![]() ![]() King Harvest is touched with a double vision. So many things about the song are odd, above all, can you think of any other rock song where the chorus is actually way quieter than the verse? The chorus is soothingly evocative, a whispered entreaty, in contrast to the harsher voice of the narrator, the farmer or sharecropper or whatever you want to call him. But because of the way the record sounds, none of this calls attention to itself. ![]() The music is unusually complex, making use of odd verse patterns and tricky rhythmic suspensions and modifying the natural sounds of instruments for various precisely calculated effects. To me, it is the most important song on the album, and while a handful of Band songs might equal it, none have ever surpassed it. If The Weight started my own interest in The Band, this song consumated it. King Harvest is a hard one for me to assess. Originally it was to be the backs of their heads, but they were advised to switch! The rear picture (26K GIF) shows them as a country band, Richard at piano, Robbie on a small acoustic guitar, Levon standing by the wood rimmed kit which features a painting of (King) Harvest on the skin, Garth with accordion and Rick with a double bass. The sleeve (58K GIF) featured a photo by Elliot Landy, framed in soft brown board (at least in earlier versions - glossy ones a few years later looked terrible). The Band had it all - rawness, competence, sublimity, experience, originality and roots. Bob Dylan was meandering through the backwaters of his roots on Nashville Skyline. They were into Alvin Lee and how fast you could play. But some British musicians felt that Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead had traded musical competence away for the sake of originality. The Beatles were producing sublime sounds, but it was St. The Stones were raw and tough, but oddly hairless - oddly chinless even. Half my record collection seemed as dull and well meaning as Chicago Transit Authority. The up-and-coming Chicago seemed merely workmanlike. It rooted music after the dweebling sounds of Pink Floyd and the pretentions of early King Crimson. Later - too many weeks later -I listened through the album with a sense of disbelief. Maybe it was better than anything I’ve heard since. The yearning keening voices the odd stumbling arrangements. I couldn’t believe the oddness of the sound. It was King Harvest on late night BBC television, accompanied by a weird black and white 1920’s cartoon. The cover touched something in my imagination. The three Christmas displays in late 1969 were Abbey Road, Let It Bleed … and The Band. I remember gazing from a freezing cold Oxford Street into the windows of the HMV record store in London. It was the last thing we cut in California, and it was that magical feeling of ‘King Harvest’ that pulled us through. The group wanted to do one song that took in everything we could muster about life at that moment in time. It was an expression of feeling that came from five people. Some of the lyrics came out of a discussion we had one night about the times we’d seen and all had in common. And when you’re lost in that song you’re floating through a whole vast American story. Or if you know the song, you want it to take you where it took you before. You want that song to take you somewhere you haven’t been. And you could go on from there … but what you don’t want to do with that song, you don’t want to take it apart, you know, seperate it into its constituent elements. Is it rock & roll? Sure, it’s rock & roll. And yet there is an anxiousness, a nervousness, a sense of being alone in the singing - it’s pure country music. There’s a progression in there, a ‘sweep’ that country music doesn’t have. Is that a blues song? There’s a lot of blues in it, but it’s not a blues song. During the chorus, both Robertson and Danko play guitars. John Simon plays electric piano through one of Robbie’s magic black boxes. By Peter Viney Copyright © Peter Viney 1997 ![]()
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