Prototypical Americana
Part Two
This is my list of ’ Some Americana before the term was invented’. They are off the top of my head, and I’m sure that readers would want to add other groups and single artists that I have left out
Bob Dylan It is almost inevitable that Dylan is at the head of this list. The ‘basement tapes’, recorded when psychedelia was at its colourful height in the 1967 Summer of Love, contained a slew of parched oddities that began to woke musicians up from their day-glo reveries. (Several went on to have hits with songs from the Little White Wonder bootleg, 'Quinn the Eskimo’, 'Million Dollar Bash’, This Wheel’s on Fire’, 'Tears of Rage’, 'I Shall Be Released’, 'You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, by acts as varied as The Byrds, The Band, Brian Auger & the Trinity, Manfred Mann and Fairport Convention.) CBS took until 1975 to officially release the vinyl double album The Basement Tapes, from the sessions, by which time Dylan has produced several other recordings that had cemented his latest 'new direction’: John Wesley Harding (the real game-changer, from 1968), Nashville Skyline (with that other white wonder, Johnny Cash), Self Portrait and New Morning. Mercilessly panned at the time, their undoubted influence began to be slowly acknowledged by younger musicians.
The Band Dylan’s backing band on the momentous world tour of 1966, The Band made The Basement Tapes with him, before recording two epochal albums in 1968 and 1969, Music From Big Pink and The Band. Both of these were to prove immensely influential for British and American musicians of the time (the inclusion of 'The Weight’ on the Easy Rider soundtrack didn’t hurt either). If there is one group that laid the tracks down for the Americana juggernaut, that group has to be The Band?
The Byrds and their offshoot, The Flying Burrito Brothers, both featured Gram Parsons for a time, another visionary who had dug deep into the American musical palimpsest, going back, as Dylan had, to Victorian forebears. The Byrds also featured David Crosby, a Hollywood brat who was kicked out of the band (for being a pain in the ***, basically) and went on to join Crosby, Stills and Nash, a move that was certainly to prove immensely successful, even if just judged in financial terms (much of the money went up Crosby’s nose, however). The cover of their sophomore album Deja Vu, a sepia-tinted exercise in deep nostalgia, featured the band (by now also featuring Neil Young) in frontier drag, in a pose that echoed both The Band and Workingman’s Dead by the Grateful Dead.
Both Workingman’s Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970) marked a screeching change of direction for the Grateful Dead, and their folk and country influences emerged in a set of songs that celebrated, most clearly and famously in 'Truckin’ ’, their love of travelling through the American landscape, and a freedom of movement, both of the body and in the mind. Their particular offshoot, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, were another band enamoured of cowboy chic, most obviously on the cover of their third record Gypsy Cowboy, a relatively late 1972 release that could have been designed with John Ford in mind.
1967-1970 saw the birth pangs of a sort of anti-modernism in American rock, and a (re)discovery of the American past and landscape. (We had out own version over here with the 'getting it together in the country’ shtick, most famously captured by Traffic on their first album Dear Mr. Fantasy, with the group moving to Berkshire to 'get their heads together’.) But the past is always 'another country’, and 'nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, and it took artists of the stature of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to produce bodies of work that celebrated the past without reinventing it. Johnny Cash too, miraculously created a late series of 'American music’ that owed much to the past (and his own), while keeping his feet firmly on modern ground.