I shall be re-released
The Band’s underrated fourth album gets a new lease of life on its 50th birthday. By David Fricke.
The Band ★★★★
Cahoots: 50th Anniversary Edition CAPITOL/UME. CD/DL/LP
BY THEIR own accounts, The Band were dazed, depleted, and drowning in excess when they recorded their fourth album, 1971’s Cahoots. In his 1993 memoir, drummer Levon Helm claimed the LP was made “during the summer” of that year; the group was “a little bit rusty”; and the music “didn’t prove to be that memorable.” In his 2016 book, Testimony, guitarist-songwriter Robbie Robertson actually recalled “heavy snow” on the day that pianist Richard Manuel and Woodstock neighbour Van Morrison cut their booze-fuelled duet 4% Pantomime, named after the different alcohol levels in Johnnie Walker whiskies. As they left the studio, Manuel was so drunk he almost ran over Morrison with his car.
Whatever the season, The Band
– the most acclaimed group of 1968 after a decade in the trenches behind Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan; the leading edge of a rock’n’roll storytelling steeped in the roots and parable of pioneer experience – were hardly the fraternal ideal in this album’s title, from a line in the bar-gig torpedo Smoke
Signal. After three straight aces – Music From Big Pink,
The Band and Stage Fright
– Robertson’s writing had given way to a litany of loss and surrealist resignation, a “tinge of extinction” as Jon Landau then called it in Rolling Stone. In the downbeat stroll Where Do We Go From Here?, bassist Rick Danko sang the chorus with plaintive candour (“I asked my woman… She said ‘nowhere’”), joined by Helm in keening harmony. The slippery nature of success loomed large in Last Of The Blacksmiths, Manuel’s bass-range piano thunder underscoring the final verdict in his high, wracked tenor: “Found guilty said the judge/For not being in demand.”
This 50th-anniversary edition affirms the underrated triumph in Cahoots –a gripping portrait of long-haul road dogs struggling with adulthood and the steep price of recklessness – while the highs are as good as anything on the first three albums. Life Is A Carnival remains a jubilant entrance, propelled by Allen Toussaint’s fleet of street-parade horns. Helm carries Dylan’s contribution When I Paint My Masterpiece in a no-surrender sandpaper howl buoyed by Garth Hudson’s cantina-rapture accordion. The Moon Struck One, meanwhile, in its grace and tragedy, is Robertson’s greatest ballad, sung by Manuel with breathtaking heartache.
The primary extra (amid a few outtakes and live ruckus from Paris in ’71) is a new mix by Bob Clearmountain that makes striking changes in the clarity and movement of parts. At one point in The Moon Struck One, the music under Manuel is reduced to a stark march of church organ and rhythm, heightening a sorrow already there in spades. It’s risky business, messing with original text. But for
Cahoots, so misunderstood for so long, it feels like another lease on life.