Music: Down to Old Dixie and Back

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Perhaps the broadest shift in rock fashion is the one exemplified by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and most of all by The Band. Though The Band calls it "just music—everything we've ever heard or done," the convenient label is country rock. However labeled, it is a turning back toward easy-rhythmed blues, folk songs, and the twangy, lonely lamentations known as country music. Country rock is also a symptom of a general cultural reaction to the most unsettling decade the U.S. has yet endured. The yen to escape the corrupt present by returning to the virtuous past —real or imagined—has haunted Americans, never more' so than today. A nostalgic country twang resounds all up and down the pop charts. Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash, two singers once chained to the old country circuit, are now national figures with coast-to-coast network shows. Commercialized even further, the country strain runs into advertising—most egregiously in Salem cigarettes' unwittingly ironic paean to the joys of fresh air.

Irony-Proof Vision

The thoughtful young have led the way in declaring disenchantment with the present. But for the perceptive and rebellious, no slickly packaged nostalgia will provide escape or inspiration. Nor are they to be taken into the near camp of Grand Ole Opry. In yearning for an irony-proof vision of a better, gentler life and more enduring values, the young have been turning for years toward solace as various as Zen and hippie communes. In pop music they are now turning toward The Band. In part, this is because The Band's words and music suggest that The Band itself has been there and back. "It's hard to describe," says an Amherst senior. "They're sophisticated, but the very words and music that make them so appealing move away from sophistication to earthy, honest qualities in life." Another adds: "You listen and you just know that's no group of johnny-come-latelys from the suburbs who've gone off to a commune while Daddy foots the bill."

Among other things, The Band's un-idealized look into yesterday includes a rare subject for pop music: consideration of the old. "Most people are knocked out by younger people," Robbie Robertson explains. "I'm knocked out by older people. Just look at their eyes. Hear them talk. They're not joking. They've seen things you'll never see." Rockin' Chair, on the latest Band LP, sketches in the weariness of old age better than pop music has any right to do:

Hear the sound, Willy Boy,

The Flyin' Dutchman's on the reef,

It's my belief, we've used up all our

time,

This hill's too steep to climb,

And the days that remain ain't worth

a dime . . .

Even the group's most lingering look back at life on the land, King Harvest, is touched with a double vision. It is marked by an ironic interplay between the rich, yet somehow threatening sound of nature and the querulous, grass-hopperish whine of the farmer.