Oh, Richard: Cahoots & Richard Manuel
Piece from Breanna McCann, curator of The Richard Manuel Archive.
Is there another Band album that inspires quite as much debate and frequent derision as 1971’s Cahoots? I am hard-pressed to name one, though some later ones may be in contention. Following the breakout success and immediate acclaim that came with their first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, their third effort, Stage Fright, divided critics. It took a darker tone, and some argued it felt less unified than the preceding two records, a trend Cahoots continued. The 50th anniversary of Cahoots, on September 15 of this year, reignites much of this discourse.
Is the reputation Cahoots garnered over time warranted? Maybe, maybe not. One thing, however, is certain, and that is Richard Manuel’s performance on Cahoots being one of its strengths.
The Band in 1971
The dark tone that hung over Cahoots came to fruition as the success of their first albums and consequent personal demons reached a head. The collaborative atmosphere of their early years was drying up, and those cracks began to show. In his book Across the Great Divide, Barney Hoskyns writes about the general aura, explaining that “[w]ith the pressure of touring taken off them, they were sinking back into their old ways. Richard, in particular, was hitting the bottle hard; not one of the eleven songs on Cahoots was even co-written by him” (p. 252).
Contrary to the retroactive narrative, however, Richard was not the only one dealing with addiction and the personal demons dividing the group at the time. As outspoken as Robbie Robertson is about this strife, Richard also acknowledged it at the time, turning back to drinking as a way of coping with the changing dynamics of the group. “We were drifting further apart, we weren’t putting our hearts into it,” Richard later explained. “What was missing was what they used to call soul music. And I know about it, because it’s the only kind of music I can play.”
That despondency, not felt by Richard alone, looms over the album. In the mind of this listener, it does not detract from the record. Taking Music From Big Pink and The Band as early statements of The Band’s worldview and their visions of America, Stage Fright is a keenly self-aware study of their newfound fame and its pitfalls, making Cahoots, the fallout of that fame, the next logical step in their journey, both in real life and the mythos created in their music.
As The Band went on this journey as a group, Richard Manuel was going on this journey individually with his own demons. His personal struggle against the backdrop of The Band’s own crumbling gives his contributions on this album a prescience and immediacy that makes it some of his most wrenching work.
Richard’s most understated contribution to the album comes in his drumming, which he provided on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Thinkin’ Out Loud.” A loose drummer, his style plays very well in both songs. He also sings alongside Rick Danko and Levon Helm in their remarkable three-part harmony in “Shoot Out in Chinatown.” However, his most notable contributions to the album, not surprisingly, come from the songs where he takes the lead vocal duties.
Last of the Blacksmiths
One of the signatures of Richard Manuel’s vocals was an incessant ability to sound completely, desperately anguished and one of his most emotive examples of that comes in “Last of the Blacksmiths.” While it is hard to parse a specific plot out of the song, the motif of artistic struggle rings through, following a progression from blacksmiths “found guilty…for not being in demand” to a man with “frozen fingers at the keyboard” and a poet with a “dead tongue.” It does not take a great deal of analysis to see The Band reflecting on their own dying inspiration in these lyrics.
In the hands of Richard, they become even more desperate. He sings as if he is putting up one last crusade, that part of him still believes he can get back what is dying, or perhaps what is already too far gone. It is an emotion only Richard could strike, and it makes this song all the more integral to the journey they go through not only within the confines of Cahoots but the one they were enduring outside of it simultaneously. Faced with a dying or at least changing dynamic, something Richard was keenly aware of, they try to push forward.
It rings with the loneliness and isolation that echoes in the gloom of the record, with Richard singing “I left my home and found a name/No, nobody could explain” and later lamenting that “no, no answer came” when trying to engage others around him in the experience in that moment. These themes of loneliness and disillusionment in the face of newfound fame and “finding a name” carry over fairly directly from the prior album Stage Fright.
Perhaps the most poignant and direct moment comes when Richard, playing the part of an uninspired and despondent poet, sings, “Cocteau, Van Gogh and Geronimo/They used up what was left.” In all the moments of startling self-awareness in The Band’s canon, this singular line hits hard as maybe the most devastatingly confessional. Coming from Richard, it feels even more so.
The Moon Struck One
“The Moon Struck One” is almost unbearably sad, rendered beautifully by Richard. If “Last of the Blacksmiths” represents some last fight to keep things alive as they had been, “The Moon Struck One” is a devastating realization that there is nothing left to save and nowhere to go. Peter Aaron writes in his book The Band FAQ that a “mellow Manuel gives one of his best and most tender performances on ‘The Moon Struck One,’ a story of childhood friends that hovers dreamily somewhere between ‘Sleeping’ and ‘When You Awake’” (p. 95). It is a song only Richard could sing, and it is a song that could only make sense in the gloom of Cahoots.
In considering Cahoots as the next step in The Band’s reckoning with their identity and relationships in the wake of their fame, “The Moon Struck One” is an eerily direct analogy. Following a terrible tragedy, two childhood lovers try to move on and find some way forward after what they have endured together and leave town, but, as Richard laments at the end, “[t]he car broke down when we had just begun/And we walked back to the house while the moon struck one.”
Richard’s vocals are so deeply affecting and sad that one can’t help but wonder if he was pulling his own experience with his bandmates into his performance. After enduring the trauma of quick fame and personal demons together, they were coming to their own moment of truth, their own attempt to try and find some way forward as the characters in “The Moon Struck One” try to do. It connects on a profound level with another song on Cahoots, the Rick Danko-helmed “Where Do We Go From Here?” After asking the titular question in one chorus, Danko sings that the answer he receives is “nowhere.” In fact, that connection extends all the way back to “Last of the Blacksmiths,” where again, a narrator strives for connection and is met with no reply. It is a repeated image that bears quite a great deal of significance both as a thematic encapsulation of the record and a statement on their relationships and attitude at the time.
4% Pantomime
Perhaps the crowning achievement of Cahoots as a whole is the larger than life, call and response duet between Richard and Band neighbor and friend Van Morrison. “4% Pantomime,” titled for the difference in proof between Johnny Walker Red whisky and Johnny Walker black, is hard to define. It is in equal spades sad in its lyrics and exuberant in its delivery. With its driving momentum and its loose back and forth shouts of “Oh, Richard” and “Oh, Belfast Cowboy,” it is a rare moment of levity on the album.
Again, not that the song’s story is particularly happy, but the desperate swagger with which Richard, in particular, sings it is infectious. While he leans into the desperation and anguish of “Last of the Blacksmiths” and “The Moon Struck One” in a wrenching way, he transforms this to be a feeling of a desperate commitment to keep moving in the face of relentless struggle in “4% Pantomime.” It is not necessarily that they are hopeful about what lies ahead, but it is the best they can do in the moment. It is refreshing, perhaps counterintuitively, and leads to something extraordinary if not somewhat bittersweet when taken in the context of the tone of the rest of the album and its place in both the personal and group journeys in 1971.
Past being one of his very best vocal performances, the song is a source of considerable mythos for its recording process. Robbie Robertson recalled:
“Van and Richard were acting this whole thing out. For a second when I was watching, it became soundless and it became all visuals- people’s hands and veins and people’s necks. It was almost like this movement thing was going on, and the music was carrying itself. It’s bizarre and wild.”
Levon Helm shared a similar account of the recording in his autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire:
“Richard Manuel played the drums with our neighbor Van Morrison on a raucous number cut in one take, 4% Pantomime. This happened when Van came to Bearsville and began discussing the merits of scotch whisky with Richard. They acted out some lyrics about management and a poker game and Richard sang, ‘Oh, Belfast Cowboy, can you call a spade a spade?’ It was an extremely liquid session, Van and Richard were into it…”
Simply put, “4% Pantomime” is a masterpiece, and were that the only song Richard did on Cahoots, it would have still been an incredible testament.
Writing about Cahoots for Melody Maker in 1971, Richard Williams concluded, “[i]t’s very good, though not flawless… (it) suffers occasionally from the same faults which put ‘Stage Fright’ just under the 100% mark. But it’s still better in every way than most bands will manage in a lifetime and what’s more it’s unique because it comes from one of the two or three bands of our time which have been, and are, true originals.”
Not just as a whole, but even in its individual members, The Band were true originals. Working against personal and collective demons, reckoning with their own dying inspiration and collaboration, they still came together to make a record that has its fair share of transcendent moments. When even one of their weaker albums is better than many groups’ best, that proves something. The same goes for Richard Manuel. If even one of his most limited showings is an unreplicable piece of emotive rock sentimentality, that proves something, too.
