What “Tears of Rage” means

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Most debut albums open with a bang. Music from Big Pink opens with a wound. “Tears of Rage” — slow, grief-stricken and grand — announced from the first bar that this was a band with something deeper on its mind.

A father betrayed

The words are Bob Dylan's, the music Richard Manuel's — written together at Big Pink in 1967. It's sung in the voice of a parent wracked by a child's ingratitude and betrayal: “We carried you in our arms, on Independence Day.” Critics have likened it to King Lear raging on the heath — a father confronting promises broken and truths ignored.

Bigger than a family

That “Independence Day” line opens the song outward. Many hear it as being about America itself — a nation that carried its founding promises like a child, only to betray them. Written as the Vietnam War escalated, it reads as an elegy for ideals abandoned: greed poisoning “the well of best intentions.” Greil Marcus called it “a sermon and an elegy.”

Manuel's finest moment

The Band slowed Dylan's original into a passionate, gospel-and-New-Orleans-flavoured lament, and Richard Manuel sang it for the ages. Levon Helm flatly called it “one of the best performances of his life.” As an opening statement of intent, few records have ever matched it.