This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Then we noticed that Bob and Albert weren’t speaking to each other.

  There were two shows, matinee and evening, and the crowd gasped when we all walked onstage. Bob’s hair was cut short and combed, and we were all dressed in gray western-cut suits and cowboy boots. This time there wasn’t any booing. It was Bob’s first public appearance in two years, and during this time his image had grown to legendary proportions. We’d rehearsed three Woody Guthrie songs at Bob’s house the day before—“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” “The Grand Coulee Dam,” and “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore”—and we performed all three after Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Judy Collins had played and actor Robert Ryan had read from Woody’s autobiography. It was the first time I’d ever played a dramatic show like that. People were performing in sections with one another, then we stretched out around Bob and helped him do his songs. I don’t think Pete Seeger was too thrilled to see us at first, but the audience was warm, and our evening show brought down the house. Bob tore it up!

  Playing Carnegie Hall proved to be good for our impending record deal. Things speeded up after that. I recall one meeting at Big Pink where we actually had to come up with a name for the band.

  Rick said, “Let’s have some real pretentious bullshit name.”

  “How about the Chocolate Subway?” Richard suggested. “Or the Marshmallow Overcoat.”

  Laughter. I said, “Tell it like it is. Tell ’em who we are: the Honkies!” I always was the provocative type.

  I had suggested we could modify it to the Crackers. Crackers were poor southern white folks, and as far as I was concerned, that was the music we were doing. I voted to call it the Crackers and never regretted it. That’s how Capitol signed the band, in any case.

  Our names aren’t on Capitol Records Contract No. 4325, dated at Los Angeles on February 1, 1968. This contract was actually between Capitol and Groscourt Productions, Inc. Instead we’re listed on an “Artists Declaration” as “Group performing as the Crackers.” Albert was furnishing our services to the record company. The deal called for twenty-four master recordings a year for two years; roughly two albums a year. In addition we granted Capitol three one-year options to renew the deal at the same rate. It was basically a ten-album deal, and we took it. We had to.

  “Life, with an option.”

  At our insistence, we retained our exclusive rights as Bob Dylan’s band. Paragraph six of the contract stated: “Artists shall have the right to perform and record... as joint artists with Bob Dylan for any recording company, television program, motion picture, or legitimate stage production for which Bob Dylan is then rendering services. Such activities shall be deemed exclusive from the agreement.”

  But the irony was that Bob Dylan split from Albert Grossman around this time. “Dear landlord,” Bob had sung on his new album, “don’t put a price on my soul.” The litigation from that parting of the ways back in 1968 is still in the courts as we write this.

  So just as Bob was leaving Albert’s stable, we were arriving. I guess the joke was on us.

  This is where John Simon comes in.

  Now that we’d committed ourselves to making an album, we needed someone who actually knew how to go about it. None of us had any idea how to work a recording console or a four-track tape machine. We’d hardly been in a studio in three years. And here was John: young, clean, up-and-coming, ready to roll. He joined forces with us, produced our first album, and became a lifelong friend.

  Let me introduce you...

  John Simon was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1941. His father, Louis Simon, was a country doctor and musician who founded the Norwalk Symphony. “I had piano lessons,” John says, “and became a jazz fan at fourteen or fifteen. I had a little group in high school, and we got to play various strip joints and lesbian clubs. I was playing baritone horn and brass instruments in the high-school band, then went off to Princeton, where I joined the Triangle Club. We did the usual drag musicals and took them on the usual tour of Christmas balls and debutante parties. In my senior year I wrote a big-band concerto that was favorably reviewed by Martin Williams in downbeat—my first good review.

  “I got out of college in the early sixties. I dug progressive jazz, hated rock and roll, liked R&B, especially Louis Jordan. I landed a job with the classical-music division of Columbia Records before switching to the company’s pop and jazz departments. There was a senior producer named George Avakian, with whom I worked on a lot of projects. In 1965 George and I coproduced an album called Of Course Of Course by a young jazz musician: Charles Lloyd. He’d been in Cannonball Adderly’s band and was making a name for himself. He was working in the studio with a quartet, including [drummer] Tony Williams, [bassist] Ron Carter, and Gabor Szabo on guitar. One day Charles says to me, ‘You gotta meet this far-out guy. He’s coming tonight to sit in with us.’

  “The far-out guy was Robbie Robertson. I guess he’d met Robbie in Toronto, and here in New York they had the same connection, a guy who lived on the third floor of Charles’s building. So Robbie came to the studio, and we cut this track called “Third Floor Richard” in honor of this dealer. That’s how I met Robbie.

  “Later that year I get a call from Nat Weiss, then the self-described American representative of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. Nat says he has a group that could be the American Beatles, and sends me a tape of three Lafayette University alumni who call themselves the Cyrkle. They were OK, so we cut a single called “Red Rubber Ball,” which immediately went to No. 2. It was the cleanest record—which meant it suffered the fewest returns—the company had that year. So at Christmas they gave me an eleven-thousand-dollar bonus and an office with windows and some plants.

  “Now the rock era hit. It’s the mid-sixties pop explosion. Recording technology became incredibly important because most of the bands we signed were without discernible evidence of any talent. They had great hair and looked right in the clothes, but they had no talent. Producing this kind of record is a nightmare. I didn’t want to do it, so they gave me quality musicians like Leonard Cohen and Blood, Sweat, and Tears with Al Kooper, and Mike Bloomfield. Al Kooper saw I was frustrated and urged me to go free-lance, so I did.

  “Around this time I met Albert Grossman on the street. I saw him in midtown and went up and introduced myself, because he was the most powerful guy in the business. That’s how I got to produce Janis Joplin for Columbia, because Janis was Albert’s client. But there was another connection to be made first.

  “Peter Yarrow hears from Ed Kleiban [who later wrote the lyrics for A Chorus Line] that I was just the guy to supervise the music for his film You Are What You Eat. This started out as a documentary about the Hell’s Angels by Barry Feinstein, Mary Travers’s ex-husband and a friend of Peter’s. Then the summer of ’66 happened, and suddenly the Hell’s Angels concept vanished, and we had a lot of wild footage—cans and cans of film—of love-ins and drug-ins, without any focus. Meanwhile, I’d just finished a Dada-esque montage album based on Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message. In June 1967 I was at the Monterey Pop Festival with Janis, when I get a message to meet Peter Yarrow, who’ll stop in San Francisco on his way to Japan with Peter, Paul, and Mary. I played him the McLuhan record on a little portable turntable in the airport lounge, and he figured I was perfect for his movie. So we arranged to meet up in Woodstock, where this movie was being worked on.

  “By this time I was starting to smoke a little, get high, expand my consciousness, blow my mind. It was good for me at the time. It got me off automatic pilot. I went to Woodstock and met a film editor named Howard Alk. He was one of the original members of Second City, the Chicago comedy troupe that spawned Saturday Night Live years later. He was a funny and clever guy, and he and I holed up in this house in Bearsville with all these cans of film and a couple of moviolas, trying to make a film out of this sucker. Barry Feinstein’s contribution was a barrel of marijuana. The soundtrack consisted of Butterfield, Bloomfield, and Tiny Tim, who was in the movie. Tiny h
ad these musicians working with him...

  “Halloween 1967: Alk and I are beavering away in this house, when I heard this ghastly sound outside. It turned out to be Howard’s birthday, and the guys in the band are serenading him, playing badly on crazy instruments: horns, washboards, squeezebox. There were only four of them: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson. They’re wearing old-looking clothes and masks; the whole thing was totally surreal in that flashing sixties way.

  “We get to talking, and I learn that this is Bob Dylan’s band, and Bob is paying them to live there while he’s recuperating from the motorcycle accident. Suddenly the connection was made. Howard knows me, he knows the band because of a song called ‘Even If She Looks Like a Pig Pt. 2,’ on which Garth sings. Howard said to us, ‘Here’s a marriage made in heaven.’ He figured wacky music, wacky producer. He promoted the whole concept.

  “Want to know what that first serenade I heard from the band sounded like? Check the bridge of ‘Chest Fever’ sometime.

  “Anyway, I loved them from the word go. Musically, I was locked into their thing the second I heard it. I went back to New York—I was living on Perry Street in the Village—when I got a call to come back to Woodstock and talk to Robbie about working with them. We talked for a long time at the house he shared with his lady, Dominique, on Rick’s Road, and he played me a lot of records and discussed the record deal they were going to do with Capitol. Robbie talked and talked, and I kept thinking, Put your music where your mouth is, because all we did was talk.

  “Finally he says, ‘Well, Levon’s here now. He’s our drummer, and he left but now he’s back. Let’s go on over to Big Pink, where most of the boys are living.’

  “So we drive over there, and the first thing we see is Levon walking out of the woods with his friend Kirby. He was just off an oil rig in Louisiana. We shook hands and looked each other in the eye, and Levon said, ‘C’mon, ah wanna show y’all somthin’.’ We hiked a half mile into the woods until we came to a cleared patch and a foot-high marijuana plant that Levon showed off like a 4-H ribbon winner.

  “So I saw my first rehearsal in the basement of Big Pink, the first time I got a real impression of the boys. Robbie functioned as the point man, the leader. Garth was into horns and equipment and could play rings around everyone. Rick was hyper, funny, business-oriented, with a lot of girlfriends. Levon was an extremely unusual and gifted drummer with a funny, syncopated bass drum and an independent right-foot thing. Very much his own man in every respect.

  “And Richard. A sweet, sweet guy. Very drunk, into pills: Tuinal and Valium. Always pushed the envelope beyond where it would go. Drove one hundred fifty miles an hour in his driveway; faster on the road. The first time I met him, there was a terrible raw scab on his right arm. Really grisly. I said, ‘My God, Richard, what happened?’

  “He says, ‘You know that table lamp in our bathroom with the bare bulb? One afternoon I got up, went to the bathroom, and I leaned on the light bulb to look at my eyes in the mirror, and I started to smell something burning, and it was me!’

  “So we started rehearsing together at Big Pink. This was before the record deal. Dylan would come by almost every day. Levon was always trying to get Bob to throw a football with him—kind of a silk purse-sow’s ear trip, but it was funny. Big Pink was a wonderful clubhouse, with good meals and beer and pot and laughter and hard, focused work.

  “While we were working on songs Albert got us some seed money to go into studio A at A&R Sound: the famous studio at 799 Seventh Avenue that Phil Ramone had bought from CBS. We recorded in the barn-shaped seventh-floor studio that had been built on top of the building, where a lot of the famous party records had been recorded. The acoustics were just the best. We did a reel of the songs we brought down from Big Pink: ‘Tears of Rage,’ ‘We Can Talk,’ ‘The Weight,’ ‘Chest Fever,’ and maybe ‘Lonesome Suzie.’ And this is what’s so important about The Band: Everybody played something that was meaningful and that meshed. There were hardly any solos, and nothing was gratuitous. The studio had four tracks. We recorded everyone live on two tracks. The horns—Garth on soprano, me on baritone—went on the third track, and the fourth was saved for vocals and tambourine.

  “We took this reel over to Albert’s office and played the songs for Dylan’s friend Bobby Neuwirth. ‘These are really great,’ he said, and that was the first validation we had, because this was a very cynical guy who would not bullshit us. Anyway, Albert took the tapes and sold them to Capitol.

  “Now it’s winter 1967-68. Capitol loves the tape we made and sends us out to L.A. for a month to record in their eight-track studios there. We move into the Chateau Marmont, a crazy person’s paradise. Levon and I discovered sushi together at the Imperial Gardens restaurant across the street and have been raw-fish addicts ever since. At Capitol Studios we worked with an older engineer named Rex Updegraft, who told us our music was ‘damn cute.’ So we went over to Gold Star—home of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—and did several things, including Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘Key to the Highway.’

  “All told, it took us a month to finish the album, and by April 1968 we were back in New York mixing the album at A&R.”

  We wanted Music From Big Pink to sound like nothing anyone else was doing. This was our music, honed in isolation from the radio and contemporary trends, liberated from the world of the bars and the climate of the Dylan tours. We’d grown up with Ronnie Hawkins, playing that quicker tempo of tunes. Now we cut our tempo, our pulse, right in half. The sense of teamwork and collaboration was incredible. Robbie was writing stuff that evoked simple pictures of American life. Richard was writing beautiful songs like “In a Station” and “Lonesome Suzie.” Garth took a great song like “Chest Fever” and composed an organ prelude. Rick’s playing and singing were amazing, and that blend of the three voices—Richard, Rick, and me—sounded really rich after we’d worked with John Simon for a while.

  We cut upstairs in that big studio on top of A&R, which had a very live sound. I’d set up in the middle of the room. There was a sound-booth against the wall, which is where Garth placed some of his speakers, so it would be a little muffled, the way he liked it. The piano’d be there, and Rick and Robbie would sit on folding chairs, with their amps beside them. That was the way we did it. There were sound-baffles around the drums, and John would kind of lean over them to discuss different drum ideas and strategies because he took it seriously and wanted a solid, professional record. That was the way it worked.

  When I think about that album, I still have to laugh about how close the songs were to our lives. The characters that appear in the lyrics—Luke, Anna Lee, Crazy Chester—were all people we knew. The music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years, distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country. There was a whole movement toward country values in America in those days, as young people searched for different ways of surviving during the Vietnam era. That’s in there too.

  The main thing was the spirit. We worked so hard on that music that no matter what the song credits say—who supposedly wrote what—you’d have to call it a full-bore effort by the group to show what we were all about.

  “Tears of Rage” opened the album with a slow song, which was just another way of our rebelling against the rebellion. We were deliberately going against the grain. Few artists had ever opened an album with a slow song, so we had to. At the zenith of the psychedelic music era, with its flaming guitars and endless solos and elongated jams, we weren’t about to make that kind of album. Bob Dylan helped Richard with this number about a parent’s heartbreak, and Richard sang one of the best performances of his life. It had those trademark horns and organ and the moaning tom-tom style of drumming that I’ve been credited with by some observers, but I know that Ringo Starr was doing something like it at the same time. You make the drum notes bend down in pitch. You hit it, it sounds, and then it hums as the note dies out. If the ensemble is right, you can hear the sustai
n like a bell, and it’s very emotional. It can keep a slow song suspended in an interesting way. (John Simon heard this and started calling me a bayou folk drummer, but not to my face.) As a matter of fact, I found the tuning I used in “Tears of Rage” by tuning to the fluorescent lighting in the studio.

  “To Kingdom Come” was Robbie’s song, and he sang it—the last time he sang on one of our records for years. Robbie didn’t sing, wasn’t a singer, didn’t like to sing, but he sang on this one.

  “In a Station” is Richard’s song about Overlook Mountain and the relative peace we were all feeling after those long years living on the road. He used to laugh and call it his George Harrison song, by which he meant it was spiritual.

  Once I climbed up the face of a mountain

  And ate the wild fruit there

  Fell asleep till the moonlight woke me

  And I could taste your hair.

  I’ve heard this song described as “visionary,” and I agree with that assessment.

  Isn’t everybody dreaming!

  Then the voice I hear is real

  Out of all the idle scheming

  Can’t we have something to feel.

  “Caledonia Mission” was Robbie’s, and Richard sang the lyrics that alluded to the little problem we’d had with the law a few years earlier.

  “The Weight” closed side one. We had two or three tunes, or pieces of tunes, and “The Weight” was one I would work on. Robbie had that bit about going down to Nazareth—Pennsylvania, where the Martin guitar factory is at. The song was full of our favorite characters. “Luke” was Jimmy Ray Paulman. “Young Anna Lee” was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. “Crazy Chester” was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips and kinda walked around town to help keep the peace, if you follow me. He was like Hopalong Cassidy, and he was a friend of the Hawk’s. Ronnie would always check with Crazy Chester to make sure there wasn’t any trouble around town. And Chester would reassure him that everything was peaceable and not to worry, because he was on the case. Two big cap guns, he wore, plus a toupee! There were also “Carmen and the Devil,” “Miss Moses,” and “Fanny,” a name that just seemed to fit the picture. (I believe she looked a lot like Caledonia.) We recorded the song maybe four times. We weren’t sure it was going to be on the album, but people really liked it. Rick, Richard, and I would switch the verses around among us, and we all sang the chorus: Put the load right on me! I read somewhere a few years ago that Robbie said “The Weight” was about the impossibility of sainthood. Well, I’ve sung that song enough times to agree with him.