Josh Rodriguez
In 1967 Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock, a town in the Catskill Mountains, having recently bought a property in Byrdcliffe. It was there that he recuperated after his motorcycle crash. As the crash led to the cancellation of his 1967 tour, he was joined there by his backing band, then known as the Hawks.
There they experienced a simpler way of life and, through sessions with Dylan in the basem*nt of the pink house rented by Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel, created the music that came to be known as Americana, a fusion of folk, country, Appalachian Mountain music, blues, and gospel. This new sound and style were first recorded on The Basem*nt Tapes but were first heard on Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the debut album by The Band, the newly re-named Hawks.
The Band’s Music from Big Pink included a version of Dylan’s I Shall Be Released, a song that Van Morrison heard for the first time played on an FM radio station at a time when he was in Boston having a hard job getting himself up spiritually:
‘… one day this song came on the FM station and it had this particular feeling and this particular groove and it was totally fresh. It seemed to me like things were making sense ... I didn't know who the hell the artist was. It turned out to be The Band. I looked up at the sky and the sun started to shine and all of a sudden the song just came through my head. I started to write it down, right from "When all the dark clouds roll away…"
The song that he started to write was Brand New Day from Moondance.
In 1969 Morrison came to Woodstock to perform at the Sound-Out festival on Pan’s Farm in West Saugerties. While there he learned that a house just off Ohayo Mountain Road near Dylan’s home was about to be vacated by Manuel and Hudson. He moved in and began rehearsing in the living room with local musicians. It was there that the songs for Moondance came to life.
Moondance was released in 1970, the same year that Dylan released New Morning. The two albums inhabit shared space lyrically – as both explore spiritual and redemptive themes – and musically – Morrison was inspired by the blend of Americana that The Band had perfected on their first two album’s and which had been inspired with Dylan on The Basem*nt Tapes.
Both are songs of immense joy and hope. Ed Ward wrote in Rolling Stone that on New Morning he’d ‘never heard Dylan sounding so outrageously happy before’ while, in Van Morrison: No Surrender, Johnny Rogan called Brand New Day a song ‘of unrestrained joy.’ Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian described New Morning as ‘a marvellous song, pointing to all our best hopes’, while Morrison spoke of Brand New Day as expressing ‘a lot of hope’. It is for both these reasons that these are great songs for the beginning of a new year, even in our current difficult circ*mstances.
Brand New Day describes and demonstrates the epiphany that a new dawn can bring both spiritually and emotionally. New Morning inhabits the present moment making that the ultimate reason for joy - ‘So happy just to be alive / Underneath the sky of blue.’ For Morrison, joy and hope are found in the transition from living under dark clouds while feeling ‘lost and double crossed’ to the sun beginning to shine so that freedom can be seen, and life is lit with love. Dylan is then to be found fully in that moment where life and love bring happiness.
If you are looking for encouragement, inspiration, joy, and hope as we settle into 2022, you can’t do better than these two songs with their shared themes, vibe, and Woodstock origins. To pray that in 2022 the dark clouds roll away, the sun begins to shine, and, in its light, we might be happy just to be alive seems to me to be a relevant prayer and one that many of us might be willing to pray.
Rev. Jonathan Evens is Associate Vicar for HeartEdge at St Martin-in-the-Fields and co-author of ‘The Secret Chord,’ an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. To know more about Jonathan’s work, visit his blog and article about Taylor Swift’s Epiphany.
categories Church and the Arts, Faith and Music, New Music, Rock n Roll
tags Bob Dylan, Christianity, Christian discipleship, Faith, Rock Music, 1960s music, Big Pink, Woodstock, New Morning, Moondance, Jonathan Evens, Morrison, Van Morrison
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