“Stage Fright” by The Band

The title track of the Band's third album, "Stage Fright", came out in 1970, written by Robbie Robertson and sung by Rick Danko. Robertson first pictured Richard Manuel singing it, but Danko's jittery, quavering voice turned out to be exactly what a song about nerves needed. Barney Hoskyns traces it to Robertson's own panic at the group's first live show the year before; Levon Helm put it plainly as the terror of performing.

Danko plays fretless bass on it too, which Helm said gave the rhythm section a whole different feel, and a bridge that lurches into a far-off key hands the floor to Garth Hudson for a sixteen-bar organ solo. Todd Rundgren engineered and Glyn Johns mixed. Ralph J. Gleason called it "the best song ever written about performing", and it stayed in the set from Rock of Ages to The Last Waltz.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.