Mellow Harvest

The Band makes music for the autumn. It is surely not complete coincidence that their latest album, Stage Fright, is being released as September approaches. For no matter if they sing about "dancin' through the clover" or some "time to kill" in June and July, the sure flavor of fall, harvest time and autumnal melancholy is in all their tunes, permeating the rhythms, punctuating every lyric.

In Stage Fright, the group's best record yet, their sound remains an intricate and often complex assimilation of styles, with heavy emphasis on country and good old rock and roll. If anything, the sound is now simpler, more accessible. But deceptively so. It complements a lyric complexity that only emphasizes that The Band gets into territory few popular musicians have ever traveled. Among many other things, the album talks about the terrors of performing and violence on the streets, but does it all with such infectious and graceful simplicity that you'll really have to listen, and then listen again, to get it.

Just Another Whistle Stop, for example, at first sounds like a good driving rock song. From beside a train, a man--like a carnival pitchman--looks out at a street where a boy is pursued by screaming police sirens and flashing lights and warns, "People, people where do you go/Before you believe in what you know?" The pitchman offers a trip away from all this, and the song becomes a rhythmic invitation to salvation aboard a train en route to glory. The Shape I'm In bids to be the album's most popular cut. A jaunty tune, it covers in four fast minutes the loss of a girl, getting busted, a "rumble in the alley," and concludes, "Save your neck or save your brother/Looks like its one or the other." Stage Fright, the title song, is a scary story about a poor "ploughboy" who becomes a musician and nightly relives the waking nightmare of performance, his brow sweating and mouth dry while the audience cries out. "Please don't make him stop . . . Let him start all over again."

Robbie Robertson, the group's lead guitarist, is not only one of the best lyricists in rock, he is far and away the greatest storyteller. In Daniel and the Sacred Harp, he spins an almost biblical allegory about a boy named Daniel who covets a sacred harp, arranges to obtain it by means devious and mysterious, and when it finally comes into his possession, finds that he has "won the harp" but "lost in sin." His fate is proved to him when "he looked to the ground" and "noticed no shadow did he cast." Robbie also turns his hand to a lullaby (All La Glory) and to a glorious description of a traveling carnival, The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show, which features "saints and sinners, losers and winners, all kinds of people you might wanna know." It embarrasses The Band to have one member singled out over the others. Yet at one time or another it is hard not to pay particular attention to Garth Hudson's organ breaks as well as his fine horn playing, Richard Manuel's smooth piano and plaintive vocals, Levon Helm's drumming and his raunchy vocals, Rick Danko's intense bass guitar and Robbie's kinetic lead. Together they form a group that remains unique in a highly imitative field.

Like Miss Brer Foxhole in The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show, they are "a true dead ringer for something like you ain't never seen." And like a lady named Bessie in an earlier, simpler tune, The Band just can't be beat.

-- Jay Cocks

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