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_See the man with the stage fright _ _Just standing up there to give it all his might _ _And he got caught in the spotlight _ _But when you get to the end, you want to start all over again _

_– “Stage Fright,” The Band_ Toronto — The crowd whooped in approval. After all, Dylan had just finished his sixth number, “The Ballad of a Thin Man,” had offered a quick bow, had moved

down the stage steps and into his modest backstage quarters, leaving the Band on its own. Now Rick Danko marched up to the mike, past the booming guitar intro: _Now deep in the heart of the

lonely kid _ _Who suffered so much for what he did _ _They gave this ploughboy his fortune and fame _ _Since that day he ain’t been the same_ “It’s accidental,” said Robbie Robertson, the

Band’s lead guitarist, spokesman, and composer of “Stage Fright.” “I mean, it was not put there because (he whistled a brain-stormed, what-a-clever-idea whistle) ‘If we do this here! . . .’

at all. The key that ‘Stage Fright’ is in, coming after the song before it — it’s a nice lift. It’s picked musically and for its tempo. It’s not necessarily picked because it’s relevant to

this or that.” “Stage Fright” is, in fact, “about ourselves,” said Robertson. “We’re those kind of people — not outgoing, basically shy. We’ve never been very comfortable showing off. We

play music, write songs and like to play them, but we have never and will never really have it in the palm of our hand. And we don’t want to. We enjoy that rush of being scared. A lot of

people I’ve gone to see, it just seems to roll off their tongue. They don’t seem to sweat. You see no pain in them whatsoever. It’s just a wonderful evening of entertainment. It’s not for

us. It’s turmoil. It’s pulled out like a tooth.” But the music is at least as painstaking as it is painful. Doing ten songs of their own each concert and backing up Dylan on another 13 each

show, the Band is winning over each audience it faces. And that is not an easy achievement, given the complete absorption by each audience into the anticipated presence, the overriding

mystique of Dylan. EDITOR’S PICKS One critic of the Band complained about their “blase professionalism.” Others hear it as a precise execution of some of the best, most thoughtful and

picturesque American rock & roll compositions ever produced, mostly written by Jaime “Robbie” Robertson. And the Band (Robertson on lead guitar, Levon Helm on drums and vocals. Rick

Danko on bass and vocals, Richard Manuel on keyboards and vocals, and Garth Hudson on organ) is not and cannot be a machine, as it has to roll with Dylan’s musical changes of mind almost

every show. We are at the Inn on the Park in Toronto. On the way here to this hotel in Don Valley, we passed through a part of town, hidden by snow in the night, that got Robbie smiling:

“This is Cabbagetown,” he said. “You know, on the cover of _Moondog Matinee_? I described the feeling of the place to the artist, and he got it just perfect.” Robertson and all of the Band,

except Levon, are from Canada, and he’s quite at ease, talking with a low voice, at a slow gait. The touring history of the Band, since their emergence in 1968 from the big pink house in

Woodstock, is a simple one: They’ve done as little as possible, taking a year and a half off between the recorded concert in New York, December 31st, 1971, to a Watkins Glen appearance in

July, 1973. Then nothing until the Dylan tour. The Band prefer to stay home with families — all are now in Malibu, along with the Bob Dylan family — and work on albums. And, as Robertson

repeated several times, in various contexts, the Band are not “very in-touch people,” and they don’t relate to much of the current rock scene. There is more than a touch of elitism when

Robertson states: “We don’t have fancy outfits or sparklers on our eyes, and we don’t cut off our heads.” But even the albums come hard. After _Rock Of Ages_, the live set from New Year’s

Eve at the Academy of Music, Robertson considered a few soundtrack offers, then decided to do another album of original songs. He’d written a few tunes, he said, and the Band began the

album; then he shifted into another gear. He had been listening to the avant-garde classical music of Krzysztof Penderecki: RELATED CONTENT “I bought one of his albums a few years ago

because I liked the album cover: It was a guy holding a candle. Very spooky looking cover. One day I put it on and I thought, ‘My God. That’s terrific.’ I think he is the contemporary

classical writer of this age.