Across The Great Divide

Description

The Band was one of the most celebrated and influential groups to arrive on the music scene in the late 1960s. The Band's members - Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm - fashioned something magically new out of musically traditional components: old-time country and gospel, Preservation Hall jazz, medicine-show vaudeville. They started as The Hawks, a teenage backup group for the rockabilly renegade Ronnie Hawkins, touring the endless highways through the heart of the South. Eventually they headed north, where they left Hawkins to become Bob Dylan's band on the revolutionary electric tours of 1965 and 1966. From there they retreated to Woodstock, and, during a period of intense personal closeness and creativity, produced two of the hallmark albums of the era. When The Band finally emerged from their Woodstock home they found themselves ill-equipped to deal with the realities of fame and the music business. Stage fright, drug addictions and growing bad feelings within the group led them to quit with the star-studded farewell of "The Last Waltz" in 1976. A few years later Richard Manuel hung himself in the bathroom of the Winter Park Quality Inn. This history captures the raw magic and complex personalities of these "musician's musicians".

Barney Hoskyns was born in England in 1959 and began writing for the New Musical Express after leaving Oxford. He has since written for The Times, the New Statesman, Guardian, Spin, the Los Angeles Reader, Creem, Vogue, and many other publications. In 1987 his acclaimed study of Southern soul music, Say it One Time for the Brokenhearted, was published. He is also the author of Imp of the Perverse (a study of Prince), From a Whisper to a Scream- The Great Voices, and Beautiful Loser, about Montgomery Clift and Ragged Glories.

The best band in the history of the universe -- George Harrison A fine meditation on the Canadians who mythologised America * Esquire * It is the great virtue of Across the Great Divide that Hoskyns has managed to make the less glamorous business of being a band come so alive. The attention to fluctuations in group chemistry and morale, on stage and in the studio, is steeped in the author's engaging fascination with the minutiae of how rock music gets made. It makes for a surprisingly refreshing and admirable read -- Robert Sandall * Sunday Times * Barney Hoskyns clearly relishes his task. Indulging in the same colloquialisms as his subjects one moment, passing critically astute judgements the next, he takes us from sleazy one-nighters backing up Ronnie Hawkins to high-rolling one-nighters firing up Bob Dylan, and beyond -- Bobby Surf * NME * Impeccably researched and elegantly written -- Charlie Gillet, author of The Sound of the City