by Levon Helm
I looked at Richard. He’d come out of a dark period, and we all worried about him. His shoulder-length hair was wet, but he smiled and gave me a look that said this was going to work. For the umpteenth time, I thanked the heavens for having Garth Hudson in the band.
Bob went back out and did his set: “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Song to Woody,” “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “It’s Alright, Ma,” which had the line “Sometimes the president of the United States must stand naked.” This always drew a big cheer in that year of Watergate, when an American president would resign his office in August.
This was a hard act to follow. We went up on the stage, picked our way through the furniture, and received an ovation that lasted three minutes. I called a huddle around the drums. “Call it,” someone said. That’s when we decided on the set list, right on stage. We did four songs—“Carnival,” “Shape,” “When You Awake” and “Rag Mama Rag”—then Bob came back and did “Forever Young,” which was a little like blessing the audience. We finished with “Like a Rolling Stone,” and came back after the ovations and did “The Weight” for an encore. Then Bob came back, and we finished with five minutes of “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine).”
And that was it. With minor variations, we played that show for the next six weeks. We kept from getting bored by finding new ways to play the old songs, but we kept coming back to what we’d once gotten booed for. Bob Dylan had stood his ground, and the world had gone round a couple of times since then. The audiences were closer to our own age—thirty-something—and were attentive and polite. I sometimes had a funny sensation: that we were acting out the roles of Bob Dylan and The Band, and the audience was paying to see what they’d missed many years before. We all felt that way, including Bob. We couldn’t help it. The tour was damn good for our pocketbooks, but it just wasn’t a very passionate trip for any of us. The one funny thing I recall is the time Richard became dissatisfied with the caliber of the groupies and asked the crew to take Polaroids of the girls who wanted to visit backstage.
We lived and traveled like six kings amid the excesses of all that seventies rock and roll money: the fastest jet, the longest limos, the biggest suites, tons of white powder. We did two nights at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and had a big reunion with families and friends, including the Hawk. I don’t even remember much else. You get on one of these big tours, and after a few shows you don’t know where you are. The road manager points to the stage, you climb aboard, and then you have to concentrate and go to work.
One show I do remember well was Atlanta. Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia, and I guess his kids came to the show, because we were invited out to the governor’s mansion afterward. Richard and I drove out in a limo, enjoying a smoke and the three-man motorcycle escort. The Carters made a family party out of it, and I got to meet the governor, and he gave us a tour of the mansion. But the part that Richard and I liked best was when Rosalynn made breakfast for us. Bob Dylan sat down and ate, and I think he enjoyed a good southern breakfast with the Carters as much as any of us.
The last night of the tour was February 14 in Los Angeles. Rick and Richard had both lost their singing voices, and mine was ripped to shreds. Ringo Starr was backstage, and we swapped hugs and drummer stories. Warren Beatty, Cher, Neil Young, and a lot of others had come to see us, so we put on the best show of the tour. After “Rolling Stone,” Bob made Bill Graham take a bow, and then we played a new arrangement of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The audience went nuts, it was a minute after midnight, and we were thrilled because six weeks of touring were over. Bob stepped up to the mike and spoke to the cheering people: “On behalf of The Band, I want to say thank you and good night.” That was more than he’d said to any audience during the whole tour, other than “It’s great to be back in Seattle, home of Jimi Hendrix.” Rick Danko walked over and patted Bob on the back, and it was over. I skipped the parties afterward and went out for sushi with Paul and Mary Berry. Later, as my limousine turned north off the Santa Monica Freeway onto the Pacific Coast Highway, I thought it was strange that none of our shows with Bob had been filmed.
All during that tour I’d had a funny feeling, a foreboding that something bad would happen. Looking back, it was something we all felt.
After it was over, I was supposed to fly back to Arkansas with Dayton Stratton and take care of some business at home. At the last minute I didn’t go because we were moving houses or something, so I stayed in Malibu. Not long after, Dayton was flying home from Texas. We think lightning hit him on the approach to the airport at Fayetteville, and the damn tail came off the plane. Dayton tried to aim for the road but hit at a forty-five-degree angle. He was killed instantly.
Boy, that one shook us up. We knew we’d lost a partner. You never had to worry when Big D was around.
Exhausted and drained, we scattered to our homes. It would be another year before we met again to begin the series of events that led to The Last Waltz.
Chapter Nine
THE LAST WALTZ
The Band took a couple of months off after that big tour with Bob. We leased a seaside ranchette up in Malibu, built a recording studio in the master bedroom, and used it as a clubhouse and studio where we and our friends could record albums and cross-pollinate one another’s music. We called it Shangri-La, after the fabled paradise in Lost Horizon, because to us Malibu felt like a paradise after years of gray Catskill winters. We all loved Malibu and its spectacular landscape of mountains crashing down to the sea, its fresh foods, fine wines, beautiful girls, and easy living. We were stars in a place that seemed to exist only to cater to stars, and so we tried to live it to the hilt while we could. Richard and I did a lot of laughing together, hanging out at Shangri-La with our raucous English buddies like Ringo, Eric Clapton, and Ron Wood.
We went back out in April to do some big shows like the World Series of Rock in Cleveland, where we played in front of eighty-eight thousand fans. For me it was good to be working again, because things weren’t working out between me and Libby, and this gave us a chance to make a break that we both needed. She and the kids moved to Brentwood, and I continued to see the kids as much as being a weekend dad allowed.
Before the Flood, a double live album from our tour with Bob, was released by Asylum Records in July 1974. Like Moondog Matinee and Planet Waves (which had come out halfway through the tour earlier in the year), reviews were only lukewarm, as if the press were starting to tire of us after years of slavish reporting and reviews. While the album did well and made us some money, I continued to complain that these deals failed to take our commitments to Capitol into account. We still owed them a bunch of records. I’d talk to our accountant, our lawyer, our manager, but they didn’t want to hear anything I said. They figured Robertson was the leader of The Band, and he tended to follow the advice they gave him. So it was frustrating for me, and I just started a process where I backed away from the whole thing as far as I could without actually quitting the group.
Shangri-La, our beachfront clubhouse off the Pacific Coast Highway near Zuma Beach, had a checkered past. It had been an expensive bordello in its previous incarnation, so it came with a Naugahyde bar and a lot of bedrooms with mirrored walls, one of which I commandeered as my HQ when in Malibu. We put in a good pool table, stocked the bar, and built a twenty-four-track recording studio in what had been the master suite. Down toward the beach there was a horse shed, with a couple of stalls and a tack room, which had been Mr. Ed’s when TV’s talking horse had been a resident. We had Mr. Ed’s stable converted to a bungalow, and Richard moved in and basically stayed there for the next year, drinking seven or eight bottles of Grand Marnier orange brandy a day, relying on the sugar in the liqueur to keep his weight up. Robbie, Garth, and Rick were all living in houses near Shangri-La and were becoming involved in various outside projects.
I was in and out of there for most of 1975, as we struggled to make our next album, which took longer than any other we ever made be
cause it became impossible to get everyone together at one time. I was also spending more time fighting with The Band’s management than I was thinking about making good music. The main issue was our investment policies, which I felt were all wrong. We had a big chunk of money coming to us around then, representing publishing money and royalties from the success of Rock of Ages, and money from the tour and albums we’d done with Bob. Suddenly we’d been goosed into a much higher income-tax bracket and had to make executive decisions way beyond our comprehension. Our management wanted to invest in a condominium development in Colorado Springs and some weird tax shelters involving oil and natural-gas exploration—potentially lucrative investments that also happened to be extremely risky. We were told that our management team’s other clients—Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Peter, Paul, and Mary—were really prospering from these fast-growing investments. Meanwhile, I knew about some prime land in northwest Arkansas that was for sale and certain to be developed. Friends of mine were involved, and the investment would be a low-risk, highyield kind of deal.
Our management wouldn’t let us do it. I was outvoted. Our money and some of Bob Dylan’s went into these condos and oil wells. I got disgusted and began to disengage. I hated to do it, but things in The Band had passed beyond my control, and I had to get out of there. I decided to keep my base of operations in Woodstock, finish building my barn, and let things happen in California without banging my head against the wall out of sheer frustration. (When they told us, some years later, that we needed to buy seven hundred replacement refrigerators, the condo investment didn’t look so hot anymore. When the oil and gas shelters collapsed in the 1980s, a lot of famous people lost a lot of money, and it made the papers as a financial scandal. Meanwhile, the vacant land I’d wanted to buy at home was soon developed into the first drive-in bank in Arkansas. I think there’s a Holiday Inn there today.)
I still get angry when I think about it. We needed help and good advice, and we just didn’t get it.
Back in Woodstock I hooked up with my old friend and mentor Henry Glover. I’d met Henry when I was eighteen years old and the Hawks came to New York to record. Now I was almost thirty-five years old and once again turning to Henry to help realize my ambitions. He and I talked and talked and decided we should work together as a team. Between my musical contacts and his expertise in the music business, we felt we could do some worthwhile projects. So we formed a company and called it RCO, which stood for “Our Company,” and started to realize several dreams we’d both had. The first of these was to bring Muddy Waters from Chicago to record an album in Woodstock. I got a twelve-thousand-dollar advance from the record company in early 1975, which helped to pay the plumbing bill for my barn. Muddy Waters came to Woodstock in February. He brought along Pinetop Perkins to play piano and Bob Margolin, his regular guitarist. We produced a pretty good album for him in a barn with a mobile truck and artists like Dr. John and Paul Butterfield, who at that time was working with his band Better Days. Most of The Band played on it as well. Muddy was wonderful to work with and extremely generous of spirit, and just to spend some time with him was a great honor for me. That, and the spirit we got out of our version of Louis Jordan’s “Caledonia.” We had a lot of fun giving Muddy the keys to the town at a reception in the great bluesman’s honor on the Woodstock town green on February 14, 1975. I wish you could have seen the look on Muddy’s face when he stepped out of that limo and saw two hundred cheering people waiting for him on a bright winter afternoon. (We were all thrilled when Muddy Waters in Woodstock won a Grammy Award for best blues recording.)
I spent the rest of that year back and forth between Woodstock and L.A. In March The Band (minus Richard, who didn’t make the flight) and Bob Dylan played a big benefit in San Francisco that had been organized by Bill Graham to raise money for high-school athletics. Neil Young played some keyboards and did a couple of numbers with us too. Neil was making a record in L.A., which both Rick Danko and I worked on. I continued to see Libby and the children, and had other girlfriends as well. I helped the Cate Brothers, my buddies from Arkansas, land a record deal with Asylum. Earl and Ernie had developed into one of the best bands in the South, playing the same circuit we used to ply as the Hawks. My original idea had been to produce the album for the Cates, but there were schedule problems, and the record got produced by Steve Cropper, master guitarist with Booker T. and the MGs, so instead I just rooted ’em on and played on their record a little.
In June Columbia released an album called The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band. The twenty songs had been picked from the demos Garth had recorded in the basement of Big Pink back in 1967, sweetened in some cases by guitar overdubs recorded by Robbie that year at Shangri-La. As usual I expressed my unhappiness at releasing yet another album that didn’t count toward our record deal (Capitol told us we were “on suspension” at the time), but I got outvoted once again. Tough luck.
Why, they wanted to know, can’t Levon be happy?
* * *
Our seventh Band album, Northern Lights, Southern Cross, came out at the end of 1975. It was our first recording of original music since Cahoots four years earlier. Some of our fans were surprised we even put out a new record at all, since it was assumed we were in semiretirement and had left the field to the Allmans, the Eagles, Steely Dan, and other bands that had come along. We’d worked on this new music for months, on and off, and in the end got eight extended songs, all credited to Robbie Robertson. I sang on half: “Forbidden Fruit” (about the lure of heroin), “Ophelia” (Grand Ole Opry comedienne Minnie Pearl’s real name), “Ring Your Bell,” and some of Robbie’s tribute to the Cajuns, “Acadian Driftwood,” which had that old three-voice Band mixture on the verses. Rick Danko did one of his best vocals on “It Makes No Difference,” and Richard sang beautifully on “Hobo Jungle” and “Rags and Bones.” One number, “Jupiter Hollow,” was a showcase for Garth, who really earned his nickname of H.B. (Honey Boy) on that album, because he was the one to put in the studio time that sweetened the record and put it in that state-of-the-studio mode. Shangri-La had twenty-four tracks, and Garth used that leeway to craft as many as half a dozen keyboard tracks on a single song using the ARP, Roland, Mini Moog, and other synthesizers he was working with. A lot of this stuff was tied together with a computer keyboard, which Garth wielded like the wizard he is, giving the music an almost orchestral overlay. Garth also played horns all over the record and dubbed a piccolo and bagpipe onto “Acadian Driftwood,” whose fiddle part was added by Byron Berline. We also had an outtake called “Twilight,” a little reggae song that we liked enough to use as the B-side to the “Acadian Driftwood” single and to put in the set when we started playing shows again the following year.
Northern Lights, Southern Cross was the best record we’d made since The Band in 1969, but it got only middling reviews, and Capitol couldn’t break the first single, “Ophelia,” on the radio. I don’t think we even got a gold record out of it. The press blamed Robbie, since he’d taken all the credit as our principal writer. We were photographed walking the sands of Malibu in our usual beards, shades, and hats, and were castigated in Rolling Stone for not having new ideas. And all I heard on the radio as I drove my little BMW 2002 down the coast to go see the children was Fleetwood Mac’s new, self-titled album, which had taken America by storm. Soft rock, they called it, and it was supposed to be the coming thing.
Eric Clapton began recording his No Reason to Cry album at Shangri-La early in 1976, and the Band played on a track called “All Our Past Times,” which related to Eric’s friendship with Richard Manuel. Eric liked the atmosphere at Shangri-La, and he and Richard were going through some of the same tribulations regarding life. Also working on Eric’s record were Ron Wood from the Stones, the great Billy Preston, and Bob Dylan, who kept trying to get Clapton to record a new song he’d just written, “Seven Days.” It turned out that Eric had enough material, but Ron Wood liked the song so much he cut it at Shangri-La a few weeks later for a solo al
bum of his own, with Mick Fleetwood on drums. Those were the glory days of Shangri-La, a relaxed place to cut a record. I had my own room there, and I’d bring the kids up for a few days at the beach. I was also going back to Arkansas with the children as much as time allowed, since my mom could never get enough of having Amy and Ezra around.
The Band went out on tour that summer of the American bicentennial. It was our first national tour in two years. Late in June 1976, we redeployed at Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater in Palo Alto, California. It was a sold-out matinee with the Flying Burrito Brothers opening, and the sun had bleached the half-naked crowd by the time we made our way to the stage aboard a fire engine spraying water on the parched crowd. I got up on the drums, made sure everybody was in his place, saw that Garth was set and ready behind his high-tech panel of keyboards, and started playing the drum lick to “Don’t Do It.” The kids began to dance and cheer, Rick Danko hit the bass line, Richard came in on piano, then the guitar—and we were flying.
We did ninety-minute shows that summer all over the country, playing our familiar songs and more recent material from Northern Lights. “It Makes No Difference” gave Rick a showcase in the middle of the set, and I did “Ophelia” and “Forbidden Fruit.” Everyone was watching Richard carefully, and he had good nights and bad. Sometimes he shouted and spat out the lyrics to “Tears of Rage” with biblical fervor; other times he sounded painful to hear, but still drenched in the conviction that Richard brought to a song. Richard could hurt you with that voice of his.
