Word: basse
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...representative of many of the pre-1960 songs in another way-the great backup voices. What today's rock songs lack more than anything else is catchy backup, and "Remember Then" makes that failing obvious. There's a surging "Re-mem-mem. re-mem-mem-member" in a pleasing bass voice at the outset. Later, the repetitions of "oop shoop, shang a lang a ding dong" nicely complement that basic line...
Over in Simcoe, Ont., a young butcher's helper and part-time bass-guitar player named Rick Danko felt a similar urge. Driving up to his parents' home one evening in a friend's Cadillac, he cried out: "I've got to leave tonight; it's now or never!" He borrowed a coat, packed and was gone. One by one, Garth Hudson in London, Ont., Richard Manuel in Stratford, Ont., and Levon Helm, down on a bare subsistence farm in Marvell, Ark. (pop. 1,200), were making similar plans. To Helm, it was especially urgent. "You get out of school...
...eyes often closed in what seems to be creative ecstasy, he stands punching out notes and laying out funky phrases like "the mathematical guitar genius" Bob Dylan used to say he was. Levon Helm approaches his drums with what is, in rock music, unparalleled subtlety and restraint. On bass, Rick Danko occasionally puffs his cheeks as if he were playing a horn. At the piano, Richard Manuel looks like a teen-ager masquerading as a pirate...
...music young, and they were brought up singing and playing hymns and folk songs with their families. The only American, Levon, was playing mandolin, drums and guitar in his early teens, and once won first prize at a county fair, accompanied by his sister on a homemade washtub bass. Rick Danko, whose father is a Simcoe tobacco farmer, was given a mandolin at five and soon joined his three brothers at Saturday night musicales...
...builds to a climax rhythmically and melodically-but not in volume-then cuts back to voice for a single loud stanza. Though the following five stanzas get even more emotional, moving all over his range and tone, they aren't loud. He works his vocal line intricately against the bass line. To share his excitement you have to explore the song with him instead of sitting back and letting a single surface of sound...