I think you're sort of getting its influence backwards -- like looking the wrong way through a telescope. What made "Music From The Big Pink" influential in the first place was that it was an entirely new way of playing old music. It's hard to hear that now, but think of it from the perspective of a listener hearing it in 1968.

Think of some of the (very) important albums that came out in 1967: "Sgt. Pepper," "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," "Velvet Underground & Nico," "The Doors," "Forever Changes," "The Who Sell Out," "Disraeli Gears," and "Are You Experienced?" You can almost smell the incense and see the paisley just reading that list. The lyrics are trippy and obscure, the vocals are compressed or echoey and the guitars are set to fuzz.

The Band pretty much wiped all of that away. Other bands were headed in a similar direction -- their buddy Dylan came back from his year off with the subdued "John Wesley Harding," and The Byrds released two country albums that year. But what was so revolutionary about The Band was how they blended timeless lyrical themes (as opposed to hippie phantasmagoria) with deceptively simple arrangements that blended decades of white and black American music -- often in the same song. Hey, is that a New Orleans jazz funeral? Wait -- is that a Booker T & the MGs groove? The organist is playing a church hymn! And listen to that clean Stratocaster playing a country lick! All the instruments stand out and serve a specific function in the song. Compare any song on "Big Pink" to Cream or Big Brother & The Holding Company, where everyone's essentially soloing over everyone else.

Their influence was huge and immediate. Consider how much the Beatles -- by far the most important and influential group of the '60s -- lifted from The Band on their last two albums (especially "Abbey Road"). They created basically a whole new genre with "The Basement Tapes" and "Music from the Big Pink."