The best rock album ever made, according to Roger Daltrey
At the same time that The Who were trying to do the unthinkable and merge rock and roll and opera with the Tommy project, a very different album came out that suggested big storytelling ambitions didn’t have to sound theatrical and epic.
On its surface, The Band’s 1968 debut Music From Big Pink was a total rejection of the trends of its era. In place of slick production, psychedelic excess, and rockstar posturing, you now had a crew of bearded pioneers delivering a stripped-down and grizzled brand of Americana, albeit with a mostly Canadian twist.
The reason so many of the Band’s contemporaries were blown away by the album, however, was a recognition that the ‘folksiness’ wasn’t actually retro-minded, but completely out-of-step with eras and trends altogether; in other words, timeless. This explains why, more than 50 years after its release, an old rocker like The Who’s Roger Daltrey found himself still listening to Big Pink, not for nostalgic reasons, but in the same way people listen to Bach or Beethoven.
“I’ve always liked classical music,” Daltrey told Classic Rock in 2023, during a time when The Who were touring with an orchestra, “After our gigs, classical music used to be the only thing that would calm me down… I very rarely listen to rock music at all,” he said, pausing to think of an exception to the rule.
“The last rock record I listened to properly at home was Music from Big Pink, by The Band, which I still think is one of the best albums ever made. It’s got a real sense of freedom to it, it’s incredibly loose and incredibly tight all at once,” he added.
To be working on Tommy when Big Pink came out must have felt like two ships passing in the night for Daltrey, as he found himself happily aboard the ambitious steam frigate piloted by Pete Townshend, but wondered what life might be like on the rugged old galley that Robbie Robertson and his pals had built.
As the Band’s primary songwriter at the time, Robertson was inspired by similar high-brow ideas to Townshend. Along with the obvious influence of his collaborator Bob Dylan, Robbie was equally moved by filmmakers like John Ford, Luis Buñuel, and Akira Kurosawa.
“I got this hunger for education and knowledge because I hadn’t gone to school since I was 16,” Robertson wrote in the liner notes to a reissued edition of Music from Big Pink in 2000, “I started to read a whole lot, and I started to see these kinds of films. I got into all kinds of mythologies; European, Nordic…it influenced me in a style of storytelling.”
The stories on Big Pink might not be as cinematic as those of a blind, deaf, and dumb pinball champion, but they changed how many of the best songwriters and musicians thought about their own work from that point forward. Eric Clapton, famously, travelled to Woodstock the next year, half-hoping that the guys in the Band would ask him to join their outfit. It was similar to how a lot of the British rockers had felt when they’d first heard American blues music as kids: it was a new way of doing things, and even into his 80s, Roger Daltrey and many of his contemporaries have never tired of it.
