![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Ah, fuck it,’ he said.”Īh, fuck it indeed. No way, man, I didn’t even know the fuckin’ guy. Greg gives us that moment with typical stoner understatement: “He and I looked at each other. In Niven’s book they’re all tripped out or coked up, so that after one Crazy Chester ingests too much powdered Khe Sanh, another Crazy Chester decides that the only remedy is a few ice cubes punched through the back door. She’s Greg’s inevitable crush, a girl born with a Rolling Rock in her fist and who likes to respond to everything with “Rilly?” to which Greg is prone to shoot back, “‘Yeah.’ Yeah rilly, you fuckin’ bitch.”Īnd as for Crazy Chester-well, he could be just about anybody. In place of Anna Lee, meanwhile, there’s Skye, whose name sort of says it all. The music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years, distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country.”Īlas, there’s no one named Luke in Niven’s story instead, he distills his vibe through Greg Keltner, an earnest, music-loving college dropout-slash-dope dealer who’s always saying stuff like “Hey, wanna go to the john and get fucked up?” Greg follows a friend to Woodstock and ends up supplying the likes of Bob Dylan, his infamous manager Albert Grossman, and of course Helm and the boys. “The characters that appear in the lyrics-Luke, Anna Lee, Crazy Chester-were all people I knew. “When I think about that album, I still have to laugh about how close the songs were to our lives,” drummer Levon Helm wrote in his memoir This Wheel’s on Fire. Niven’s is the first fictional treatment, and it’s easy to see how he might have spied a worthwhile story up there in the mountains of Woodstock. 29 in Continuum’s quirky and admirable “33 1/3” series that matches seminal rock albums to good prose. Then came the LP, The Band’s classic 1968 debut record that lodged itself so thoroughly in our cultural subconscious we’ll forever be humming its lines, “Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ’bout half past dead …” Now Music from Big Pink is also a novella by John Niven, No. ![]()
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