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

Wolf, I just saw your above posting from 6-30 (I don't know how I missed it before!), and know all too well what you mean about The Band being bad news for musicians in the late 60's, Clapton included. I've tried to help non-musicians understand just how influential, how revolutionary, how transformative The Band and their first two albums were, usually unsuccessfully. They and those two albums completely changed the approach to making music of every "good" R & R musician of that time I have ever known!

I think the sound of the brown album, which Fremer describes as muddy, is actually really cool. It's very organic sounding, very woody, the drums sounding real "thumpy", which is how the Gretsch drums (and Ludwig snare) Levon is playing were tuned. I have two sets of Gretsch myself, and have tuned them and damped the heads to make them sound as much like Levon's do on the album as possible. For Jazz fans, it's the sound of calfskin heads, like Gene Krupa's in the 30's. When Levon started playing in Arkansas in the 50's, plastic heads had yet to be invented, and apparently Levon tried to keep his plastic-headed drums sounding much as the calfskin-headed drums from his early days had.

As you said, the brown album is just insanely great. The musicianship, the ensemble playing (which remains unequalled in R & R to this day), the singing, just made nearly all other contemporary music sound, you put it right, lame. It's just amazing how different it is from MFBP, while still obviously being from the same group of musicians and singers. MFBP was recorded in proper studios, and is infused with the standard fake reverb and echo, sounding much bigger and glossier than The Band actually sounded. The brown album was recorded "dry", and is exactly what The Band sounded like live. Totally unlike any other Band/Group I have seen/heard live, and I've seen a bunch!

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.