The Story Behind The Song: The Band’s major introduction through ‘Tears of Rage’
When Robbie Robertson started working with Bob Dylan as a member of his backing band the Hawks during that fabled mid-1960s heel turn into electrified rock, it wasn’t just Dylan’s songwriting craft that had him in awe.
“Playing with Bob, I didn’t know how much vocal power could come out of this frail man,” Robertson told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “He was so thin. He was singing louder and stronger than James Brown.”
Dylan needed to build up his pipes, not just to adapt to a fully plugged-in backing band joining him on tour, but to rise above the occasional moans and boos coming from disappointed members of his audiences, and Robertson witnessed all of this firsthand, of course. This built an immediate sense of camaraderie between Dylan and the Hawks, an outfit that would soon evolve into the entity better known as The Band.
“We were in a battlefield on that tour,” Robertson said, “And you had to fight back”.
Two years later, in 1967, Dylan and The Band famously convened at the Big Pink house in upstate New York for the recording sessions that became The Basement Tapes. Long before most people got to hear those original tracks, though, many of the songs they worked out landed on other albums, including Dylan’s next few solo records and the 1968 debut of The Band themselves, fittingly called Music From Big Pink.
The first track on Big Pink, serving as the all-important introduction of The Band’s groundbreaking new folk-rock sound, was ‘Tears of Rage’, a song that featured original lyrics by Dylan, music by Richard Manuel, production from John Simon, and a Robertson guitar lick distorted to great effect through a big Leslie organ speaker.
An earlier version of the song, as later heard with the belated release of The Basement Tapes in 1975, had Dylan on lead vocals and Manuel on high harmonies. For The Band’s new take, without Bob and his aforementioned big voice, the lead was handed over to Manuel, and the results were remarkable.
What was once a sort of touching folk lament was reborn as something much more slow, epic and gut-wrenching, with gospel undertones and an earthy power that would come to define much of The Band’s appeal, lending a fitting heft to a ballad told by a father to a daughter he believes has gone astray: “We pointed you the way to go / And scratched your name in sand / Though you just thought it was nothing more / Than a place for you to stand”.
Robbie Robertson knew they’d knocked it out of the park, and 50 years later, he still vividly remembered the experience of sharing the new rendition with Dylan. “It was so much fun to see the look on Bob’s face when we played him Music From Big Pink, and ‘Tears of Rage’ is the first song on it,” Robertson told the LA Times, “Starting your album with a long, slow song was so against the rules, but when he heard what we did with this song, the look on his face—it was just priceless. He didn’t see this coming, and neither did anybody else.”
As part of this same interview, conducted a few years before his death in 2023, Robertson was asked to have a listen to the original version of ‘Tears of Rage’ he had done with Dylan, and while Bob was obviously front and centre on that track, Robbie found himself instantly drawn to his old friend and bandmate Manuel.
“That’s Richard singing that falsetto thing,” he said, getting wistful, “You put it on, and it takes you right to that place, you know?”
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