In the early autumn of 1987, as I was settling into my new digs in Minot, North Dakota, I got a call one Saturday from a friend back in St. Cloud. She’d been to the record store the night before and – knowing my affection for The Band – had picked up The Best of The Band, a 1976 anthology.
“It’s
all good,” she said, “but there is one song that is the most beautiful thing
I’ve ever heard.”
What
was the title? She’d paid no attention. Nor did specific lyrics come to mind.
All she knew was that the track was gorgeous and she’d lost herself in it for a
few minutes.
And I
was stumped. My regard for The Band at that point was based on three albums’
worth of music – Music From Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright – and my awareness that The
Band had been Bob Dylan’s back-up unit for a good length of time. I’d
heard Cahoots – the album
that followed Stage Fright –
and had been underwhelmed, and the only attention I’d paid to the group after
that came in the context of its work with Dylan: the live Before The Flood and the studio
album Planet Waves.
I was
aware that the group had released a few more albums before calling it quits
with The Last Waltz, but I’d
paid no attention. As my interest in music had been renewed earlier in 1987, I’d
put The Band on a list of performers whose work I wanted to explore further,
but time was short and the list was long. So I wasn’t thinking at all about the
group’s 1975 album Northern
Lights-Southern Cross, which was on my want list, and I wasn’t even
aware of “It Makes No Difference,” one of two truly great tracks on that 1975
album. (The other one? “Acadian Driftwood.” As for “Ophelia,” I like it but
don’t see it as quite on the same level as the other two tracks.)
By the
end of that long-ago weekend, my friend had made a note of the title of the
track that had so impressed her. Not long after that, I got hold of a copy of
the two-LP Anthology of
The Band’s work released on Capitol on 1982, and I concurred with her opinion
of “It Makes No Difference.” (I also, between that Saturday in 1987 and early
1989, completed a collection of The Band’s original albums from its first
incarnation, leaving for later years my own copy of The Best of The Band, the anthology that
began this tale.)
As I noted, my friend called “It Makes No Difference” the “most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” and there’s no doubt here of its beauty. But is it the most beautiful track recorded by the original version of the group? I lean toward saying yes, with the only other contenders being “I Shall Be Released” from Music From Big Pink and “Whispering Pines” and perhaps “King Harvest Has Surely Come” from The Band. And here it is:
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