The Band: The Notch #3

Armed with horns, burning ears, corn whiskey, a few second story views and two successful albums the Band has rolled up the rugs up there in Woodstock and cut a third, Stage Fright.

This new album represents a veiling of their old image as five country lads messing with their music in a big pink house, and shoots them up as a fist-full-of-stars. A monument to musical perfection, they have written, played, produced and mixed it themselves, with the flawless assistance of Todd Rundgren.

One of the new songs, "Chest Fever," has already been widely received when Garth Hudson brought down the house of 35,000 with his ten minute organ solo at Central Park recently. Garth, who seems to shun stardom the most, had the concert boxes shaking with his hearty organ and saxophone. This golden horn and his trombone too, slide through another new song, "W.S. Walcott." It's a good natured Elmer Gantry styled country medicine show; a slice of writer Robbie Robertson's personal history. Though contemporary, the music whisks you in and out of an era of hoops and ribbons and quack medicine, holding a hero who's a "faith healer, a woman stealer," with a characteristic respect for the fool. Never quick to judge, the Band holds a kind of Baal like attitude... "Every vice is good for something," says Baal.

There are some beautiful ballads in the album, like "Daniel and His Sacred Harp" and "Second Story" ("Patti on your dreaming ladder") and a Levon Helm classic, which is pretty reminiscent of "Seventh Son," a Mose Allison classic called "Strawberry Wine." "Strawberry Wine" has all the laconic sexuality one usually associates with Levon.

Another song, "The Rumor" was written by Robbie and is probably the best cut on the album, and also the one most admired by the other four. It's impossible to paraphrase it as it's one of those magical songs that evaporate after you hear it. "The Rumor" conjures up an atmosphere with characters and events passing, but one can't grasp them. Bob Dylan uses a similar structure in "As I Rode Out One Morning" ("to breathe the air around Tom Paine").

Robbie Robertson is a master of this seductive device of offering facts and signs to situations which are unable to be reduced. These taunting odd fraction songs leave the listener with an uneasy feeling, often a bit disoriented but with plenty of room for fantasy.

Plenty of room for nostalgia too. The Band has a real gift for recapturing an old America. A time when man really wrestled with the weather. In the second album, Richard Manuel cries out like a wounded weather cock in songs like "King Harvest," "Look Out Cleveland" and "Whispering Pines," revealing the damaging beauty of nature's forces:

   My barn burnt down and that's no joke
   My horse Jethro, he went mad
   Dry summer then fall
   Hey rainmaker

It's a time imagined when desperados, with a mean look mouth and an eye for trouble and a flask of tequila in the boot, lost all that California gold dust to a Mississippi gambler in a game of cups and balls.

Yet they aren't lost in things past, being first rate renegades, true believers in the poetry of a little healthy sin, their approach to these subjects is truly contemporary and experimental, taken from their years of travel and struggle to the top. Deliriously irresponsible they shoot through eras with ease with their boozy Bible music, sweeping one woman up on their horse while dropping a bandana as a promise to a second.

Paul Valery once said that every time we accuse or judge, we miss the heart of the matter. The Band always seems to be caught in that heart of the hurricane's eye. They offer no stable solutions, nor arguments. Their music isn't clouded by social messages and psychedelic drugs and one is served the conflict between melody and message which is too evident today.

GIVEN:
   no moral or amoral code
   I'm a thief and I dig it
   the shrug
   an eyeful of a stitching woman
   a roll on the rainmaker's wagon
   glimpses of persons passing
   they brush your clothing
   a scene from a backwoods trial
But the message is the music

Music. Sound. Robbie, who writes most of the songs but who sadly does not sing them, has music under his fingernails, shaking through his veins through his instrument. There is music contained in the words of his songs; word combinations that pulsate music: rag mama rag, old jaw bone. All of the Band have such an understanding of the music inherent in words, that broken up, their songs could compose musical flashcards. SEA. SEVENTY THREE. VIRGINIE. SLOW DOWN HEART. STORM THROUGH. YOU DON'T JUDGE.

"When you awake you will remember everything."

As in their new album... the sounds and the rhythms are so clear that you can disregard the meaning of the words and sense the direction of the songs, like following a river's current.

The feel of Stage Fright is pretty positive, looking at things with a friendly ironic eye; designed to make you feel good, recorded in friendship. It's true they have admiration for each others gifts, and tease and cheer each others smallest successes behind the glass recording boot.

They have produced it themselves and chosen to distribute their own mix on Capitol Records. As a friendly experiment, Stage Fright underwent a mixing showdown between Glyn Johns (who mixed the Beatles pre Phil Spector) and Todd Rundgren (the Band's rising henchman who has produced and written his own album, The Runt). Todd's mix was chosen for its sensitivity to the Band's musical and just because it's great. John seems to know the mixing craft well enough but lacks the artistry and originality of Todd and Robbie.

To date, The Band is touring from here to Canada, Robbie has produced one of the finest new albums, Jesse Winchester, and Levon may also produce an album of Libby Titus and they are all perfecting their own music.

Thinking back on their last two albums, the honesty and sense of humor they have shown, the helping hand the gave Dylan over the years and their fine lyrics drenched in pure musical notes, it's pretty certain record three will add to their list of notorious successes. All of them, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Jaime Robbie Robertson unselfishly pool their talents, even out the level of performance and get one big music whole: The Band.

Stage Fright, destined to be a musical landmark, mixes their past and present to echo a deeper past.

Poetry springs from the desire to create a form of speech filled with more music than ordinary language can hold.

Song springs from the limits of poetry.

The Band springs from the limits of cataloging... too diverse to call poets, producers, outlaws or singers. Rather it could be said they all create a real positive nostrum; an agreeable quack medicine to cure all your musical ills.