Amazon.com essential recording
This 1972 live album is a watershed recording for the Band. Recorded the previous New Year’s Eve, the two-disc concert recording presents the core quintet fortified by a five-man horn section overseen by New Orleans ace Allen Toussaint, and it is capped by a guest appearance by Bob Dylan. The brass and reed players incite the group to gut it out with more unrestrained fire than these road-hardened vets were accustomed to. The lion’s share of the set selections are culled from the quintet’s first four studio albums; only an ebullient cover of the Marvin Gaye hit “Don’t Do It,” the unremarkable original “Get Up Jake,” Garth Hudson’s mind-boggling organ improvisation “The Genetic Method,” and an absolutely piercing version of Chuck Willis’s “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes” spice up the reliable album selections on disc one. But Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel sound like they’re having so much fun singing the likes of “King Harvest,” “Stage Fright,” “Caledonia Mission,” and “Chest Fever” that it matters not that Robbie Robertson’s writing muse had already pretty much dried up. The 2001 digitally remastered reissue includes an entire second disc of previously unreleased tracks, including four with Dylan at the mic. More than four years would pass before the Robertson version of the Band would call it a day following its star-studded Last Waltz, but, as a live entity, here is where they crested. –Steven Stolder

Rock of Ages