Thoughts from Big Pink

Even more expansive is Free Reed’s Revival Masters, featuring six compact discs on Thompson’s career and a 172-page book. Indeed, the complex musical journey of Thompson requires the spectrum of box sets to capture even a small part of his talent, breadth and knowledge.

There is an archival function of these box sets, providing a context and narrative history unattainable in the smash, grab and download culture of MP3s. Perhaps the greatest of these box sets is not only a testament to the compact disc, but to vinyl’s history. For size and grandeur, The Band: A Music History is much more than a six-disc set. In fact, the music is hidden at the back of the package. Filling out the size of a vinyl album, the hardback “book” features both pictures and closely written text. The scale and majesty is not wasted on The Band. Adored by music critics, but misunderstood or forgotten by fans, it is a/the band for the creepy guys with comb overs who used to run second-hand record shops.

Formed by Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko, they gained their start with Ronnie Hawkins but fame through Bob Dylan’s 1965-66 world tour and the recordings that became The Basement Tapes. Their legacy though would be their own, through the two albums that moved music out of the choking-on-your-own-vomit death rattle of the 1960s into the “take it easy” 70s.

Music from Big Pink and The Band were their extraordinary first two albums featuring songs that swept through American history. “The night they drove old Dixie down” and “King harvest has surely come” were not only founding tracks of the country rock genre, but released the dense drama and tragedy of the rural south.

The Band’s box set conveys the complexity of a musical history that will never be understood through the ephemera of digitisation. The whiteness of the iPod results in a compressed - jump cut - history without the linearity of albums or the complex dialogue between album covers and the enclosed music. The High Fidelity lads can now fetishise the box sets like they used to worship to authenticity of vinyl.

The compact disc - like the redundant vinyl before it - has changed its function and audience. It can never be as portable as MP3 players. It can never be as convenient. It can never be as small. For the CD to occupy a place and role in the market, it had to get larger, cannibalising the rock biography, photographic collections, music videos and DVD documentaries to become physical, tactile and sensual tributes to the music history of the past. Now that the compact disc has become a vault, we are freed to open a new chapter: the light, compressed, non linear future of pop.