THE BAND – The eponymous second album with special guest JOHN NIVEN.

This interview took place before and after we listened to the vinyl album.

The Band’s debut, ‘Music From Big Pink’ and their eponymous second LP are two of the most influential albums ever made.

John Niven’s novella, Music From Big Pink caused the Band’s Robbie Robertson to ask, “Was that guy in the room?”

John is one of the UK’s greatest writers and has published over ten acclaimed books. His latest offering is the truly wonderful O Brother. It’s a brutally honest family memoir about his young brother Gary, that is both hilarious and devastatingly tragic.

CAT Club stalwart, Ian Clayton was in the interviewer's chair.

THE BAND – edited review by Jason Draper (www.udiscovermusic.com)

The self-titled second album by The Band honed everything from ‘Music From Big Pink’ with deft performances and an innate knack for storytelling.

If The Band single-handedly created Americana with their debut album, on their self-titled sophomore effort (aka “The Brown Album”), they honed everything that made ‘Music From Big Pink' so quietly epochal. Initially, the group relocated from their iconic Woodstock home to a New York studio in order to work up the 12 songs that formed their self-titled second album, but the pro facilities didn’t suit the group’s laidback, down-home approach.

Packing up and heading west, they recreated the Big Pink vibe with what lead guitarist Robbie Robertson called “a clubhouse feel” at 8850 Evanview Drive in West Hollywood, a house that had previously been owned by Sammy Davis Jr. The place had enough bedrooms that the group could reside there with their families and a pool house where they set up the studio.

The Band’s second album came after a difficult period. Bassist Rick Danko had broken his neck in a serious car crash and had taken time to recover. The move from East Coast to West Coast proved an invigorating change. Crossing the vast expanse of North America was apt: The Band was almost simply titled America, and its songs are populated with characters from the continent’s past; like the lucky hopefuls who set off west in search of the American Dream in the mid-1800s, The Band struck gold.

Truckers, sailors, Civil War soldiers: it’s the sort of roll call that would feel contrived in lesser hands, but Robertson and co’s deft performances and innate knack for storytelling allowed these disparate characters – like the wide array of instruments the group rotated through – to coalesce, working up a collection of songs that, as Ralph J. Gleason put it in his Rolling Stone review, are “equal sides of a 12-faceted gem, the whole of which is geometrically greater than the sum of the parts.”

This event took place on 30th November 2023 in the Pigeon Loft at The Robin Hood, Pontefract, West Yorkshire.

To find out more about the CAT Club please visit: www.thecatclub.co.uk

This podcast has been edited for content and for copyright reasons.

Happy Trails.