Another encore for The Band

The Band endures. 

At least, in these parts. But if you look at where the folks come from who show up to Levon’s studio to see music and soak up the lore, you’d know that the legends still reach far flung outposts of humanity. 

The tales are told, how this group of Canadian kids, along with one from Arkansas, found their way into the clutches of grizzled, low-down Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly singer who would drag them through every disreputable bar in northern North America and whip them into a cohesive musical force. They would become The Band, living and working in Woodstock after tumultuous times playing with Bob Dylan during his electric conversion. Their first two albums were musical masterpieces of what later was tagged ‘Americana’, and they became rock stars, putting out albums, one after another, songs that swung, historical songs, rootsy songs, with Garth Hudson’s unearthly keyboards dripping liquid color. And then, after a slow glide back down the ladder, called it quits with a big fare-the-well concert and movie. 

They reconstituted after several years, minus guitarist and prolific songwriter Robbie Robertson, but with still formidable skill and inspiration. A dreadful tragedy happened, Richard Manuel’s suicide, but they played on. Rick Danko died in the late 1990s, and things ground to a halt until drummer Levon Helm resurrected the magic in the early 2000s and had an eight-year run of magnificent Midnight Ramble shows at his home. Levon died in 2012, but the Rambles still go on. 

You can see evidence of this storied history in Woodstock doctors’ offices, hanging in the Bearsville Theater, in business establishments, or framed on the walls of countless homes of longtime Woodstockers, photographs of The Band by Elliott Landy…iconic ones that you may immediately recognize, where they look like 19th century citizens, roughhewn, yet refined.

You can read the stories, set in Woodstock and internationally, in books like Barney Hoskins’ Small Town Talk, in John Barry’s Levon Helm: Rock, Roll & Ramble – The Inside Story of the Man, the Music and the Midnight Ramble’ or Joe Forno’s Levon’s Man. Levon and Robbie’s own stories were published in hardcover.

And you can almost feel the tales unfold in Landy’s lush volume, The Band Photographs, 1968-1969, a limited edition released in 2015, that he funded with a Kickstarter campaign. 

Now Landy is at work on a Volume II. 

“In general, when I photograph somebody,” Landy, who was an official photographer at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, now says. “I don’t try to capture them, I let what happens express what needs to be captured. I don’t analyze it, I just expect it to happen. I usually start out where people live and go from there.”

There’s a good chance you’ve seen his photos — a smiling Bob Dylan tipping his hat while holding a gorgeous Gibson J-200 guitar on the cover of Nashville Skyline, his 1969 album, or Janis Joplin, arms spread wide taking a bow on stage; or maybe you’ve seen the shot from behind the amplifiers looking out at the crowd at the Woodstock Festival — even if you haven’t viewed one of his gallery exhibitions or perused any of his 12 books of photos. 

“With The Band, I was living in New York at the time, and I went up to the house they called Big Pink and took some pictures and there were some really gorgeous photographs of them, but not quite what they thought would be good for an album picture. So I went back a second time…again without any plan, I just showed up and they dressed how they wanted, also some really great photographs, but they said, no, we still don’t see the album picture we want.

“Just by chance I had a book of photographs by Matthew Brady, the Civil War era photographer. These photographs are very deeply integrated into the landscape. When those photographers came around in 1850 and 1860 it was a very big deal and everybody got dressed up for it. And people paid attention to the photographer…it was really set up and posed and integrated with the landscape. So I showed the book to them and I said, this is a style that I’d like to do and they agreed with that. We drove around Woodstock looking for the right spot for the picture. It needed to be kind of a barren landscape because that’s how landscapes were in the west in those years. We couldn’t find anything. So we went back to the house that Levon and Rick were sharing on West Ohayo Mountain Road and were hanging out in the living room. I look out the window and there’s the landscape right in front of the house. So we went out into the yard and took the photograph that’s in the Big Pink album, the one that’s most well known.”

Landy says that there will be two editions of the book. 

“A regular version, which I’ll sign — the signature edition — and the Deluxe edition which comes in a slipcase and has an 8×10 fine art print that I’m making specially for this series. That photo won’t be available in any other place.” 

He talks about the process, which began by raising an astonishing $193,626 from the public on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

“I financed the first book with a Kickstarter campaign and it did so well — it was the highest funded photography book in Kickstarter history at that point. It took about a year to make the book, because we went through every one of the 10,000 frames of film that I shot of The Band. We had to figure out how to make the book; I had never made one myself completely. 

“In the process, my designer chose about 600 images she thought would be good for the book. We looked at them on the computer. Of those I picked out about 300 that I felt were the best ones. I then made proof prints of those and picked. There are about 200 pictures in the first book. 

“I stored the rest of the proofs in boxes on my shelves. Maybe a year or two after the book came out, I started looking through them and I saw picture after picture, really good pictures that were not included in the first book. And I couldn’t believe it. I said, why isn’t this in the book, it’s one of my favorites, and why isn’t that one in the book…and the reason of course is that there wasn’t enough space. The first book is 160 pages, 12 by 12 inches…and I was using a lot of single pictures to a page…I like a lot of large photographs in a book. When I saw all these really great photographs, I knew I had enough for a second book. 

“My original inspiration to make a book of photographs of The Band was that they were among the best work I’ve done, an extensive work and one of the first bodies of music work that I did, because I stopped doing musical photography after about a year and a half. There was so much beautiful work there, I knew it would sell, so that’s why I did the first one. And it was really very successful. 

“I take my pictures both for myself, because I like doing it and also to show them to people. The ultimate way of showing a print to someone is on a piece of paper, whether it’s a fine art print on a wall or a print in a book. So I hope to do more books in the near future…there’s no far future for me, I can’t wait 40 years…

“So that’s why I’m doing the second book — it’s the pictures. I think the people should see them. Not for the idea of making a book on its own, because that’s a big pain in the ass…”

Levon Helm is gone. Rick Danko died in the late 1990s. Garth Hudson still lives locally but is not active in public. Richard Manuel committed suicide in 1986. Robbie Robertson lives in California, we think. The music of The Band still gets played live. The Midnight Ramble Band that backed Levon in his final act plays its own music, but is naturally inspired and informed by The Band. Jim Weider, the guitarist who replaced Robbie Robertson in The Band’s second life has The Weight Band, a knife edged crackling unit descended from above that plays its own music, too, but keeps the spirit alive. Professor Louie and the Crowmatix will always play some Band music in its shows. 

“The guys in the Band were real,” says Landy. “They were connected to old music as well as future music…they made music that touched people very deeply, in a unique way. It was different from other music that was being made at that time.” 

He points out they were very close in those early days, and that, despite what later became a seemingly unbridgeable gap between Levon and Robbie, “they loved each other as people and their spirits integrated when they played. As well as being master musicians and super creative people, they had this symbiotic connection, this deep familial connection to each other psychically, spiritually. All that combined to make them a very unique group in the history of music. They weren’t just ‘of the sixties…’, they weren’t limited by those boundaries. They belong to many eras of music at the same time…” 

Now more stories will be visible in a soon to be released new book of Band photographs by Elliott Landy, who has begun a Kickstarter fundraiser to help with the publication of a second volume of The Band Photographs, 1968-1969.