U.S. Bancorp Tower

The U.S. Bancorp Tower is a 42-story, 163.38 m (536.0 ft) skyscraper in Portland, Oregon. It is the second tallest building in the city after Wells Fargo Center, and with its nearly 69,000 m² (740,000 sq ft) office space, it's the largest in Oregon in terms of volume.

History

Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) with Pietro Belluschi as the consultant, the tower cost $60 million to construct. Ground was broken on May 29, 1981, and the building was largely completed in June 1983. It was dedicated on December 1, 1983. The tower adjoins U.S. Bank Plaza at 555 SW Oak Street, a 7-story, 497,800 sq ft (46,250 m²) building constructed in 1974. A tower expected to rise about 37 stories was already part of the bank's long-term site plans at that earlier date, but that phase of the plans ended up being delayed until the 1980s.

Originally, the building served as the national headquarters of U.S. Bancorp, and was the regional headquarters of that organization until a 1997 merger moved the corporate offices to Minneapolis, Minnesota. U.S. Bancorp has 480,000 sq ft (45,000 m²) leased until 2015.

Music from Big Pink

Music from Big Pink is the debut studio album by the Band. Released in 1968, it employs a distinctive blend of country, rock, folk, classical, R&B, and soul. The music was composed partly in "Big Pink", a house shared by Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson in West Saugerties, New York. The album itself was recorded in studios in New York and Los Angeles in 1968, and followed the band's backing of Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour (as the Hawks) and time spent together in upstate New York recording material that was officially released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, also with Dylan. The cover illustration for the album is by Dylan.

Reception

The initial critical reception to the album was positive, though sales were slim; Al Kooper's rave review of the LP in Rolling Stone helped to draw public attention to it (even though Rolling Stone referred to them as "the band from Big Pink" instead of just "the Band"). The fact that Bob Dylan wrote one and co-wrote two of the songs on the album also attracted attention.