This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Garth always believed in visiting the pawnshops whenever we hit a new town, because he found good old horns and rare music books there. By then I could afford to run the first of several Corvettes and buy a good twelve-string Martin guitar if I wanted. Down at a pawnshop on Santa Monica Boulevard I found this set of drums with wooden rims for $130 and fell in love with them. I bought the whole kit with a set of cymbals; a great crash and a real good ride. These were old-fashioned instruments, but they read well on the microphones when you had a tape machine going. So I ended up using the bass, the snare, and one of the two cymbals in that set on the album, and we’d take ’em out on the road when we toured. I also found an inlaid antique mandolin, circa the 1930s, at that shop.

  John Simon recalls: “After Big Pink I’d gone on to produce a bunch of other stuff—Big Brother, the Electric Flag, Mama Cass—but I was very happy when The Band asked me back. Around the second album I asked Robbie if I could actually join the band. Because we worked so well together and I just wanted to be one of them. He said, ‘Man, you know... We already have two piano players.’

  “A cold dude.

  “Before we started in California, I went to Hawaii with Robbie, Dominique, and their baby, Alexandra. We were supposed to be working on songs for The Band, but instead we worked on songs for my first album for Warner Bros. Then we went back to L.A. and met the others at this house and pool complex we rented for a couple of months from Sammy Davis, who’d brought it from Wally Cox—Mr. Peepers on 1950s TV. It was right above Sunset Boulevard. The place had a living room, kitchen, immense master bedroom featuring glamorous May Britt’s bathroom and closet. Upstairs was like a motel, with four bedrooms off the hall. The pool house in back had a separate suite. A downstairs suite underneath the kitchen was occupied by Robbie, Dominique (who was very pregnant), their daughter, and Robbie’s mom, Mama Kosh, who was helping take care of the baby. We all drew straws for the rest. I got Sammy’s suite, and Levon got the pool house, minus the big room to record in. Richard and Jane got the double bedroom upstairs, and Garth and Rick got the rest. We all took turns in the kitchen, alternating the cooking, and after the first month we drew again and changed rooms.

  “The plan was for Capitol to supply recording equipment so we could record in the house. We waited for it for a month after we arrived. And then I found I wasn’t really there to produce the record. I was supposed to teach the guys in the band—meaning Robbie—what I did, so they could make records by themselves. For months Robbie had been asking me, ‘What do you do, John? What do engineers do? Could we do it by ourselves without an engineer?’

  “Anyway, we hung out for a month, waiting for the studio gear. Capitol gave us a fleet of VW Beetles to drive around in while Robbie was writing the songs. When we finally got the equipment set up, we decided to test it out to see how the studio sounded. We had the second Dr. John the Night Tripper record, which had a discordant version of ‘My Country! ’Tis of Thee’ on it, with kids singing and all sorts of sound effects. Garth finally got the speakers wired at three in the morning, and we put on Dr. John. Sounded pretty good too—until ten minutes later Dominique Robertson runs in, barefoot in her nightgown, saying, ‘Robbie! Robbie! Ze cops! Ze cops are here!’

  “We ran outside, and Dr. John is everywhere. It turned out we’d tapped into Sammy’s poolside speaker system, and we were broadcasting Dr. John at top volume into the Hollywood Hills. We tried not to laugh as more cop cars pulled up, lights came on in houses up into the hills, and the neighborhood dogs began to howl in answer to this insane Dr. John trip.

  “So now we had one month in which to record two months of scheduled work. We had a band meeting in the living room of the house the night after the gear arrived. Richard Manuel says, ‘What we want is to get a hold of some of them high-school fat-girl diet pills.’

  “I asked what he meant, and Richard said they liked these little pink triangular pills that had a line through ’em. So I called up a college drummer buddy of mine, by then a neurosurgeon in San Francisco but still enough of a hippie to prescribe a whole pile of these amphetamines. And that’s how they liked to work. I got into it and started smoking for the first time in my life because the pills made cigarettes taste so good.”

  We never had any rules about making records. In those days you lived with a tape recorder, strictly trial and error. Living so communally, like in the days of Big Pink, helped pass the ideas around, and with the studio right there we were always experimenting, without any deadlines or worrying about the engineer’s overtime. Richard was drumming up a storm—he played on half the album—and John Simon and I worked for hours just getting those old wooden drums of mine deadened down until they had a good thump to them. We’d tape up the bottom of that old snare drum with the wooden rim, and it just sounded better than average to me. We’d adjust the lug nuts to get that weeping tom-tom effect where that note would bend down, and you’d hear it go eeeeuuuuu.

  An average workday might start at seven in the evening, working on those sounds and getting in tune with one another. A lot went into differentiating the instruments to individual songs so there was very little repetition. At night, after a good meal, we’d rehearse, getting our parts and the lyrics right. We discovered the songs themselves dictated who would sing and who would play the supporting roles. That was the real pleasure we got out of playing as a group. After midnight we’d record. Working this way, we cut nine songs during March and into April. We had hardly any interaction with the L.A. music scene and, indeed, rarely saw anyone at all. When a writer from Look magazine showed up near the end of the month, he told us the neighbors were whispering about the grouchy, bearded mountaineers who had taken over Sammy Davis’s house. Some kind of cult, maybe.

  Richard sang on “Across the Great Divide” and came up with all those chord progressions and tempo changes in the song. You can really hear the glory and plain goodness of Richard’s personality if you listen carefully. We had a film projector in the studio, so we could watch movies as part of this whole process. We’d been offered the sound track for Peter Fonda’s movie Easy Rider, but we’d turned it down; likewise Ned Kelly, Mick Jagger’s film debut. While we were recording “Across the Great Divide,” the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came up to the house to visit. The auteur of Red Desert and Blow-Up wanted us to consider doing the music for his first movie about America, Zabriskie Point. Signor Antonioni didn’t speak much English, so it was funny when he heard Richard on the playback singing the beginning of that song—“Standin’ by your window in vain, a pistol in your hand”—and Antonioni starts gesturing and shouting “Pistoli!” in recognition. (We turned down his movie too.)

  “Rag Mama Rag” was a collaboration among the band. At the time, it wasn’t anything special; as with many songs, we didn’t understand its importance until after we’d recorded it. I’m singing and playing the mandolin, and Richard’s playing drums. That’s Rick playing the fiddle, Garth playing the funky piano, and John Simon blowing tuba for the first time in his life. (There’s no bass on the track.) We were trying to bring to mind the feel of those old acoustic songs like “In the Pines” when we cut that. To me, it came as the height of our collaboration: We were all at our fullest. Everybody had input, especially Garth. This is a point that has to be made. We called Garth “H.B.” among ourselves. This stood for “Honey Boy,” because at the end of the day, after the other instruments were put away, Garth was still in the studio sweetening the tracks, stacking up those chords, putting on brass, woodwinds, whatever was needed to make that music sing. Garth made us sound like we did.

  Robbie and I worked on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era for the lyrics and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect. It was another of those “workshop” songs we worked on a long time before we got it down. This was when we started halving the beat on a lot of tunes, which gave us a distinctive t
hing. Instead of keeping full time rhythmically, we found if we halved the beat we could lay the lyrics in a different place, and the pulse would be easier to move to, more danceable. And it made it easier for us to learn to really sing with one another and behind Richard. My problem was that I had to learn to sing and play this half-time meter at the same time. I’d grown up shouting “Short Fat Fannie” over a barroom din while playing at top speed. Now I learned to sing quieter and play as best I could. I had to record a tune six, eight, ten times before I really got it. Incidentally, the harmonica sound is actually Garth overdubbing a melodica over the accordion stop on his Lowrey organ. He also blows some trumpet at the end of the song.

  Richard and Robbie collaborated on “When You Awake” and “Jawbone.” “I’m a thief, and I dig it,” Richard sings. (We recorded the chorus in my bathroom.) Richard sang “Rockin’ Chair,” “Look Out Cleveland,” and “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Rick Danko sang “Unfaithful Servant” with those blowsy Band horns. We spent a lot of time on “King Harvest,” another song from the previous autumn in Woodstock that summed up what we were about. Some of the lyrics came out of a discussion we had one night about the times we’d seen and all had in common. It was an expression of feeling that came from five people. The group wanted to do one song that took in everything we could muster about life at that moment in time. It was the last thing we cut in California, and it was that magical feeling of “King Harvest” that pulled us through. It was like, there, that’s The Band.

  It was a complicated record. We wanted to make one that you didn’t really get until the second time you played it. Some of the songs, like “Rockin’ Chair,” sound like folks playing accordion and mandolin on the back porch of some farm. Others—“Look Out Cleveland” and the back end of “King Harvest”—are more rock and roll. Old people talk in the songs, like Ragtime Willie, the grandpa in “When You Awake.” There was nothing normal about it. The title we had for the record was Harvest, because we were reaping this music from seeds that had been planted many years before we’d even been born. But we could have called it America as well, because this music was right out of the air. We were saying, Listen! You can’t ignore this.

  At the same time, John Simon was reminding us, “You aren’t finished yet.” We had nine good ones, but an album was at least twelve, so we’d have to finish the album in New York. This was no big problem, as we had some pieces of good tunes we’d been working on, like “Whispering Pines” and “Up on Cripple Creek.”

  But before we could tend to that, we were obliged to move the whole show to San Francisco, where Bill Graham had scheduled three nights of performances. At twenty thousand dollars for the weekend, they were the first paid concerts we’d given in three or four years, and would mark the public concert debut of The Band. We were scared shitless.

  Originally the idea was not to tour, just be a recording band. I mean, we’d already been everywhere, so the idea of touring didn’t have much attraction for us. But Bill Graham, master of the Fillmores West and East, had been bothering Albert about us playing for him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Bill believed in pushing you right onstage. Albert couldn’t tell Bill that Rick had broken his neck, so he just said to go to Woodstock and talk to the band. Bill came up, talked to Robbie, and scheduled three nights in San Francisco and a weekend in New York a few weeks later.

  Ralph J. Gleason announced this in his San Francisco Chronicle column in February 1969: “The Band from Big Pink will make its first appearance in public at Winterland in a three-night stand April 17, 18 and 19. An appearance on May 9 and 10 has also been set for Fillmore East [in New York] as well. The Band from Big Pink has been in Hollywood recording for Capitol for the past two weeks. Their first album has been one of the most impressive underground hits of the past year and an album of immense impact within the field of pop music.” It was our good fortune that Ralph J., at fifty-two the most influential music journalist of the day, liked what we were doing and sort of took us under his wing.

  We had rehearsed for this toward the end of our time in Los Angeles. We worked on “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” from the basement tapes, plus “Little Birds,” which my daddy had taught me, and Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It,” among others. But we were still scared, and I recall an incredible amount of tension in the air. I was nervous and worried about playing in public again, and it would be fair to say we were all beside ourselves with concern about bringing out this music for the first time before an audience. And not just any audience: This was San Francisco! This was opening right at the top; no out-of-town preview or club date. It was Bill Graham Presents ...

  Plus Robbie’s wife was about to have her second daughter. The California papers were full of predictions that an earthquake—the Big One—was going to happen the weekend we were due in San Francisco. Just our luck.

  We pulled into San Francisco, looking about half past dead, on Tuesday, April 15. Robbie hadn’t eaten in two days and was airsick on the plane, but whatever was wrong wasn’t cured when we landed. By the time we checked into the Seal Rock Motel, he was running a fever of maybe 103 degrees.

  When Robbie felt even worse the next day, Bill Graham wanted to cancel the Thursday opening night and play on Sunday instead, but Albert said no. He and Bill got into it a little, two gonzo personalities on a collision course. “We can’t cancel,” Albert said, “we’re on a schedule, we got babies coming any minute, we got plane reservations, and we’ll play Thursday night. I’ll guarantee it.”

  John Simon: “I was on this trip to supervise the music and sound. Once again I called my neurosurgeon buddy, who came over and gave Robbie a complete physical. He had a fever and chills, stomach flu, nothing really wrong. Phil suggested a hypnotist to get Robbie through what he diagnosed as nervous exhaustion, and I think Bill Graham’s people found one.”

  Ralph J. Gleason in that morning’s Chronicle: “The debut of The Band from Big Pink tomorrow night at Winterland is an event of considerable importance, perhaps more so than even the fans of the group expect.”

  We had a rehearsal and soundcheck without Robbie that night. While I’m restringing my new mandolin, I hear John Simon, up in the balcony, call to Richard, “If you play that figure, play it with the sticks because we can’t hear the brushes up here.” We had a discussion with the light-show people about what they wanted to project behind us. Hold the psychedelia, we told them. We felt that there were enough pictures in the music anyway and didn’t like the idea of competing with a light show. We didn’t bother rehearsing much without Robbie, and all I could hear was my bass drum hammering off the concrete walls. We spent hours setting up stage monitors so we could hear ourselves before giving up and repairing to a Japanese place for some sushi.

  Thursday at the motel, Robbie’s lying in bed, semicomatose. We’re all in the room. The tall, silver-haired hypnotist, Pierre Clement, is rubbing Robbie’s forehead, photographer Elliott Landy is clicking away, Albert and Bill Graham are pacing around, trying to figure out what to do. The hypnotist’s diagnosis is acute stage fright. In the end they decided the show must go on.

  Cut to Winterland that night. The Ace of Cups, an all-girl band who’d recently won the Fillmore West’s weekly audition, stretched out their set, as did the Sons of Champlin, a veteran Bay Area band who’d just released a double album on Capitol.

  Then: nothing for an hour and a half. Five thousand people waited. It was a sellout. They’d driven up from Big Sur and flown in from Montana, Oregon, Washington. Backstage was jammed with press, girls, rounders, poets. The New York Times was there, Time, Look, Rolling Stone. Robbie was sick as a dog. Bill wanted to cancel, but Albert again refused to play Sunday night. It was like King Kong versus Godzilla. The rest of us were really down. Finally, at eleven Bill Graham went out front and apologized for the delay, explaining that one of us was sick. Someone yelled, “Fuuuuck yew!” from the balcony, and five thousand people cheered. So they played Grateful Dead records over the sound system for
another ninety minutes until we went onstage at twelve-thirty with this hypnotist sitting in a chair near Robbie, trying to make him forget his problems. While we tuned up in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes, the people were cheering, and we could hear the girls yelling, “Hey Band! We loooove youuuuu!” I looked at Garth to see if he was smiling, and he was.

  Next, I could hear Bill Graham talking to the crowd, which was ready to explode. He said something about the historic event that was taking place there that night. Then Bill paused and said, “Ladies and gentlemen... The Band.”

  The roar was almost overwhelming. As we started to play, raggedly, the hypnotist began waving his hands at Robbie, which seemed to have some effect, although it sure looked weird. He had on a blue suit, white shirt, and tie. The day before, he’d waved his hands at Robbie and brought down his fever five degrees in an hour. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there myself.

  Robertson leaned against the piano and looked about to collapse. We were ready to catch him if he did. We played seven numbers for thirty-five minutes and followed Robbie when he walked off, unable to continue. As we were sadly waving good-bye, a young blond girl stood up in front of the stage and yelled, “Play the other side!” The vibes in the hall were bad. “Assholes!” “Shitheads!” Some stuff I wouldn’t even print. People who’d come hundreds of miles felt ripped off. They booed and whistled and clapped, but the show was really over, and the audience was bummed as they filed out into the cold San Francisco night.