The Band was peaking as a creative force when “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” appeared on their second album. The song’s subject is a rural victim of the Great Depression who joins a labor union to avoid starvation. His plight seemed awfully remote to most young listeners in 1969, but the economy has changed in a big way since then. What goes around, comes around…

Richard Manuel sings like an impassioned modern-day Job — My horse Jethro, well he went mad/And I can’t remember things bein’ so bad — and Robbie Robertson is at his tasteful and funky best as a guitarist and a writer of songs that, as Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train, “were made to bring to life the fragments of experience, legend and artifact every American has inherited as the memory of a mythical past.”