Stephen Davis - This Wheels on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band

LEVON HELM
AND THE STORY OF THE BAND

LEVON HELM WITH STEPHEN DAVIS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Helm, Levon.

This wheels on fire: Levon Helm and the story of The Band / Levon Helm with Stephen Davis.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-55652-405-9

1. Helm, Levon. 2. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. 3. Band (Musical Group). I. Davis, Stephen. II. Title.
ML419.H42A3 1993
782.42166092dc20
[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 978-1-55652-405-9

Printed in the United States of America

15 14

Isnt everybody dreaming!
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Cant we have something to feel.

IN A STATION
RICHARD MANUEL

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 oclock on the morning of March 4, 1986, in Winter Park, Florida.

Richard Manuel and I had been laughing for years at stuff that wasnt 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 werent 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 Id left my daddys 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.

Richards wife, Arlie, was screaming hysterically, Hes dead! Oh my God, hes dead! Rick Danko and his wife, Elizabeth, were already in Richards 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. Thats for damn sure. It wouldve broken yours too.

Five days later Rick and I and Richards 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, Richards ex-wife, and her children were there, dozens of Richards 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 didnt show up. Friends of Richards 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 wasnt 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 Richards 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. Its gonna shake em up and change things round some more, because thats what needs to happen.

Now, to understand thisand I think I have come to an understandingyou would have to know what Richard had been through, although that would be hard to convey. In fact, youd 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 youll live to tell the story.

Thats what this book is all about. My story is recalled and written from my perspective on the drum stool, which Ive always felt was the best seat in the house. From there you can see both the audience and the show. Along the way well 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 youve got to take the good with the bad. So draw up a chair to my Catskill bluestone fireplace while I roll one, and well crack open a couple of cold beers. The games on the cable with the sound off, and Im gonna take you back in time, specifically to cotton country: the Mississippi Delta just after World War II. Were gonna get this damn show on the road.

Waterboy! Hey, waterboy!

Thats my cue. Its harvesttime, 1947, and Im the seven-year-old waterboy on my daddy Diamond Helms 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 wed 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 Im 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 thats 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 wasnt even born yet.

Im 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 deltas cypress forests sheltered Mississippian Indian tribesChoctaw, Chickasaw, Natchezwho constructed giant burial mounds related to astronomy and magic. Im descended from them through my grandmother Dolly Webb, whose own grandmother had Chickasaw blood, like many of us in Phillips County.