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Though they once played for $2 each a night, they now turn down $20,000 if the scene seems wrong. When they went to California to make their second LP, they wanted things just like their informal sessions in Woodstock. After a struggle, they avoided a sound studio with wrangling engineers, on-again, off-again schedules. Instead, Capitol fitted up a pool house that used to belong to Sammy Davis Jr. The group tinkered with the knobs themselves and worked at do-it-yourself recording pretty much when and as they pleased. Recently, they walked out of a guest appearance with Glen Campbell because they could not do it live—Campbell wanted them to sit on barrels in a pickup truck and silently mouth songs to their own recorded music.
Given so much longing for simplicity, they are choosy about movie offers. "The newest script we got," Robbie snorts, "was called Jesus Christs." Robbie is compiling songs for a new album. Until they make it—probably in the spring—they will do more concerts, calling their shots and places at suitable intervals, rather than launching the kind of all-out tour seen in the Rolling Stones' recent invasion of the U.S.
Somewhat distrustfully, the members of The Band have acquired a few of the trappings of big success. Their new Woodstock houses, perched on hills outside the village. A new recording studio. Levon's zippy gold Corvette. Garth's stately black Mercedes. Before tasting that success themselves, they faced—vicariously through Bob Dylan—the kind of assault on time, privacy and spontaneity that fame and personal success can make on pop musicians.
They have come a long way from home to get where they are, on a harder road, requiring a greater need for growth, endurance and devotion to music than most flash rock groups ever have to display. They seem well prepared to stay as they are. In a commercialized, McLuhanized, televised, homogenized world, care and craftsmanship have to be cultivated as a matter of personal faith. Experience telescopes, and the young learn fast when they learn at all, sometimes in a few years of running through a range of experience and self-realization that once used to take decades. What The Band has worked out is something that countless other Americans hope for, a sort of watchful, self-protective truce with the encroaching world of noisy commerce. Robbie Robertson said it for them all when he was asked if they worry about being uninvolved, about living such an isolated life. "Live outside what's going on?" he replied. "Well, look what's going on. You almost have to live outside or you lose it. You lose everything. You become your own joke."