Looking back from today’s perspective, it’s hard to comprehend just how revolutionary The Band was. On 1968’s Music From Big Pink and the group’s self-titled album the following year, The Band resurrected styles, stories, and instruments from the early 20th and late 19th century. What’s so groundbreaking about that?
The new, two-volume photo book from famed rock photographer Elliott Landy, The Band Photographs, 1968–1969: Two-Volume Set, demystifies and contextualizes The Band. With essays from Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Elton John’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, Margo Price, producer John Simon, Landy himself, and The Band’s family and friends, the books illustrate with both words and photos how The Band shattered the psychedelic swirl of the ’60s with sepia-toned tintypes of American folklore, setting up the decade of music to come out of places like Laurel Canyon.
“It was an epiphany of extraordinary proportions,” Clapton wrote about hearing The Band for the first time. “I felt I was being shown a new world, a new kind of music that drew on all the roots of what I considered serious music to be… I was both inspired and terrified at the same time, like being given a glimpse into the future.”
Elliott Landy began shooting The Band before they were The Band—and before he even had permission to do so. In January 1968, Landy snuck his cameras into the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall, capturing Dylan’s first concert in 18 months following his motorcycle crash. Backing him up was a then-unknown band—identified in a contemporary Rolling Stone report solely by the instruments they played. By the end of the year, they would become The Band and Elliott Landy would be their exclusive photographer. Between 1968 and 1969, he took over 10,000 photos of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, including the photos on Music From Big Pink and The Band. He estimates that only 25 to 30 of his images have ever been published.
“These photographs of Garth, Levon, Richard, Rick, and Robbie show their camaraderie, their love of life and music,” Landy wrote in the introduction. “They visually define who they were for the generations to come—brothers creating two of the greatest albums in the history of music.”
Of course, we all have mental images of The Band; rustic and anachronistically dressed, bushwhacking it through the woods of Woodstock, NY. Landy is the one who created that image, capturing the Old West-style photo featured on the back of Music From Big Pink.
The Band members themselves weren’t concerned with image, choosing anonymity from the very beginning with their name. As Music From Big Pink made waves with critics, fellow musicians, and, eventually, the general public, the only image they had of this mysterious new group was Landy’s photo from the back cover. After Rick Danko got in a serious car accident and The Band canceled its inaugural 1968 tour, their mystique only grew until April 1969, when they finally stepped onstage at Winterland Arena—a scene Landy also captured.
There’s plenty of the antiquated, rootsy photos of The Band in Landy’s book. But something that makes the 300-page, two-volume collection so fascinating and new is seeing them in the regular world, in the studio (Sammy Davis Jr.‘s poolhouse, where they recorded The Band), a modernly decorated home, in the backseat of a car, playing checkers, being normal and sitting on the couch—or just seeing them in color. It’s almost like they don’t belong in those settings, like if John Wayne stepped off the set of a Western and opened a can of Tab. Your brain has a hard time reconciling the disparate images you’re seeing. In that sense, the book is both daring and a testament to Elliott’s unfettered access. He was there with them, all the time, and he never asked them to do anything that wasn’t real.
Seeing them play catch in the front yard, they look like The Little Rascals with beards and cigarettes. Just like their music did back then, the photos make you miss something that maybe you never even experienced. They’re the kind of images that make you want to throw your cellphone in the river and start wearing three-piece suits.
“That initial record was so incredibly fresh, yet it had an inner geography to it that was so American,” Springsteen wrote of hearing Music From Big Pink in the coffee shop where he was playing when he was 18. “If you were born in this country, you immediately absorbed everything that was in that music, so when you heard it, you went, ‘Oh, yeah—that’s an America I recognize.’ And yet it sounded obviously completely fresh and brand-new. I think every American carries that geography inside of them, the geography that was Big Pink. It was amazing to be reintroduced to your country once again by a group of Canadians, and one American singer.”
There is an inherent sadness to the band, one of the great American musical tragedies, one that unfolded much slower than that of Sam Cooke or Buddy Holly. A gradual erosion of a brotherhood never to reform, but that’s not what’s in these photos. These are the good times, preserved forever.
Some of the essays, though, are tearjerkers, sometimes for sweet sentimental moments like Garth’s former ’60s and ’70s girlfriend visiting him in the nursing home in 2022 and him telling her, “You turned out alright!” and her kissing him on the forehead. Others, like Richard Manuel’s from the author of his first official biography, are heartbreaking. “Richard was real. He gave so much of what he had that he ran out of what he needed for himself.”
As Bernie Taupin wrote of Music From Big Pink, “If indeed there is an album equivalent to the great American novel, this is it.”
Purchase The Band Photographs, 1968–1969: Two Volume Set by Elliott Landy here. Volumes one and two are available as standalone purchases or bundled together in a special hardcover slipcase. Click below for a selection of photos from the books.
