The Band

59 glossy black-and-white photographs (each 3 1/2 x 5 in.; 89 x 127 mm). "Levon" written on the verso of one print in ball-point pen; some minor wear from handling, occasional pin holes to some prints. 

"My sister Bonnie was beautiful, cool and musically precocious, that is, she had great ears. I was in the end of my freshman year at UNC in 1965 when I got a postcard from her saying she had heard the best band ever. I didn’t take this assessment lightly. Bonnie had been involved in music from the age of 15 singing backup and recording with a high school band which included Jack Cassidy in DC, our home town. The “best” band ever was Levon and the Hawks and they were appearing at Tony Mart’s on Somers Point outside Atlantic City. A year later I met Levon at his and Bonnie’s apartment in LA. They were to be an item until late in 1969 and she spent a lot of time with The Band in Woodstock during those transitional years. While in LA, she and Levon were friends with Leon Russell. I remember that Levon and Leon, Bobby Keyes, Jesse Ed Davis and others were part of a pick up band that played dates around town and it’s at that time that Bonnie became close to Kay Poorboy who was Carl Radle’s girlfriend. Bonnie was also good friends with other “Shelter People”, so it was natural for Kaye and Carl to invite her to Miami to the Layla recordings, every day of which Bonnie’s diaries recount in excellent detail." (Monty Diamond)

Hoskins, Barney. Small Town Talk, p. 94

After Bob Dylan went electric, The Band went to “Big Pink.”

Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon Helm first entered the national spotlight in 1965-66, while touring as Bob Dylan’s backup band under the moniker “The Hawks.” Following the famed world tour, the group – Dylan in tow – settled in the Woodstock, New York area. It was in during this time that they began performing as “The Band,” and undertook a sustained collaboration with Dylan that resulted in the 1974 release of The Basement Tapes, while concurrently writing their debut album, Music from Big Pink (1968).

Their debut album was, to quote Barney Hoskins, “a unique white-gospel country-funk style was patented and never successfully copied. ‘To us,’ says Robbie Robertson, ‘Southern music that was white or black all got swirled in the same gumbo.’ Big Pink was the sound of all the Hawks’ R&B and country influences filtered through Dylan’s poetics.” (Hoskins, 94).

This grouping of candid photographs depicts The Band at play in their famed West Saugerties hideaway “Big Pink,” so called for its vibrant pink siding. This lot includes a substantial number of images of Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko playing football, in addition to a number of images of Levon (holding a shotgun), Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel posing in front of a U-Haul, and a young Robbie Robertson posing with his white-clad and bouquet-bearing wife-to-be, Dominique Bourgeois, on their wedding day.

A playful collection of images of the famed rock band at “Big Pink”