Rebelling Against The Rebellion

"It was certainly Robbie [Robertson] whose vision determined the nature of Big Pink's cover. Keen to make a visual statement that would set [The Band] apart from the incendiary, post-Flower Power mood of 1968, he hit on the idea of Landy's photographing the band together with their families up in Ontario. 'We were rebelling against the rebellion,' he says. 'If everybody was going east, then we were going west. It wasn't like we even discussed it, there was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack.' For Robbie, the spectacle of Jim Morrison...was not shocking but merely faddish. Nor was he prepared to jump on any anti-American bandwagon. 'I never ran around with flags on my car or anything, but I think that America has given me the opportunity to do something I was very appreciative of.' Like so many immigrants, this outsider was far more reactionary than the angry sons and daughters of the establishment of the time. In a year when the time was right for violent revolution, The Band was about to release the oddly plaintive, explicitly conservative 'Tears of Rage'."

From Across the Great Divide: The Band And America by Barney Hoskyns, p165

(By the way, here's the photo that appeared on the album and proved to be a revolutionary statement of non-revolution, consciously associating themselves with what the masses were distancing themselves from)