An Evening With Levon Helm

Reposted from Nov. 8, 2009

Levon Helm patted Gary and me on the knee when he arrived on stage for his set last night and patted me on the back when he left. Such incarnational moments are surely the stuff of pilgrimages. After he'd given us a big smile, I was so transfigured that I couldn't have cared less about anything else that might have happened. But as a matter of fact, the Band's legendary singer and drummer barely opened his mouth during his two and a half-hour concert last night in his Woodstock studio. A throat cancer survivor, he's still recovering from another scare last summer, when a non-cancerous lesion was removed from his throat.

While he's not yet singing as he works with his vocal coach to get back in shape, he's drumming as powerfully as ever. He powered his 12-piece show band from the right end of the stage, counting four by standing, waving his drumsticks in the air, and mouthing the words. There were plenty of lead vocalists to take up the slack, including his daughter Amy, Teresa Williams and her husband, guitarist Larry Campbell (storied performers in their own right), and, sitting in last night, roadhouse pianist David Keyes, who got to sing this classic Robbie Robertson lyric on "Across The Great Divide":

Standing by your window in pain
A pistol in your hand
And I beg you, dear Molly girl
Try and understand your man the best you can...
Now Molly dear, don't ya shed a tear
Your time will surely come
You'll feed your man chicken every Sunday
Now tell me, hon, whatcha done with the gun?

Helm and his band performed five more Band songs -- "Long Black Veil," a country standard which appeared on their "Music From Big Pink," plus "The Shape I'm In," "It Makes No Difference," "Chest Fever," and "The Weight." Songwriter and guitarist Robertson wasn't there, and Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the group's two best voices besides Helm, died early. All this Band music, but no Band voices? Nobody cared. Nobody cares if it isn't John Wesley singing the hymns he wrote, either.

Robertson is said to have been unappreciative of the Helm-Danko-Manuel-Garth Hudson iterations of the Band that performed without him in the 1980-90s. I guess I can't blame him in view of the fairly showy "goodbye to the road" the Band paid in the film "The Last Waltz." Still, I hope Robertson brings his famous Fender to the Midnight Ramble one time to see how the congregation is doing with his hymns, the classic songs that have entered the canon of American New Orleans-influenced R&B songwriting.

In addition to Band songs, we heard Delta peaches such as Dr. John's "Such A Night," the boisterous "All On A Mardi Gras Day," and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man." The Ramble was in Woodstock without being especially redolent of the Woodstock festival, which was more famous for the Who and Jimi Hendrix than for proto-roots music such as the Band's, whose members looked like Mennonites, not acid rockers. The Band played the festival but didn't especially enjoy it. Nor did a certain other Americana band from San Francisco. Bad weather during their set killed the Grateful Dead's spotlights, so nobody saw them. Literally. They said they'd never played worse.

Appropriately enough, Helm's ensemble has its own links to the greater Dead family, Williams and Campbell having recently toured with Dead bassist Phil Lesh. We heard two Dead songs last night: "Tennessee Jed," which Helm recorded on his new album "Electric Dirt," and the Robert Hunter-Jerry Garcia collaboration "Attics Of My Life." Here the evening waxed from joyful to sublime, with Williams, Amy Helm, and Campbell singing Hunter's gorgeous lyrics, as the Dead themselves did on their album "American Beauty," in luminous harmony:

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

Oh regret, oh grace -- oh, baby boomers! We listened in rapt silence to that aching old song, we men and women of a certain age huddled together in a cozy barn, mostly in our fifties and sixties, though there were a few younger people who'd said they learned about the music from their parents. Welcomed with an easy hospitality by Team Levon, which had lit the muddy parking lot with fragrant stove fires and invited us to bring dishes for a common buffet table, we felt like we were going over to an old friend's house. We sipped beer and wine from red plastic cups they'd provided (we were asked to keep the liquor bottles in our cars) and traded stories about concerts we'd seen, albums we'd loved, sights we'd seen around town. Except in church, which comes with a common vocabulary just like rock and roll, I've rarely bonded so easily with strangers. It felt like going to a show when we were 19.

But we weren't 19. Most of our children won't see 19 again. It might just have been a nostalgia trip, but as one of the passengers, I'm looking for a better word than that. It had something to do with the curtain beginning to come down on a storied if self-absorbed generation and trying to savor and honor people and things and memories we love, trying to discern what's really precious and then find the words to explain it.

One of the things I love is the Band's live version of the Motown song "Don't Do It," recorded at the Academy of Music in New York City on New Year's Eve in 1971. Levon Helm sings lead. It's lean, sharp as an icicle, almost explosively powerful. That long-ago night in New York was the first time the Band had worked with a horn section. Howard Johnson, who'd played with Charles Mingus and later led the Saturday Night Live band, played tuba and baritone sax. The horns helped make "Don't Do It" a masterpiece. Near the end, Helm and the late Rick Danko take this line as Helm plays a complicated drum pattern which you're amazed he can hold together while singing: "My biggest mistake was loving you too much." Then Johnson and the rest of the horns come back in with a mighty roar.

I'd be surprised if I've heard the song fewer than 1,000 times in the course of nearly 40 years. If I could have just one song, I'd be content with "Don't Do It." As it happened, Howard Johnson also anchored the horn section last night at the Midnight Ramble. After the show, he walked out behind Helm, and I touched him on the shoulder and said, "Thank you. God bless you." He smiled and said, "Thank you." Perhaps presumptuous of me, definitely gracious of him. I felt like I was thanking him for all the music I'd ever loved.

Tell Them The Promised Land's Calling

As Gary Baker and I looked for Levon Helm's mailbox (#160) this afternoon along a country road near Woodstock, New York, I decided that pilgrimage was the right word for our weekend's work. Holy Land pilgrims, such as we 20 from St. John's last summer, walk in Jesus's footsteps along desert paths. Musical pilgrims strain to hear echos in the woods. The roots of the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane remember the agony of Jesus's lonely final night of freedom. The trees in this neighborhood had the best seats in the house as amazing popular music was conceived, recorded, and performed.

The purpose of today's mailbox reconnaissance was to make it easier to find our way to the Midnight Ramble tonight on Levon's farm. Once there, of course, we had to stop and take a picture. It's a pilgrimage, right? Just then a young couple from New Jersey came along and told us how to find Big Pink, the nearby houses where the late Rick Danko and Richard Manuel once lived, and the road where the photo was taken for the Band's second album. On second thought, maybe we're putting on airs by calling it a pilgrimage. The young man was only a little nuttier than we, because he'd looked all this stuff up before hitting the road for Woodstock.

But did we follow his directions to Big Pink? You knew that we would. Because here (it's now Big Orange-Yellow) the Band and Bob Dylan recorded "The Basement Tapes" and the Band its masterful first two albums, with songs such as "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The germ of the idea for a music festival at Woodstock in 1969 was organizers' optimism that the Band would agree to perform and the then-reclusive Dylan, also a Woodstock resident, would show up at the last minute. They did, he didn't, and because of local politics, Woodstock ended up in Bethel, 90 minutes away. As you know, Joni Mitchell didn't write a song called "Bethel." Yet Woodstock gets almost all the tourism, which isn't inappropriate given that original germ of an idea. Helm, after all, is still here, as is Band mate Garth Hudson.

Gary and I made plans for our pilgrimage a few months ago. We've been music buddies since 1993. Before deciding to be buried on the grounds of the Nixon Library, President and Mrs. Nixon sent me to Rose Hills in Whittier, California, where many Milhouses and Nixons are buried, to investigate possible sites. There I met Gary, who helped us with arrangements for both Nixons' Yorba Linda funerals (when he wasn't programming alt.-country playlists for the Rose Hills employee cafeteria and designing the $1 million pipe organ for the Sky Rose Chapel and playing Van Morrison songs for the installers through the state-of-the-art PA system he'd also designed).

One day Gary was driving me back from a planning lunch for Mrs. Nixon's funeral when I asked if he'd ever heard of a Texas singer-songwriter named Joe Ely. He smiled and pushed a button on his CD changer and loaded Ely's album "Love and Danger." Gary and I now have our music loaded onto iPods. Meeting up Thursday evening at JFK, we rented a car, dropped Kathy at her sister's in Tuckahoe, and headed for the promised land. On the way he introduced me to the Kings of Leon and Terry Evans, which I liked. I played him Pat Donahue (which he liked) and Conor Oberst (less so).

Yesterday we visited a magnificent interactive Woodstock museum near Bethel. It's odd to see albums from your collection presented as museum pieces. Standout interviewees in the many video kiosks included former Attorney General Ed Meese, who had nothing good to say about Woodstock, and former Sen. Norm Coleman, who was there and dug it. Perhaps the wisest comment about the performers during those three fairy tale days came from one of their successors, Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid. "They were up there saying, 'This is what we do with our lives'," he said, "challenging everyone else with the question, 'What are you going to do with yours?'"

We then caught a show at the Bearsville Theater, built on the site of Dylan manager Albert Grossman's legendary studio, where everyone from the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt to R.E.M. and They Might Be Giants have recorded. It was an interesting if cerebral fusion set by Grateful Dead-connected guitarist Steve Kimock which was driven by Kimock's miraculous 18-year-old drummer son, John Morgan Kimock, and which really caught fire when Kimock traded solos with Band-connected guest guitarist Jim Weider, whom we hope to hear tonight at the Midnight Ramble.

That's right. We're going to hang out with Levon. We've already been to his house once.

Photo of Bob Dylan on someone else's body; and the Band