Levon Helm: 1940-2012

posted in: Features • Music News

Some people think of The Last Waltz – the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary about The Band and their star-studded farewell concert – as the greatest rock film ever made. Others will say that it is an overblown, Hollywood-engineered, ego project on the part of guitarist Robbie Robertson, bordering on fiction.

Levon Helm, The Band’s singer and drummer, fell definitively into the latter category. He made as much clear in his entertaining memoir, This Wheel’s On Fire.

Be that as it may, that film opens (after the encouraging warning that “THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD”) with The Band’s last song of the night, a cover of “Don’t Do It” sung by Helm. This was my first conscious exposure to The Band and it was mind blowing. To see this guy, playing drums with such style and subtlety on the most swinging of tracks, all while singing his ass off, and really leading the band, is to see a performer at the top of his game. And this after hours and hours on stage.

By virtue of his songwriting and ambition, Robertson is remembered as the de facto leader of the group. And you can’t say that any one of the guys was the soul – not when you’ve got Richard Manuel and Rick Danko – but Helm always seemed like the heart, the center of The Band. He was always a substantial presence and the model of a drummer.

Levon singing was something else, a powerhouse voice with both passion and control. He took Robertson’s dreams of Americana, the old South, the Bible Belt, the disaffected and lost, and imbued them with authenticity – he was after all the only American-born member of the group, hailing from Arkansas. And though he came up in the 1960s, on rock and roll, playing with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan like the rest of The Band, his voice transcended time…when he sang that he was Virgil Caine, who lived and fought in the Civil War in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, you just believed it.

Helm and the other guys weren’t ready to break up The Band. They reformed without Robertson and continued to tour until 1998, even after the death of Manuel. Helm was stricken with throat cancer, but recovered – even enough to keep singing, record some new music, and win a Grammy. For years, he hosted the Midnight Ramble – a now-legendary series of concerts at his farm in Woodstock NY, where he would usually perform with his excellent Levon Helm Band.

After several close brushes, with different acts over the years, I was finally slated to play a Midnight Ramble show on April 28th. We received the email from his people a week or so ago… Levon was not well and the show was cancelled – rescheduled, we hoped, anticipating some minor injury. Then the word came that the end was very near. I immediately mourned the chance I had to meet the great man and hear him play, and to play for him.

The world lost not just a great musician on Thursday, not an aged former great, but a leading representative of our collective music history. He made an indelible mark on popular music and was, until the very end, a vital musical light.