Music / Singles & Videos / Singles & Videos

Singles & Videos

The Band came up in an album-oriented era, and singles were never where the group's reputation was built. Most of their best-known songs, "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," were album tracks first, hits on classic rock radio second, and only modest chart entries as actual singles at the time of release.

Selected singles

• "The Weight" (1968), peaked at No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100, the only single from Music from Big Pink to chart at all
• "Up on Cripple Creek" (1969), the group's highest-charting single ever, reaching No. 25 on the Hot 100 and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show that November
• "Rag Mama Rag" (1969), reached No. 57 in the US and No. 16 in the UK, the group's best-ever UK chart placement
• "Don't Do It" (1972), a live single pulled from Rock of Ages
• "Ophelia" (1975), the lead single from Northern Lights–Southern Cross, its chart performance modest but its radio and live-show life long

Full chart context for each song's original release is covered on the individual song pages linked from the Songs hub.

Videos

The Band's classic-era catalog predates the music video format almost entirely; MTV launched in 1981, five years after the group's farewell concert. What visual documentation exists from the original lineup comes largely from television performances (The Ed Sullivan Show, Saturday Night Live) and concert film, above all The Last Waltz, rather than promotional music videos in the format that became standard afterward. The reunion-era lineup of the 1990s produced some promotional clips to support Jericho, High on the Hog, and Jubilation, though none achieved significant rotation or lasting visibility compared to the group's television and concert-film appearances.