Tag: Northern Lights – Southern Cross

Band – Acadian Driftwood

Everlasting summer filled with ill-content
This government had us walkin’ in chains
This isn’t my turf
This ain’t my season
Can’t think of one good reason to remain

I will say that my favorite Canadian export is The Band. Combine the 4 Canadians with one southern American and you have gold…no scratch that… you have diamonds. Something I will confess about this band… after I’ve heard songs like The Weight, all of my life, sometimes I don’t realize or forget…wow that is great songwriting! I guess because those songs are so ingrained in my head and I don’t give them as much notice but I want to say something about that now. After posting Daniel and the Sacred Harp and now Acadian Driftwood…my respect for Robbie Robertson’s songwriting knows no bounds. This is songwriting at its best. Don’t get me wrong…I always knew those popular songs were great but I took The Band for granted for a while.

Robertson was inspired by the history of the Acadians, a group of French settlers in Canada who were forcibly removed from their land during the Great Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement) between 1755 and 1764. This event scattered the Acadians across various regions, including Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns. He was also influenced by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 poem Evangeline, which describes the deportation of Acadians

Just like with Daniel And The Sacred Harp this song showcases the vocals of Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and Richard Manuel. Each takes a turn singing different parts of the song, contributing to the narrative’s depth and meaning. There were some other Americana bands but none sounded like The Band.

Who would even think about writing a song about this subject? The song was on the Northern Lights – Southern Cross album released in 1975. The album peaked at #27 in Canada and #26 on the Billboard Album Charts.

Anyway…now when I listen to The Weight, Cripple Creek, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and the other well-known Band songs…I will stop and listen a little more carefully.

Acadian Driftwood

The war was over and the spirit was broken
The hills were smokin’ as the men withdrew
We stood on the cliffs
Oh, and watched the ships
Slowly sinking to their rendezvous
They signed a treaty and our homes were taken
Loved ones forsaken
They didn’t give a damn
Try’n’ to raise a family
End up the enemy
Over what went down on the plains of Abraham

Acadian driftwood
Gypsy tail wind
They call my home the land of snow
Canadian cold front movin’ in
What a way to ride
Oh, what a way to go

Then some returned to the motherland
The high command had them cast away
And some stayed on to finish what they started
They never parted
They’re just built that way
We had kin livin’ south of the border
They’re a little older and they’ve been around
They wrote a letter life is a whole lot better
So pull up your stakes, children and come on down

Fifteen under zero when the day became a threat
My clothes were wet and I was drenched to the bone
Been out ice fishing, too much repetition
Make a man wanna leave the only home he’s known
Sailed out of the gulf headin’ for Saint Pierre
Nothin’ to declare
All we had was gone
Broke down along the coast
But what hurt the most
When the people there said
“You better keep movin’ on”

Everlasting summer filled with ill-content
This government had us walkin’ in chains
This isn’t my turf
This ain’t my season
Can’t think of one good reason to remain
We worked in the sugar fields up from New Orleans
It was ever green up until the floods
You could call it an omen
Points ya where you’re goin’
Set my compass north
I got winter in my blood

Acadian driftwood
Gypsy tail wind
They call my home the land of snow
Canadian cold front movin’ in
What a way to ride
Ah, what a way to go

…

Band – Ophelia

I believe I could listen to Levon sing anything. He makes a song feel like that old shirt with holes that fits perfectly that your wife wants to hide or throw away. You keep going back to it to wear it triumphally.

This was inspired by the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

The most famous Ophelia is a character in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. She is caught between her love for Hamlet and the wishes of her father, Polonius, who uses her to spy on Hamlet. She feels she has no control of her life and descends into madness, eventually drowning after falling out of a tree into a brook.

It was on the album Northern Lights – Southern Cross released in 1975. It peaked at #26 in the Billboard Album Charts and #27 in Canada in 1976.

It wasn’t a huge hit but the song peaked at #62 in the Billboard 100 in 1976…

Robbie Robertson: There was another tune I was anxious to spring on Levon because I thought it had his name written all over it. The song dealt with the mysterious disappearance of Ophelia, and I had an old-timey-type chord progression to go with a whole new spin on the story. I liked having a modern-day Shakespearean character that Hamlet couldn’t get, and neither could I. Ophelia—they don’t have names like that anymore, or maybe they do in Denmark. I loved the way the track felt after we cut it. The combination of horns and keyboards Garth overdubbed on this song was one of the very best things I’d ever heard him do. It was definitely the cherry on the cake, and completed this musical odyssey. “Ophelia” became my favorite track on the album, even if it didn’t have the depth of some of my other songs. The pure, jubilant pleasure of that tune swayed me.

Band biographer Barney Hoskyns claims the song isn’t named for Shakespeare’s heroine, but for Hee Haw comedienne Minnie Pearl, whose real name was Sarah Ophelia Colley. I don’t know why Robbie just wouldn’t say that to begin with…he doesn’t seem to be a person that puts on airs.

From Songfacts

In this song The Band drummer Levon Helm sings about a woman named Ophelia who has skipped town. We know she left in a hurry and he would love to have her come back (“The old neighborhood just ain’t the same”), but we really have no idea who she is what her relationship is with the singer.

The song was written by the group’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, and the ambiguity was intentional. “I was always fascinated by that girl’s name,” he told Melody Maker in 1976. “I always like the mystery factor. I may be writing a song and the music may imply a certain lyric, or vice versa. It’s not that deliberate, or an intellectual exercise. It just comes out naturally.”

The character in this song could certainly be an analog to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, possibly driven mad by a lover.

A modest hit for The Band, this is a number they played at many of their shows, including their famous final show in 1976 that provided footage for the concert film The Last Waltz. In the film, we see Levon Helm belting it out from behind his drum kit.

This Ophelia has three syllables: “Oh-Feel-Ya,” giving it a rootsy sound. The more mannered pronunciation is “Oh-Feel-Ee-Ah,” which is how Tori Amos sings it in her Ophelia. In 2016, The Lumineers had a hit with a five-syllable Ophelia: “Oh-Oh-Feel-Ee-Ah.”

Artists to cover this song include Animal Liberation Orchestra, Jim Byrnes and My Morning Jacket. The Dead Ships played the song at a benefit concert in 2012 after Levon Helm passed away, and the following year released it as a free download on the one-year anniversary of Helm’s death.

In our interview with their frontman Devlin McCluskey, he talked about recording the song. “It was right after I came back from the funeral. We had a show in Pomona and we played this song. It’s got this big high note in it, and I can just remember pushing that so hard and being hit with this thing of, no matter how hard I go at it, no matter how hard I push for it, absolutely nothing is going to change. Nothing is going to bring him back.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rpRDIKAUnY

Ophelia

Boards on the window
Mail by the door
What would anybody leave so quickly for?
Ophelia
Where have you gone?

The old neighborhood just ain’t the same
Nobody knows just what became of
Ophelia
Tell me, what went wrong

Was it something that somebody said?
Mama, I know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I’d die for you

Ashes of laughter
The ghost is clear
Why do the best things always disappear
Like Ophelia
Please darken my door

Was it something that somebody said?
Mama, I know we broke the rules
Was somebody up against the law?
Honey, you know I’d die for you

They got your number
Scared and running
But I’m still waiting for the second coming
Of Ophelia
Come back home

Band – It Makes No Difference

Rick Danko conveys so much hurt, loneliness and heartache in this song. You can feel his pain with every word he sings. It’s one of the best vocals of pure suffering I’ve ever heard. He sounds like a man at the end of his tether because of a hopeless love affair.

The Band’s later material sometimes gets neglected since their first two albums were so good. This song was on the Northern Lights – Southern Cross album released in 1975.

The album peaked at #26 in the Billboard 100 and #27 in Canada.

Robbie Robertson: “I thought about the song in terms of saying that time heals all wounds,” he said. “Except in some cases, and this was one of those cases.”

Robbie Robertson: “I wrote this song specifically for Rick to sing, and when we first started discovering the possibilities, it kept expanding to more levels of emotion. What Garth and I could add to finalize the statement of this song was purely instinctual.”

From Songfacts

This was included on the soundtrack to The Last Waltz, a 1978 documentary about The Band directed by Martin Scorsese, named after the group’s 1976 concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The group also performed the song during the concert, which was a basis for the film.

This was included on the sound Solomon Burke covered this on the 2005 album Make Do With What You Got. Other covers include My Morning Jacket on the 2007 album Endless Highway: The Music of The Band and the 2012 album Love for Levon, and Over the Rhine on the 2013 album Meet Me at the Edge of the World.

It Makes No Difference

It makes no difference where I turn
I can’t get over you and the flame still burns
It makes no difference, night or day
The shadow never seems to fade away

And the sun don’t shine anymore
And the rains fall down on my door

Now there’s no love
As true as the love
That dies untold
But the clouds never hung so low before

It makes no difference how far I go
Like a scar the hurt will always show
It makes no difference who I meet
They’re just a face in the crowd
On a dead-end street
And the sun don’t shine anymore
And the rains fall down on my door

These old love letters
Well, I just can’t keep
Cause like the gambler says
Read ’em and weep
And the dawn don’t rescue me no more

Without your love I’m nothing at all
Like an empty hall it’s a lonely fall
Since you’ve gone it’s a losing battle
Stampeding cattle
They rattle the walls

And the sun don’t shine anymore
And the rains fall down on my door

Well, I love you so much
It’s all I can do
Just to keep myself from telling you
That I never felt so alone before

…