This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band

341 Pages·2000·6.24 MB·English

by  Stephen Davis

THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE
LEVON HELM
AND THE STORY OF THE BAND
LEVON HELM WITH STEPHEN DAVIS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Helm, Levon.
This wheel’s on fire: Levon Helm and the story of The Band / Levon Helm
with Stephen Davis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55652405-9
1. Helm, Levon. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Band
(Musical Group). I. Davis, Stephen. II. Title.
ML419.H42A3 1993
782.42166′092′—dc20
[B]
93-4413
CIP
MN
Copyright © 1993 by Levon Helm and Stephen Davis Afterword copyright ©
2000 by Levon Helm and Stephen Davis All right reserved.
Originally published by William Morrow and Company, New York.
This edition published by A Cappella Books An imprint of Chicago Review
Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-55652405-9
Printed in the United States of America
15 14
Isn’t everybody dreaming!
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel.
“IN A STATION”
RICHARD MANUEL
CONTENTS
Prologue Time to Kill
Chapter One The Road From Turkey Scratch
Chapter Two The Hawk (Out for Blood)
Chapter Three Take No Prisoners
Chapter Four Levon and the Hawks (One Step Ahead of Land of 1000
Dances)
Chapter Five Dylan Goes Electric
Chapter Six Something to Feel
Chapter Seven The Band
Chapter Eight Divide and Conquer
Chapter Nine The Last Waltz
Chapter Ten The Next Waltz
Afterword The Most Fun I’ve Had So Far
Acknowledgments and Sources
Index
Prologue
TIME TO KILL
The Band had always had a pact that if one of us died on the road of a heart
attack or an overdose or a jealous boyfriend, or whatever might kill a traveling
musician, the others would put him on ice underneath the bus with the
instruments and haul him back to Woodstock before the police started asking
questions. This flashed through my mind as I ran half-dressed down the motel
corridor at nine o’clock on the morning of March 4, 1986, in Winter Park,
Florida.
Richard Manuel and I had been laughing for years at stuff that wasn’t even
funny anymore, when he went and took his own life. We were on what had been
jokingly called the “Death Tour” because the gigs were in small places hundreds
of miles apart. We tried to approach it with good humor, but I know Richard felt
we weren’t getting the kind of respect we were used to. This was ten years after
The Last Waltz, fifteen years after we were playing the biggest shows in
American history, twenty years after Bob Dylan had “discovered” us, and
twenty-five years after Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest,
speed-driven bar band in America. It had been almost thirty years since I’d left
my daddy’s cotton farm in Phillips County, Arkansas, to seek my fortune on the
rockabilly trail.
For sweet, ultrasensitive Richard Manuel, the trail ended on a spring morning
in Florida.
Richard’s wife, Arlie, was screaming hysterically, “He’s dead! Oh my God,
he’s dead!” Rick Danko and his wife, Elizabeth, were already in Richard’s
room, and I heard Rick kind of gasp and say, “Oh, no, man …” I went inside:
The room was in disarray, the bed unmade, the TV on, an empty bottle of Grand
Marnier on the dresser. The light was on in the bathroom. Suddenly I got a
terrible sense of pure dread and felt surrounded by the chill of death. I wanted to
run the other way as fast as I could, but instead I walked to the bathroom door
and looked in.
What I saw just broke my heart. That’s for damn sure. It would’ve broken
yours too.
Five days later Rick and I and Richard’s brothers carried his metal casket into
Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford, Ontario. Richard had been raised a
Baptist, but the bigger church was needed to accommodate his last sold-out
show. The organist was Garth Hudson, who set the tone of the service with his
old Anglican hymns. My mind was wandering through the prayers and the
Scripture readings. Jane Manuel, Richard’s ex-wife, and her children were there,
dozens of Richard’s relations, and many friends from our days in Toronto. It was
hard to see so many beloved sad faces on such an occasion. I never did like
funerals.
Robbie Robertson had been asked to deliver a eulogy, but he didn’t show up.
Friends of Richard’s remembered his laughter, his jokes, his scary driving, his
love for music. Then Garth played “I Shall Be Released,” which Bob Dylan had
written for Richard to sing. Through all three verses there wasn’t a dry eye in the
church.
I had a funny experience while Garth was playing. I was thinking about
Richard and asking myself why, when I clearly heard Richard’s voice in the
middle of my head. It came in as clear as a good radio signal. And he said,
“Well, Levon, this was the one action I could take that was gonna really shake
things up. It’s gonna shake ’em up and change things round some more, because
that’s what needs to happen.”
Now, to understand this—and I think I have come to an understanding—you
would have to know what Richard had been through, although that would be
hard to convey. In fact, you’d have to know what we all had been through: the
story of The Band, from 1958 until today. Because from then to now we went
through the best of times as well as times that were full of pain and
disappointment. But those bad times are important. They give you a chance to
practice, listen, take stock, have a life, get your feet back on the ground, and
maybe you’ll live to tell the story.
That’s what this book is all about. My story is recalled and written from my
perspective on the drum stool, which I’ve always felt was the best seat in the
house. From there you can see both the audience and the show. Along the way
we’ll check in with friends and family, and I thank them for their memories and
the ability to share them. In the end, though, the story must be my own, with
apologies in advance to those I neglect to mention or damn with faint praise.
Memory Lane can be a pretty painful address at times, but in any inventory of
five decades of American musical experience you’ve got to take the good with
the bad. So draw up a chair to my Catskill bluestone fireplace while I roll one,
and we’ll crack open a couple of cold beers. The game’s on the cable with the
sound off, and I’m gonna take you back in time, specifically to cotton country:
the Mississippi Delta just after World War II. We’re gonna get this damn show
on the road.
Chapter One
THE ROAD FROM TURKEY SCRATCH
Waterboy! Hey, waterboy!
That’s my cue. It’s harvesttime, 1947, and I’m the seven-year-old waterboy
on my daddy Diamond Helm’s cotton farm near Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. My
dad and mom are working in the fields along with neighbors and black
sharecropping families like the Tillmans and some migrant laborers we’d hired,
seasonals up from Mexico. My older sister, Modena, is back at the house
watching my younger sister, Linda, and my baby brother, Wheeler. Since I’m
still too young for Diamond to sit me on the tractor, my job is to keep everyone
hydrated. I got a couple of good metal pails, and I work that hand pump until the
water runs clear and cold. I run back and forth between the pump house and the
turn row, where the people drink their fill under a shady tree limb. I learned
early on that the human body is a water-cooled engine.
It was hard work. The temperature was usually around a hundred degrees that
time of year. But that’s how I started out, carrying water to relieve the scorching
thirst that comes from picking cotton in the heat and rich delta dust.
I was born in the house my father rented on a cotton farm in the Mississippi
Delta, near Elaine, Arkansas. The delta is a different landscape from the one you
might be used to, so I want to draw you some sketches of the old-time southern
farm communities I grew up in, when cotton was king and rock and roll wasn’t
even born yet.
I’m talking about a low, flat water world of bayous, creeks, levees, and dikes,
and some of the best agricultural land in the world for growing cotton, rice, and
soybeans. When the first Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, the
delta’s cypress forests sheltered Mississippian Indian tribes—Choctaw,
Chickasaw, Natchez—who constructed giant burial mounds related to astronomy
and magic. I’m descended from them through my grandmother Dolly Webb,
whose own grandmother had Chickasaw blood, like many of us in Phillips
County.
In the 1790s Sylvanus Phillips led the first English settlers across the
Mississippi River into eastern Arkansas. They were mostly immigrants from
North Carolina, the Helms probably among them. They laid out the town of