History / Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975)

Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975)

Robertson had moved to Malibu in the summer of 1973, and it turned out Dylan lived close by. The two hadn't worked together since the chaos of 1966, but in September that year Dylan came over to Robertson's house, sat down with the whole group, and ran through an incredible number of songs over four hours. It went well enough that a tour got planned almost immediately. They cut Dylan's new album, Planet Waves, in six days that November, and when it came out in January 1974 it became his first-ever No. 1 record on the Billboard chart. The tour that followed, forty shows across twenty-one cities, drew roughly ten million ticket applications for houses that could hold a fraction of that. In Chicago, opening night, Robertson found the reception almost disorienting after what they'd gotten used to in 1966. What happened tonight, he told a reporter, is so reassuring for us.

The tour made real money, some of it lost afterward in bad tax-shelter investments Helm had specifically warned against, but enough of it stuck around to fund something the group had wanted for a while: their own studio. Robertson found a property in the hills above Zuma Beach, a former bordello with mirrored walls and a Naugahyde bar that had once belonged to an actress named Margo Albert, and had engineer Rob Fraboni convert it into a working recording space. They called it Shangri-La.

Northern Lights–Southern Cross was the first album made there, and the first collection of new original songs the Band had released since Cahoots, four years earlier. They produced it themselves, and every song on it carries Robertson's name alone, the only record in their catalog written that way from front to back. It also took most of 1975 to finish, not because anyone was struggling for material, but because getting all five of them into the same room at the same time had become its own project. Helm later wrote that he spent much of the year in and out of Malibu, on an album that took longer than anything they'd made before, simply because nobody could be counted on to show up when they said they would. Robertson admitted the same thing years afterward in blunter terms: the writing was on the wall, people drifted in late or not at all, and the interest in what they were doing seemed to be fading even as they made some of their best music.

That contradiction runs through the whole record. Shangri-La had a twenty-four-channel console, more room to layer sound than anything they'd worked with before, and Garth Hudson used it to build an entire synthetic horn section out of organs and synthesizers for "Ophelia," a New Orleans-flavored arrangement so convincing that when Allen Toussaint later scored real horns for the same song at The Last Waltz, he barely changed what Hudson had already invented alone in a studio.

The album's centerpiece, "Acadian Driftwood," tells the story of the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians, French colonists forced out of what's now Nova Scotia by the British, some of whom eventually resettled in Louisiana and became the ancestors of the Cajuns. Manuel and Helm split the verses, Danko joins them for the three-part harmony on the chorus, and Hudson layers in chanter, accordion, and piccolo alongside a guest fiddle part from Byron Berline, with a few lines sung in French. It's the kind of historical storytelling Robertson had done before on "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," turned this time toward his own country's history rather than America's.

"It Makes No Difference" gave Danko one of the most acclaimed vocal performances of his career, a heartbroken ballad that closes with a long instrumental duet between Robertson's guitar and Hudson's saxophone. The opener, "Forbidden Fruit," put Helm at the center of a song widely read as at least partly about the group's own drug problems, with some of the loosest, most extended soloing Robertson had put on record up to that point.

The finished album came out in November 1975 to strong reviews, "Ophelia" reached the lower end of the Hot 100 as a single, and yet the record stalled commercially, never climbing past the edges of the Top 30. The cover, a photograph by Reid Miles, the designer behind countless Blue Note Records sleeves, showed the five of them gathered around a bonfire on the beach behind Robertson's house, an image that reads, in hindsight, like a portrait of unity staged right at the moment the unity itself was running out. All three of the record's best songs, "Ophelia," "Acadian Driftwood," and "It Makes No Difference," would get one more major performance the following year, at a show nobody involved was calling a comeback.