Band's Music from Big Pink

I really enjoy this book. So much so that I've actually read it a couple times. It certainly breaks from the usual mold of 33 1/3 books but I find that quite refreshing. It's engaging and fun... but not a literary masterpiece by any means. For someone who's read most of what's been written about The Band, I find it a creative way of delivering the same information. So when I'm in the mood to read about The Band, I generally reach for this book. It's a quick read that, for me at least, can transport you back to that time and place. Plus, I usually skip over a couple of particularly heavy-handed scenes.

If you're looking for "facts" about The Band, or a straightforward analysis of the Music From Big Pink album, look elswhere. The excellent Band website might be a good place to start. That kind of thing ain't what this book is all about. But if you've listened to Music From Big Pink or the Basement Tapes, or stared at Elliott Landy's photographs of The Band in Woodstock and just wished you could be there, hanging out with Richard, Rick, Levon, Garth, and Robbie, taking in the fresh air of the Catskills (and maybe some other scents too), then this book is about the closest you can get. It's billed as "faction" because that's what it is - a fictional story from the point of view of a made-up guy, intertwined with the real people and events of that time and place. John Niven uses this approach to come up with something that rings far more true than a purely non-fictional account ever could. He's clearly done his research, but what's brilliant about this book is that Niven has used that extensive knowledge to bring that time and place alive, and capture the personalities so vividly. You get to be right there with your heroes as Big Pink is coming together. The book also fortunately steers clear of the ridiculous mythologizing about the "love generation" and "the 60's" that's so commonplace today, just as the Band itself avoided the flower-power business back then. And there is a dark side to the story - the protagonist is a drug dealer after all. But that was what went on; the members of the band were certainly no teetotalers. Just check out Levon's book (which I would also HIGHLY recommend). Niven's book is an exhilarating little journey that you can take cover-to-cover in a day or two, and you'll come away with a nice glimpse of just what it might have been like to have been around The Band in Woodstock in 1967-68. And when you listen to the Big Pink album again, you just might understand it in a new way - which is the whole point of the 33 1/3 series after all.

Richard Manuel's voice has haunted many people, and one of those people is John Niven, author of an outstanding novella called Music From Big Pink that came out in 2005 but I just got around to reading on a plane last week (mid-'07). Read it, please. Written from the point of view of a drug dealer who associates with the members of The Band and the general Woodstock explosion of the late '60s, it details the promise and broken promise of that time with precision, wit, and an amazing command of and love for its source material. Not since David Shipper's Paperback Writer, decades ago, have I read a piece of fiction about rock'n'roll that so captures the big themes and microscopic details that make a life lived in music -- either as a practicioner or a hanger-on -- so thrilling and harrowing. It's as open and dark as Manuel's voice on the album that gave it a title. I'm not going to describe in much or quote any of it here because I want you to read all of it without me inadvertently ruining any of it. But this is that very, very rare piece of rock'n'roll-drenched fiction that actually feels like rock'n'roll.

I loved this book. It was like being there, in Woodstock in '67. Sad, funny and beautiful at times. 'An amazing piece of work' as Greil Marcus says on the cover. And he would know. Highly recommended even if you're not a fan of The Band.

Whilst this Continuum series has so far provided mostly brilliant personal accounts of recollections of seminal albums or exhaustive archival run throughs of the recording process, here, Scottish first time author John Niven has taken a different tact and pieces together the Woodstock '66 story as a semi fictional account of an era that threw its unique and fantastical curveball at rock 'n' roll. Music From Big Pink paints vivid, Technicolor pictures of a time that is so often only ever talked about in scholarly black & white. The book takes the view of a dealer on the peripheries of the scene and catches all the moods associated with the drugs that gradually took hold, from balmy summers viewed through a psychedelic haze to brutal, terrifying bathroom overdoses, although at no point does it revel and wallow in a narcotic haze like so much 90s Brit lit. Music From Big Pink might not be the Continuum book Band fans hoped for, more information, more facts uncovered (when, really, pretty much everything that can be know about the sessions that produced the album is out there in the public domain) - what it is is a startlingly brilliant companion piece to one of the greatest records of all time, essential reading for anyone in love with The Band's music who still sits and daydreams what it would be like to have been there themselves.