With an hour left before showtime, we knew we had to head back to the hall, regardless of how we were feeling. Rick got behind the wheel and drove for about fifteen or twenty minutes in silence, confidently retracing his footsteps back to the venue. Suddenly he blurted out, “I don’t know where in the fuck we are! I thought I had it, I thought the hall was up here, past this park, but I must have gone the wrong way.” We pulled into a gas station and asked for directions, but the guy had a strong accent that made him hard to understand. His directions kept getting more and more vague until Rick just stepped on the gas and roared out of there.
Finally, we pulled up next to some cops in a patrol car. By now we were running very late; even if the police could tell we were stoned, we were desperate. They led us to the stage door of the auditorium, and we ran in. The guys were standing in the wings, ready to go on. They shook their heads, looking at us like the idiots we were. I’m not sure how we played that night because I don’t remember a damn thing—and maybe it’s for the best.
Capitol wanted a new record from us as soon as possible after the success of The Band album. We considered the idea of recording our next album at the Woodstock Playhouse. The building had nice acoustics and a warm, woodsy feel to it. It was mainly a summer-stock theater, and availability didn’t seem to be a problem.
Rick didn’t want John Simon to produce our next album, and the other guys thought it would be good to produce it ourselves. It was partially a financial issue and also just wanting to try something new. To me John was like family, and he’d played a vital role in our discovering our musical path. But I could see how strongly the boys felt, and if producing ourselves would get everybody more involved I was all for it. So I asked Todd Rundgren if he would do some engineering, and he agreed.
But before we got set up at the Playhouse, a dark cloud rolled overhead. Levon, Richard, and Rick had started some serious “chippying” around with heroin. You could feel it: out of reach, out of touch, a cold and dark disconnect. I tried to engage them with ideas and possibilities we might try on the new record, different instrumentation and vocal stylings, but things kept getting worse by the day.
This wasn’t completely new. Some months earlier I had seen a certain strain of medicated madness in Levon’s eyes. He had been seeing an African American girl who was a knockout and decided he wanted to, as he put it, “take her down home with me and see what those fuckers think about that. Those ignorant sons of bitches will fall by the wayside when they see us together. I’ll show them that my country ass ain’t the same as it used to be.” It was like some demon had crawled inside my friend’s soul and pushed a crazy, angry button.
I said, “Why would you want to submit this girl to such a terrible, uncomfortable situation?”
He just waved it off. “Nah, she’ll like it. I’ll show her something she ain’t never seen before. We’ll blow everybody’s damn mind.” He was looking at me with one eye closed, and I could tell that something he was taking was bringing this behavior to the surface.
A couple of months later, after that relationship had unsurprisingly ended, Levon hooked up with our singer friend and local beauty Libby Titus. Libby had a very smart, street-savvy side and I thought she might be able to pull Levon back on track. I complained to Rick and Richard about their messing around with scag and how it was affecting Levon—and them, and our working relationship. I got through to Rick a little bit at times, but he drifted in and out.
It did surprise me some that Levon, Rick, or Rich never offered me any heroin. Over the years we had shared just about everything, but with this, not a peep. They probably knew I would condemn this hard-core interference with our work, so I didn’t really expect an invitation, but hell, I was no angel. I didn’t know if they asked Garth into the fold either, but I suspected not. Garth was all too familiar with the drug-fueled downfall of many a jazz great that he admired.
At one time, there was talk that if you wanted to play like the angels, you had to dance with the devil—that heroin was a gateway to music supremacy. That myth was yesterday, but the power of addiction was still in full force. It hit me hard that in a band like ours, if we weren’t operating on all cylinders, it threw the whole machine off course.
This was the first time that writing songs was painful for me. In some cases I couldn’t help but reflect on what was happening behind the curtain. I wrote “The Shape I’m In” for Richard to sing, “Stage Fright” for Rick, and “The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show” for Levon—all with undertones of madness and self-destruction. While watching Richard pound out the rhythm on the clavichord, I couldn’t help but see the irony as he sang out, “Oh, you don’t know, the shape I’m in.”
Garth and I showed up every day on time, hoping the other guys would follow suit. When Levon returned from another trip home to Arkansas, he said he might have the beginnings of a little blues tune. I was thrilled to see him making an effort in the songwriting direction and, without even hearing what he had, said I’d help him finish it. He called it “Strawberry Wine,” and I treasured this rare songwriting collaboration.
But back at the Playhouse, Todd Rundgren didn’t know what the hell was going on. He wasn’t acquainted with the world of hard drugs and didn’t understand why the guys were showing up late or maybe not at all. On a couple of occasions he spoke his mind about it, and Levon chased him around the Woodstock Playhouse threatening to kick his ass. Levon had just totaled his new Corvette after nodding off at the wheel, which might have contributed to his being a little short-tempered.
While we were working at the Playhouse, Jon Taplin brought me a new green BMW CS2800 coupe that had just been delivered from Germany. I had ordered this sweet baby a month earlier and looked forward to getting my hands on it. The car handled like a dream on these mountain roads and looked pretty sharp. One afternoon, during a break from recording, Levon said he needed to make a run back to his house and asked if he could use my car, winking around the room at everybody. I wanted to show faith in our brotherhood and belief in better days ahead. I wouldn’t be bluffed, even if it wasn’t the wisest decision. I immediately, defiantly threw him the keys. He grinned back at me with his one lazy eye. “Don’t you worry, Duke. I’ll bring her back all in one piece.” He did, but I also knew I would never do that again.
After we recorded “Stage Fright,” I thought we’d finally started to hit our stride. Garth and the guys played strong and determined. In a completely different vein I wrote a tune reflecting on fatherhood called “All La Glory” (a slight français tinge in there for my wife and daughter) and thought it might be inspired to see if Levon could handle the vocal in his present state of mind. Levon’s performance on it was extremely touching. The sound of his voice and his superb phrasing—pure talent. Next Levon and Libby announced that they were expecting a little one.
I invited John Simon to stop by the Playhouse to see how we were coming along and maybe to play horns on a track with Garth. I missed working with John, and I didn’t want him to feel shut out. He listened to some of our tracks approvingly, but you could tell he didn’t like seeing Todd sitting behind the recording console. I could also feel that John sensed something dark and heavy in the atmosphere. The smell of drugs and dust lingered in the air, and the volatile behavior of Richard, Rick, and Levon said it all. John looked around, looked at me, and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t have to say anything. Garth, meanwhile, kept busy, working on his instruments and experimenting with electronics. He knew better than to try to make sense of what was happening with our brothers in the band.
One day between setups, Levon got a mat, a cushion, and a blanket and lay down and went to sleep. Todd, who was doing a superb job engineering, said to me in dismay, “I really don’t get it. I don’t understand how you guys work. How can he go lay down on the floor and go to sleep in the middle of the recording session?” I felt somewhat ashamed and didn’t have an answer.
That evening when we finished working, I told Levon that I would drive h
im home. On the way I said how horrible it was watching Rich, Rick, and him on this drug binge. I confessed how helpless I felt in the midst of this monster. “It’s destroying us. It’s tearing our band apart. You are my brother, my best friend, and I can’t stand watching this happen.”
I pulled the car up in front of Levon’s house and shut the motor off. He turned to me and began a ten-minute rant. “No, baby. What do you think? I’m strung out? I wouldn’t do that shit. No, man, I’d tell you if I was sick, you know that. I got it under control. You don’t need to worry about me. You wanna see my arms? You wanna check for needle marks? Here, let me show you.” He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “Look. Clean. Just a couple of old bruises. Sure, I did a little skin popping a while back, but I’m cool now.”
For the first time, Levon had looked me straight in the eye, patted me on the shoulder, and lied. We had never lied to each other. It made me terribly sad. He opened the car door and said, “If you want, I’ll talk to Rick and Richard tomorrow and make sure they ain’t getting in deeper than they need to be. But you don’t need to worry none about me. This ship ain’t going down on my account.” He stepped out of the car, waved at me with a wink, and walked away.
Things changed in that moment. A distance grew between Levon and me that I don’t know if we were ever able to mend. It wasn’t about the drugs; whatever he wanted to do, that was his business. It was about the betrayal. About disrespecting the brotherhood and our partnership.
When I got to my house, I shared with Dominique my painful exchange with Levon. She helped clear the air and grounded the situation. “Everything can’t revolve around drugs and insanity,” she said. “I’m having a baby and that’s reality. This other shit is imitation life.”
—
We finished our stretch at the Woodstock Playhouse, but I had one more song for which I needed to finish the words. I wrote about a traveling medicine show I had heard Levon speak of years earlier, something between a carnival sideshow and the African American origins of rock and roll. We recorded “The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show” and another take of “Daniel and the Sacred Harp” with Todd at a studio in the city, and these turned out to be a couple of our favorite tracks. That put the finishing touches on what we could pull out of the hat for this record. I was worn out from this process and trying to maintain a stable family life with my baby daughter and pregnant wife.
As the recording was wrapping up, we accepted an unusual offer to play a train tour across Canada called the Festival Express. It sounded like a fun idea and included Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and others. But the whole thing was ill-fated from the start. Local authorities in Montreal pulled the plug on the planned first show, and instead the tour kicked off a few days later in Toronto.
Before the show in Winnipeg, Garth said that Don Docker was here—the Mountie who had been one of the arresting officers in our Toronto pot bust. I couldn’t believe that tough-ass RCMP was here at this rock ’n’ roll event. Garth smiled. “Yeah, he’s here, and he wants to say hello.” We brought him backstage and Levon introduced him to Jerry Garcia of the Dead and Janis Joplin. People were smoking grass all over the place. “You see,” I said to Don, “we were just ahead of our time.”
“Oh, you don’t know what happened,” Don replied. He explained that after our bust was basically dismissed, all the arresting police came under investigation. Their superiors in the police department believed there was some kind of hanky-panky going on, and they paid the price. Don claimed some of the cops were reassigned to Nova Scotia and British Columbia, and he’d been sent to Manitoba.
As the Festival Express chugged westward, it turned into more of a fiasco. All the musicians on board drank the train dry, and the promoters had to stop and reload the express with booze. Rick knew how to roll, and I heard he was the king of entertainment on board. I had to slip back to New York to do more work on the record, and I talked Levon into joining me. We were doing mixes with Todd, and at the same time Levon made arrangements to send multitrack tapes to London, England, for engineer/producer Glyn Johns to take a crack at mixing. We thought a fresh perspective on this material could be helpful, and though Todd was doing his own mixes, he didn’t seem to mind at all. He knew and respected Glyn’s work.
The train tour made it to Calgary, Alberta, before the whole thing imploded. What had started out as a romantic notion of traveling across wide-open spaces turned into a ballyhoo of danger and destruction. The initial plan was to wrap up the tour in Vancouver, but the city wouldn’t approve the permit. Then we heard that the promoter and the Calgary mayor had gotten in a fight at the show. Musicians who actually rode the train across Canada looked haggard and beaten by the time they finished up. Nobody died, but that was probably just luck.
We returned to Woodstock to catch our breath and compare Glyn’s and Todd’s mixes. Art director Bob Cato said he had a new photographer from South Africa we should try. He was just arriving in the U.S., and Cato sent him directly up to Woodstock to shoot us for the album cover. The photographer arrived like a phantom and set up in the studio building at my house. He had kind of a wiry frame and blond hair. He looked a bit jetlagged, and scared. I never spoke to him, just got out of the way. When the guys came over for the shoot, we had no idea what to expect. I could tell the photographer was very nervous; he tried to situate us in a particular way but could see we weren’t picture-friendly at all. He spent a very short period of time placing his flash and getting what he could. I wanted to thank him for coming to Woodstock to take the shot and venturing from South Africa, but I hadn’t caught his name. He politely shook my hand and said, “Norman, my name is Norman Seeff.” Later, two shots were anonymously delivered. I had never seen this texture, the style of art, in photography before. It was soft and stark at the same time, in a modernistic sepia tone. We ended up using one of his shots for the cover. Norman went on to become one of the most celebrated and sought-after photographers in the whole country. Once again I said to Bob Cato, “Good eye.”
I ended up sequencing the songs on the album, which we had decided to call Stage Fright. I know it probably sounds a bit odd now, but I wanted any cowrites with the guys to be presented up front, even if it meant some of the best songs ended up on the second side of the LP.
Capitol put the machine in motion to get this album on record-store shelves before you could blink an eye. They had just hired and fired another president and had no comments, no feedback, nothing. It felt like an empty pit, a vacuum. But maybe there was nothing anyone could say about an album called Stage Fright. I was just trying to do the best we could under these dark, drugged-out circumstances. It is what it is. One thing I knew: some of my favorite songs that I’d ever written were contained on this album, so I could live with that.
On July 30, 1970, Delphine Kateri Robertson was born in Montreal. She favored my mother a little, and looked like a little Indian in her blanket. We were living temporarily in a little apartment near Dominique’s folks in Côte-des-Neiges when she was born. This was a thrilling time for us. We were growing into a new stage of true parenthood. Having two daughters can bring out a protective side in a father that you didn’t even know you had. Dominique was right: This was real. Everything else in my world was balancing on a wire.
We took Alexandra and Delphine back to our house in the Catskill Mountains and put both cribs in the bedroom next to ours. Quick, easy access was our goal—until the girls would start crying in stereo in the middle of the night. Dominique was nursing, so she would pick up Delphine and I would get Alexandra, and we would walk them in circles while we were half asleep, praying for slumber before we all keeled over.
In the beginning, Dominique wouldn’t consider hiring any help, but I tried to encourage the idea of getting a nanny. The Band had a concert schedule, and I really wanted Dominique and the kids to be covered. Dominique, however, would only agree to French-speaking help, which was fine so long as we could find people who wouldn’t mind living in the mounta
ins, a hundred miles north of New York City. As one might imagine, we went through an interesting array of characters in search of someone Dominique trusted and who didn’t drive us crazy, like the flying squirrels that had taken up in our roof.
—
I had barely recuperated from finishing the album and the Festival Express tour when we were booked for several concerts around the country. We ran over some of the new songs to see what felt good live and to see if everybody was road ready. We all showed up, though some days were extremely encouraging and others were borderline. For an upcoming date at the Hollywood Bowl, Albert asked us our thoughts on the opening act. I looked at the list of possibilities and saw only one name: Miles Davis. What a night of music this could be for the audience at the Bowl, I thought. Miles had extraordinary musicians playing with him at all times, but they were really exceptional during this period: Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, and Keith Jarrett. I shared my enthusiasm with the other guys and hoped this would encourage everyone to be on top of their game.
While Rick usually rose to the occasion, my biggest concern was Richard, who walked the most vulnerable tightrope with his health and keeping his voice in shape. During these particular days, Levon too was struggling with his drugs of choice. It seemed to me that he was trying not to get caught in a heroin web, so he took pills to help soften withdrawal. A whole lot of Valium might ease the pain, but it could also make you groggy and crazed.
At the hotel the night before the show, Levon fell in his room and cut open his forehead. When we did our sound check at the Bowl the next day, it quickly became clear what a hard time he was having. He seemed unsteady and sluggish. I pulled him aside, and he said that he’d be fine in time for the show. He looked rough but said he just needed a little nap. That night he showed up wearing a Confederate flag shirt, a straw cowboy hat, a bandage on his face, and sunglasses to cover his blurry eyes. He acted pissed off at the world. Again I pulled him aside to ask if he was going to be able to play, but he didn’t answer me. Instead he went on a tirade about our accountant, lawyer, and management, venting his fury. Trying to calm him down, I changed the subject and asked if he wanted to go check out some of Miles Davis’s set. He just complained about our even having an opening act.
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