Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns

Author:Barney Hoskyns
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306823213
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

19

the shape they’re in

THE BAND HAD good reason to call their third album Stage Fright. On the eve of their live debut in San Francisco, on April 17, 1969, Robbie Robertson came down with a mysterious illness that almost stopped the show, and even he wondered if fear wasn’t a contributing factor. Here the group was, having played no more than thirteen minutes onstage in four years, headlining for the first time with their own material—and with no Ronnie Hawkins or Bob Dylan to hide behind. Headlining, moreover, in front of a crowd of hippies in the capital of acid rock.

Many people, when they heard Stage Fright’s title song, assumed Robertson was writing about Bob Dylan. But “Stage Fright” spoke as much for the five men who’d shied away from the limelight in the Catskills as it did for the man who’d mellowed into the reclusive bard of Nashville Skyline. The scale of the Woodstock and Isle of Wight festivals unnerved them, while the success of The Band caught them by surprise, making them stars in their own right. On January 12, 1970, they were on the cover of Time magazine with the misleading headline “The New Sound of Country Rock.” “The Band appeals to an intelligent segment of this generation,” William Bender said in the opening “Letter from the Publisher.” “Many have tried the freaked-out life, found it wanting, and are now looking for something gentler and more profound.”

Little did Bender know what was really going on behind the scenes. After touring for the first three months of that year, the Band returned to Woodstock to prepare for their third album. This time the fraternal spirit was tougher to summon: though they were starting families, fame and money had disrupted the group’s tenuous chemistry, while drugs and alcohol were beginning to mess with the health of at least three of them. Libby Titus would later describe Richard Manuel as “the worst alcoholic I’ve ever met in my life,” claiming he drank “quarts of Grand Marnier” every day. “Richard was drinking too much from the very beginning, and his liver was now pushing up into his stomach,” says Jonathan Taplin. “Levon had some serious problems with downers. Rick was like a hoover; he’d take whatever was around. Garth would have a little toke once in a while, but he was very moderate. At that point Robbie was Mister Responsible.” Fans of the Band who idealized them as peaceful farm boys would have been shocked to learn that even opiates were not off-limits to them. “I hope we didn’t,” says Peter Coyote, “but I’m afraid Emmett Grogan and I might have been the people that introduced Levon to heroin.” Pictures Elliott Landy took of the Band outside Manuel’s and Hudson’s Spencer Road house appear to show Helm in an opiated state. “Heroin was a problem,” Robertson admitted. “I never liked it, never understood it, and I was scared to death of it. But it came through, you know, like everything else came through.

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