This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  I’ll bet they didn’t feel as bad as we did.

  Robbie, Levon, and Rick onstage at the Woodstock Festival, August 1969 (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  The Band in the rain on John Joy Road in Woodstock, summer 1969. This was the group’s first choice for the cover of The Band; the record company preferred a shot with Levon facing the camera. (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  “Hudson on Hudson” or “The Band on the Hudson.” The Band lounging around Rick Danko’s old Hudson on Zena Road, summer 1969. (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Rick Danko and Hamlet, 1969. Note Levon’s old wooden drum kit after the King Harvest scene had been painted on the bass drum. (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Levon and Rick, summer 1969 (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  “The New Sound of Country Rock,” Time magazine (January 12, 1970) (COVER PAINTING BY BOB PEAK, REPRODUCED COURTESY TIME INC.)

  Levon backstage at the Fillmore East, 1970 (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Richard’s birthday party, New York, 1970 (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Levon, 1970 (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Richard A vedon poses a “sleeping” Band for the back cover of Cahoots, 1971. (COURTESY CAPITOL RECORDS)

  Levon’s house and studio in Woodstock (COURTESY MCA RECORDS)

  Henry Glover (top) and Muddy Waters during the recording of Muddy Waters’s The Woodstock Album, February 1975 (TURKEY SCRATCH ARCHIVES)

  The Band at Shangri-La Studio, Malibu, California, 1975, during the recording of Northern Lights, Southern Cross. From left: Garth, Levon, Richard, Robbie, and Rick. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  The Band on MGM’s soundstage during postproduction work on The Last Waltz, 1977. This was the last time the five original musicians played on the same stage. From left: Richard, Rick, Robbie, Garth, and Levon. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  Levon as Ted Webb in Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1980 (UNIVERSAL PICTURES)

  Levon with the Cate Brothers, 1981. Earl Cate plays guitar at left. Levon plays harmonica at right. Levon’s nephew Terry Cagle is on drums. (PHOTO BY DAVID NANCE)

  Sandy and Levon, 1981 (PHOTO BY DAVID NANCE)

  Bob Dylan joins Levon, Rick, and harmonica player Shredni Volper onstage in New York, 1983. (ELLIOTT LANDY)

  Levon Helm as Major Ridley in The Right Stuff, 1983 (THE LADD COMPANY)

  The Band re-formed in the mid-1980s without Robbie Robertson. From left: Levon, Rick, Richard, and Garth. (TURKEY SCRATCH ARCHIVES)

  Levon rehearsing for a movie role in his backyard, 1984. (TURKEY SCRATCH ARCHIVES)

  Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, and Levon at the dedication of the Historic Helena Depot, 1990 (PHOTO BY GENE TAYLOR. COURTESY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ARKANSAS HERITAGE.)

  The Band in its 1990s lineup. Clockwise from top left: Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Bell, Jim Weider, and Randy Ciarlante. (COURTESY OF THE BAND)

  * * *

  Things were much better the next night, Friday, with two shows scheduled. Robbie was better, and when the audience saw us, it was in our classic Band configuration. My drums were on a riser, stage right, next to Garth’s organ, also on a riser in the middle of the stage. Richard’s grand piano was stage left. These were sight lines we’d worked out years before so we could see one another’s eyes to know where the music was going. Robbie stood between me and Garth; Rick, between Richard and Garth. It was right and tight.

  All that day, bad word of mouth ran around the Bay Area, so the Friday shows didn’t sell out. Backstage was empty except for guards keeping the few visitors out of our dressing rooms. When we went on after Ace of Cups, they gave us an ovation, and we all felt better. Robbie had recovered; he was playing guitar and walking around. Garth built some major tension in the room with his long organ intro to “Chest Fever,” and the audience burst into a loud cheer when the dazzling improvisation merged into the chords of the song itself. It was only then that we felt we could make this work. Richard was singing well, and we played a lot of Big Pink, as well as some other things: “Ain’t No More Cane,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” “Little Birds.” People actually clapped when Richard and I changed seats at the drums so I could play the mandolin. We did “Slippin’ and Slidin’” for the encore after five minutes of very loud encouragement from the audience. From the best seat in the house, I could see the people dancing and leaping around as we took it fast. Everybody had a smile on their face.

  It was the first time in four years we hadn’t been booed when we played.

  It also marked the first time we worked with Bill Graham, a relationship that lasted for many years. He made things as comfortable as possible for musicians. Working with him was always a very special deal and a cut above anything else. Bill was the one who had it figured out.

  Ralph J. in the next day’s Chronicle: “The first thing that flashed into my mind was, ‘this is Levon’s band!’ I had never thought of that. But there he was, bushy beard, swinging shoulders and his Mephistophelian visage pushed up to the mike on one side of him as he drummed. ‘He’s got a great voice!’ I thought next, and then Rick Danko took over the lead, and I thought, ‘There’s another one!’

  “I don’t know why, but even the impact of the album had not really sunk into me the real feeling of admiration I got when I saw them do it. They were together, like a team, like a family, like a band.... Somehow four Canadians and an Arkansas country boy found it in themselves to express part of where all of us are at now while expressing themselves in language that can ignite explosive trains of thought inside your head. Out of all the idle scheming, they gave us something to feel.”

  A couple of weeks later we played four sold-out shows at the Fillmore East on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys opened, and the audience was with us from the minute we stepped onto the stage in what was described in the press as “suits and ties.” These were actually dark western-cut clothes, string ties, and black boots, plus assorted hats from Richard’s collection. We tuned in the dark for a moment—the light show had been given the night off—the lights came on, and the New York audience began to scream. Standing ovation. Looming over the Lowrey organ, Garth looked like a biblical prophet in his untrimmed black beard. We were very tightly rehearsed, because we wanted the performances to sound like the records. We stayed close to those arrangements and didn’t stretch it out. We did music from Big Pink—“Tears of Rage,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Caledonia Mission”—and we couldn’t believe the wild response. We mixed these up with “Get Up Jake” (from the California sessions), the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” (Richard sang great on a nod to our Motown fandom), and “Little Birds.”

  “Levon’s dad taught us this one,” Robbie announced. “We hope you like country music here in New York.” Wild, stomping applause.

  Garth got another ovation when he emerged, shoeless, from behind the organ with his accordion for “Rockin’ Chair.” We watched from the wings as the crowd sat raptly through the show’s only solo, Garth’s intro to “Chest Fever.” When the rest of us ambled onstage I looked out and saw people on their feet, then on their chairs when Garth hit the first familiar notes. The encore, “Slippin’ and Slidin,’” was pandemonium. I thought to myself, Well, if that’s the way it’s gonna be...

  My other recollection of that weekend is from Saturday night. I’d moved from the drums to the mandolin for “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” and I touched my lip against the live microphone and saw a flash.

  I’d been shocked. It nearly blinded me. I went through the song, tears filling my eyes, my whole face on fire. Our equipment was new, remember, and probably hadn’t been grounded properly.

  In the dressing room after the show, I’m holding some ice to my lip and listening to Richard give the girl from The Boston Globe an interview.

  “How didja start out in music?” she asks, notebook ready.

  “Well, let’s see: I started at nine and quit. Then got back to it when I was twelve. Then I became a party star. In fact, I became a party!”

  All those old houses we li
ved in in Woodstock had a lot of character. Artists have lived in all of them: painters, sculptors, the Woodstock School. Richard and Jane Manuel lived in painter George Bellows’s old house on Bellows Lane, where he painted some of his famous prizefight pictures. The house came with an old piano that had one key really out of tune; Richard used to work out his music on it. So when we were in California, he spent days retuning the studio piano so “Whispering Pines” would sound the way he wanted it. When we went back into the studio to finish our album a bit later that spring of 1969, “Whispering Pines” was one of the songs we took into the Hit Factory, Jerry Ragavoy’s studio in New York.

  We also cut “Jemima Surrender” there, which I wrote with Robertson. That was another of those songs about wanting the love of a lady of color; Aunt Jemima was as close as we could get for a name. We switched instruments: Richard was on drums, I played guitar, and I think Rick played a six-string bass. (We made sure to tweak Ronnie Hawkins in the lyrics.) We also recorded “Get Up Jake,” about a sleepy ferryman on the Mississippi. (“I loved ‘Get Up Jake,’ John Simon says, “but it didn’t make it on the album because we had enough.”) And of course there was “Up on Cripple Creek,” which became the song by which we were best known.

  It took a long time for that song to come around. It’s an example of the way we raised some songs: slowly, bit by bit, putting things together gradually. We cut “Cripple Creek” two or three times in California, but nobody really liked it. Finally, late one night in New York, we got hold of it, cut it once, then turned around and doubled a couple of chorus parts with harmonies. That was it; time for the next one. Garth found that Jew’s harp sound by running his clavinet through a wahwah pedal. Little Bessie is an echo of Rick’s song “Bessie Smith” from the basement tapes. People always wanted to know who she was, and I’d tell ’em she was Caledonia’s cousin.

  As of the spring of 1969 we still had never given an interview or done any publicity. We were known by some photographs we’d posed for up in the country, and that was it. Around that time Life magazine did an article about us that really played up that image: rustic hermits crafting American roots music up in the mountains.

  That became our image, and we didn’t fight it. We were hermits after a fashion. We spent that whole year recording and playing a few shows, and then it was back to the hills and lie low. That was what we wanted to do, not go back on the road.

  As you’ve heard, heroin came into the scene around then. We got into it because it was there, and it was free. People were always wanting to do us favors, turn us on, and some of the people we liked to hang around with were doing it, so it came our way—no charge.

  I’d feel hypocritical about soft-peddling this, because it was part of the scene and part of the era. It was fun when it started, and then it became a problem, like it often does. I think it was another Woodstock resident, the jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who once said that if God made anything better than heroin, He kept it for Himself.

  I stayed with it until I got sick of it a few years later, and went home and cleaned up.

  While we were finishing The Band at the Hit Factory, Libby Titus came into my life.

  “By April 1969,” she recalls, “I was doing OK. New York was enjoying beautiful spring weather, my son and I had a lovely apartment on Gramercy Park, Albert and Sally Grossman were living right across the square, Todd Rundgren was teaching me to sing and was going to produce my record for Albert’s new Bearsville company. I was seeing Emmett Grogan, the poet who had founded the Diggers in San Francisco. I looked good and felt I was on my way to something.

  “I heard The Band was at the Hit Factory, and I went over to say hello. Locked eyes with Levon—major flirtation. He made a date with me for that night and didn’t keep it. Never showed up. I really didn’t care and went to sleep. Five-thirty in the morning, phone rings:

  “‘Libby? I wanted to call so I didn’t ruin your night completely... And I was kinda wondering... Can I come over now?’

  “Half hour later my doorbell rang, and this cowboy walks in. Very handsome, very charming, and he looks around—Persian carpets, velvet sofas, yellow tulips, pale lights—and says, ‘Libby, I didn’t know you were rich.’

  “I said, ‘I’m not rich. My husband is, and I inherited all this.’ Levon looked at me and said, ‘Yes you are.’

  “I fell in love with Levon that morning: April 28. And he fell for me, I know it. Something major happened to both of us.

  “I didn’t hear from him for ten days after that. Then the phone rang.

  “‘Libby?’

  “I said, ‘Yes?’

  “‘I just wanted you to know that I haven’t looked at another girl for ten days—and for me that’s real unusual.’

  “I just held the line. He said, ‘Have you looked at anyone else?’

  “‘No, Levon. I haven’t wanted to. When are you coming back?’

  “‘Soon,’ he said. But he didn’t really. Because The Band had no room for girls and never had. They were all busy living up to the story of The Band and the whole Dylan myth, which was an attitude that said, Don’t get uptight, be cool, don’t reveal anything. He couldn’t bring me to Woodstock because that would be saying too much to me and to the others. So he’d call me at three A.M., and we’d be together. That was the only time I ever saw him.

  “Finally, while they were at the Hit Factory, I wanted to break this cycle—and I couldn’t stay away anyway—so I dressed up and went to the studio. Levon was there, but their road manager started coming on to me. Suddenly Levon steps between me and this roadie. He says, ‘Libby, I’m going to Arkansas tomorrow morning to see my parents. You wanna come?’

  “And I go, ‘Yes!’

  “Levon was wonderful with me: soft, ultraconsiderate, a gentleman in every way. Next morning we flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Levon’s brother, Wheeler, met us and took us to Springdale, where his parents lived. I knew I was dressed all wrong as soon as I walked into the house, because Levon’s family looked at my curls and minidress with total horror. But I made friends with his mother, who was just great: sweet, kind, higher in mind and spirit. Nell just took me in and did everything she could to make sure I felt at home. It really meant a lot to me.”

  Summer of ’69. No interviews, no publicity, really, and we’re still a mystery. Plans to play a bunch of the big pop festivals in the summer. They told us about a big festival set for Woodstock, in which Bob Dylan was supposed to headline. It was going to be an Age of Aquarius type of thing, a gathering of people who felt the same way about the Vietnam War and a lot of the changes taking place in the country. We were totally apolitical, but since it was going to be right down the road, we said we’d do it. Then Bob pulled out because he was already disgusted that our adopted town was becoming a mecca for people seeking... Bob Dylan. Then Woodstock itself pulled out, citing sanitation and crowd problems in anticipation of a hundred thousand hippies grooving on Tinker Street. We might have pulled out too, but the deal was done, and we promised to show up if the concert went ahead later in August.

  That’s how we got to be the headliners at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

  First, on June 22 we played the Toronto Pop Festival with Chuck Berry, Procol Harum, Steppenwolf, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. We were looking forward to playing Toronto, but our set was a disaster, with horrendous sound problems. Those amps crackled like machine guns. The Toronto press called us “aloof” because we didn’t jump around like the Hawks and stuck to our disciplined presentation of our music. They also described us as “too country.” We played “Up on Cripple Creek” for the first time in public at that show.

  In the meantime, British promoters had offered Bob a lot of money to appear at a festival on the Isle of Wight a couple of weeks after the Woodstock event. He accepted and asked us to play with him. We said OK because it gave us a chance to renew our friendship with Bob and see some of our English friends. We had a sort of live rehearsal with Bob on July 14 at the Mississippi River Rock
Festival in Edwardsville, Missouri. We played our usual set for about three thousand people and then left the stage. But instead of the encore, Bob came back out with us, unannounced, in brown shirt, pants, and boots. His hair was cut short, and no one recognized him.

  A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since we’d played with him at Carnegie Hall eighteen months earlier. He’d released his country album, Nashville Skyline, and appeared as a guest on Johnny Cash’s TV show. His voice and style had changed, and not all his fans applauded his new maturity. But we were happy to rehearse with him, since he hadn’t played outdoors since that Hollywood Bowl show back in the autumn of ’65. So we played new, easy-rolling versions of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “She Belongs to Me” and did a couple of old things like “In the Pines.” When we finally came back to do “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” Bob Dylan sang on the chorus, waved merrily, and split. “See ya next month,” he said to me.

  Everybody knows what happened at the Woodstock Festival. How none of the towns in the country wanted the thing in its jurisdiction, how it was hounded out of Ulster County and over into Sullivan, where a Bethel dairy farmer named Max Yasgur let it roll on his hillside cow pasture. Four hundred thousand people showed up without tickets, so they declared it free and open. And it rained, turning the site into a mudbath. We knew that Jimi Hendrix was there, Sly Stone, Janis, the Dead. Paul Butterfield came back to Woodstock after playing the first day and told us that half a million naked hippies were waiting in the mud for us to play. We heard that people were dying out there (three did), as well as being born (two were).