Following their turn as Bob Dylan’s touring band in the months after he went electric, they’d made two albums- Music from Big Pink in ’68 and The Band in ’69-that took an irreverent approach to American traditional music, mixing old, weird folk with rock and whatever mad scientist Garth Hudson was doing. More dire than any of that, however, was the state of the Band, which was unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity. “We are not traditional studio musicians where we go to a studio for a particular sound,” Robertson comments in the liner notes to this 50th-anniversary reissue.
They would have a place to experiment, as they planned to do on their fourth album. Their manager, Albert Grossman, had built Bearsville Recording Studio in Woodstock, New York, with the idea that his clients could use it as a clubhouse-most of them lived less than 10 minutes away. So the Band didn’t have any completed songs to take into the studio with them, which was fine because the studio itself was barely finished. Robbie Robertson-who, by 1971, was tasked with churning out all of the Band’s material-found himself battling an intense bout of writer’s block, which sapped his passion for the project. Richard Manuel was in the throes of addiction and had stopped writing altogether.