The Band – "Chest Fever" (1968)

“She’s stoned,” said the Swede

And the moon calf agreed

“Chest Fever” is a hot mess – but hot messes are not unwelcome in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.

The track opens with a dramatic organ solo – which is said to have been inspired by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor – performed by Garth Hudson.  (Unlike the vast majority of rock and jazz organists, Hudson eschewed the Hammond B-3.  He preferred a Lowery organ.) 

Garth Hudson and his Lowery organ

Robbie Robertson gets the songwriting credit for “Chest Fever,” but I’m not sure that it’s really accurate to say that the song’s lyrics were “written.”

Robertson says that the lyrics were improvised in the recording studio because lead singer Richard Manual needed something to sing while the group was rehearsing the song.  He never got around to rewriting the words.

“I’m not sure that I know the words to ‘Chest Fever’,” Robertson later told an interviewer.  “I’m not even so sure there are words to ‘Chest Fever’.”  

Click here to read the lyrics to “Chest Fever.”

Click here to listen to “Chest Fever.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

The Band – "Look Out Cleveland" (1969)

Look out, Cleveland

Storm is comin’ through

And it’s runnin’ right up on you

A number of very accomplished people have graduated from my alma mater, Rice University.  But the late Dr. Frank Ryan – who was not only a star NFL quarterback but also a world-class mathematician and computer scientist – was in a league of his own.

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After graduating from Rice with a mathematics degree in 1958, Ryan was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams.  During the next several years, Ryan split his time between quarterbacking in the NFL and doing the work required to earn his master's and doctorate degrees.  

He was awarded his Rice Ph.D. six months after leading the Cleveland Browns to their 1964 NFL championship.  (His dissertation was titled “A Characterization of the Set of Asymptotic Values of a Function Holomorphic in the Unit Disc.”  If you have any idea what that means, maybe you can explain it to me.). 

Ryan then joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University, where he taught advanced mathematics electives at the same time he was quarterbacking the Browns. 

You read that correctly: Ryan was a star NFL quarterback and a mathematics professor simultaneously.  

Professor Ryan in the classroom

Here’s what a former student of his wrote about Ryan:

Ryan was not only a professor at Case Western Reserve, where I was an undergraduate in the ’60’s, but he was at the same time the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns.  The starting quarterback for a NFL football team, and a professor with a full teaching load.  

During the football season he taught his class early in the week, and then on Sundays he was behind the center taking the ball. Handing it off, throwing passes, and getting sacked – like any other quarterback in the league.  He was one of the best quarterbacks of his day, and had great successes.  For example, he appeared in three straight Pro Bowls.

I still remember listening to him explain a fine point in complex analysis on Tuesday, and then watching him on TV getting tackled on Sunday.  It was hard to believe, even though I knew it was the same person, the player being taken hard to the ground was my professor.  The player being tackled knew how to throw a perfect spiral 40 yards, and also could go to the board and prove Picard’s Little Theorem.  Amazing. . . .

I still recall wincing when he got sacked during one tough game. Then, a few days later I saw him in class, with his arm in a sling . . . . Sling or not we pushed on, deeper into the beautiful structure of complex analysis.

I think it’s safe to say that there will never again be a star professional athlete who is simultaneously a full-time college professor.

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Ryan was an NFL quarterback for 13 seasons and a three-time Pro Bowl selection.  He led the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL Championship, and compiled a 48-17-1 (.727) record in the five seasons in the 1960s when he was the starting signal-caller for that team.  

During that same five-year time span, no NFL quarterback – not Johnny Unitas, not Sonny Jurgensen, not Don Meredith, not Fran Tarkenton – threw more touchdown passes.

Frank Ryan on the cover of Sports Illustrated

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After leaving the Case Western Reserve mathematics faculty, Ryan became the Director of Information Services for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he supervised a staff of 225 and was primarily responsible for the creation of an electronic voting system for the House.  

After a decade as Yale’s athletic director – he was a lecturer in mathematics at Yale as well – Ryan returned to Rice, where he not only taught mathematics and computer science but also served as the school’s vice president for external affairs.  During his tenure in that post, annual giving to Rice increased some 50 percent.

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Frank Ryan was 87 when he died from Alzheimer's disease this past New Year’s Day – exactly 65 years after throwing a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl matchup between Rice and Navy.  

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may have played a role in the progression of Ryan’s disease.  Later in life, Ryan spoke out about the risks of concussion and other injury risks associated with football.  He donated his brain to the Boston University CTE Center, which is studying the effects of repetitive brain trauma on the human nervous system.

Like other prominent athletes, Ryan received many fan letters and autograph requests.  “He appreciated his fans enormously, and he kept every fan letter that he received,” according to a statement issued by his family after his death.  “Frank fulfilled each and every autograph request that was sent to him, until he became physically unable to do so.”

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“Look Out Cleveland” was released on the Band’s eponymous second album in 1969.

You’re probably assuming that the song refers to the large Ohio city located on the shore of Lake Erie, but my theory is that is it’s about Cleveland, Texas.

That Cleveland is located just northeast of Houston – the home of Rice University – and the lines that follow the ones quoted at the beginning of this post mention Houston:

Look out, Houston

There’ll be thunder on the hill

But for purposes of this post, let’s say that the song is about Cleveland, Ohio and Houston, Texas – the two cities where Frank Ryan distinguished himself on the football field and in the classroom.

Click here to listen to “Look Out Cleveland.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon. 

The Band – "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (1969)

In the winter of '65

We were hungry, just barely alive

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about driving to Farmville, Virginia, to ride my bike on the western half of the High Bridge rail trail in southern Virginia.  I also explained why I spent the night in Appomattox, a half an hour’s drive from Farmville.  You can click here to read that post.

Before driving to Farmville, Virginia to ride the eastern half of the High Bridge rail trail the next morning, I made a brief detour to visit the Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the remnants of his tattered and depleted Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, on April 9, 1865.

I’ll tell you more about some of the events that preceded that surrender in the next 2 or 3 lines.

It was a brisk 39 degrees in Appomattox that morning:

Lee’s surrender didn’t end the Civil War – several large Confederate armies remained in the field – but the handwriting was on the wall for the Confederacy after Lee threw in the towel.  By June, the remaining Confederate commanders had given up, and the Civil War was officially over. 

Lee signed the surrender documents in the parlor of a house belonging to Wilmer McLean, who had moved to Appomattox from Manassas, Virginia, to get away from the war.  (McLean’s farmhouse in Manassas had come under artillery fire during the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.)

The parlor of the restored McLean House

After the ceremony, Union generals Edward Ord and Philip Sheridan handed McLean some gold coins and helped themselves to the parlor furniture, some of which ended up in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.  

A Union captain picked up a small rag doll belonging to McLean’s seven-year-old daughter and took it home as a souvenir.  Eventually the doll was returned to Appomattox and placed on display in the park’s museum.

Lee surrenders to Grant

McLean was unable to afford to make his mortgage payments, and sold the house in 1867.  It was later sold to an entrepreneur who planned to take it apart and then reassemble it in Washington as part of a planned Civil War museum.  But he ran out of money after he dismantled the house, and the piles of bricks and other building components just sat in the yard until the National Park Service took possession and rebuilt the McLean house many years later. 

A park ranger and tour group in
front of the McLean House

I’ll tell you about my second day’s ride on the High Bridge rail trail – the highlight of which was the famous High Bridge itself – in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” – a first-person lament about the defeat of the Confederacy sung by a poor white Southerner – was released by the Band on its eponymous second album in 1969.

The song was written by Robbie Robertson, one of the Band’s four Canadian members, although Arkansas native Levon Helm later said he helped Robertson with the historical research he did prior to writing the song’s lyrics.

Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, actually fell to Union forces in early April 1865.  If the narrator was using Richmond as a metonym for the Confederacy rather than referring literally to the city itself, May 10th was as good a day as any to pick as representing the fall of the Confederacy because that was the day that Confederate President Jefferson Davis – who had met with his cabinet and dissolved the Confederate government a few days earlier – was captured by Union soldiers.

Here’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

The Band -- "Chest Fever" (1968)

"She's stoned," said the Swede

And the mooncalf agreed

I'm like a viper in shock

With my eyes on the clock

She was just there, somewhere

And here I am again

And as my mind unweaves

I feel the freeze down in my knees

But just before she leaves

She receives

I know this blog is called 2 or 3 lines, but I thought it was better to quote the entire final verse and chorus.  Quoting just two or three lines out of context might have been confusing -- but when you read the entire verse and chorus, it all makes perfect sense . . . right?

I first heard this song over 40 years ago -- the Three Dog Night version, not the original version by The Band -- and I had no idea that these were the words.

The Band

This may be TMI, but if you've never heard the term "mooncalf," it originally referred to a miscarried fetus of a cow.  (Superstitious folk believed that the moon could cause miscarriages.)  Later, the term came to be used to describe malformed or grotesque creatures -- it appears in Shakespeare's The Tempest, an H. G. Wells novel, the Harry Potter books, and The Bank Dick (a 1940 W. C. Fields movie).

"Chest Fever" is from The Band's first studio album, Music from Big Pink, which got its title from the pink-siding-ed house in upstate New York where The Band and Bob Dylan hung out in the mid-sixties.  (The Band had been Dylan's backup band on his 1966 tour, and he wrote or co-wrote several songs on the album).

The Band had a unique style.  You might say they were the quintessential American roots rock band, except for the fact that four of the five members were natives of Ontario.  (Levon Helm -- who died of cancer just last year -- grew up in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, an unincorporated community near Helena.)

Music from Big Pink wasn't a big seller at first, although Al Kooper's rave review of it in Rolling Stone helped.  Eric Clapton liked its laid-back, rootsy style so much that he quit Cream so he could take a different musical direction.  (Clapton's work on the Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominoes albums demonstrates how influential The Band was on him.)  George Harrison loved it, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said it was the second-most influential rock and roll record ever (behind only Sgt. Pepper's).

"Chest Fever" is credited to Robbie Robertson.  He freely admits that the lyrics don't make any sense.  That's a fact, Jack!  (Levon Helm says that the lyrics were originally improvised by him and Richard Manuel.)

Garth Hudson at the Lowery organ

The song begins with a very Bach-like organ solo played by Garth Hudson.  Unlike most rock organists, Hudson played a Lowery organ -- not a Hammond B-3.  

I'm not a huge fan of roots rock, but you can't argue with songs like "Chest Fever," "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," "Rag Mama Rag," and "Don't Do It."  The first 500 songs featured in 2 or 3 lines didn't include anything by The Band, but now I've made up for that oversight.

Here's "Chest Fever":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon: