History / Rock of Ages & Moondog Matinee (1972–1973)

Rock of Ages & Moondog Matinee (1972–1973)

Allen Toussaint's horn charts got lost at the airport. Robertson had hired the New Orleans arranger, who hadn't even heard of the Band before that phone call, to write parts for a five-piece horn section joining the group for a residency at New York's Academy of Music at the end of 1971. Toussaint had already done striking work on "Life Is a Carnival" from Cahoots, and Robertson wanted more of it for the live shows. When the luggage carrying the original charts vanished somewhere between New Orleans and New York, Toussaint didn't reschedule. He sat down in a snowbound cabin near Robertson's house in Woodstock and wrote the whole thing over again from scratch.

The Band played four nights at the Academy, December 28 through 31, with two sets each evening, one without the horns and one with them. Toussaint's charts covered eleven songs, mostly pulled from the group's first three albums, with Cahoots material almost entirely absent from the setlist. Covers filled out the rest: a Motown-adjacent opener, a Four Tops song, the B-side of a Chuck Willis single nobody in the audience would have expected. It was, by design, less a victory lap through their most recent record and more a full-band reintroduction to everything that had made them worth watching in the first place.

Just after midnight on New Year's Eve, Garth Hudson slipped a few bars of "Auld Lang Syne" into the extended organ intro he played before "Chest Fever," and Bob Dylan walked out to join them for the last four songs of the night. It was a genuine surprise, unannounced, and it stayed that way on record: contractual issues kept Dylan's appearance off the original LP entirely, even though it had happened, on tape, in front of everyone in the room.

Rock of Ages came out in August 1972, reached No. 6 on the Billboard chart, and went gold. Robertson never fully loved the way it had been mixed, and said so for years, but the reaction out of the gate made it hard to argue with. Ralph Gleason's review in Rolling Stone that October was glowing enough that Robertson later admitted he just rode out his own private reservations rather than push for changes nobody else seemed to want.

By 1973, whatever had powered that Academy of Music run had mostly drained out of the group. They hadn't toured in two years. Manuel's drinking had gotten worse, not better. Robertson was stuck on an ambitious project he called Works, a piece inspired by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, built around the history of Native American displacement, and it never got finished. Nobody else in the band was writing much of anything either. Helm explained the resulting paralysis years later without much diplomacy: they couldn't get along, everyone knew the money situation wasn't fair, everyone knew they were getting shortchanged, and none of that leaves much room for sitting down together to write new songs.

So they made an album with no new songs at all. Moondog Matinee, recorded at Bearsville between March and June of 1973, is ten tracks of covers and one instrumental, nothing original on it. The title borrowed half its name from Alan Freed's Cleveland radio show, Moondog's Rock 'n' Roll Party, and the other half from what Helm called the "torrid afternoon shows" the Hawks used to play for teenage crowds in Toronto a decade earlier. The original plan had been to recreate their old bar-band setlist from those years, but by the time they actually sat down to record, only one of the ten songs they picked, Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Share Your Love (With Me)," had ever actually been part of that old repertoire. The rest came from Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Platters, LaVern Baker, and Sam Cooke, among others. On the opener, "Ain't Got No Home," Hudson rigged up a hose running from a talk box so Helm could sing through it, an improvised vocoder effect years ahead of when the trick became common.

It sold less than half as well as its predecessor, peaking at No. 28 against Rock of Ages' No. 6, and reviews split down the middle: warm from critics like Christgau, who called it an uncommonly well-chosen batch of oldies, cooler from those who heard it as exactly what it was, a band with nothing new to say filling time with other people's songs until they figured out how to say something again. It would take two more years before they did.