I want to talk about "King Harvest" as a song. Could you tell us what the inspiration was for that song and what you were trying to achieve with it. And how did the actual performance of the song fill that out?

It's a song, uh --

Say King Harvest.

Yeah. "King Harvest" is uh, is a song that I wrote that's about another period when unions became either, when unions first came along, they came along as sort of a saving grace. Where they went eventually I'm sure is another song. But, the idea of writing, you know, writing about this subject matter and taking these characters and everything, the nature of the music that I wrote for this and the way it was rhythmically, these were all very separate pieces, pieces that don't belong together at all. And trying to see if they would all fit together and make this, you know, complete thing. It was very experimental. And uh, tossing the vocals around, this guy sings this, he comes in here, and then he takes over the focal, and all of these things. When it's all done and everything it sounds quite pat, it sounds like, yeah, sure, I would've done the same thing. But when we were approaching it, it really seemed like this had a good chance of not working at all. And uh, and it, there's a great reward in experimenting in that kind of way where it seems like a long shot but it's worth giving it the benefit of the doubt, and it takes shape and all of a sudden you feel like, oh, I really like this. I like where we've gone with this. So, when you're doing a song, you hear it, when you write it, you hear it completely, and you know how it should be. Um, a lot of times, that's a very, that's a very organic idea. All, everything works together and you know what's going on. When you write these kind of songs that are about something like what, what's it about? What kind of rhythm is this? Instrumentation, all of these things are just so outside, and then it, it comes together eventually in a way that has that same feeling to it, it seems like this is not, you know, a bunch of bits and pieces that you're trying to stick together. It really feels like one piece. You could say, oh yeah, I knew all along where this thing was going. It was all right here, I had it in my mind. Well, in this case, it really, to be honest, I didn't know if this was going to work at all. And when it did work it was gratifying.

Did you realize that on playback or when you were playing it?

I realized it on playback. Because when we were playing it, I was busy playing. You know? I was thinking what am I going to do next here, what am I going to play it, when do I play it. Uh, no, when I heard it back, I thought, it's like looking at a photograph. You snapped it, but you couldn't see really, the light was a little funny, but when you look at the picture it comes out and it, it looks right.

I wanted to return a little bit to the kind of spareness of The Band's sound as a whole. We read, there's a quote from Dizzy Gillespie that it took him 20 years to figure what to leave out. Is there something similar, were you guys figuring out what to leave out in your sound?

This wasn't a minimalist. When the, when The Band was making records, nobody was saying, uh, because it was very common, people were saying, I don't know, maybe it's too busy, or maybe we're playing too much or something. We'd heard a lot of that kind of talk from ourselves and from other people in the past. It wasn't that. It was like, what does the song deserve. And our job here is not to, is not to get in the way of the colors of it. If this is going on and something presents, a sound presents a mood and the way the tune is going, and you do something that breaks the spell, well, then it's your job to know when to get out of the way. And the songs dictated a lot of that. We would do things, and the song would be going along and you'd play something when you're kind of working it out, and you try stuff and you think boy that's real unnecessary. And there was nobody in the ensemble that, that, uh, that felt the need. We'd been around long enough that we kind of got over that, that naivete, that you're playing and thinking, I've got to get in a lick wherever I can. I felt that way, earlier on. Where anybody somebody stopped singing for a half a second, I'm there, filling up that space. And, and you just get over it. It's a little bit of a maturity in music maybe, but it's about letting the song breathe.

We've got this quote from Ed Ward from 1970 that The Band helped a lot of people dizzy from the confusion and disorientation of the '60s feel that the nation was big enough to include them.

The, the what?

That the Band helped a lot of people dizzy from the confusion and disorientation of the '60s feel that the nation was big enough to include them too.

Mm-hmm. What does that mean? No, I don't know. You'll have to ask him, I didn't write it.

Here's another question, you can sort of imagine the context this will be in. But what was the experience of playing for armies of hippies at Woodstock like?

For, for us in particular, Woodstock was, we had very mixed feelings about this whole thing. Because everybody else was coming from some other place. We lived in Woodstock and they said, well, it's only appropriate that you guys play here. We understood that. But, you could tell that there were going to be repercussions from this. And uh, and we played at 9 o'clock the last night of the festival, and by then, everybody, it had settled into its own little city and its own little world, and people were over, a little bit over the initial excitement of just getting together with all of these other people. And, I, it was supposed to be in the name of peace, and this was to send out a message to the rest of America and the leaders of America and the rest of the world that this voice was not a quiet voice. A lot of people felt the way they did. And I think it had a, a big impact, because it was just such a phenomenon, and such a news item. I'm sure that, uh, you know, that people in the government thought, gee this isn't like a few crazy kids anymore. If this is where they start you can imagine where this is going. And I, I know that it was influential, in people saying there's a lot of people that aren't for this war. We're going to have to turn it, we're going to have to do something. So that was like the part of it that you thought was, this needs to be done, and you need to make a contribution to this. And if we can do it by playing the music that, um, that makes everybody feel like coming together like this is worthwhile, aside from the reason of it. But uh, you wanted, you wanted to do that. Nobody really knew what it was going to be or anything. And it was wonderfully out of control. That, there were people I know never imagined themselves wallowing in the mud for days and liking it, you know. But it was particularly strange for us, because we went to the festival, played at it, everybody was having a good time, there was a very nice family thing going on. But after the festival, when we had to go back home, the people of Woodstock that lived there, they had very mixed feelings about this. Like, what's this going to do to this place? This has just overnight become the most famous small town on the planet. And they were right. And from then on, there were just hordes of vans, Volkswagen vans coming through town with people sleeping all over. They thought this was the place to go just to hippie out. And uh, and these, when we went up there, this was like a quaint little art colony. And there was, the people, their family had lived there for many generations, and all these writers and painters and poets, lovely. And it ruined their existence to a certain extent. And… I felt guilty about this.

I want to ask you about your education. Because I read an interesting quote about playing as a 16 year old in a band at these school dances and seeing all the kids who were going to school and feeling that you were missing out on something and what did that imply.

Yeah, my education, because I caught this fever and had to go off and play music and almost felt like without a choice. It's tricky explaining this to your parents. I have to do this. If I don't do this I may be dissatisfied for the rest of my life. It was trying to make a strong story and it was always, well, you can try this but you're going to have to see about your education, you're going to have to come back and deal with that at some point. Will you do that? And I promised everything under the sun that I would certainly do this. And it was the least of my concern at the time. I thought get me out of school and get me on the highway. Well, after I did it for, when I was probably 19 years old and we were playing, we would play a lot of schools and a lot of dances and everything, and I could see part of the ritual of growing had been just, I had sliced it out of my life completely. And in the beginning I thought I was lucky to get rid of this thing that most kids have to go through, I found a way around it. And there was a void that I missed, something inside that just didn't feel right. And I became a bookworm. I started reading all the time. I was trying to make up for something. And I found out I could make up for, for it somewhat in information, but I couldn't replace the ritual. And uh, and it's just, it's a sacrifice, it's just a piece that I lost in my growing up that I, I don't believe I'll ever be able to replace. So I tried to overcompensate by reading. And I went through a period where I just read, uh, and read until I needed glasses.

Were you reading up about the South?

That was part of it, I was reading, you know, I wasn't reading about the South, but I was reading, you know, I was reading Faulkner and Steinbeck and some of these people. But I was reading everything. I mean, I was reading books on Zen and just going through the whole thing. And just trying to teach myself. I was reading the classics, the great writers. And I just gained a tremendous respect for someone that can sit down with a pencil and just, you know, write with such, you know, like a ballet on a piece of paper. And I just enjoy the rhythm of language now.

When you were, do you feel at the time in the Hawks time period, were sort of the orthodoxies of music being exploded. Was that sort of a liberating experience for you, in terms of your thinking about music and about lyrics, the whole composition?

I think that, um, this period in the mid-60s was a very fortunate period to be a part of because, uh, the, the walls were torn down and new ones were being built. And what we, it was so experimental in music at that time, the Beatles were making very interesting records, and there was lots and lots of stuff coming along. We could name all the people that were very influential then, but it just kept coming. Sly and the Family Stone, Van Morrison, and the Stones were always trying stuff, and it just went on and on and on and on. And it was the whole wave of amazing music coming from Motown and from Stax and it just was like, you know, swimming in it, so much good stuff. And at the same time this thing happening with Bob Dylan that he was writing songs with much more depth than what had been along. It was like a little tune, some catchy lyrics, it doesn't really matter if they mean that much or anything. This, it was just, everything was changing, and it had to do with the times and timing and all of these things. That's why I say it was fortunate to be a part of that thing because it just opened up these doors that you thought I could try anything. Anything was worth trying right now and it's what abled me to try and write these kind of songs that I did at the time. And without some, you know, all these people kind of breaking this ground. Or you felt the ground about to be broken. It hadn't been broken yet but it was like in the process, in the way that the youth of the country was all uniting in something, and the leaders were being assassinated and the war, and all of this stuff, all of these really added up to this whole thing to make it, um, revolutionary times that are very healthy for experimenting and trying stuff and being fearless in what you try. And what happens, and then when those things go away you try to figure out other ways to make those things happen. People now, you know, the younger generation of musicians, um, they've been passed the torch, but sometimes it's really hard to keep that torch burning without showing signs of desperation, that I'm trying too hard to make something happen and it's just not in the air. So I'm going to have to overcompensate. And you can, you sense that, you sense when things are happening really naturally or somebody's just trying too hard. And it gets a little bit, you get suspicious of it, it seems a little fakery in the bakery or something.

Just to clarify one other thing. You said the Band wasn't rebelling against the rebellion. That was the general reaction to the psychedelia and all that.

The Band was never conscientiously rebelling against anything. But we started something when we were so young that wherever everybody else was going that's the place that we weren't interested in. It was too obvious, too ordinary, not challenging, and not musical enough. So we kind of set up something for ourselves, a path for ourselves, and as we followed that path no matter where it took us in these, whether it was these sleazy little bars that we used to play in or playing in front of hundreds of thousands of people, whatever was the given was boring. And what I mean is that comes out looking like, okay here you're making your first record, every, the theme going on today is anti-parent, anti-country, loud, psychedelic. And everything, the fact that we, everybody kind of wore, we looked like Mormons or something, I don't know. We were very reserved looking. That's the way people dressed, that's the way we dressed in Woodstock. People wore like black suits and white shirts and hats, because it rained. It was no big fashion statement at all, nobody even thought about that. But when you saw it in a photograph you thought, oh my God, look at these guys. They don't have psychedelic shirts on. We just thought this is another fad, get over it. It looks silly and we just didn't want to buy into things as they were coming, here comes another one. And it came out that way, and it came out in our music too. So it looked like a rebellion against the rebellion is what I was saying, but it wasn't -- nobody, we never spoke about it. We never said, well, everybody's doing this, so why don't we do that. Never came up.

…

I don't know about the comparison to the Beatles at all, because they, it's like they got into music, they, they, when they went into become really who, you know, respected and everything musically and everything, it was, they were rebelling against this other thing where they come from. And The Band was never that. This was just about a musicality. This wasn't about being cute. It wasn't about any of those things. But I think what he says after that is right. That you, you put these all things together and it really became like one voice. And that was the ultimate compliment to The Band, that we were like a real band. We weren't Joe Blow and the One Eyed Snakes. We were this thing, where everybody did their bit and it all added up.

The ultimate compliment to me in regard to The Band was that this unit that everybody made their own contribution, nobody more, nobody less, that it all added up, like it really was a real, real band. And the way everybody pitched in, that, uh, you know, it wasn't like these two guys, they're really the, they're The Band, these other guys are lucky that they happen to live in the same neighborhood as them. It wasn't like that at all. We picked one another out of a whole lot of people to become what we'd become. So the idea that this guy does this, and then just in time this guy can read his mind enough to know to come in exactly then with this, and this overlaps, and it switches, that all of this kind of passing the ball thing works so well, the synchronicity of something like that when it's really working and you feel one another musically, this was what this group was really all about. It had nothing to do with fashion, it had nothing to do with the times, fads, nothing, it was just about music.