We recorded it one way, and then Richard and Van swapped verses, just to see what might happen. It was fantastic and hilarious, Van moving up and down, arms wailing in the air, Richard pounding on the piano, singing right back at him, like two angry barflies quizzing each other on the madness of the world. When Van got to the lyric about smashing a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red on a rock, I knew we were done. I ended up calling the song “4% Pantomime”: “4%” because that’s the difference in alcohol level between Johnnie Walker Red and Johnnie Walker Black, and “pantomime” because of Van’s body language when we recorded the song—like he was acting out the story play by play.
I offered to drive Van home, but Richard claimed that was his responsibility. Van now lived in Richard’s old house, and Richard insisted he knew how to get there with his eyes closed. I just hoped he wouldn’t put that challenge into effect. I teased Van that those notches on Richard’s belt weren’t from girls he had loved but from cars he’d sent to the wrecking yard.
Van fell back laughing. “Are you kidding? Richard drives like an old geezer. I fear not!” Still, it was snowing and icy outside, so I gave Richard a look. He gave me a look back to assure me he was completely fine.
Later Richard told us that he’d driven Van back to his house safely and without incident. They said good night, and Van got out of the car. Richard waited a moment, put the car in reverse, and started to back out of the driveway. Suddenly he heard Van yelling and swearing at him, so he jammed on the brakes. Just in time—Van had slipped in the heavy snow behind the car, and Richard was starting to back over him.
Van stumbled to his feet and stomped up to his front door. “Jesus!” he yelled at Richard. “You nearly killed me!”
Richard swore he didn’t know Van had fallen and that he had no reason to want to run him over. “Dying is easy,” he hollered back. “Comedy is hard!”
—
After we recorded “Life Is a Carnival,” I was jonesing for a horn arrangement on it, but not the Salvation Army/funeral-style horns we’d done in the past. Lately I’d been listening to a Lee Dorsey album called Yes We Can, written and arranged by Allen Toussaint. The incredible New Orleans horn charts Toussaint did seemed like they could be a good fit for our track in that “Carn-i-vale”/Big Easy mode.
Spur-of-the-moment, I called Allen Toussaint, asking if he’d be interested in doing horns for the song. I wasn’t even sure if he’d ever listened to the Band’s records. Over the phone, though, he had an air of southern sophistication and seemed very aware of our music. I sent him the track, and he agreed to meet me in New York City in five days and asked me to pick the studio and musicians—he said he wanted seven horns.
I ventured into the city with Jon Taplin, a multitrack tape, and a bit of nervousness inside wondering if this idea was going to fly. Allen showed up at the studio looking early-1970s cool, and younger than I would have imagined for someone so experienced. When I found out that he’d had his first hit song, “Mother-in-Law” by Ernie K-Doe, when he was eighteen years old, it all made sense. He was still making notes on his horn charts as we settled in to work, and showed me a section he still might want to change. I had to admit that I didn’t read or write music.
He looked at me and smiled. “That’s okay. We’ll decide when you hear it. By the way, for the intro could you count it in for me? The guitarist is playing a strange figure there, and I’m not sure where ‘one’ is.”
I said, “I’m the guitar player.”
He laughed. “Well, you play some far-out timing.”
The musicians arrived and tuned up their horns, and Allen put the horn charts in front of them. These were seasoned, hard-nosed instrumentalists who had been around and seen it all. One of them looked at his chart, looked at the next guy’s chart, and frowned. He played a phrase from the page and said, “This part here at the beginning isn’t going to work. Maybe it’s a mistake.”
Allen didn’t even look down at the music. He just said, “Play what’s written. Thank you.” The horn player just shrugged his New York shoulders.
“Bar twenty-four,” Toussaint called out. “Two, three, four…”
They played it, and afterward Allen instructed them to slide to certain notes. They made marks on their music charts and the playback came over the headphones. As they started getting familiar with the arrangement, you could see the musicians looking at one another with slight grins, almost as if they had discovered something sneaky. Horn players were used to playing parts in harmony, together, or against a countermelody, not one or two at a time, voicing in full-on rhythmic patterns. Like call-and-response, rarely all playing together at the same time. This was N’awlins gumbo horn styling, quite rare up here in Gotham. “I apologize, man,” said the skeptical horn player to Allen. “This is very cool. Some of it shouldn’t work, but it does.”
I couldn’t wait to get back to the studio in Bearsville so the guys could hear the horn arrangement Toussaint had done. When I played it, the expression on everybody’s face was one part trying to adjust to space travel and another part hearing ourselves in a whole new light, like having a new funk master in the group.
A few days later, Bob Dylan came by my studio and we listened to some records. I put on the turntable an acetate I’d just received from Elton John and Bernie Taupin of a song called “Levon.” Bob smiled to himself as he listened to it. I told him that I had played it for Levon yesterday, and it bugged the hell out of him. The Christian stuff in the lyrics prompted him to say that “Englishmen shouldn’t fuck with Americanisms.” Levon could have taken the song as a compliment, but that wasn’t happening. Bob found the whole episode pretty amusing.
I told Bob I had written some songs for the new Band album, but that we needed one more. I didn’t go into too much detail but I implied that it was a bit rough going with the boys these days. He got it. He knew the chemistry of success and destruction in the rock ’n’ roll world. He thought for a moment and said, “There’s a tune, might be good for you guys.” He picked up my guitar and sang what he had so far on “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
What a song! What an idea! I thought. I asked him if he wanted a Coke from the small fridge I had in my studio, and he came up with a bridge, “Sailing around the world in a dirty gondola, oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola.” I wrote down the words and the guys and I recorded the song the next day. With everything we brought to the table—Garth’s soul-stirring Italian accordion, Levon’s vocal, Richard’s drumming, Rick’s and my pure, rhythmic churning—I thought we aced it. I couldn’t wait to play it for Bob. When I did, he just said, “That’s great. What a vocal from Levon. Is that Garth on accordion? Beautiful, like an Italian concertina. Makes me want to have spaghetti.”
To finish off our experiment at the unfinished Bearsville studio, I wrote a song called “The River Hymn” on the piano. I had imagined Garth playing an official-sounding church piano intro, along with his majestic keyboards. The song had a southern flavor to it—I had discussed with Levon the setting I was trying to evoke in the words. He related to it as being similar to an “all-day singing and dinner on the ground” gathering. Like most songs I wrote, it was a combination of the real and the mythical. That gave room for imagination and personalizing, along with vivid life experiences. Levon sang the hell out of it, and I asked him if Libby, his girlfriend, could do some background vocals. Libby had a lovely singing voice and took direction very well. Garth helped her with some choir voicings, and she did a wonderful job. Putting the finishing touches on that song gave me a sense of completion for the record.
—
In May, we were scheduled to do a European tour starting in Germany. Albert asked, “Are the guys up for it?” hoping everybody was in good enough shape.
“That might be just the medicine we need,” I told him. We shipped off for Europe: nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, just show up and play our music as good as we possibly could. These foreign cities were majestic and inspiring. The crowds were different too,
overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The old world felt new and fresh. We started out in Hamburg, where they made us feel we were long overdue for an appearance. Same thing in Munich and Frankfurt—such appreciation for our North Americana sound—and Vienna and Paris, with all of their incredible musical history; now we felt a little part of that tradition.
Albert was very proud of how we were playing and joined us for much of the tour. The European concert promoter he worked with was headquartered in Copenhagen. When we arrived in Denmark, the promoter decided to throw us a party on our day off with lots of traditional Danish food, pretty women, and an interesting group of his friends. He asked Albert if he had ever been to a show in Denmark.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘a show,’ ” said Albert.
The promoter asked me the same question. When I shook my head no, he called to his secretary across the room. “Come, come. You must take Robbie and the fellas to a show. They’ve never seen one.”
So after dinner we all piled into vehicles and headed to the heart of Copenhagen. We entered a building with bleachers surrounding what looked like a dance floor. The place could hold about a hundred people; on this night it was about half full. Nobody would give us a clue as to what we were about to witness. Someone in our crew, having done their own detective work, asked the secretary if this was going to be some kind of transvestite parade.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Just watch.”
The lights dimmed, and spotlights shone on the middle of the floor. A woman appeared with a man, who was carrying a chair. When they walked into the spotlight, the man set down the chair and they both disrobed, but not like a striptease—they just took all their clothes off abruptly, matter-of-fact. The man had a gigantic dong. I laughed and looked at Richard sitting next to me; he raised one eyebrow. The music in the background made no statement at all; it just blocked out some of the weird noises coming from the audience. With no messing around, the woman dropped to her knees and started performing oral sex on the man’s huge dong. Then he got up from the chair and screwed her every which way known to man. The audience looked like they could have been watching a fashion show—appreciative, but no big deal.
Next, two women appeared, one carrying a bullwhip, the other with some chains wrapped around her naked body. They strutted around the floor area, sizing up members of the crowd. Round and round they went until the one with the whip stopped right in front of Albert, put the whip around his neck, and started to pull. Albert laughed. “No, no thank you.” But the girl was determined to get him onto the floor. He pulled back on the whip with his hand and said, more strenuously this time, “No, really, I’m not into it.” But the girl thought he was just playing shy or hard to get. Then the other girl came over and tried to help her. We were all cracking up, yelling, “Go, Albert! Show ’em what you got!” Both girls were tugging on Albert and begging him to join them in the middle of the floor. Finally he said with great force, “Stop! This is not my thing! It’s not for me!” as he unraveled the whip from around his neck.
The girls didn’t even blink. They moved on and pulled a more willing gentleman onto the floor. They ripped his shirt open and pulled down his pants to reveal his bare ass. They fondled him every way possible, whipped him, and rode on his back, yelping like cowboys.
I whispered to Albert, “Now I bet you’re sorry. See, you could have been enjoying all that fun.”
He laughed helplessly, like, Can you even imagine? The show went on with several other acts for another hour. It was exhausting and intimidating but not really sensual, like watching circus sex on a trapeze. It was a relief when it was over. The audience filed out, looking as if they had just finished a heavy meal.
“Did you enjoy the show?” the promoter’s secretary asked me.
What do you say? Oh yes, quite invigorating, thank you.
She escorted us back to our hotel. When we arrived, she whispered in my ear, “Would you like me to come up and tuck you in?” I thanked her for the thoughtfulness, and told her I was married. But at the same time, I was thinking, How in the world could anyone follow an act like that? The show would make King Kong feel inadequate.
—
Returning to play Royal Albert Hall in London was a major experience. We played two nights there, our first time since we’d played with Bob in 1966. The audience was now rippling with enthusiasm and tremendously familiar with our music. What a wonderful relief to not be booed or have to duck flying objects! Standing ovations after certain songs made us sing and play our hearts out. Jack Nicholson, whom we’d met a few times before, came to both shows. At an after party on the second night, he commented on the difference between the vocal harmonies in the two shows. “On night two,” he said, “they sounded tighter and stronger, and soared over the heads of the audience.” He was absolutely correct. I was impressed.
The tour concluded with two shows in Holland, the first in Amsterdam. At a lot of our concerts you could smell marijuana in the air, but here the pot smoke outweighed tobacco ten to one. We were either playing good, or the crowd was simply lifting us higher. We loosened up and wailed the night away. For our final show we drove through the city of Haarlem to Rotterdam. The concert promoter told us that the audiences here loved their music. He promised that the crowd’s enthusiasm would make this one of the most exciting concerts of the whole tour. He was right. They stomped and rejoiced, and because it was our last show of the tour, we pulled out all the stops. During the encore, on “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever,” I broke two strings, and that was during Garth’s solos.
I had missed Dominique and the girls on this European tour, but it was necessary for the Band to feel our oats, to show ourselves that we could rise to the occasion and knock it out of the park. Richard had a challenge not letting his drinking interfere with his singing and playing. As far back as the Woodstock festival, whenever Richard was having trouble with his vocals, I would help out by doubling his part—on the other guys’ songs I would either sing a low part or the melody as I’d written it. Fortunately, at these shows Richard avoided any big bumps in the road. I felt renewed and positive about this phase and hoped we could hold it steady and carry it forward.
—
Summertime in Woodstock, and Dominique and the girls were putting our big swimming pool to good use. Delphine had grown some and was getting around pretty well. Alexandra kept a cautious eye on her, though, careful not to let any harm come her way, which completely melted my heart.
Our friend the writer Mason Hoffenberg came by one afternoon for a visit. Mason and Libby were old friends and they were hilarious together—both brilliant comic minds. Mason was telling us that he’d driven Libby to the bus depot in the middle of Woodstock for her to make a trip into the city. As Libby waved to him from her bus seat window, he yelled out to her, “Good luck with your sodomy trial!”
Libby stopped waving and looked around. Who could this crazy man be talking to?
Our new album, which we had decided to call Cahoots, was released on September 15, 1971. There were a few gems on it, but we knew it wasn’t all our best work. Some of it was a test to try out the new studio, and some of it was real album material. Deep down I wished we could have made the record after our tour, so we could have all been in our clubhouse mode.
Toward the end of the year, while the Band was on a roll of playing some pretty damn good concerts, I made a suggestion. “Why don’t we do a live album while our chops are in good shape? I’ll see if we can get Allen Toussaint to write horn charts for the appropriate songs.” The guys liked the idea. We happened to have a request to play the last four days of the year at the Academy of Music in New York City, so I called Toussaint in New Orleans and asked him what he thought of the idea. “Yes, I believe that could work out just fine,” he responded in his southern-gentlemanly fashion. I cautioned him that he would have to come up and work with us in Woodstock over Christmas. “That will be fine,” he said again. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore.”
We made a plan that I would send him songs I felt might work with a horn arrangement, and that in December he would come to Woodstock and work with us, refining the parts and rehearsing before the shows leading up to New Year’s. John Simon and I got in touch with our friend Howard Johnson, who was the master of the low-register horns, about putting a solid section together. Allen thought a five-piece would do the trick.
He would call once a week to go over details. We talked about all different horn arrangers, from W. C. Handy to Willie Mitchell, and their styles and flavors. Allen had a wide-open imagination and was into exploring all sorts of interesting possibilities. After every conversation I felt better about this concept.
When it came time for Allen to join us up in Woodstock, we were in the middle of a major snowstorm. He arrived looking flustered and upset, and explained that when he got off the plane in New York, someone had stolen his briefcase while he was gathering his luggage. In that briefcase were all the horn charts he had written over the last few weeks.
I was stunned. We had ten days before the show. What the heck are we going to do? I wondered.
“Maybe someone had a mix-up of briefcases and will return the charts,” Allen said, trying to stay hopeful.
I scoffed. “In New York? Fat chance.”
“Yeah, I forgot where I was.” He thought for a moment. “Well, we really don’t have a choice. I’ll just start over.”
I had made arrangements for him to stay in one of the cabins between Albert’s house and mine, and we had a little phonograph player and an electric piano put in his cabin so he could work there. When I drove him over, he admitted he had never seen snow like this before: a full-on winter wonderland. As I helped him inside with his bags, I thought he must be feeling there were probably no black people in this area for a hundred miles.
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