). The other three reunited Band members also got small roles in the film: Rick Danko as the kidnapped boy's father, Richard Manuel as a member of a Witch Hunt mob that confronts the recluse (a Posthumous Credit), and Garth Hudson as a different backwoods recluse (a Shell-Shocked Veteran of The Vietnam War).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Basement Tapes floated around for years as bootlegs before an authorized version was finally released, and even then the official album only scratches the surface of what was recorded.
  • A more or less complete Basement Tapes collection was finally released in 2014, as Volume 11 of Dylan's Bootleg Series.
  • There are also bootlegs of the Last Waltz concert that feature the complete original live recording without the later editing and overdubbing.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Originally a 3-LP (later 2-CD) set, The Last Waltz soundtrack album was expanded into a 4-CD box set for the film's 25th anniversary, with many additional performances from the concert, a few live rehearsal versions, some studio outtakes, etc.
  • Live at the Academy of Music 1971 is a 4-CD/1-DVD set of performances from the shows that the Rock of Ages album was taken from, including an unedited soundboard recording of the complete 12/31/71 show and 5.1 surround mixes on the DVD.
• No-Hit Wonder: Despite being recognized as one of the most influential groups of their era, The Band never had a song crack the top 20 in the United States. Even in their native Canada they only had one single ("Up on Cripple Creek") make the top ten.
  • On the other hand, they did manage to score top 20 hits in both the UK and the Netherlands.
• The Pete Best:
  • Jerry Penfound (saxophone) and Bruce Bruno (vocals) were part of Levon & The Hawks for a few months after they split away from Ronnie Hawkins. They both left the group on good terms: Penfound had to be let go because they didn't have enough money to spread around between seven members, and New York native Bruno left because he was getting homesick.
  • The drummers The Hawks used in their 1965-66 live stint with Bob Dylan after Levon Helm quit also might count: Bobby Gregg, Sandy Konikoff and most famously Mickey Jones.
• Referenced by...:
  • Secondary protagonist Okuyasu Nijimura from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable has a Stand known as The Hand, which is meant to be a punny one-letter-swapped Shout-Out to The Band.
  • Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem did a version of "Ophelia" when they played a live set at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco in 2016.
• Troubled Production: Cahoots. Tensions between members, substance abuse issues, the album being recorded at the huge new Bearsville studio complex (with the kinks still being hammered out), Robertson writing songs that were complex musically but a bit uninspired lyrically. All this led to an album that, while not a total flop, underwhelmed fans and critics.
• Vacation, Dear Boy: After recording the first few songs on Music from Big Pink in New York and shopping them around to record labels, Capitol Records signed them and invited them to finish the album at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood, which they gladly accepted, since it allowed them to spend quality time in the California sun away from the harsh Upstate New York winter in Woodstock. They also recorded most of the second album in California for the same reason.
• What Could Have Been: Stage Fright was originally going to be a live album of all-new material, performed in front of an audience at the Woodstock Playhouse, their hometown's summer stock theatre. But the town council, remembering the chaos of the Woodstock festival down the road the previous year, were fearful of being overrun by hippie concertgoers and refused to give permission. Since they'd already worked out the rental deal for the theatre, they just used it as a makeshift studio and recorded there anyway.
• Write Who You Know: A bunch of the people named in "The Weight" are figures from their past. Luke was the nickname of Jimmy Ray Paulman, an early member of The Hawks in their Ronnie Hawkins days. Crazy Chester was an eccentric fan of theirs in Arkansas who would patrol Hawks shows with toy guns. Anna Lee was a childhood friend of Levon Helm (though it's worth mentioning that Bob Dylan's daughter Anna Leigh Dylan was a few months old when the song was written).

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