I still love Stagefright but it is a slightly flawed album with some wonderful songs(All the Glory for instance) and some less so.
I've lifted an article some of you may have read and some may not have. Cheers.
The Band delivered a classic with their self-titled second album
in 1969 — but almost as quickly as they found their groove, they
started falling apart. The fissures in the Band were evident with their
third record, Stage Fright.
Released
Aug. 17, 1970, it retained the rough-hewn sound of its predecessor
while continuing to highlight the group's virtuosity — each member
played at least two instruments on the album — and adding a bit more of a
rock feel than they had on The Band. But it was hard to miss the sense of darkness that loomed over the record as a whole — and hard not to miss the once-plentiful vocal harmonies that seemed to be less of a focus in the new songs' arrangements.
Part of the change might have been a function of time, or lack thereof. As drummer Levon Helm explained to Hit Parader, their relatively leisurely pace while recording The Band
may have produced a more fully realized album, but it also left a
painful financial sting. "When you've had two records and you still
can't pay your bills...you get to figure something ain't quite right,"
he pointed out. "Doing it the other way costs so much money."
To
avoid ending up in the hole again, the group decided to record their
next album at the intimate Woodstock Playhouse in upstate New York.
Initial plans called for it to be tracked as a true live album, in front
of an audience, but as soon as word got out that the Band would be
putting on an exclusive show, demand for tickets so far exceeded supply
that they decided to do it in front of an empty theater.
While plans for Stage Fright
were coming together, the bonds between the Band members were being
tested by a number of complicating factors, including the growing issue
of songwriting credits. In his memoir This Wheel's on Fire, Helm recalls being shocked by the liner notes of The Band, realizing that guitarist Robbie Robertson
had claimed sole authorship of most of the record — and although Helm
admitted to being assuaged by assurances that the royalty imbalance
would all be taken care of in the end, the creative tension in the group
would only worsen over time.
"The level of the
group's collaboration declined," Helm observed, "and our creative
process was severely disrupted. [...] Who wanted to pour out their souls
and not get credit? [Richard Manuel]
stopped writing completely after awhile, and I don't think [Garth
Hudson] got much credit at all until some of the final records."
But even if creative issues hadn't eroded the
Band's camaraderie, there's a good chance they still might have been
undone by a far less obvious culprit: their own sudden success. After
spending years backing up Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, they hit the Top 30 with their 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink, and then leapfrogged into the Top 10 with The Band. Their lives — and their habits — quickly changed.
"If
you’ve never made a million dollars overnight, like we did, you have no
concept of what it can do. We saw it ruin people — kill them! Suddenly
we had all the money we needed, and people were falling over themselves
to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand,"
recalled Rick Danko in This Wheel's On Fire.
"People wanted to turn us on for free, do us favors, and some of us
were happy to be taken care of like that. There wasn’t anything real
dramatic about it, because it was a fact of life, and probably still is.
I’m here to tell you that it’s a crying shame to see what success can
do to some people. I’m sure it wasn’t the best thing that could have
happened to the band."
"Mentally, healthwise, success was not the best thing for the Band," Robertson told Musician.
"It confused people. It brought out where people were striving or
pushing. The inspirational factor had been dampened, tampered with in a
certain kind of way. The curiosity wasn't as strong. We didn't
compensate for it, we didn't try. We just did what we did and, rather
than it being a consistent thing for a period or something, it was not
the center anymore."
"The drugs were just part
of the dark mood that settled upon us," countered Helm. "There were also
the issues of artistic control of the Band the direction we were going
in — if any."
Compounding all these issues was the pressing need for product. Per the usual custom of the day, Stage Fright arrived hot on the heels of The Band — less than a year after its predecessor. Even taking into account its purposely abbreviated recording time, Fright
was a record that Helm, for one, believed would have benefited from
more time. Perhaps as an indication of its speedy gestation, the album
was actually give a pair of parallel mixes — one by Glyn Johns, whose
work made the final cut, and one by a young Todd Rundgren.
Stage Fright wasn't critically savaged, but the reviews weren't as overflowing with praise as they'd been for The Band. "Glory is the operative word at this stage of the game," wrote John Burks for Rolling Stone. "What this third Band record seems to lack is the glory of the first two." That lukewarm response didn't deter fans, however; even without a strong single to propel sales, Fright peaked at a career-best No. 5 and went gold.
The
record's success couldn't salve the fractures between the members of
the Band, however, and subsequent efforts found their creative dynamic
slowly leaking out as they retreated to separate spheres — a state
summed up by the title of their final studio effort, 1977's
contract-fulfilling Islands. While they'd only improve as a live act over the decade to follow — achieving a transcendency later captured in The Last Waltz — Stage Fright sounded a warning that no one in the group was able or willing to heed.
"It
was a dark album," Helm observed in his book. "And an accurate
reflection of our group's collective psychic weather. ... We all
realized something was wrong, that things were beginning to slide."
