GEM:

About the only way I can go about discussing the content of the album is to use as an illustration a view of Mt. Tamalpais on the Pacific Coast shore line above San Francisco. The western part of that mountain runs right down to the sea and the more you look at it, the more you see. Week in, week out, month by month, hour by hour even, nature conducts a change which rings through the twelve months and the four seasons, and there is the change in daylight when the sun shifts and the shadows bring out silhouettes and crevices in the rocks and accentuate the gullies and the draws and at night when there's moonlight, it is a different mountain altogether.

The album is like that. It is full of sleepers, diamonds that begin to glow at different times. As with the Beatles and Dylan and the Stones and Crosby-Stills and Nash, the album seems to change shape as you continue to play it. The emphasis shifts from song to song and songs prominent in the early listening will retreat and be replaced in your consciousness by others, only in later hearings to move to the fore again. Little things pop up unexpectedly after numerous listenings and the whole thing serves as a definition of what Gide meant by the necessity of art having density.

Take "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a Civil War song sung by Levon ("I aimed it right at him, I wrote it for him, he gets to say it all," Robbie says). It is the story of a Rebel soldier who served on the Danville and Richmond railroad which supplied Richmond during the war and which was cut several times by Gen. George Stoneman's Union Cavalry. Virgil Kane is the soldier's name and the song builds a story of the winter after Appomattox, lean and sparse like a Hemingway short story.

Nothing that I have read, from Bruce Catton to Douglas Southall Freeman, from Fletcher Pratt to Lloyd Lewis, has brought home to me the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is the Red Badge of Courage. It is a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Rick and Richard Manuel in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some oral tradition material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of '65 to today. It has the ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity. Yet after playing the album a dozen times, I began to feel that "Dixie" was an obvious song, the superficial standout number on the album and I acquired other favorites. But I kept coming back and coming back until now I am prepared to say that, depending on one's mood, these songs stand, each on its own, as equal sides of a twelve-faceted gem, the whole of which is geometrically greater than the sum of the parts.

Just as "Dixie" evokes history, "Up On Cripple Creek" throws images of trucks and trailers rolling down the great inland highways, putting the Danville and Richmond Railroad, as well as many others, out of business. "Up On Cripple Creek" is a modern song, its rhetoric is the rhetoric of today and even the line "When I get off of this mountain, 'y' know where I'm gonna go, straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico" (on Highway 61 from Minneapolis to New Orleans, paralleling Ole Miss?), which is, as a friend remarked, surely the oldest line in American folk history, does not date it. "Cripple Creek" is the story of a trucker and the gal he has stashed away in Lake Charles, "a drunkard's dream if I ever did see one." It is a salty, sexy, earthy (rather than funky) ballad and it is Levon who sings it with a little help from his friends Rick and Richard. (Levon's chuckle towards the end is surely the nastiest, dirtiest, evilest sexual snort in the history of the phonograph record). And again the rhythmic tension created between the interplay of the bass and drums and the line of the voice sets up a tremendously moving pulse. It vies with "Dixie" as the song that hooks you first and like the former it fades and then returns to fade and return again.

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