History / Stage Fright & Cahoots (1970–1971)

Stage Fright & Cahoots (1970–1971)

The Band wanted to do something nice for their neighbors. The actual Woodstock Festival hadn't happened anywhere near Woodstock, it took place forty miles south in Bethel, but the town had absorbed all the fallout anyway: strangers pouring in by the vanload, looking for a scene that had never actually been there. So the group offered to record their third album live, for free, in front of the townsfolk at the Woodstock Playhouse, a six-hundred-seat theater. The town council said no. Robertson later remembered their reasoning bluntly: it would be pouring gasoline on the fire.

They recorded there anyway, just without anyone watching. Playing to an empty room turned out to have its own strange acoustics. Curtains closed gave the songs a dry, tight sound. Curtains open let the room breathe. The proper studios weren't finished yet, so their engineer worked out of a prop tent rigged up behind the stage, on headphones, unable to see the band at all. That engineer was twenty-one years old, a guy named Todd Rundgren, hired mostly because he'd done a competent job miking a Jesse Winchester record Robertson had produced. Stage Fright would be his first real production credit.

It did not go smoothly. Robertson later described the atmosphere as tense, full of distraction and drug experimenting. Helm called it a dark mood that had settled over all of them. The band didn't much like Rundgren, and he didn't always help his own case: not knowing that Garth Hudson had undiagnosed narcolepsy, Rundgren once called him an old man for dozing off mid-session, and Helm chased him around the studio for it. Two competing mixes got made afterward in London, one by Rundgren at Trident, one by Glyn Johns at Island, and for decades afterward nobody, including the two engineers themselves, could say with total confidence which mix actually ended up on which pressing of the finished record.

None of that chaos kept it from selling. Reviews were lukewarm, Rolling Stone complained the record lacked the glory of the first two, but Stage Fright reached No. 5 on the album charts, the best chart placement the Band would ever have, and went gold. The money still didn't add up the way it should have. Helm put it plainly to an interviewer years later: when you've had two acclaimed records and still can't pay your bills, you start to figure something isn't right. The imbalance he'd first noticed in the songwriting credits on the previous album hadn't gotten any better.

Cahoots wasn't even supposed to be an album at first. Their manager, Albert Grossman, was finishing construction on a new studio near Woodstock called Bearsville, and invited the group over to test the room while the last details got sorted out. The sessions gradually turned into a record almost by accident, in early 1971. Nobody involved seemed to love the results as they were happening. Robertson called the process painful, comparing it to pulling teeth, and said the group found the new studio too bright and too cold for the loose, funky sound they were after. Drug and alcohol use, already a problem on Stage Fright, hadn't eased up.

Two moments saved the record from total ordinary-ness. "Life Is a Carnival," the opener, got a horn arrangement from New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint so good the band later hired him again to rework the same charts for their live album. And "4% Pantomime" happened almost by chance: Van Morrison, who was living near Woodstock at the time, wandered into Bearsville one afternoon, started talking with Robertson about the alcohol-content difference between Johnny Walker Black and Johnny Walker Red, and the two of them wrote a song about it on the spot. Morrison stayed to duet it with Manuel. Helm later called the session extremely liquid, in more ways than one.

Critics weren't kind, and this time the sales agreed with them. Rolling Stone's Jon Landau wrote that the album felt filled with a tinge of extinction, a review that turned out to be more accurate than he probably meant it. Cahoots reached only No. 21, a real step down from Stage Fright's No. 5, and it would be four years before the Band released another album of new original material. Two albums, two years, and a band that had been called the future of American music in 1969 was, by the end of 1971, visibly running out of whatever had made the first two records feel effortless.