This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  It was funny. You kind of felt you were going to a war. I think we drove down to Stewart Airport, and they helicoptered us into the landing zone and then took us into motor homes to wait for the show. I remember walking around and checking out the thirty-foot stage, elevators in back, immense scaffolding, and an army of muddy people out on the hillside. They were set back about half an acre from the stage. It was the final day of the festival, and they’d run out of fresh food and water. There weren’t any dressing rooms because they’d been turned into emergency clinics. There was lots of acid around—they were making announcements about it from the stage—and the audience was immensely under the influence of anything you could think of. This was Sunday, and some of them had been out there four nights already. The crowd was real tired and a little unhealthy. We just sat backstage and did our usual thing: go in, shake hands, eat, play the show, and split. We never hung around.

  It rained pretty hard after we got there; a hard Catskill summer storm. So they stopped the show and then started it back up. I think we went on between Ten Years After and Johnny Winter: “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Chip Monck, the voice of Woodstock, “please welcome with us... The Band.”

  Inhuman roar from the dark hillside. We looked at one another in disbelief. Garth was shaking his head.

  He started playing, and so did I. I played my cymbal, and he hit the bend pedal on that Lowrey organ, and we had a little duet until he slid into “Chest Fever.” We were off. We played what was, for us, a real slow set: “Chest Fever,” “Tears of Rage,” “We Can Talk,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” “Don’t Do It,” “Ain’t No More Cane,” “Long Black Veil,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “I Shall Be Released,” and “The Weight.” The encore was “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever,” which Rick sang for half a million soggy folks holding up lighters and matches.

  Then we got the hell out of there, believe me. We took off from backstage in a rented station wagon, pulled through the mud by a bulldozer with a short chain. It took off with us, got us through a field, over a couple of ditches, and then finally onto some hard road. It took us a couple of hours to get the fifty miles back to Woodstock.

  By the way, The Band doesn’t appear in Woodstock, the documentary movie, or on the album either. This is because we were offered half our fee for the movie rights to our performance, and Albert naturally said no. They did film us, in low light because we told them not to mess with us onstage. Our set was recorded, and someone at Atlantic Records told us later that our tapes came out better than anyone’s. They really wanted to put them out. We felt we didn’t play a bad set, but it wasn’t totally up to our standard since Robbie’s microphone had been inadvertently left on, and he wasn’t much as a singer.

  Ten days later we flew to England to play the Isle of Wight Festival with Bob. Libby came with me. We rehearsed a number of tunes with Bob and were prepared to play a dozen or so songs with him if things worked out. I remember taking the ferry across the English Channel to the big island off the southern coast of England on a summer afternoon. Two hundred thousand people had been waiting three days to see us, sleeping in an improvised shanty town called Desolation Row. The flower of English rock aristocracy was there to witness Bob’s first paid show in more than three years. He was making eighty thousand dollars cash, according to the quarter million words about Bob in that morning’s papers. Peter Fonda’s movie Easy Rider had just opened over there; we’d turned down the chance to do the music, but “The Weight” had been used to cushion a crucial scene in the film and so gave our whole neofrontiersmen image a big boost. (Albert wouldn’t even license the song to go on Easy Rider’s sound-track album.)

  Bob was supposed to go on at 8:00 P.M., but someone decided the press enclosure in front of the stage had to be cleared out, so the show was stopped. The crowd got angry and started to throw things at the journalists; beer bottles, fruit, and clods of earth came flying toward the stage. At ten-thirty we went on by ourselves and played for forty-five minutes, took a ten-minute break, and then Bob ambled out—short hair, white suit—and played for an hour, with maybe a fifteen-minute encore. We were all tired and jet-lagged and never got around to most of what we’d rehearsed, but the show was fun. Three Beatles and three Stones stood at Bob’s feet in the press enclosure, and the audience got into it. We mixed up songs from Nashville Skyline with new arrangements of older things. Garth’s windswept organ dominated “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” and turned “Like a Rolling Stone” into a gospel song. Bob did a few songs by himself, and we finished with “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo),” “Minstrel Boy,” and “Rainy Day Women.” I can still hear that big audience shouting, “Everybody must get stoned!”

  Our new album, The Band, was shipped a few weeks after that, in September 1969, eventually reaching No. 9 on the charts. Capitol released “Up on Cripple Creek” as a single, and this got to No. 25 late in the year—our only Top Thirty single.

  For the rest of the year, the press treated us like gods:

  “The Band is a masterful record,” declared The New York Times. “Like a perfectly cut gem, every time you turn it, it shows you something new.”

  “This is an album to which you rapidly become addicted,” Ralph J. Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “They use voices unlike any other contemporary group. The lead singer is either echoed by another singer or joined by one or more voices in a repeated verse or phrase throughout their songs. At times the lead voice and the other voices interweave in a way that sets up a rhythmic pattern. Since The Band’s rhythm section itself conducts a continual duet between the drums and the bass, a complicated (though superficially simple) pulse is set up.”

  Just so. I think Ralph J. came close to our secret in that review.

  “... so overwhelmingly good, so perfect together, so obviously one of the most important groups on the scene today.”—Chicago Tribune.

  “... consummate virtuosity, an amazing spread of musical styles.”—Newsweek.

  “... musical depth and substance beyond anything in rock except some of the Beatles’ best work.”—Village Voice.

  “...the closest thing to a perfect rock group we have.”—Vogue.

  “The Band is Life.”—Tampa Times.

  “... quiet, gentle, bittersweet strains, rivaled in musical inventiveness and sophistication only by the Beatles.”—Toronto Globe and Mail.

  For me personally, though, the killer was published in Rolling Stone: “Levon Helm is the only drummer that can make you cry.” (Today, when I hear Jim Keltner or Steve Jordan play the drums, I’m the one who’s doing the crying.)

  Despite these accolades, it proved impossible for us to completely escape our sordid past, especially after Rolling Stone published an interview with Ronnie Hawkins around that time. The Hawk had successfully remained in the bars of the Arkansas-Ontario circuit with a succession of good bands. By now he was the grand old man of Canadian rock and roll and lived in a mansion—“Mortgage Manor”—outside Toronto and drove a white Rolls. (When John Lennon and new wife Yoko Ono came to town with Eric Clapton to play a rock and roll revival at a nearby stadium that fall, they moved in with Ronnie and his family while they ran their antiwar campaign. “John was so henpecked,” the Hawk told me, “he couldn’t take a shit without Yoko saying it was OK.”) Now Ronnie was getting rediscovered in the wake of our success, and he had a new album of his own out on Atlantic to promote. Remembering our wild youth together, he took a highly confabulated stroll down memory lane for Toronto reporter Ritchie Yorke in Rolling Stone: “We had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend. In all the time I been on the road, I must have laid a million girls, a few boys, and an odd goat. The goats were all right too, only you had to go around to the other end to kiss ’em.

  “We had so many gang bangs and freaky orgies that I lost count. In every town, there was a dozen. Levon was always the best fucker. I remember this place in Arkansas—West Helena, it was called—there was this colored hooker we called Odessa
; wrote a song about her, too. Levon and I would give her two bucks for the night. Levon’d go first, and then I’d go in, and Odessa would say, ‘Mr. Ronnie, you can go ahead, but I think Mr. Levon has gone and taken it all.

  “‘That Mr. Levon has a strip of meat on him like a horse,’ she would say. Yes sir, Levon was well hung. He was a big boy, that one. Never knew when to stop, either. He had more meat than the Toronto abattoirs. Odessa was a good gal, and she could cook up a storm.

  “... Anyway, we named Richard ‘The Gobbler.’ He’s a home wrecker, man, the working girl’s favorite and the housewives’ companion, or whatever that dumb saying is. If you’re hip, you’ll understand why we called him that.”

  Albert Grossman hit the ceiling when this was published, and we weren’t all that thrilled either. The Hawk’s vivid account of whoring and pill-popping wasn’t what we were about anymore, even though it was pretty funny. Albert called the magazine and threatened a million-dollar lawsuit. A few weeks later the Hawk told Rolling Stone: “I called Rick [Danko], and he was sure hot about the article. He said all kinds of things about how bad it was for them, how Albert was upset, and how I shouldn’t do that to them. Hell, man, if someone said I had the biggest dick in America, I’d be happier than a dog on meat!

  “It’s fun remembering old times. I only talked about Levon because I know Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson are married now, and it might upset their wives to recall the wild times we had together.

  “Rick told me not to mention their names about anything again. They must want to get a Billy Graham image or something, though that will be pretty hard, I figure.

  “I thought the only thing they could complain about was my exaggerating the length of Levon’s peter... but mind you, I didn’t exaggerate too much.”

  * * *

  Autumn 1969. “Up on Cripple Creek” got played on the radio, and suddenly we had a hit record. That’s when we got the call from Ed Sullivan to do his Sunday-evening variety show. We’d already walked out on Glen Campbell’s show because they told us we’d have to sit on barrels in the back of a pickup truck and lip-synch, but we said yes to Ed because he let you play it live.

  It was a big day in our lives. I couldn’t sleep for two, three nights before we played. Then we got there and rehearsed, and of course there were no voice monitors, so we couldn’t hear ourselves. This scared us even more.

  We were on with Buck Owens, Pearl Bailey, and Rodney Dangerfield. We set up in a T formation around Garth; the guitar and bass were going through the same amp, so they were about as loud as an acoustic guitar. We were bouncing off one another, but we pulled it off, even though we couldn’t hear anything.

  The whole country watched it.

  We finished the number and started to walk offstage. But wait a minute: Ed Sullivan was calling us back to shake hands! “Come on out here, boys,” he said, and lined us up like he did the Beatles five years earlier. “I wanna introduce you. This one here is Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko’s over here, Richard Manuel and—what is that? Leh-von or La-von?”

  “Lee-von,” Richard told him.

  “Levon Helm. Originally came from upstate New York, but cold weather drove them to San Francisco, where they made their first major public appearance. Let’s have a wonderful hand, and I want to tell them how delighted we are to have them on our show.”

  Back in Woodstock, one of the cops snapped a picture of Richard shaking hands with Ed Sullivan, and gave the snapshot to Richard, who carried it in his wallet for the rest of his life. “Best ID you could have,” he told me. I know he showed it to every cop who stopped him for speeding, dozens of times. Richard always swore that sometimes the picture got him off with a warning.

  We spent much of the rest of 1969 on the road, during a time of great upheaval in our lives. Band babies were on the way and being born: Paula Manuel came along around then. We were all drinking and doping a little more than our share, and dear old Woodstock itself was becoming overcrowded in the wake of that summer’s blowout. That’s when Bob Dylan cut and ran, moving his own large family back to the city, specifically to one of the busiest intersections in Greenwich Village.

  We played all over America to great reviews and further acclaim. The Band earned a gold record for sales of half a million units, and it was obvious that a lot of people who thought Music From Big Pink too weird liked The Band just fine. In Boston, where we’d been so reviled when we were with Bob, we sold out Symphony Hall and had ’em hanging from the balconies. We got ovations when we changed instruments between songs. We had a rabid audience for our shows at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago; they rushed the stage when we hit the encore, “Don’t Do It,” like an old-fashioned rockabilly show. The Buffalo Evening News, reviewing our sold-out nights at Kleinhan’s Music Hall, described Garth as “a bearded, broad-browed Thor in the back, forging back-up riffs and hammering out organ solos.”

  The shows took enormous concentration to make it sound like we wanted it to, like on the record, and I felt under a lot of pressure in those days. I was definitely burning with a short fuse. An example: We had this road manager, Jonathan Taplin. He was OK, but you wouldn’t want to send him for the ammunition. Early in this process he came to my motel room and started to exercise his authority to get me out of bed. But I was on him like a mad dog as soon as I heard his tone of voice, which conveyed something less than the respect that I expected from the employees. I picked him up until his legs were off the ground and kicking, walked him backward, and heard myself saying, “Jon, I’m gonna bite your damn nose off. I’ll kill you if you ever talk to me like that again. Do you understand me?”

  Of course, I didn’t mean anything by it, but I noticed he steered clear of me after that.

  My favorite moment was when Capitol sent us to Paris to play one night at the Place des Arts on November 16 as a showcase, since The Band had just come out in Europe. We checked into the George V Hotel, and I called up room service and just ate and drank as long as I could. No Arkansas boy ever enjoyed himself in that town as much as me.

  Meanwhile, Robbie went up to Montreal to produce an album by a young Tennesseean who’d fled the Vietnam draft and taken up residence in Canada. His name was Jesse Winchester, and I played some mandolin on his album too.

  The year ended for us with two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum auditorium, two days after Christmas. We played for twenty thousand people. I loved those shows, because, despite the packed houses and all the anticipation, we still played together like a bunch of friendly neighbors having fun in the back of some hillbilly general store.

  The year’s last show was in Hollywood, Florida, on December 29. Then I took Libby to New Orleans, where we checked into a fine hotel and spent New Year’s Eve—our first vacation together. Unhappily Mississippi beat Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl, 27-22. From there we rented a Cadillac and drove up to Phillips County, Arkansas, so I could show Libby where I came from. Grandpaw Wheeler Wilson and Grandmaw Agnes made us feel welcome, and I had fun showing Libby the sights and sounds of Marvell, Elaine, West Helena, and the Mississippi River, places I’d left more than ten years before to seek fame and fortune.

  The following week The Band was on the cover of Time magazine.

  Chapter Eight

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  I was almost thirty years old when The Band made the cover of Time on January 12, 1970. We’d known they were doing a story on us, because the reporter had been hanging out for a while. “You get out of school in May,” I’d told him about growing up on a cotton farm, “and that’s when you’ve already started planting cotton. You work right through until September, and the only break in there is the Fourth of July. I found out at about the age of twelve that the way to get off that stinking tractor, out of that 105-degree heat, was to get on that guitar.”

  We were astounded by the cover: an explosion of color, with caricatures depicting the five of us as bearded and mustachioed mountain men. “The New Sound of Country Rock
,” was the headline. “For years, practicing together for as much as ten hours a day, they played one-night stands in grubby towns all over the South and Canada. Later they played invisibly behind Bob Dylan at the peak of his fame.... The Band has now emerged as the one group whose sheer fascination and musical skill may match the excellence of the Beatles.”

  The writer had talked to each of us. “We got healthy when we came to Woodstock,” Rick told him. “To us, getting healthy was getting up in the morning instead of going to bed in the morning.”

  And Richard Manuel was quoted as saying: “Well, we were shooting films up here [Woodstock], and then we were shooting vodka, and first thing you know, we took to shooting fresh air. What a habit!”

  A dark hint of the shape we were in.

  We musicians couldn’t have cared less about it, but my family and friends back home really liked us being on the cover of Time. The Helena World headlined: “COUNTY NATIVE PICTURED ON TIME COVER, BUT YOU WON’T KNOW HIM.” “He is Lavon Helm, a native of the Marvell community, who started out at the age of nine in school talent contests.... Some old-time fair-goers will remember Lavon as the youngster who played the ‘bones’—a pair of spoons which he beat against his knees while Linda Helm strummed a one-stringed bass made from an inverted washtub.” The West Helena Tribune (“FORMER MARVELL BOY MAKES MUSICAL BIGTIME”) ran interviews with my dad and mom. “‘I think I’d faint if I ever got a letter from him,’ Mrs. Helm said. But she has cultivated the motherly habit of keeping in touch with his current girlfriends, who send her bits of news and clippings.”