Levon Helm (1940-2012): Tribute to a Peerless Singing Drummer

Levon Helm, former drummer and vocalist for the Band, has died at the age of 71. This news has been greeted in various quarters as "impossibly sad" and "hard to even read," and it is easy to see why. Though the Band quit the game decades ago, and not a lot of new rock groups these days cite them as an influence, Levon Helm is still fairly well-considered one of the last true good guys in rock. Anyone who has ever seen Martin Scorsese's documentary The Last Waltz will automatically attest to his preternatural musicianship, his powerful voice, his handsome-yet-grizzly mug, and yet those were but a handful of his virtues. Many people, including myself, were first introduced to Lev and the Band through The Last Waltz, and even though I played guitar, I found myself drawn more to Levon's playing than Robbie Robertson's (not that it was a contest). Unique even among that rarefied sub-class of musician, the Singing Drummer, Levon Helm had a ragged, easygoing lope to his playing style that kids today would probably identify as "swag."

Prior to their split, the Band was notable for their unique approach to songwriting and performing. Each of the group's five members had his own particular skill set, either as a songwriter, singer or multi-instrumentalist, and when their talents combined every contribution was given equal weight--their distinctive styles paid dividends in the form of incredibly ambitious, authentically virtuoso rock tunes. For a brief while, they were one of those rare groups with no frontman. After splitting from Bob Dylan in 1968 (following a decade honing their skills on the road with Ronnie Hawkins), the Band carved a niche, first with Music From Big Pink in 1968 and then The Band in 1969, as one of the most democratic groups in rock history. Yes, Robbie Robertson was clearly the leader--he wrote the majority of the music and played guitar (magnificently, usually)--but onstage he played that instrument and nothing more. Garth Hudson, the group's organist and other non-singing member, was rarely credited as a songwriter, yet he more than made up for that as the group's amateur musicologist and instrumental savant (if you haven't heard Hudson ripping it at the beginning of "Chest Fever," do yourself a favor).

Meanwhile, the Band also had the greatest tripartite of vocalists in the history of rock, namely bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and Levon Helm. Generally, Robertson delineated singing duties in the following fashion: Danko sang the folksy, conversational tunes, Manuel claimed the multi-octave ballads, and Levon was the power-belter. All of them have their great moments, but Levon was an especially soulful presence on record. It's fitting that his first notable vocal performance on record is on a song where all three vocalists (plus maybe Robbie?) share harmonies: "The Weight." Lev opens the tune with the famous lines "I pulled into Nazareth/was feeling about half-past dead," probably cementing his status right there as the Band's most beloved vocalist. To my listening ears, the dopest part of the song is the final verse, which Lev and Rick Danko sing in tandem. Listen to how they reinforce each other's wistful exhortations at the part where they sing "To get back to Miss Annie/you know she's the only one." It's a devastating, ear-popping moment, which Danko and Helm somehow manage to top in The Last Waltz, with an assist from the Staples Singers.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to talk about Levon Helm in the context of the Band now without acknowledging how poorly he was treated, by Robbie Robertson and his various business handlers, in the three decades following The Last Waltz and the Band's dissolution. I don't see a reason to rehash the details, but you can read about some of it here and in the book This Wheel's On Fire (which, though far from balanced, paints an undeniably damning portrait of Robertson's rock star antics). On the Band's first four albums, Levon was a steady if occasional songwriting presence, cowriting the songs "Jemima Surrender," "Strawberry Wine" and "Life Is A Carnival." After 1971's Cahoots, Robertson started writing music without the other members' input, and tensions within the band escalated quickly--somehow, the greatest band democracy in history had devolved into yet another disappointingly petty clash of egos, and their music no longer had that same sense of telepathic connection. In Robertson's defense, it wasn't exactly fair of Levon to blame Robbie for refusing to reunite with the Band in the 80s, despite being shut out of songwriting royalties, either. Their mutual bad faith accumulated exponentially: By the time they appear together in The Last Waltz, you can tell that the Band's guitarist and drummer are hardly on speaking terms.

The Last Waltz is great for what it is, a well-directed documentary of an undoubtedly epic concert, but the Band stopped functioning as a band (lower case b) around the time of Cahoots, or maybe their covers album Moondog Matinee. The late 60s/early 70s albums are the Band at their most pure: for my money, no Levon performance will ever beat "The Rumor," from the Band's third album Stage Fright. I have a theory that the song is a sequel-of-sorts to "The Weight," not only regarding its similar rhythm and Danko-Helm tag-team vocal arrangements, but also because of parallel thematic undercurrents, especially in respect to what Greil Marcus calls the "rootless wanderer", a common Robertson protagonist:

Danko gets the first part of the first vocal, his good-natured bellow complementing the upbeat melody, and then, on a dime, the tune descends into a sadder register, and Helm responds to him in turn. The two continue trading lines in this fashion, alternating between jaunty and plaintive, coming together in time for the bridge, which Helm takes solo: "Close your eyes/hang down your head/until the fog rolls away." If you doubt rock music's capacity to take benign and/or meaningless statements and elevate them to the level of tearjerking, gobsmacking art, click above. And somehow, he's nailing the drum part at the same time.

In retrospect, it strikes me as more surprising than tragic that Robertson would so severely undervalue Levon's contributions to the Band's elemental dynamic. Simply as a drummer, he was one of the best. As a soulful white rock singer, he was basically without peer. And when it came to the greatest of human challenges, singing and drumming at the same time, no one made it look more effortless, or incidental to his skills as a performer.* Though a lifetime of cigarette smoking eventually took its toll on his vocal cords, he kept performing for grateful audiences up to the end--his laconic shuffle backbeat never waned in its power, even as it went out of fashion for succeeding generations of power drummers. Whether with the Band or with other groups of musicians, he played with a style that was redolent of his personal history: the lone Southerner in a group full of Canadians, a product of decades on the road as a traveling musician, mastering the trade. He lived the life, he honed his skills, he became one of the best through sheer principle, ambition and hard work. Nothing, not even death or Robbie Robertson, will diminish that accomplishment.

Levon Helm will always be the soul of the Band, but for a while he was part of something even greater: a group steeped as much in the communitarian, Emersonian ideal of transcendental American individualism as it was in the blues, gospel and rock music they fused so effortlessly. We probably won't see its like again.

*Also: a decent guitarist and mandolin player. Not a bad actor, either--check out Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Chapter Book Revue

Thanks to Hennepin County's libraries, I've managed to read a few books about music in the past month. I thought I'd write them up...

Silence, John Cage
Cage was an important, even pivotal figure in 20th Century music, and this book collects many of the experimental composer's lectures and magazine pieces, up to the early 1960s. He returns to the same subjects over and over--the dichotomy between noise and music, the nature of 'experimental' music, electronic sounds, the influence of chance in composition, and silence, or the impossibility thereof.

Profound questions, and, at its best, inquiries well-handled by Silence. On noise and silence--those false antitheses to music--in particular, the book sparkles with uncommon depth and a sense of intellectual mischief.

But to find the whole of Silence interesting, or even readable, one's interest in music must align perfectly with the composer's. I don't believe the concept of filler existed in Cage's period, but Silence is stuffed with it--uncritical expositions on Eastern philosophy, an unending barrage of unordered vignettes, 'experimental' lectures that were never meant to be read. Parsing the good from the nutty isn't difficult, however--when Cage chooses to write clearly his unorthodox ideas are almost always provocative--and still worth you time.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller
An early entry in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Andy Miller's take on The Kinks' greatest album features an unimaginative structure, unimaginative prose, and an unimaginative take on 15 of the richest songs every recorded. Miller mostly pulls quotes from Ray Davies' autobiography and articles about the Kinks, and connects with wordy, worshipful sentences; it reads like a lengthy Wikipedia article. The track analyses are OK, but by the time I got to the chapter of analysis about Village Green-era tracks not included on the album, I put down the book. The volume itself is slim, but the whole book seems very slight.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus' prose, on the other hand, is sublime. Large parts of Invisible Republic are given over to lengthy, novelistic descriptions--of live performances, Appalachian history, the Anthology of American Folk Music, and above all, the worlds Marcus hears inside songs. Some of these sections are reason to read the book by themselves.

But in a book ostensibly about Bob Dylan & The Band's landmark Basement Tapes, Marcus' stream of consciousness cultural history doesn't always work. The ace writing masks the fact that parts of the book have the cluttered, impenetrable inner logic of, well, a Dylan epic. Like "Desolation Row," Invisible Republic sometimes insinuates very thoughtful points through clouds of poetry and allusion. Other times you get the letter just as the doorknob breaks.

Perhaps you have heard that Greil proposes an "old, weird America"? Why yes, yes he does, and this old and weird America is a shot at poet Kenneth Rexroth, recognition of the centrality of the coo coo bird in American song and mythology, and home to Smithville and Kill Devil Hills, hamlets of the author's own creation. Among thousands of other things.

I won't rule out that large parts of Invisible Republic simply elude me, though I doubt the whole thing does. Dense and twisting thoughts work wonders in "Desolation Row," but as cultural history their power is somewhat diminished; I'd argue style should sometimes take a backseat to decipherable analysis in any history. This is by no means a bad book, however, and I can promise you that Marcus writes beautifully and with great knowledge.

The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting: An Oral History, Jim Walsh
An oral history of rock's greatest fuckups that gives more time to fans, scenesters, critics, and local history than it does to the band. The approach was probably necessary: Paul Westerberg doesn't appear to have talked to Walsh for the book, Bob Stinson sadly cannot, and while Chris Mars and Tommy Stinson participated, they don't play a major role as storytellers here. Walsh relies on folks like Peter Jesperson, Lori Barbero, and Peter Buck to fill in the details.

But the outside looking in angle makes sense for a band that was almost more important to its fans than its own members. There's a wealth of hilarious and heart-wrenching anecdotes, though major aspects of the band go almost unmentioned. Notably, there's very little about the terrible incident, shortly before Bob's dismissal from the band, when Westerberg forced Stinson to drink after having completed a treatment program, and absolutely nothing about Chris Mars' Pappy the Clown alter ego.

Walsh's book has a wonderful sense of place, at least if you're reading it in South Minneapolis. The obsession with street names and local hangouts may explain the mixed reviews Shouting received in 2007--that, or the author's boring articles from the 1980's that he chose to reprint--but it gives a sense of the scene and city that gave rise to the Placemats.

Great Guitar Solos #3: The Band, "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" (Robbie Robertson)

Available on: The Band (1969)

Solo bits: 2:52-3:39

If Robbie Robertson comes to be considered the guitar hero he deserves to be and "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" becomes his representative track, it will be in spite of Robertson's protests. A guitarist/songwriter who could play loosely with economic use of character while retaining an encyclopedic knowledge of all the disparate elements that would play a roll in rock music (i.e. country, blues, gospel), he makes perfect sense as a foil for someone like Bob Dylan, whom he played with during his fabled electric tour of the mid-60s. During this time, as Robertson put it, the chances to show off were plentiful, and Robertson's chops were such that he would have made mincemeat of any normal front man who was not Dylan. When the Band finally broke with Dylan and set up shop in Big Pink, Robertson made the crucial decision of jettisoning guitar solos altogether in favor of a type of songwriting that would sound homier and more authentic than what he observed in the San Francisco psychedelic scene. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it also could have been the catalyst in making Robertson the de facto leader of a group whose original strength was that they were all powerfully capable musicians and songwriters. Maybe if Robertson was less disturbed by the sort of guitar playing being utilized by Jefferson Airplane and the like, he wouldn't have gotten burned out as fast. But that's a subject for another thesis.

The Band is, in case you didn't know, an amazing band. Truly, one of the best this world has ever seen and ever will see. In fact, I wager I listen to their first three albums Music From Big Pink, The Band, and Stage Fright more than I have any Dylan album, which I realize puts me into a minority. People talk about the Beatles as an insane cross-section of talented individuals, but in terms of sheer musicality and individuality, it's difficult to beat Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Levon fucking Helm. In addition, they are also one of the coolest- looking bands. Anyway, Robertson must have realized this early on, that no matter how much he worked, he still wouldn't be considered the Band leader. So, he had to assert his dominance in other ways. He wrote most of the songs, and slowly phased out the songwriting contributions of his fellow band members, for instance (even though he couldn't sing). However, this obviously wasn't good enough, as Robertson was merely considered to be doing his part in what was still ostensibly a democracy: though he wrote all the songs, he didn't sing lead on any of them (unlike the rest of them, sans Hudson), and he didn't play anything besides guitar. He was a good-looking guy, but nothing compared to the paragon of manliness that is Levon Helm (again, I'm editorializing). He compensated by bogarting all of Scorsese's interview time in The Last Waltz and placing himself squarely in the middle of the stage, even though, I repeat, he didn't sing. This is obviously a man in a conscious, anxious battle with his own ego.

I say all this because that's exactly what the guitar solo at the end of "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" sounds like--that is, a battle with ego. Throughout the entirety of The Band, wonderful album as it is, there is a conspicuous absence of solos, although Robertson offers several brilliant lead lines in songs like "Up On Cripple Creek" and "When You Awake" in lieu of this. On the last two songs, Robertson breaks this formula. "The Unfaithful Servant" has an acoustic solo at the end. It's not particularly groundbreaking, but it's bracing enough and serves as a nice counterpoint to Danko's affected aches. "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)," the following song, is another creature entirely. This is a mode of songwriting that has no serious precedent as far as I can tell, especially in how the chorus is so spare and minimal as opposed to the verses. I have a theory that this song may have influenced the Pixies in some way. I know everyone talks about how they were the first to employ the quiet verse/loud chorus formula, but these same people fail to mention how Frank Black flipped that structure around in songs like "No. 13 Baby," where Santiago stops playing and all that's left is Kim Deal's bass and Dave Lovering's drums. Obviously this is far more harmonically complex and utilizes a lot of techniques the Pixies never used, but the point still stands.

"King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" is one of those storytelling songs Robertson was so fond of in those days. This one is about a farmer who has a tough time making it but survives due to his union membership, or something. Richard Manuel, the late pianist, sings it at a lower register than what we are used to. Levon Helm contributes some brilliant drumming, particularly during the chorus when he pauses and then taps the high-hat for a snaky-sounding effect. Hudson is somewhere in the back, pumping on the organ. Rick Danko plays the bass, clipped and deliberate as usual. But it's Robertson who is the obvious center of the song. Throughout, he plays guitar fills that almost seem like the start of solos, but then retreats. It's a great moment when the chorus comes along and Robertson reduces his playing to single notes, in tandem with Danko; it's the sort of moment where he deliberately underplays for fear of breaking into self-indulgence.

The solo itself is one of those album-capping solos that I am particularly fond of. Yet even here, Robertson deliberately underplays. Given where it's placed in the song and how Robertson has set up the dynamics so far, this makes perfect sense. It's the kind of solo that's meant to sound quiet, but that doesn't mean it's any less intense. In fact, Robertson ratchets up the tension by trying to maintain that sort of feeling instead of going into all sorts of crazy directions. You can tell that some notes are barely being plucked, but it never seems like he's playing a wrong note. In interviews, Robertson has noted how hard it was to play a solo like that, which depends both on perfect timing and an insane sense of dynamics, and it seems here that he found the perfect medium between showing off his blooze skills from the Dylan days and acting like the socially responsible songwriter he obviously wants to be. Therein lies the tension, and therein lies the success of the solo.

I particularly like the end, where the instruments start picking up again, and Robertson plays two notes in tandem before breaking off into more familiar territory. The song ends so abruptly that you wonder where Robertson could have gone from there, but something tells that this isn't a situation, like "Little Wing," where the song is simply the victim of bad editing. Everything has a purpose, and it makes you appreciate the minute beforehand that much more.