Stage Fright

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After two albums of warm, communal Americana, Stage Fright is the sound of success starting to bite. Robertson set out to make a light “good-time” record; instead, as he put it, darker songs “started seeping through the floor.” The result is a contradictory, fascinating album — bright, funky music carrying anxious, disenchanted words.

Recorded in an empty theatre

The plan was to record live in front of an audience at the Woodstock Playhouse — but the town council, fearing another Woodstock-festival stampede, vetoed it. So the group used the off-season theatre as a makeshift studio, with a young Todd Rundgren engineering. It was the first album they produced themselves, and by Helm's account the sessions carried a “dark mood,” with tension and “a lot of drug experimenting.”

The songs

Its two best-known tracks are the panicked “Stage Fright” (Danko) and the dissolute “The Shape I'm In” (Manuel). Around them: the gossip-and-fame parables “The Rumor” and “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” the funky “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” Manuel's dreamy “Sleeping,” and one ray of pure light — “All La Glory,” Robertson's lullaby for his newborn daughter, sung tenderly by Helm.

Their biggest chart hit

For all the mixed reviews at the time, Stage Fright was actually their highest-charting studio album, reaching No. 5 in the US and going gold. Later critics have been kind to it — some now rate it just a step below the first two records, and one even called it “the greatest of their records.”