No Band Has Ever Started Their Career Quite Like the Band Did
It worked as a metaphor for a nation still learning how to welcome back young people damaged by an unpopular war.
With its watery guitar intro and decaying drum pattern, “Tears of Rage” quickly established the Band as something entirely different – even before Richard Manuel’s devastating vocal began. This was an album-, and career-, opening track like no other.
The idea used to be that you kicked off an LP with up-tempo rockers, not something so darkly elegiac – something so clouded by troubled times. Instead, the Band began its debut album with a song (featuring lyrics by Bob Dylan and a melody from Manuel) about parental heartbreak, and in so doing, put forward a lasting metaphor for a nation just learning how to welcome back damaged young people returning from an unpopular war.
More generally, its first-line Independence Day imagery also cut deeply for anyone trying to come to terms with the wreckage of the 1960s dream. So much once seen as iron-clad promise at the beginning of the decade had become muddled and confused in an eruption of violence – perhaps most graphically in the fields of Vietnam but also at home, in the streets of Detroit and of Watts, on a hotel balcony in Memphis and in a Los Angeles kitchen pass through.
Much of that anguish plays out in the completely interior world of “Tears of Rage,” which features one of Manuel’s very best vocal performances. As he tries to make sense of how things turn out once something is set free, he could be referring only to a child (in something of a King Lear rerun), or a soldier, or a country.
The song, written during The Basement Tapes era when Dylan was the only father among the bunch, works on a number of different levels. It’s a credit to the stirring artistry of all involved. As he always would, Manuel served as a delicate and moving conduit.
“There’s no doubt that it was thrilling to me to be able to put a song into the hands and tools of Richard,” Robbie Robertson later told me. “To this day, I still don’t know any singers that can bring that kind of sadness so boldly and movingly to the front.”
“Tears of Rage” had been earlier fronted by Dylan, during 1967 sessions at Big Pink, and the song appears on the Band’s debut in slightly altered form. Every subtle edit, however, seems to give the song a deeper resonance.
Where Dylan originally sang “you throw us all aside and put us on our way,” Manuel’s “put us all away” cuts deeper. Dylan’s “to wait upon him hand and foot, yet always answer no” evolves into the far more direct “always tell him no.” His “we pointed out the way to go” is transformed into “pointed you the way to go.” Then “while we watched you discover there was no one true” becomes, in Manuel’s hands, “no one would be true.”
They were small, but important, changes — indications that the Band had developed a more complete understanding of the rough sketches they’d worked on the previous year, and of songcraft itself.
Producer John Simon girded the song with a baritone horn, while providing key words of advice that helped round out their early basement ideas. “I always get involved in pre-production writing, even on Big Pink,” Simon told me. “All the music gets filtered through my musical tastes.”
The smallest of details are astonishing. Put aside, for a moment, Manuel’s crying vocal – something of such power that it always tends to define “Tears of Rage,” even in the maelstrom of the Woodstock festival – and turn focus to Levon Helm’s work on the toms. It’s something not often said about rhythm players, but his moaning performance could be accurately described as shatteringly emotional.
Every moment of Helm’s cadence plays out with an excruciating loneliness, setting the stage perfectly for what happens as Manuel ramps up into this heart-breaking interpretation of a line that, decades later, would come to accurately describe the fin de siècle atmosphere of the late-1960s: “You know, we’re so alone – and life is brief.”
With every member of the Band now gone, the lyric only gathers more weight.
This is an excerpt from Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso’s next book. ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters’ is set for release in Spring 2025. www.nickderiso.com.