by Levon Helm
Richard’s “We Can Talk” opened side two. It’s a funny song that really captures the way we spoke to one another; lots of outrageous rhymes and corny puns. Richard just got up one morning—or afternoon—sat down at the piano, and started playing this gospel music that became this song with its famous line, “But I’d rather be burned up in Canada/Than to freeze down in the South.”
“Long Black Veil” sounded like an old southern ballad, but it was actually written in 1958 by M. J. Wilkin and Danny Dill. We knew it from Lefty Frizzell’s version and liked the story of the young man who goes to the gallows for a murder he didn’t commit because his alibi was that he was “in the arms of his best friend’s wife.” I guess we thought it was funny. Anyway, that’s Richard Manuel playing a Wurlitzer electric piano on that track.
“Chest Fever” had improvised lyrics that Robbie put together for the rehearsals and never got around to rewriting. The song came kinda late in the whole process and got recorded before it was finished. Garth put together an introduction from J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor with that Lowrey organ and a good solo in the middle. The bridge has this funny, tuneless Salvation Army band feel: Rick on violin, John Simon on baritone, Garth on tenor.
“Lonesome Suzie” was like a miniature portrait that Richard sang in his squeezed-out falsetto, really expressive, with horns and organ. Years later he described “Suzie” as his attempt to write a hit record. It was a quiet song that told a story and was pretty typical of Richard’s general philosophy, which was to be kind to people. Richard was complicated and felt things really deeply, more than most people. Everyone who knew him would tell you that. His attitude, often expressed to me, was that you might as well live tonight, because tomorrow you could get run over by a truck.
Rick sings “This Wheel’s on Fire.” These were lyrics that Bob had, which Rick put to music. Garth got some distinctive sounds on that track by running a telegraph key through a Roxochord toy organ. Garth just hit that key when he wanted the sound. I thought we’d cut a pretty good take on it, but when we got back to New York from California there were problems. “The snare drum wasn’t loud enough on our four-track recording,” John Simon recalls, “so Levon had to go back into the studio and overdub the snare; an awful chore. When it was over Levon growls at me, ‘Don’t lemme ever have to do that again.’”
“I Shall Be Released,” which closed the album, was the third song Bob had written with us. (For that reason, we declined his generous offer to play on the album. We didn’t want to appear to be trading on Bob’s name any more than we had to. We did, however, ask him to paint the album cover, which he kindly did.) It’s a prisoner’s lament that Bob had sung on the basement tapes and Richard sings in his falsetto voice. Richard cut another version in his regular voice that was just as good. The drum sound was me playing the snares of an upside-down drum with my fingers. The windlike sound is Garth playing organ with one hand and manipulating the stops with the other.
And that, to the best of my recollection, is the way we made Music From Big Pink. The record was meant to describe our take on the crazy times we were living in. The year 1968 was like a civil war, a time of conflict and turmoil in the United States. There was tension in the air, sometimes so thick you could barely wade through it. Here’s an example. On our way to California to cut the tracks, Robbie had gone ahead with Albert, who needed to talk big business at the Capitol Tower. Garth, Richard, Rick, and I brought up the rear. Cash was still scarce, so Rick bought us plane tickets with a credit card he’d gotten somehow. During a stop in Chicago the man from the airline came aboard, called our names, and asked us to follow him. He told us the credit card was over its limit, and we owed him money. I called our banker in Arkansas, and Paul Berry helped us straighten things out with the airline. While we were waiting for our new tickets, we ducked into the snack bar, which was occupied by a hundred or so airborne troops on their way home from Vietnam to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They’d been celebrating and were in a jovial mood, at least until we walked in. They got on our case immediately.
“Shit, man, is this what we fought a damn war for, to eat with a bunch of hippies?”
“They need a damn haircut.”
I’m thinking these boys are about to kick the hell out of us. They all had these big ugly walking sticks with the words “Khe Sanh” carved on top. It got real quiet in there. I figured that when it started, I’d try to run one of them through the door, land on top of him, and start yelling for the cops. Just as the taunting started again, our flight was called. We got up and left, slow as we dared, and I heard Mama Nell’s voice saying, It’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.
All this time we were settling deeper into Woodstock. We all had that hometown feeling about the area. The town took in the band and treated us like favorite sons. If someone asked, “Is the band in town?” they could be talking only about us. That’s how the town actually gave us our name. And, of course, they tolerated us.
Richard Manuel and I enjoyed taking a couple of rent-a-cars out in the big, flat field next to Big Pink. We liked to see what our cars were made of. We’d do figure eights and dance with each other at top speed. Then I’d get at one end of the field, he’d get at the other, and we’d run at each other. We’d get right beside each other, cut the wheel, a little leg on the gas, and both cars would just sashay, break off, and bow to each other. Swing your partner, do-si-do! We’d go around again, then stop in at Deanie’s for dinner and a few drinks. Richard might sit down at the piano around midnight, and maybe Paul Butterfield would sit in and play. There were many nights like that.
Richard and I were in Deanie’s one night, not too long after my arrival in town. We left around two in the morning, feeling very little pain. We were headed back to Big Pink in separate cars to see what they were made of out in the field there, have a little more fun. Richard was a couple of minutes ahead of me on the road out of Woodstock. I was telling the people in the car with me that my leg was still a little stiff because I’d just gone down to Arkansas for a few days and had fallen off my friend Paul Berry’s Triumph 250 motorcycle and scraped my leg, leaving a pretty good scab.
The road heading toward Saugerties out of Woodstock has this curve to the left, and it also drops down. You lose some altitude, and it’s a bad spot even when it’s dry. That rainy night, Richard took the curve too fast, skidded in some gravel, and caught the last fence post with his rear wheel, which threw him over into the ditch, nose first, ass end up in the air. Richard walked away from it. It was a tendency of his to walk away from car wrecks, which was good because he had of lot of them. He was a hell of a good driver, but real nervy.
The police came next, stopped in their lane with their lights on, and pronounced Richard OK. I was five minutes behind all this and determined to catch him. When I hit that bad corner I was doing it as fast as I thought I could and still keep the car on the road. I hit my flashers and dimmed a couple of times, didn’t get an answer, so I was gonna take that curve and keep smokin’ over that next big hill and past Zena Road, where you could really go down those flats there at a high rate of speed. But bless my soul, as soon as I cleared the curve, I saw a bunch of people in the middle of the road and the police lights.
“That’s Levon,” a dazed Richard said to the Woodstock police chief, Billy Waterous, as I barreled down on top of ’em.
“Oh my God!” Billy exclaimed. “He’s going to kill us all!”
I went off the gas and hit the brake a little, but then decided to zigzag through the people and cars. It was the only way to avoid a high-speed collision. So I zigged, and that was good. Then I zagged, but missed by three inches. An inch and a half of my right nose caught an inch and a half of the police car’s left rear. It was that close.
And so we kissed. I demolished both doors of the police cruiser, spun three times, and ended up stopped in the middle of the road, facing the opposite way as Richard. It was a scary scene. My car was wrecked, the police lights were flas
hing, people were running. If they hadn’t jumped out of the way, I’d have killed them all.
I had a girlfriend and a passenger in the car. As soon as I made sure they weren’t cut up by the glass, I jumped out of the car and ran to Richard. We grabbed each other by the arms. “Are you all right, man?” “Yes, brother. Jesus Christ! What a fuckin’ mess. Are you OK?”
All of a sudden a cop came out of the ditch, where he had jumped to save his life. We didn’t know him. He was a county deputy from another town, and helping Billy because they were shorthanded. He was as scared as we were. I turned to go back to the car and check on my friend Bonnie, and the cop said, “You’re not going anywhere.” I ignored him, sat down in the car, left the door open, and was making sure she was OK when the cop grabbed my jacket and tore the pocket off trying to get me out of the car. This was a new leather jacket I’d managed to buy myself—good-lookin’, cut like a suit jacket with good lapels—and he tore the damn pocket right off! I really liked this jacket, so I decided, Here, let me help you. I let him help me out of the car, then reached up and got me a handful of his galluses. That was the move he’d been waiting for, so he went for his blackjack.
And I went for speed. I had him above me and was trying to run him backward with my knees in a bad place for him. He was trying to give ground so he could connect with that blackjack. We were doing a pretty good dance backward when Billy Waterous and Richard saw us coming their way. Billy saw the blackjack waving in the air and was going to intervene, but Richard grabbed him around the neck, and they started dancing in circles! Then we all hit the slippery gravel and went down in one writhing pile. Billy had my jacket now, and the other cop was hitting me across the shoulders with the blackjack. That old boy swung again and hit Billy across the back of his right hand with the blackjack! I thought, Boy, this is a hell of a good idea! How did we let it get this far?
This other cop swung one more time and caught that little bone that sits right behind the ear. I thought someone had shot off a firecracker, but it was my head. It made everything rock, like you’re playing a show and get that electric squeal in the air that makes you woozy, and you think your drum seat is falling over.
Of course, the fight was over, and I was damn glad of that. I didn’t want to get hit like that again. I realized I’d torn up a police car, beat on a deputy, and the police chief was worse off than anyone, because the whole back of his hand was swollen into a goose egg. They put handcuffs on me, which was probably a good thing. I’d certainly been drinking too much, and when your blood gets fired up like that and you’ve got that alcohol in you, that’s when people end up killing themselves.
They took us to the station. Some guy came in and looked at me and yelled at the deputy, “Search his boots! He might have a knife in there!” So I reached down and pulled up my pant leg. The scab from the Arkansas mishap had rubbed off in the gravel during the fight, and my leg looked raw and bloody. I said, “Put that in the goddamn report,” and the guy looked at the cop who’d arrested me, like, “You didn’t have to do that to him, did you?” Of course Albert Grossman was right there in a flash and had us cut loose that quick. The next day we showed up before Judge Joseph Forno, Sr., also the town pharmacist. He was stern with us, as he should have been, but we managed to stay out of jail and eventually made a friend of the judge, who has been a mentor to me ever since.
In May 1968 we posed for our album picture at a house I was sharing with Rick Danko in Wittenburg, which is west of Bearsville. We’d left Big Pink by then because we all needed more room. This house of ours had a long view of the hills. The photographer was Elliott Landy, who worked for a New York underground paper called The Rat. Albert Grossman had discovered Elliott while he was personally ejecting him from Janis Joplin’s Carnegie Hall show a few months earlier. Richard brought along some funny hats from his collection, which all of us wore except for Garth. While the photographer was focusing his camera, the young wife of a friend of Garth’s was dancing behind Landy, trying to make us smile. As he snapped the first shot, she tore off her dress and did a naked little grind. So there we were, trying to be cool in the face of this outrageous hippie dance. I think that’s the shot we ended up using.
As for the way some of us looked in those days, once, Robbie was driving down to the city a little too fast on the Thruway, and a state cop pulled him over for speeding. The officer checked out Robbie in his beard, wire-rim glasses, and porkpie hat and said, “I’ll let you go this time, Rabbi, but try to slow down from now on, OK?”
Then we took Elliott up to Ontario to shoot a picture called “Next of Kin.” This was more rebellion against the so-called revolution, when it became fashionable to hate your families and repudiate their values. Hell, we loved our families! We’d gone on the road when we were still boys, and we missed our families and would talk about them all the time. So we gathered everyone on Rick Danko’s brother’s farm near Simcoe and did a group shot with our people gathered around us. That’s Robbie’s mom on the far left with Garth and his parents. I’m the guy with the hat and a cig hanging out of his mouth. Then Richard’s folks, Richard, Robbie and Dominique, Rick’s dad with his finger in his ear, Rick, and his brother Terry. Little Freddie McNulty, our beloved mascot, is between Rick and his granddad, who stands with his wife and a bunch of grandchildren. John Simon stands behind in a floppy hat and blue shirt, with Rick’s mother and her brothers. Rick’s uncle Rick Smith in that group was a famous chicken judge. People would fly him all over the world to judge birds. He showed me how to hypnotize a chicken while we were on that mission. My mom was feeling ill at the time and couldn’t make it to Ontario, so Elliott was good enough to go down to Springdale and take a separate picture of her and Diamond, which we inserted in the upper left corner. We also told Milton Glaser, who designed the album jacket, to include a photo of Big Pink with these lines written by Dominique Robertson:
BIG PINK—A pink house seated in the sun of Overlook Mountain in West Saugerties, New York. Big Pink bore this music and these songs along its way. It’s the first witness of this album that’s been thought and composed right there inside its walls.
I guess that’s how we thought of the place: like it was Mother.
When the album was eventually released on July 1, 1968, we were shocked to find it credited not to the Crackers but to a group called...
The Band.
Well, it was us. That’s what Woodstock people called us locally: the band. When the people on the other side of the desk at Capitol didn’t want to release an album called Music From Big Pink by the Crackers, they just went and changed our name!
You know, I thought the Crackers was a funny name, and still do. I was shocked when I first heard about “The Band.” Calling it The Band seemed a little on the pretentious, even blowhard, side—burdened by greatness—but we never intended it that way. I voted for the Crackers, though.
John Simon reflects: “Music From Big Pink came out that summer and was an underground sensation, if not exactly a commercial smash. I can honestly say that I loved the music and was enormously proud to be associated with these men. And that’s the point. These guys weren’t teenagers. They were seasoned veterans whose debut album sounded more like a band in its prime. The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists. The reason for that is they were playing out of what I called their ‘Appalachian scale,’ a pentatonic, five-note scale like the black keys on the piano. That was the palette from which those melodies came.
“Big Pink was like nothing that came before it. Nothing like what they were before it. A lot of it was Robbie’s writing and the pictures he evoked. A lot of it was Levon and Rick’s playing and the blend of the three voices, plus Garth’s trip. It was just so rich. People wanted to copy it, and did. Look at Elton John.
“Of course, the Dylan connection helped. The funny thing was, when Capitol sent out a blank-label acetate of Big Pink to press and radio people, everyone assumed ‘The Weight’ was the
Dylan song on the album. The Band fooled everyone except themselves.”
Music From Big Pink entered the American charts in early August. Competing against the Doors, Procol Harum, Janis Ian, Cream, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, sales were disappointing, and I think it eventually sold a quarter-million copies that first year or so. At the same time, many people regard that record as one of the defining moments of the decade. People have been telling me ever since that Big Pink changed their lives.
A certain amount of mystery surrounded our debut. There was no cover shot of the group on the record, only Bob Dylan’s painting of five musicians, a roadie, and an elephant. The group photo inside didn’t identify us by name. There was no lyric sheet, so you couldn’t tell who was singing, and most people couldn’t understand the words. We didn’t do any interviews, there wasn’t much publicity that summer save for a few reviews, and we had to quash Capitol’s promotional campaign that tried to market us like some teenybopper group. They were going to ask fans to name Bob’s cover painting. Prizes were pink Yamaha motorbikes, pink pandas, and pink lemonade. So we told Capitol to just leave it alone, and they did.
We didn’t tour either. My leg was still in bad shape from the motorcycle accident, and besides, our policy was not to tour if we could help it. The policy was to keep making music using the methods and work habits that had kept us productive through the basement tapes and the Big Pink era. We didn’t care about being stars. We just wanted to survive with our integrity. Even if we wanted to tour, it would have been hard because Richard also had a little accident that put him out of commission. As Jane Manuel recalls: “We had actually broken up the year before, but Richard and I stayed in touch, because he was my first love. In the spring of 1968 he called me; one of his brothers was getting married, and he asked me to drive him up to Stratford, Ontario, for the ceremony. He couldn’t rent a car because they’d taken his license away for speeding. So we went to the wedding, to get me in the mood, because Richard proposed, and we got married the next weekend. He was very pleased about this and used to tease me about this total manipulation.
