This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Sandy was in the house, and this friend of mine was there. I told him, “We have to go. I have done it. I’ve really done it. Damn thing’s in there deep.” We loaded up pretty quick, I laid the bad news on Sandy, and she went white, although not as white as I was.

  First stop was the pharmacy. Richard Young was there, and so was Jane, his wife. She put a piece of gauze over the back of this gaping hole in the back of my leg. Joe Forno, Jr., who was looking after Richard Manuel’s affairs, took over and got me to the hospital in Kingston. That started about ten real rough-ass hours. The first doctor who saw me shook his head and told us they might be able to save my leg. They took X rays and called the state police because it was a gunshot wound. Then they shipped me up to the big hospital in Albany. I spent the night with a slug in my leg, and in the morning the surgeon looked at me and said, “Mr. Helm, I’m gonna try to save your leg.” And I begged him to do just that. The nurse said they could give me a local or put me all the way out, and I told ’em, “All the way out, because what you all don’t understand is, this thing is on fire. It is on fire!”

  I’d severed the tibial nerve, the main nerve running down the leg. They put it back together and repaired it, and said don’t play the drums for a couple of years—if you can play at all.

  So I took some time off. That summer I played guitar in a septet we called The Woodstock All-Stars, with a wonderful local girl named Cindy Cashdollar playing dobro. “Singing the blues,” reported The New York Times of our Lone Star date, “the quality Mr. Helm expresses is a mixture of patience, true grit, and spiritual fire.” Stan Szelest was the real star of that band.

  On Labor Day The Band played a memorial for our late friend Dayton Stratton on the tenth anniversary of his death after the ’74 Dylan tour. His wife, Lois, and eldest son, Randy, were carrying on the family business, and this was our first appearance in northwest Arkansas since the Hawks last played there in 1963.

  The following year I sat down at the drums for the first time and realized I was going to be OK when I could play the “King Harvest” lick without too much pain. During the summer of 1985 we went on tour opening for Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but halfway through the tour we realized it just wasn’t paying with eight people in the group. The Cates went home, we kept Jimmy Weider, and continued as a five-piece through the rest of the tour. For me it was heartbreaking to see the boys go, but there was nothing I could do.

  We were doing most of this stuff without any real manager. “There are no more real managers,” Richard Manuel would growl, and by that he meant the old-school types like Albert Grossman, who had a lot of power and looked after his clients. Albert and Richard were still connected, and there had always been talk of Richard writing and recording his own music. Joe Forno, Jr., was handling The Band’s business and tour affairs. Various people came and went in this era who called themselves our manager, but they never did much for us.

  In October 1985 The Band was booked at a big outdoor show in Portugal. When we arrived at the soccer stadium where the Avante Festival was to be held, we noticed a lot of pretty red flags and bunting flying everywhere. It was a stirring sight. We learned later we had played for the annual youth picnic of the Portuguese Communist Party.

  In November Richard went to his hometown of Stratford, Ontario, because his old band the Rockin’ Revols was reuniting after twenty-five years for a special show at the famous Festival Theater. Richard was nervous and excited. He’d rehearsed with his old mates the night before the show, and they realized they couldn’t even remember what they used to play. “Levon,” he told me later, “the people were just there. I could feel it, man. All the old crowd showed up, and there was this incredible teenage middle-age magic going on. People were yelling, ‘Richard! Richard!’ It was really something.”

  Everyone wanted to see the Beak, as Richard was universally known in those parts. He performed beautifully for his people, and they welcomed him home with a huge, warm ovation. I know it meant an awful lot to Richard that he was able to return home in absolute triumph that night.

  Then Albert Grossman had a heart attack on a February night eight miles over the Atlantic. When the plane touched down at London, Albert was pronounced dead. He was sixty-one years old.

  They had a memorial service in Woodstock. Richard sang “I Shall Be Released,” and it tore everybody up. Robbie Robertson delivered a eulogy and said, “Every once in a while you meet a great teacher in life, and Albert’s been my teacher.”

  Sitting in the back of the hall, John Simon wondered, What could Albert ever have taught Robbie except how to be a son of a bitch in business?

  Albert was buried in a little grove behind the Bearsville Theater. In the summertime, young actors and actresses rehearse their lines in the clearing near his grave.

  Albert’s death really got to Richard. It may have even seemed like an abandonment, because Albert was looking after Richard’s affairs, and I don’t think that Richard knew who to turn to anymore when things got bad.

  The following month we headed down to Florida to play some shows. The guy who was booking us had scheduled it so we were traveling hundreds of miles between relatively small clubs. It was a lot of traveling and not much dignity. Everyone had a cold, and the crew started referring jokingly to this trip as the “Death Tour.”

  We tried to laugh about it. We’d get to a club and set up, and someone would say, “Hey, Richard, how’s the piano?” Richard would pantomime hanging himself. The quality of the shows came down to Richard’s ability to perform. Could he sing the high notes to “Tears of Rage”? If he could, the shows were great. If not, no one liked them. He had started drinking since Albert’s death, and, to tell the truth, all of us backslid from time to time. Rick and Elizabeth Danko were trying to use their considerable influence with Richard to get him to slow down, and Rick said something to him like, “We’re disappointed in you.”

  But Richard just growled, “Don’t nigger me, Rick!” He just wasn’t gonna be told what to do at that stage of his life.

  On March 3 we arrived at an upscale fern bar called the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, outside Orlando, Florida. We set up and checked in at the local Quality Inn Motel. Rick and Richard both had their wives along; Garth and I were traveling alone. That night we played two sets for capacity houses of people who’d paid eighteen dollars apiece to get in. They went nuts over “Rag Mama Rag,” “Cripple Creek,” “Dixie,” and “The Weight.” Richard did “You Don’t Know Me,” and it made me want to cry.

  After the show, Richard went up to Garth, who was busy packing his keyboards, and thanked him profusely for twenty-five years of good music and appreciation. Garth acknowledged this, but he was preoccupied with getting his fragile synthesizers in their hard cases so they could be shipped to the next gig. Back at the motel, Richard said good night to his wife, Arlie, and then came to my room, where we talked until maybe two or two-thirty. He wasn’t angry or too depressed, although he complained about the piano over at the lounge, and we did commiserate together on the hard touring conditions and the lack of respect it implied. He told me, “Levon, nothing hurts like selfdoubt. When you put that whammy on yourself, it can be real bother-some. And playing these little joints after playing in Japan, you just feel you’re slipping.”

  “I know what you mean,” I told him. “You could get the feeling that you’ve slipped. But look: I like to think at the same time that every chance to play is a good time to test ourselves, then retest, and prove once again that it doesn’t matter. All we have to do is set down, give it some concentration, and do a dozen tunes, whatever it takes, until you get that same enjoyment that the kid gets when he falls into the end zone with the ball in his arms.

  “We’re just musicians,” I told Richard. “We’re just working for the crowd. It’s the best we can do.”

  Then we were just talking about songs and old movies on TV and people that we knew in common. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Around two-thirty Richard said he was go
ing to his room for a few minutes and would come back to finish the movie we were watching.

  Richard had left his room key in the room and woke his wife to get in. She said later he was annoyed and worked up about something, but I don’t what. He lay down on the bed, and she went back to sleep.

  When she woke up later that morning, she was alone. Arlie said that she thought Richard had gone out to sleep on the tour bus, so she went across the street to get some breakfast and returned with a bag of coffee and pastries. She went into the bathroom and found Richard hanging from the shower rod. That was when she started to scream.

  I was dead to the world. There was pounding on my door. It took maybe five minutes just to rouse me. When I opened the door I heard Arlie screaming, “He’s dead!!!”

  I rushed into Richard’s bathroom and basically went into shock. Rick was holding back tears, and Elizabeth gave me a horrified look I’ll never forget. Richard had buckled his belt around his neck and looped the other end around the curtain rod, near the wall mounting where it would support his weight. Then he just sat down so hard that the screws had popped out of the mounting. But it had held, and Richard looked ghastly. I grabbed Richard and lifted him up while Rick got the belt loose. Then we carried him to the bed and got him down. I hit him in the chest, and I think Elizabeth tried cardiac massage, but hell, we knew he was gone. Paramedics arrived, and my hand shook violently as I lit a cigarette. Richard would have been forty-three in a few weeks. It was so sad and terrible to see this sweet, sad friend end like this. The tragedy was just overwhelming.

  Soon the place was crawling with cops. They found an empty brandy bottle and an empty cocaine vial, and concluded that Richard had gotten drunk and committed suicide. Then the press got hold of it, and it was headlines all over the world the day after that.

  When asked for a comment, Rick and I told reporters that we had no idea why Richard would end it all when we were selling out our shows, had just finished a movie, and were about to go into the studio to record.

  But that wasn’t it at all. I knew what Richard had done. He wasn’t afraid of anything. I think he finally just got mad enough at the way things were that he sacrificed himself to shake things up, to make things change, to liberate himself from the earthly pain he lived with and expressed in his music. Richard had had a bellyful, and so he went right ahead and done it.

  Because Richard was a true Christian man, you know? He knew that everything we’re doing down here is just the blink of an eye, or however it’s versed in the good book there. That’s the way Richard looked at it.

  Richard had flirted, maybe halfheartedly, with the Reaper a few times before, and every time God threw him back to us. This time He decided to keep Richard Manuel for Himself. Wherever he is now, you can bet that Richard’s got a hell of a good band.

  After the funeral in Canada, we actually went back on the road to keep some promises we’d made to club owners in Boston and New England. This was an insane thing to do, in retrospect, but Blondie Chaplin joined The Band and got us through until we could carry on no longer. We all attended a memorial for Richard in Woodstock, where his friends remembered Richard’s sensitivity, humor, concern for others, and his utter and total commitment to music. Our friend Happy Traum spoke sadly of the demons that had pursued Richard throughout his life, and people could only nod sadly in agreement.

  And so we put that chapter of our communal history to rest.

  Now there were only three of us left: Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, and me. I think we decided to let things drift for a few years until the right opportunities presented themselves. I hunkered down in Woodstock with Sandy, enjoying life and occasionally taking to the road with the Cate Brothers. After Richard’s death we had various augmented versions of The Band whenever called for. Fred Carter, Jr., played guitar on a tour we did in 1987 with Roy Buchanan opening some shows. I played some shows with drummer Max Weinberg of the E Street Band in 1987. Garth did a Band gig in Spain with the Cate Brothers one time because I didn’t feel like going. (We always figured it was still The Band if Garth showed up. Garth also played in Marianne Faithfull’s touring band around that time.) And after years of working on film scores, Robbie Robertson released a solo album featuring a song for Richard called “Fallen Angel.”

  Paul Butterfield died that year. Then Roy Buchanan in 1988. All around us, we could see that a certain way of life was taking its toll.

  I did a few more film roles and was lucky to get enough voice-over and commercial work as an actor to keep the cash flow interesting. When I wasn’t working I holed up with Sandy, and we usually had a couple of Arkansas boys living in the basement with standing orders to evict the stream of well-meaning but uninvited guests in constant search of Big Pink, The Band, and directions to the Woodstock Festival.

  In 1988 our old and dear friend Ringo Starr checked into an Arizona clinic to dry out. When he came out, he got together with David Fishof, a New York agent, and they assembled a touring company called Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Review. Ringo was going to do his old Beatles songs and needed some friends who had enjoyed a few hits of their own. So Ringo and David put their heads together and hired what I considered a dream band: Billy Preston and Dr. John on keyboards, Rick Danko on bass, Clarence Clemons on sax, Joe Walsh on guitar, and Jim Keltner and me on drums. With Ringo, we had three drum kits set up onstage. We took this out on the road in the summer of 1989, and some reviewers said it was one of the best shows they’d ever seen. The old Beatles fans were very emotional toward Ringo, and when Rick and I would do a few Band songs, the amphitheaters and sheds that we’d sold out would simply explode.

  But my elation of our success was tempered by the death of my mother that year. People who are close to me say that I’ve never gotten over it. Does one ever?

  Ringo’s tour was rejuvenating. Rick and I felt excited about connecting so solidly with our fans. Some executives at CBS Records (which would soon be bought by Sony) thought the same way we did, and suddenly in 1990 The Band was offered a record deal. It felt like a real good second chance to get the people back on our side again, so we jumped at the contract and went to work at a studio near Woodstock with various writers, testing and recording songs.

  I went home to Phillips County in May 1990 because I’d been invited to participate with Governor Bill Clinton in an unusual event.

  The delta in May is green and beautiful, and it felt wonderful to be home. I went over to Turkey Scratch and saw our old family friend Sam Tillman, an eighty-year-old black retired farmer who reminded me that he’d had to put me over his knee once or twice.

  So much in the delta had changed. Agribusiness had taken over the land, which was depopulated. The people now crowded into Helena and the other towns. All the farming is mechanized; the tractors have cold boxes so you can ride in comfort. You got Garth Brooks on the stereo. So much change, and yet still very much the delta of my roots.

  Home is where they know you, and I had been asked to attend a ceremony at what was now called Historic Helena Depot. The Missouri Pacific railroad hadn’t run through old Helena in a long time, and a great organization called Arkansas Heritage was restoring the 1912 depot as the home of the Delta Cultural Center. On May 12 they brought an old caboose down the line and hoisted it with a crane so it would sit behind the depot as part of the exhibits. At ten-thirty that morning, Governor Clinton said to me, “So, Levon, which of us is gonna go first?”

  I looked at the governor, a big man with a wide smile and knowing eyes. The guy was a good five years younger than me. He was wearing a dark suit, ‘cause this was official business. I’d just given him a couple of Band tie-dye shirts for his daughter, Chelsea.

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  “We have to say a few words. Why don’t you go first?” This was the first I’d heard about giving a speech. But they pushed me out there in front of several hundred people gathered around the depot. I looked around and saw so many people I grew up with and knew. I flashed back to the day
Thurlow Brown’s big snake arrived in a broken crate at this old depot and they called Thurlow down to get it. I looked down Cherry Street, where Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson had walked. (Mr. Gist had just donated the building Sonny Boy used to rent for a Sonny Boy Museum.) Meanwhile, this red caboose was hanging in midair from a crane: totally surreal.

  I just told the folks how my daddy had worked on that levee over there, and how his daddy probably had too. I told them how my parents had raised me and how the old levee camp music and swamp boogie that we liked to play down here had taken me all over the world, from Europe to Japan, but that the greatest honor I’d ever had was to be invited back to Helena that day to help dedicate a monument to the heritage we all shared in common. To me, that was the greatest.

  When I finished, they were polite enough to applaud. I felt someone patting me on the back and turned. It was Bill Clinton.

  By the end of 1990 we had gotten The Band the way we wanted it. As a peculiar facet of The Band’s penchant for teamwork, Richard had been both drummer and piano player, so it took two musicians to take his place. Randy Ciarlante was one of the best drummers I knew, and he was good enough to come on board to anchor us while I played my harp or the mandolin. For piano we tapped the great Stan Szelest, our former colleague in the Hawks and one of the best rock and roll piano players anywhere. Stan had some good songs he was working on, and he and Garth liked to play their accordions together. My father, J.D., was living with me that fall. We used to take him to Band shows, and sometimes he’d sing along on some old song like “In the Pines.” Those were good days, and I was full of hope that we were on our way into a whole new era.

  Then we had a whole series of calamities.

  In January 1991 Stan began to feel chest pains while rehearsing at my barn. Joe Forno was driving him over to the hospital when Stan suffered a heart attack and just died in the car. He was only forty-eight years old. We tried to comfort his wife, Caroline, as best we could, and she was a comfort to us as well, but it was a devastating blow. Then in April, a cruel month, Henry Glover died at age sixty-five. He’d been my mentor for more than thirty years, and it was a terrible loss for everyone who knew him. Only a few weeks later our barn burned to the ground. Faulty stove wiring was the verdict. The damn fire took near everything we had, although a concrete storage vault containing my archives and other important material survived intact. If Caroline Szelest hadn’t smelled smoke and woken us all up...