Review: The Band's 'Stage Fright' 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

The Band were responsible for one of the most influential albums of the late sixties when Music from Big Pink helped spark the era’s “return to the roots” trend in 1968. They were responsible for one of the era’s very best albums when they released their perfectly crafted eponymous LP the following year. So The Band could be forgiven if their third album wasn’t quite as fresh or electrifying as their first two. Rather Stage Fright finds the quartet working in the deep groove they’d already etched out. “Strawberry Wine” is a return to the driving backwoods funk of “Up on Cripple Creek”, “Sleeping” is another delicate Richard Manuel vehicle in the model of “Whispering Pines” or “Lonesome Suzie”, and so on.    

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of 'The Band'

Bob Dylan and The Band spent the summer of ’67 in Woodstock, isolated from the sitars, Mellotrons, and psychedelics that defined the season. When they emerged, they put out the two albums that redefined Rock & Roll for back-to-the-roots ’68. But whereas John Wesley Harding felt like Dylan’s most personal album since Another Side, The Band’s Music from Big Pink was clearly made under Dylan’s heavy influence. It’s an excellent record, but their own defining personal statement was still a year away.

The Band finds The Band leaving the Dylan-collaborations and covers behind for a completely self-created work. Robbie Robertson emerged as a songwriter with a vision nearly as individual as his mentor’s. Much has been made of the idea that The Band is a sepia snapshot of America’s past seen through the eyes of an (Canadian) outsider. However, many of Robertson’s characters seem to be born Americans, and he dramatizes them with such commitment and authenticity the backwoods funk of “Up on Cripple Creek” or the farming woes of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” feel completely homebrewed in American soil. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is so soaked with humanity that it’s easy to forget that its sympathetic narrator fights alongside the Civil War’s villains (apparently that’s what staunch Civil Rights activist Joan Baez did when she turned it into a hit).