This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  “We went back to Woodstock and lived with Garth in a house on Spencer Road on Ohayo Mountain. Robbie and Dominique were already married and living on Glasco Turnpike. The band rehearsed in our living room, so there were always people trying to get a party going.”

  This house had a nice view of the Ashokan Reservoir, and a barbecue grill, which Richard tried to fire up one day by building a gasoline fire in the bottom. But he used so much fuel, it turned into a bomb, and he ended up grilling the top of his foot—third-degree burns. So Richard couldn’t work for two months, another reason we didn’t tour behind Big Pink in the summer of ‘68. And, boy, we were hot. Albert was turning down offers of twenty thousand dollars a night.

  We got pretty good reviews, though. Al Aronowitz, in Life: “With Big Pink the band dips into the well of tradition and comes up with bucketsful of clear, cool country soul that washes the ears with a sound never heard before. Traditionalists may not like it because it’s too original. Pop faddists won’t like it because it’s too traditional.”

  “I have chosen my album for 1968,” Al Kooper wrote in Rolling Stone. “Music From Big Pink is an event and should be treated as one.” He finished his review: “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks. There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”

  According to Time, “The band from Big Pink plays the best, boneclean ‘white soul’ anywhere. Along with their musicianship, a lack of self-indulgence plays a large part in the beauty of their sound.” All reviewers noted that this was not a guitar album, which is what people expected from a so-called rock group. But Robbie had soloed himself to death on the Dylan tours, and we were consciously writing songs without much space for solos. This was something that people who liked us picked up on. This group without a name was an ensemble.

  Al Aronowitz again, this time in Rolling Stone: “What the band plays is country rock, with cadences from F. S. Wolcott’s Original Rabbits Foot Minstrel Show and music that tells stories the way Uncle Remus did, with the taste of Red River Cereal and the consistency of King Biscuit Flour. Robertson himself calls it mountain music, ‘because this place where we are—Woodstock—is in the mountains.’... the kind of album that will have to open its own door to a new category, accompanied by all the reasons for the burgeoning rush to country pop, by the exodus from the cities and the search for a calmer ethic, by the hunger for earth-grown wisdom and a redefined morality, by the thirst for simple touchstones and the natural law of trees.”

  Our local paper in Woodstock, by the way, said the album was OK, but we could have done better.

  Writers were always stuck when they tried to find a label for us. On Sunday, August 4, 1968, The New York Times’ critic declared, “Fortunately, we needn’t wait for the Byrds to understand what the country-rock synthesis is all about. Already, the movement has its first major album, Music From Big Pink by The Band. You can tell right away this is country music by its twang and tenacity. But you know it’s also rock, because it makes you want to move.”

  Country rock was the label that finally stuck. We hated it.

  When Albert Grossman’s office finally got tired of turning down interview requests, Robbie was deputized to talk to the press. “One thing I’d like to clear up,” he told Eye magazine that September, “we have no name for the group. We’re not interested in doing record promotion or going on Johnny Carson to plug the LP.... The name of the group is just our Christian names. The only reason the LP is by ‘The Band’ is so they can file it in the record stores. And also, that’s the way we’re known to our friends and neighbors. Another thing, we’re not Bob Dylan’s band; he doesn’t think of us that way; neither do we.

  “See, we don’t freak out anymore; that was seven or eight years ago. We wanted the album to be loose and easy. There was a lot of instrumental swapping—everyone took turns. It was a very drunken LP. We had a good time.”

  Around this time we got a letter from George Harrison, who complained that EMI released Music From Big Pink in England in a single sleeve instead of the double-fold jacket of the American version. They printed the title and name of the group over Bob’s painting and threw out the “Next of Kin” photo. George was a big advocate for us, being quoted in the British press about how Music From Big Pink was the new sound to come from America and everybody better pay attention. His friend Eric Clapton was quoted in the British paper Melody Maker as saying Big Pink had made his group Cream, the contemporary kings of so-called acid rock, obsolete. The power trio announced its disbandment that summer.

  George Harrison came to Woodstock that fall. We’d appreciated what both he and Eric Clapton had been saying about us in print. It was encouraging to have the Beatles say they were fans of ours. At one point there was discussion of recording with George and Eric, who came to see us a little later on. We talked about doing a fireside jam, real informal, with American and British players and a lot of beer, but nothing ever came of it. Bob and Albert were fighting pretty good by then, so that might have had something to do with nothing like that happening for us.

  “Hi, I’m George. Nice to meet you.” That’s what he was like. Very quiet. I think he was with us for Thanksgiving at Bob’s house, and we jammed a little bit and swapped some songs. George and Bob wrote a couple of things together, and there was much talk of us being in a rock western called Zachariah that Apple Films was promoting. We were maybe going to do the music with George, but in the end the script was silly—MTV fifteen years ahead of schedule—and it didn’t happen.

  A lot of people came to Woodstock to hang out with us that fall. My memory is that everyone wanted to know Richard Manuel and just hang out. Albert’s office fielded quite a few movie queries for Richard.

  It took a while for word about The Band and Big Pink to get around, but by the end of 1968 people like promoter Bill Graham were offering us serious money to get out and play. I was content not to tour and just to make records. We had another album due to Capitol, and the beauty of that autumn in Woodstock was inspiring our writers—Richard and Robbie—to turn out some good songs. We already had a working title for the next record: Harvest.

  Then Rick broke his neck in a car accident, late at night, and our choice of whether or not to tour was taken away.

  “Levon and I were living in a house in Wittenburg,” Rick recalls, “and I was heading to this house Garth and Richard had, where Van Morrison later lived while he was making his album Tupelo Honey. I was driving a 1953 Bristol, a beautiful English car with an aluminum body, which belonged to my girlfriend’s older brother. I was a little too drunk, a little too high. I’d just climbed a mountain and took the S-curve and felt the car sliding. I put my brakes on and hit a tree. I was knocked out but had a lot of flashbacks until I regained full consciousness three or four days later.

  “A few minutes later, I’m out of the car, really bleeding, when Bill Avis and his wife come along on their way to Richard’s house. I started screaming and yelling, ‘Just get me home—back to the house!’ I somehow walked into the house, into the bedroom, lay down on my bed, and that was it. I didn’t get up for three or four months after that.

  “Flashbacks: Suddenly there’s people in my room. There’s a state trooper, and he’s asking for my driver’s license. Levon’s standing there, naked, because he’s been rudely awakened, and there are now six or seven people in the room, and Levon was telling this trooper, ‘Now’s no fuckin’ time to be asking for his goddamn license! Call an ambulance, for God’s sake!’ Levon, Richard, and Bill came to the hospital, and when I woke up again I’m on the examining table, feeling a lot of pain, and I hear Richard telling the doctor, ‘If I hear him scream one more time, I’m gonna break your neck.’

  “It must’ve been the weekend. He must have had a couple of drinks.

  “In the recovery room, I wake up in excruciating pain. I had to scream to wake up the nurse. They got me to my own room, but they didn’t know my neck is broken, didn’t know my back is broken in four places
. I’m asking them, ‘Why can’t I get up?’ Someone gave me a shot.

  “When I woke up again, Albert Grossman was in the room, talking with a neurosurgeon. I was in for weeks of traction. I told Albert not to tell the press I’d had an accident, and decided to suppress all my hyper instincts and lie perfectly still for the time it took for my neck to heal. Nobody thought that I could do it, but I managed, and that’s how it grew back into place.

  “The second time Albert came to see me, he said the group was getting offers of four thousand dollars a night. He was saying, ‘Can’t I tell the press something? Can’t the band go out and play?’ I said, ‘I don’t want you to tell the press nothing about my accident, because I saw what Bob Dylan went through, and it was ugly; people saying he was finished.’ I didn’t want to go through that. Next time he comes, Albert goes, ‘They’re offering seven thousand dollars a night, eight thousand dollars a night.’

  “‘Tell ’em to go out on the road,’ I said. ‘I’m not the leader of the band.’”

  Well, of course we didn’t go out without Rick. How could we? The Band was a team. But it was real quiet in Woodstock that winter, believe me. We might’ve gotten into some mischief because of it.

  Chapter Seven

  THE BAND

  Here my story intertwines with that of the mother of my daughter.

  I’d heard of Libby Titus before I met her because people said she was one of most beautiful girls in Woodstock. She was born Irene Justice in 1946. Her Russian father moved his family to Woodstock to work with his brother-in-law producing Batman comic strips for Stan Lee, and Libby was raised on Ohayo Mountain Road.

  Cut to the summer of 1964. Libby, just out of high school and on her way to nearby Bard College, lands a waitressing job at the Café Expresso on Tinker Street, owned by Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel. Libby is eighteen years old, with a headful of dark, curly hair. She looks good. Here are a few of Libby’s memories of that era. She has her own acerbic point of view, so let the reader be advised to take them with a barrel of salt.

  “There was incredible excitement that summer in Woodstock,” Libby says, “because Bob Dylan had moved to town, and suddenly Joan Baez was driving around in a low-slung green Jaguar, and the café was full of heavyweight bohemians from the Village and Chicago. Bobby Neuwirth. Sara Dylan—never had I seen anyone so beautiful, like a Brazilian Madonna. One night Victor Maimudes, Dylan’s road manager, took me up to Albert Grossman’s, which was the center of all this. I met Sally Grossman, so beautiful that her body could have been carved on a frieze. She was like a Byzantine hooker! So much life and passion, sexy clothes, everyone flirting. LSD hadn’t hit, so no one was out of their mind. It was so beautiful and innocent, that summer.

  “Working in the café, I met and became friends with Mason Hoffenberg, this fantastic junkie who’d written the novel Candy with Terry Southern and was like the beatnik king of Woodstock. He was so smart and so funny that he made being a junkie somehow attractive.

  “I only lasted a year at Bard, and went to New York and got a job at the Café Figaro on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the very crossroads of the avant-garde in 1965. There I met Barry Titus, the handsome grandson of Helena Rubinstein, who invented makeup. He looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo, and swept me off my feet to his apartment on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-fourth Street. Our son, Ezra Titus, was born in July 1966. In the spring of 1968, having left my husband, my son and I moved into a nice apartment on Gramercy Park. Like everyone else I was trying to figure out what to do with myself.

  “On July 4, 1968, Mason Hoffenberg comes by in a big white Cadillac and says, ‘Libby, wanna come to Woodstock to meet The Band? They’ll love you!’ So I left Ezra with his nanny and drove up to Woodstock with Mason. We pull into the driveway of this house on Boggs Hill, where Robbie and Dominique were living. I took one look at this gorgeous, pregnant French girl and bonded with her immediately. Mason went off somewhere because he was kicking heroin and left me there for a long time, so I bonded with both of them.

  “Rick Danko came over early that afternoon—nervous, hyper, cheekbones, bedazzling, adorable. Rick must have heard there was a new girl in town, because he came over to display himself. He just had to take me off in his old Pontiac to see some awful creek, and I’m in a white Bendel dress and Brazilian espadrilles, very uncomfortable. The chemistry wasn’t there between Rick and me that day, so he brought me back to the house and drove off.

  “Late that evening Robbie, Dominique, and I go down to the Café Expresso. As we’re going in, there was an argument on the street. Two Woodstock natives are shouting at two guys on the street. One is Andy Yarrow, Peter’s younger brother. The other is Levon.

  “I see Levon and think, I’ve never seen anyone so good-looking ... but how weird that he’s smashing the side of that pickup truck. I’ll remind myself to stay away from him. But I also thought, Man, look at that. Look at him! I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so handsome, and I still remember every detail: blue jeans, checked shirt, cowboy boots and hat, long golden curls, and a beard under green eyes, with a sinewy body that gave him the appearance of a mountain lion.

  “That was Levon. There was a direct look between us that night. I could feel it; he was contacting me through our eyes. I knew it. That electricity—maybe you feel it only a few times in your life or never at all.

  “I saw someone similar to myself.

  “And he had that power of his. He could draw you to him. He looks into your eyes and draws you into his sphere. But there was also this violent and untamed side to his nature. He was wild.

  “The summer of ‘68 went on, hot and sunny all the time. Big Pink came out, and The Band was getting famous. They were running around Woodstock in their Pontiacs, their fame and youth had arrived, and they were basking in it. Levon and Rick were living in the Cabbott house, a dusty and sexy little cowboy house off the Wittenburg Road. Levon was sleeping with every girl in Woodstock, one after another, like clay pigeons. I wouldn’t be one of these girls, and Levon liked that.

  “Over the summer I got to know them a little better, enough to sketch them out a bit.

  “Robbie Robertson was tall, quiet, handsome, self-contained, in control. He seemed to be more of a rock and roll carny type than he really was. He was a businessman as well as a musician, a folk artist, a great storyteller. He was good to his wife, his mother, the other guys. He alone of them was organized enough to present this mountain-lion energy they all had. He knew how to call it in and turn it into art that could be put on a record. He suffered later for this quality, but I saw him as a great young man!

  “Rick Danko was the young buck in the forest, coming into his own. The wild man, the innocent guy who fell for the girl with the tiny waist: Grace Seldner. Rick was hyper and always telling stories about the horrific accidents that were happening to them because they lived so completely at risk.

  “Garth Hudson was authoritative about music, distracted, in his own world. He was very funny in a subtle way and more careful than the rest of them. Garth didn’t tend to have bad traffic accidents or burn himself up. He was older and wiser, and everybody looked up to him.

  “Richard Manuel: self-deprecating, funny, soulful, sweet, extremely self-destructive, major alcoholic. He had zero information how to live. I was a mess myself, but I looked like Eleanor Roosevelt next to Richard. There were signs of what was gonna happen; anyone could see. He’d build a concrete barbecue, fill it with lighter fluid, leave a hole in the bottom, stand over it with a match with his foot next to the hole—third-degree burns and nobody can work that summer. He was accident-prone but making a joke out of it, as if it was some funny thing that wasn’t happening to them. It was ‘Richard crashed the damn car, ha-ha-ha.’

  “One night Rick and Levon made a bet that whoever got to my place first—I was living with Mason Hoffenberg in an old stone house—was going to be the one to sleep with me. They both raced over, Rick crashed the car, and Levon and I got together. We didn’t sleep
together, but by now I had a crush on Levon. I was very attracted to him. Rick married Grace, the girl whose car he crashed.

  “But then, after that summer, things began to change. This wonderful, nymphomaniacal group of young rock stars became surrounded by these extremely charming and attractive vultures: John Brent, Howard Alk, John Court, Larry Hankin. Some of them were brilliant, charismatic junkies, like John Brent, who was so magnetic you wanted to be a junkie ten minutes after you met him and heard his stories of beautiful girls in the Village and shooting up with William Burroughs.

  “And that’s what happened. As The Band was trying to continue their career, a major heroin scene began to surround the picture. They were very dangerous times for all of us.”

  We went to California to make The Band. We had some songs we’d been working on, and wanted to get away from the long winter and the temptations of Woodstock life and do our work. This was our prime now. We were in our era. Instead of touring, our creative energies went into making this record. It was the way we ordered our lives. We wanted to chase that music. We were a self-contained unit who’d reach outside for help once in a while. So we hired John Simon again and rented Sammy Davis, Jr.’s house in the Hollywood Hills for a few months (having borrowed $10,000 from Paul Berry in Arkansas so we could live in style). It had a big pool house, which we converted into a studio, plus I lived there. We taped up the metal chimney, sealed off the fireplace, and had Capitol send over a couple of carpenters to box out the windows. We packed blankets around them and taped them all off. To me, things were as satisfying as they could get. It was February 1969.