From the side of the stage, I watched Miles and his array of powerhouse musicians. Miles Davis looked like an alien that night. He wore round, bulging, ball-like sunglasses and a space-age black and red leather jacket. He wasn’t playing any of his earlier material, the modal jazz from Kind of Blue or Sketches of Spain. This was all about new, experimental music. Bitches Brew, his jazz-rock fusion record, had come out a few months earlier, and he was putting it out here in full force. The music was quite abrasive and cluttered at times, with Miles often playing with his back to the audience or even leaving the stage. Miles was more than modern, more than hip; he was futuristic.
Still, the majority of the audience were fans of the Band, and I could feel a pronounced lack of appreciation for him. As Miles’s set went on, the crowd began hissing like snakes in a pit. It occurred to me that when our group went out there, we’d have to chill everybody out and get them back on our side.
Backstage I thanked Miles for playing the show with us. He seemed quite unfazed by the audience’s reaction, except for a quiet, raspy “Kind of tough crowd out there…but they’re okay.”
Garth, Rick, and Richard knew what we were up against with the crowd, but Levon had been back in a dressing room with some friends. The lights went out, and we took the stage. The audience seemed relieved and excited, cheering and whistling in the dark. When the lights came up, Levon began stomping his foot on the drum riser to kick us into “Stage Fright.” But his tempo was too slow, so I nodded a little faster with my head, and he began stomping to that tempo. The audience clapped along to the beat, with Levon’s foot vibrating through the mics on the drum riser. The energy was building until suddenly Levon shook his head, stopped, and said into the vocal mic, “Hey—I’ll keep the goddamn beat.” The place froze.
I turned my back to the crowd. “Easy does it, Lee. Let’s just play some music.”
As I looked at him with his Confederate flag shirt and bandaged face, I knew this was going to be a rough night. During every song we played, Levon would start slowing down at a certain point. I wanted to have his back the best I could, so I would either swing my guitar neck to the right tempo, tap my foot so he could see it, or nod my head in time. After each song Levon looked away, embarrassed. We got through the show, but just barely. The audience watched us like they were at the zoo—pointing and waving. They could tell something was off-kilter.
After our encore, I put my arm over Levon’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Well, old buddy, I ain’t gonna do that ever again. I’m done.”
He answered in a direct and apologetic tone. “You won’t have to, ’cause I promise you, I ain’t gonna do that no more—ever. You can count on it.”
Rick was particularly upset by how embarrassing the show had been, and he confronted Levon backstage. “If someone is unable to hold up their end on a gig, say so. I don’t wanna go out there and make a fool of myself because someone else can’t do their part. If any of us can’t play a show, let’s cancel. Are we in agreement on this?”
Levon really didn’t want to be chewed out by Rick, whom he still thought of as the little brother in the group. For him, that was humiliating enough. Levon had a lot of pride, and he vowed never to let anything even close to this happen again.
—
We were on the road pretty regularly in those days. We played in New Orleans at a great big funky club called the Warehouse, a bit of an unusual venue for us, but I liked the ambience—less formal and more bare-bones. A cool-looking crowd roamed the joint. They had their own dance styles, their own costumes—they even sounded different in their reaction to our music, which made us play looser and rougher. After the show we met up with some local musicians and an interesting group of artists and hustlers. They insisted we go with them to an after party in an industrial part of town, where there was an incredible place like we’d never seen before.
We entered a concrete and brick building where the setting was somewhere between modern industrial and voodoo ceremonial, with masks and top hats hanging on the wall. In the middle of the living area, there was an open pit in the floor with a fire burning below. This wasn’t just a party; this was an experience. Local New Orleans funk, like Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” and Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya,” played over the sound system. Quite a few people were pouring in from the hall we had just played. They grabbed glass cups and scooped up a drink concoction from large bowls that had been set out on a table. I asked one of the show promoters if it was sangria.
“Hell, no,” he laughed. “That’s devil juice. Try it. It’ll make you get down on all fours.”
Richard sampled it and said it was like a combination of white lightning and peach. “I wouldn’t light a match near this.”
Soon the guy who owned the establishment came over and welcomed us to his “inner sanctum.” He wore a purple shirt open to his waist, loose pants, and no shoes. He looked rumpled, like he’d just had sex, and stared at us with eyes darker than black. You couldn’t help but imagine what this guy did for kicks.
It seemed like we were going to find out right quick. People started gathering on the floor around the fire pit, and our host gestured for us to join. He threw a screened wire basket down into the fire and picked up two hoselike attachments. He handed one of the hoses to people sitting on the left side of the pit and the other hose to people on the right. The basket crackled and sparked in the fire. He peered down into the pit, then said, “Okay, it’s ready.”
Everybody started taking big puffs on the hoses and passing them around. The smoke smelled like marijuana, but mixed with some other scent I didn’t recognize. We all took a puff on this hoodoo mixture, and pretty soon everyone was laughing and moaning. Our host started howling and dancing around to the jungle beat of the Meters. Others joined him and two or three of the girls took their tops off. Somehow it all seemed quite normal in this scenario. I asked someone, “What was that stuff we were smoking?”
“It’s some kind of pot from Africa,” he told me. “Imported through Haiti. There’s a hothouse out in the bayou where this cat gets it.”
In all of North America, only in New Orleans would you find this kind of black-magic partying going down. People danced and moved like they were under a spell, and we looked on in wonder. The host threw another basket of ganja down into the fire, and I thought that was my cue to get up and leave while I still could. The guys smiled at me and at one another. They knew that if we stayed any longer it would be trouble. So we stole away into the night.
At the Warwick Hotel in New York, I received a message that Elton John and his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, wanted to come by for a visit. Elton’s album had come out the year before, and we admired his singing and playing. When they showed up, Levon and I were hanging out in my suite. They seemed a little nervous but terribly sweet. Bernie explained that their new album was very “inspired” by the Band, and they wanted to give us the first acetate. They didn’t want us to think anybody was ripping anybody off. Elton said the album was called Tumbleweed Connection, and right away I knew they had nothing to be worried about. Levon was distracted, rolling a joint, and asked Bernie and Elton if they wanted to go in the bathroom and smoke it. At that, Elton and Bernie got up, bumping into each other awkwardly like they were interrupting Frank Sinatra shooting up in The Man with the Golden Arm. They shook our hands and scurried out the door.
—
Between shows and travel dates, it felt so good to get back home and see Dominique, Alexandra, and Delphine. Being with them made me feel sane and warmed my heart. I started taking serious Polaroid portraits of the girls. I just couldn’t help myself; they wore hats and painted their faces and reminded me of classic vaudeville characters. I had to capture it.
Dominique thought our house and the setup in Woodstock were beautiful, but she also believed that small-town living had extreme limitations. I had an escape, going to play gigs, so I didn’t feel it as severely, but for Dominique our trips to Montreal or into the city wer
e too infrequent, and she was getting a bit stir-crazy out in the woods. It was also important to her to have her language spoken around the kids, and not to leave her Canadienne culture behind. We decided on our next trip to Montreal that we would see if we could find a second home there. Thanks to the Band’s live dates and record sales, an idea like this was financially feasible.
Albert was on the opposite track. He kept buying more properties in Bearsville. He was originally from Chicago, so with the combination of the Bears football team, living in Bearsville, New York, and to some extent his own appearance, everything began revolving around “the sign of the bear.” He bought a house down on the main road and turned it into a three-star-type French restaurant called the Bear, with offices upstairs. He brought in a French chef, so the food was marvelous, as were the design and ambience, with beautiful, comfortable chairs and a full bar in the back. Classical music piped softly through speakers, nothing later than Brahms, as attractive female servers in black tights explained the menu. The place was incredible but totally out of context to the area.
Albert’s empire grew from there to include a Chinese restaurant over by the creek. Then, next door to that, a great burger place that also served breakfast. The biggest news, though, was the building of Bearsville Recording Studios just up the hill from my house. This was a major project, undertaken with Albert’s full confidence that he could single-handedly turn this small town into a worldly crossroads. The actual junction of Bearsville was made up of a little post office and convenience shop—that’s it. This man had balls, and he was digging the challenge. He even built a theater next to the restaurants, where acts from all over could come and perform.
I often dropped by Albert’s house for one of his infamous BLT sandwiches, made with the best aromatic lightly toasted whole-grain bread, homemade mayonnaise, imported lean bacon, and organic tomatoes homegrown in special soil he had shipped in. Albert said he wanted to invent a delicious sandwich glue so nothing would ever slip out.
At the beginning of October 1970, I called Albert to ask his advice on an addition I wanted to build on my writing studio. When he answered, his voice sounded distant and quiet, and then he said, “Janis is gone, Janis died, so upsetting, I thought the world of her. This is unbelievably sad. She was so fabulous, such a wonderful soul.” I had never heard this tone in Albert’s voice before, over anything. Janis would sometimes come to Woodstock and stay with Albert and Sally. She did seem incredibly down-to-earth and a wonderful soul, like he said. We had done the Festival Express train tour together, where I think she and Rick had an especially good time. Janis’s death knocked the wind out of me. I had seen her just weeks before in Albert’s kitchen, helping with the cooking and looking full of love and life. How could this be?
It had only been about three weeks since we got word that my old guitar buddy Jimi Hendrix had died in London. What a horrible loss. I couldn’t get over it. And a year earlier, our friend Brian Jones had died as well. The eerie thing about it was that Janis, Jimi, and Brian were all twenty-seven years old when they died, and now I was twenty-seven too. And then, the following year, Jim Morrison would also die at the age of twenty-seven. All four of their deaths were drug related. It shined a harsh light on our own condition with the Band. Life can be fleeting, especially when you’re playing with fire.
—
At the end of 1970, the Band had a few upcoming dates, and the boys were in reasonably good shape. Heading to a show in Madison, Wisconsin, we ran into some tricky timing and bad weather and ended up riding a chartered prop plane to make the gig. It was just big enough to hold six of us and the pilot. We flew for what seemed like way too long with zero visibility and constant turbulence. The pilot looked extremely busy and focused, navigating through endless clouds and rough winds. We were all hardly breathing, with eyes closed much of the time. Levon blurted out at one point, “Maybe we should turn this son of a bitch around and get back on the ground. This is horrible!”
“It feels worse than it is,” replied the pilot. “We should be fine.”
So we white-knuckled it until we started our descent into the Madison airport. As we broke through the clouds, it was snowing heavily and we were getting tossed around, but at least now we could see lights on the ground. The pilot was talking loudly to the tower, pushing and pulling levers and buttons with hands tight on the yoke, fighting those winds. We sat breathless in the back with a prayer in our hearts. As we came in for a landing, I watched wide-eyed as the runway came up fast on this flying machine. When we touched down, a gust of wind spun the plane sideways, and we skidded on the ice and snow for what seemed like forever. With clenched teeth I cried out, “Not now!” Finally we slid to a halt with one wing scraping the ground. I opened my eyes to see that we were sitting crosswise on the runway.
The pilot apologized for the near-death experience. “Hey, all’s well that ends well,” he said. We scrambled out of that plane angry, upset, and scared, mumbling about never ever doing this shit again. I started developing some serious reservations about this whole “being on the road” thing.
I played with a vengeance at that show in Madison, thinking, You gotta play every show like it may be your last.
—
Dominique and I brought the girls to Montreal for the Christmas holidays. We looked at homes in Westmount, up on the mountain, and in various neighborhoods. Finally we found a place in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that had been a convent. It was a beautiful old stone four-story building with a fully finished basement. From the top floor you could see across the Saint Lawrence River into Vermont. I asked my mother if she would like to live there and take care of it.
While we were in Montreal, Dominique and I spent more time with her friend Louise Latraverse and Louise’s husband, Emmett Grogan, a writer and founder of the activist group the Diggers. I’d first met Emmett when he was up in Woodstock visiting Albert after doing press for his book, Ringolevio, which I had really enjoyed reading. The protagonist, Kenny Wisdom (Emmett’s alter ego), was my kind of guy: he balanced between being a cat burglar and working with the outrageous Italian movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini, known far and wide for his powerful religious indignations.
In Montreal, Emmett told me about a new novel he was writing called Final Score, about a heist with a serial-killer twist. I told Emmett I was trying to write new material for the Band but that times had changed. We no longer had our old clubhouse/private-street-gang mentality. We were all married with kids or in serious relationships. A distance had grown among us, and our drug use and the boys messing around with heroin was taking a toll. Emmett knew all about that, having had his own issues with “H.” I confessed to Emmett that I was struggling trying to write music for a wounded beast. A certain gloom hung over me, and I couldn’t help feeling unenthusiastic about rising to the occasion fully when I didn’t know what the occasion might be.
My songwriting in Montreal felt labored and flat. I missed my studio in Woodstock, where I had a proper setup and relative isolation. Also, being disconnected from the other guys bothered me. “Out of sight, out of mind” was not what we needed.
For reasons I wasn’t consciously aware of, the songs I began writing at this time had a strong theme about things becoming extinct: railroads (“how can you get to sleep when the whistle don’t blow”), blacksmiths, traveling carnivals, the old ways of the North American Indians. There was a despair to it, and a reflection of the world shifting inside the Band.
—
Rick and Levon came over to my studio in Woodstock one day, and I played them a song I was just finishing called “Life Is a Carnival,” which grew out of my time working at a ragtime carnival and midway sideshow in Toronto. I wanted to get a different rhythmic feel in the choruses, and Rick jumped right in and started to play along. Levon got behind the drums and worked on an unusual pattern to go along with my guitar and vocal. There was no getting around the fact that when we made music, sparks flew. We were back in the circle, and it felt so good that I
ended up sharing the songwriting credit on the tune with Rick and Levon.
Albert was in the final stages of getting Bearsville Recording Studios up and going. He was anxious for us to come in and check it out, which was tantalizing. He hired a talented recording engineer, Mark Harman, and we went in and started messing around. The place wasn’t entirely set up yet, but we weren’t new at makeshift studios. If technical problems and sound issues bogged us down, we pushed on through the distractions. There was a feeling in the air that had us unbound.
One afternoon, Van Morrison stopped by my home studio while I was working a chord progression on the piano. I offered him a puff on a joint, but he said, “No, if I have any of that, I might start barking.” Then he said, “Play those chords again. I’ve got an idea for some words.”
As I played, he started improvising lyrics about how merciless our managers and agents were about touring schedules, then started singing words directly to Richard (who wasn’t there), as if Richard would understand his plight. I sang back, answering, “Oh Belfast cowboy, tell me, is it poker, oh Belfast cowboy, is it poker, and who’s got the joker.” Van scratched down a few more words about Johnnie Walker Red and asked if the guys were around. He thought maybe we could go up to the Bearsville studio and record that night.
We gathered at Bearsville around 8:00 p.m. that evening. Van had a bottle of whiskey, maybe Johnnie Walker Red, and Richard brought a six-pack of beer, knowing the whiskey would put him out of commission. I made up a rough structure for the song and taught it to the guys. As we went along, Van refined the words. As he sipped on the whiskey jug and Richard gulped away on beers, I knew the clock was ticking before the lights went out. We ran it down once, and I yelled to Mark Harman, “Let’s cut it.”
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