This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  The same issue of Time reported that forty thousand American soldiers had been killed to date in Vietnam.

  Among ourselves, being on the cover of Time was never discussed. I don’t remember even hearing it mentioned. We were happy that it would make us a better draw, because we were about to go back on the road, but we were also trying to stay focused while recording our next album under trying circumstances.

  Stage Fright was when everything changed for us. It was an immense turning point, something that was obvious to anyone who bought and played the record.

  Rick Danko: “Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us. ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ was never really a hit, but it had been recorded by a few people, and all of a sudden I got a couple hundred thousand dollars out of left field! This was half the writer’s royalties from one song. We were all shocked at these windfalls we never dreamed existed. Dealing with this wasn’t in the fuckin’ manual, man!

  “If you’ve never made a million dollars overnight, like we did, you have no concept of what it can do. We saw it ruin people—kill them! Suddenly we had all the money we needed, and people were falling over themselves to make us happy, which meant giving us all the dope we could stand. People wanted to turn us on for free, do us favors, and some of us were happy to be taken care of like that. There wasn’t anything real dramatic about it, because it was a fact of life, and probably still is. I’m here to tell you that it’s a crying shame to see what success can do to some people. I’m sure it wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to the band.”

  Heroin was around Woodstock, around New York. It was everywhere. Being a musician, you couldn’t avoid it. People told me, “I can get you some of this.” It was more of a shared thing back then, but of course after you use a little of it, you start to want all you can get. Later I started to mainline heroin, and that experience would last a couple of years. Once I got into it, it took me a little while to get a handle on myself, and eventually I did.

  Robbie Robertson has referred to the Stage Fright era as “The Darkness,” by which he means this period of addiction and dissolution. But I remember that the drugs were just part of the black mood that settled upon us. There were also the issues of artistic control of The Band and the direction we were going in—if any.

  When The Band came out, we were surprised by some of the songwriting credits. In those days we didn’t realize that song publishing—more than touring or selling records—was the secret source of the real money in the music business. We’re talking long-term here. We didn’t know enough to ask for or demand song credits or anything like that. Back then, we’d get a copy of the album when it came out, and that’s when we learned who got credit for which songs. True story.

  The first one, Big Pink, went right by us. Some of the credits looked a little funny, but hell, I figured I’d just got back to town after being gone for a long time. Think of “Chest Fever.” Do you remember the words? Me neither. I remember Garth Hudson playing the organ. Now check the credits: “J. R. Robertson.”

  John Simon says, “In those days that was how it was done. If there was a group, one guy tended to write the songs and get credit for them. It kept things relatively simple that way.”

  But I looked at Richard Manuel as The Band’s singer and writer, and Rick had a couple, and I figured that after all the work we did in California and New York, the second album’s credits would spread out to include me and Garth; especially Garth, the soul and presiding genius of our band.

  So when the album came out, I discovered that I was credited with writing half of “Jemima Surrender,” and that was it. Richard was a cowriter on three songs. Rick and Garth went uncredited. Robbie Robertson was credited on all twelve songs.

  Somebody had pencil-whipped us. It was an old tactic: divide and conquer.

  After that, the level of the group’s collaboration declined, and our creative process was severely disrupted. There was confusion. It’s important to recognize Robertson’s role as a catalyst and writer, but I blame Albert Grossman for letting him or giving him or making him take too much credit for the band’s work.

  I even confronted Robbie over this issue during this era. Can’t you see what’s happening? I asked. It’s the same old divide and conquer syndrome that the management boys always pull on musicians. They took Elvis away from his band, Bill, Scotty, D.J.; same thing with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings. It’s the old trick: Isolate the “star” and fuck the other guys. And it’s always the worst thing that can happen to the music. Maybe it simplifies things for the company, but it interferes with our job, which is to make better records every time out. We shouldn’t care about how much more work a true partnership might be for the brownnosers in the front office.

  I went on to express my belief in creating music with input from everyone and reminded him that all the hot ideas, from basic song concepts to the mixing and sequencing of our record, were not always exclusively his. I complained that he and Albert had been making important business decisions without consulting the rest of us and that far too much cash was coming down in his and Albert’s corner. Our publishing split was far from fair, I told him, and had to be fixed. I told him that he and Albert ought to try to write some music without us, because they couldn’t possibly find the songs unless we all were searching together. I cautioned that most so-called business moves had fucked up a lot of great bands and killed off whatever music was left in them. I told Robbie that The Band was supposed to be partners. Since we were teenagers we’d banded against everything and anyone that got in our way. Nothing else—pride, friends, even money—mattered to the rest of us as much as the band did. Even our families had taken second place when the need arose.

  I said, “Robbie, a band has to stick together, protect each other, support and encourage each other, and grow the music the way a farmer grows his crops.”

  Robbie basically told me not to worry because the rumors were true: Albert was going to build a state-of-the-art recording studio in Bearsville and wanted us to be partners in it with him. So any imbalance in song royalties would work out a hundredfold within the grand scheme of things. We would always be a band of brothers, with our own place. No more nights in some company’s sterile studio. I was beginning to see it. Unlimited studio time. No more breaking down after sessions and losing the sound and all the time it took to sweeten the drum kit. Everything would be set and ready to roll. Garth could build a monster keyboard outfit and never have to move it. Rick would have all his bass amps in one spot. Richard’s piano would stay in perfect pitch without changes in temperature and humidity. The guitars would stay in tune. Everything would be set and ready to roll, and we could take a shot at making a record as good as Ray Charles did. We could cultivate and grow a song until we got it right. When we wanted a break, friends would rent the studio from us, and it would pay for itself. All we needed to do was to play music and follow our hearts.

  Well, it never quite worked out that way. We stayed in the divide and conquer mode, a process that no one ever seems able to stop, to this day. (Look at Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the latest example.)

  So that’s when that great sense of teamwork stopped. Who wanted to pour out their souls and not get credit? Richard stopped writing completely after a while, and I don’t think Garth got much credit at all until some of the final records.

  At the same time, of course, we had a long-term record contract that called for us to produce another eight albums. We were also making good money and enjoying our newfound fame to a certain extent. We liked being recognized as the best band in North America and maybe the world, so we soldiered on and continued to record and tour. Those were the conditions under which we cut Stage Fright. But I know that after that second album came out, The Last Waltz started to create itself.

  * * *

  When that first money started to flow, I went out and got myself a couple of those Martin guitars I’d wanted. Garth picked
out a black Mercedes-Benz diesel, Richard a Pontiac Grand Prix, Robbie a BMW, Rick an Audi. I’d always wanted a Corvette since the first ones came out in 1955. I was old enough to know better but dumb enough to go ahead and do it. So I bought the first of three Corvette Stingrays that I wore out between Arkansas and New York. I’d put ’em on the road, and they wouldn’t hold together for me. I’d go back, turn one in, and they’d give me another. I put a couple of ’em in the shop real bad. Then I hooked onto a little brown one with a small 350 engine in it. A beautiful car. By the time I tried to turn that one in (you couldn’t even hear the radio at seventy miles per hour), the relationship between me and General Motors was beginning to sour. But by then I was tired of ’em anyway.

  I also bought some land just east of the center of Woodstock. As usual, I was inspired by Garth, who’d bought a mountaintop overlooking Ashokan Reservoir in nearby Glenford and was starting to build his house. So I just followed suit. Garth gave me my first copy of Architectural Graphic Standards and helped me put the water in there. He came over one day with a green switch and walked it off north and south. Then he walked it east and west, and said, “Levon, you could try right here.”

  We brought this old local in to dig. He regarded water dowsing as blasphemous. He was perturbed, this guy. “If that’s what your man says, we’ll drill it anywhere you want to.” He went down to 150 feet … 160 … 170 and began to get that satisfied look on his face. Real satisfied, as if he was thinking how stupid these longhairs were for believing in that corny crap. When he got down to 214 feet we hit water: sixty gallons a minute. That’s almost an artesian well down where we live.

  When we first left Arkansas in 1958, Jimmy Ray Paulman was married, and I saw it cause him all kinds of problems. It complicated his life. To me, wives and steady girlfriends were as deadly as drink. I had that pretty well figured out for myself when Libby came into the picture. I’d been footloose and fancy-free, and now…

  Libby: “In January 1970 Levon went on tour with The Band and didn’t call me for four weeks. Then I heard through the grapevine that he was living with some groupie in California, and I was devastated. He had left his dog with me!

  “Levon came back from L.A. and came over to my house one morning at four A.M., like nothing had happened, smoking a big cigar. He had presents for me—expensive soap, a beautiful handmade vest—but I wasn’t home.

  “So I got his number and called him at this little house he was living in, in Wittenburg. I told him I wanted to see him and be with him; at least bring him his dog. And he said, ‘Libby, you can come on up.’

  “So I left Ezra with the maid and took off for the country in a blizzard. Halfway up the New York Thruway, the limo broke down. I’m dying to see Levon, so I got out and hitchhiked. Eventually I paid some guy fifty dollars to take me to Levon’s shack. I went in and gave him his dog and got into bed with him. It was my way of saying, ‘Yes, I do still love you.’

  “So Ezra and I moved in with Levon. It was the three of us in this house. There were lipstick-red movie-set drapes down to the floor, pork chops in the fridge, a fireplace, one stick of furniture, and us. At first Levon and Ezra hated each other with undisguised glee, but then they formed a bond. One day, late in the winter, Levon went outside to chop some wood. He turned to Ezra and went, ‘C’mon, son,’ and my little boy went with him. And when they came back Levon says to me, ‘You know what? We’re leaving you.’ My blood ran cold. He said, ‘Yep, we’re goin’ to town to get some juice. You want anything? Because you can’t come with us.’ And Ezra took his hand, and off they went. A great thing happened to Ezra that day.

  “I became pregnant in March 1970. I didn’t mean to get pregnant, but I was with Levon and wanted to have his child. Friends came by—Albert, Robbie, and Dominique—and said, ‘You’re crazy! You could have a singing career! You’re gonna mate with this guy, who’s totally wild?’

  “And I know they were saying the same thing to Levon: ‘This girl, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s lost. She’s stray.’

  “I was madly, obsessively in love with this man. In Arkansas, and in Woodstock, people thought I got myself pregnant to capture Levon. That wasn’t it. I loved him. Love was what we called it and he took wonderful care of me.

  “That fall we moved into a rented house near Levon’s land, and our daughter, Amy Helm, was born in Rhinebeck Hospital on December 3, 1970.”

  We were on the road during the first three months of 1970. We told Albert we wanted to play relatively small concert halls where we could concentrate. My main memory of this period is a show we did at Massey Hall in Toronto, with Jesse Winchester opening. Garth’s parents came to support their son, who’d just had a tooth pulled, plus Mama Kosh, Bill Avis, Freddie McNulty; all our friends from the days when we rocked the Yonge Street strip with Ronnie Hawkins. Garth’s mom told Albert Grossman that she’d heard so much about him that she thought of Albert as family. The place erupted when we walked out, and again at the sixth song of the set, “Jemima Surrender,” where we switched instruments: Richard to drums, Garth to piano in his stockinged feet, and me to guitar and the microphone. In the dressing room afterward, Mrs. Hudson said, “You know, Garth, we had heard that you were doing concerts in your socks…”

  After a few shows around Ontario, we went to California: Pasadena, L.A., and Berkeley, where we played two Saturday shows at the Berkeley Community Theater. Once again Ralph J. Gleason caught the way we ticked: “Garth Hudson, who looks like a combination of Beethoven and U. S. Grant, contributed beautiful sounds in both concerts, doubling on accordion and soprano saxophone. Levon Helm, who has the best sense of phrasing for delayed five- and seven-stroke rolls since Gus Johnson with Count Basie, is a remarkable singer with a fine voice. Rick Danko’s bass playing is deceptively simple, and he looks delightful as he plays. Manuel’s singing and piano playing and Robertson’s rare solo bits fall together perfectly.... They created a hurricane of emotions and sound, one of the most effective musical products I ever heard. Their program included seventeen songs in eighty minutes, and was thoroughly satisfying. The audience stood outside the hall for a long time. Nobody wanted to leave, it was that good.”

  Our third record, Stage Fright, was recorded quickly to save money. The original idea was to record live during a concert at the Woodstock Playhouse, the little summer-stock theater we had in town. We had some songs, and we were going to rehearse for a week in the theater and then cut this show on the weekend. But then word got out, and suddenly they had three thousand ticket requests from as far away as California for this little place that held about six hundred people. Then the town coughed, and that was the end of that idea. Toilets, parking, small town, etc. There wasn’t gonna be any Woodstocks in Woodstock. So we ended up using the playhouse to record by ourselves. It was a nice room with a rounded ceiling. The stage was the studio, and the controls were in the downstairs prop room. Capitol sent up some recording gear in a truck, which we parked around the back. We didn’t have to hear from the label about studio budgets and deadlines. When we got bored we played football, and I taught John Simon to ride a motorcycle in the parking lot.

  “I didn’t produce Stage Fright,” John recalls, “because by then Robbie was learning the board himself, and they brought in Todd Rundgren, a young engineer who knew all the hip new sounds. So I was around Woodstock when they were recording, and played on the album, for which I was credited with ‘special thanks.’ I knew I wasn’t gonna be on the next one.

  “With Big Pink, we just went into the studio, did our best, and it was a hit. That made The Band much harder to do. In comparison, Stage Fright was simpler. The musicians didn’t even mix the album. They gave one set of tapes to Todd to mix and sent another to British engineer Glyn Johns in London, to mix down with completely fresh ears. The album that came out was mostly Glyn’s mix, with a few of Todd’s in there as well.”

  With just ten songs and running a little over thirty-six minutes, Stage Fright reflected the haste to ge
t it to market to capitalize on our post-Time notoriety. The first take on “Strawberry Wine” was the one we used, Richard playing drums. Richard and Robbie came up with “Just Another Whistle Stop” and “Sleeping,” which included Richard Manuel’s classic lyric: “To be called by noon/Is to be called too soon.” Rick sang “Stage Fright,” and Richard sang on “The Shape I’m In,” both of which became staples of our concerts. I shared the vocals with Richard on “W. S. Walcott Medicine Show” (that’s Garth on tenor sax). “Miss Brer Foxhole with the diamonds in her teeth” in the song’s last verse commemorates “The Lady with the Million Dollar Smile,” who used to sing with F. S. Walcott’s traveling show on the dark outskirts of Marvell when I was a boy. We changed the initials so it would move the syllables around and make it sing easier.

  It was a dark album, and an accurate reflection of our group’s collective psychic weather. “Daniel and the Sacred Harp” was about selling your soul for music. “Stage Fright” was about the terror of performing. “The Shape I’m In” was about desperation. “The Rumor” was about paranoia. Robbie took most of the credits, played a lot of guitar (Stage Fright was called The Band’s first rock and roll album), and generally tried to assume full control of that part of the whole process. And with Albert in his corner, there was no alternative but to go along with it. But we all realized something was wrong, that things were beginning to slide. We were in our fourth year of this band and had just turned in our third album, and for the first time we hadn’t cut it to our standard. It takes a while to polish a record, but by the time of Stage Fright the pendulum had swung, and we were forced to put the polishing rag away. The days when we would live with the music were over. It wasn’t as satisfying for me to leave it in a rougher shape, when you’re positive you could have done it better.

  Capital released Stage Fright in the later summer of 1970, and it was an immediate commercial success, if not exactly a critical one. The critics picked up that it was a record about loss and the sweetness of success gone slightly sour. Rolling Stone called me the best drummer in rock and roll and noted that Robbie wrote the best songs. Richard’s “Sleeping” was too laid-back for the reviewer, who noted it wouldn’t rate very high on “The People’s Marxometer.” Critic Albert Goldman called us “The Bland” in The New York Times. Time gave us a rave; they liked the image of the plowboy in “Stage Fright” and just about all of “W. S. Walcott,” which sounded like an Uncle Remus story to them.