The Band’s celebrated 1969 debut Music From Big Pink is set to receive the deluxe Vinylphyle treatment courtesy of UMe.
The Band, which consisted of Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson, skyrocketed in the Americana rock scene from Big Pink, thanks in large part to seminal singles like “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released.”
The album, which will be released in a premium Vinylphyle package, was pressed at RTI on 180-gram black vinyl and cut from original analog tapes by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound. The newly remastered limited edition LP features a gatefold tip-on jacket and a four-panel insert with all-new liner notes by Rick Florino. The release also features original tape box scans.
Each Vinylphyle release features all analog mastering from original sources by an elite group of today’s top vinyl cutting engineers (unless sequenced analog masters don’t exist). The LPs are pressed at the world-class audiophile vinyl record pressing plant RTI, on 180-gram black vinyl.
When Music From Big Pink arrived, The Band were already road warriors, approaching almost a decade of gigging together. A few years before recording Big Pink, they joined Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour, when the songwriter infamously went electric.
As Robertson remembered in an interview with uDiscoverMusic, “To think now that we played all of these places and everywhere that we played, people booed and sometimes threw stuff at us. I had never heard of anybody that got booed all over the world and got through it in some kind of successful way.”
When the tour wrapped, the band retreated to a house in West Saugerties, New York. Decamping to the home, named Big Pink, was a suggestion of Dylan’s. It’s from this world that Music From Big Pink emerged.
Robertson added: “Everybody was in this circle of creativity and experimenting was going on. Garth Hudson, our amazing keyboard player, was building musical instruments and Richard Manuel was writing ideas, and he wrote ‘Tears Of Rage’ with Bob.”
Buy the Vinylphyle edition of The Band’s Music From Big Pink here.
