My friend Dave Jensen and I had a terrific time last Friday night at the Tarrytown Music Hall where we say a program of songs of The Band, performed by Jimmy Vivino, Byron Issacs, Jim Weider, Randy Ciarlante, Amy Helm, and as a special treat, the immortal Garth Hudson, and as a very special treat, Sister Maud Hudson. Maud really shone on her performance of “It Makes No Difference,” and Garth’s playing was jaw-droppingly spectacular. I especially liked hearing “`King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” “This Wheel’s On Fire,” and “Rockin’ Chair”. Again, thanks to Mr. Vivino for the tickets.

This article first appeared in the Daily Beast today, April 21, 2013.

“I don’t want a biography,’’ Levon Helm told Jacob Hatley in 2007 when the young director came to Helm’s Woodstock home and broached the idea of making a film about the venerable singer and drummer’s life. Helm had no interest in exploring the past, and neither, really, did Hatley, who felt less like investigating than sitting back, fly-style, and creating a portrait of a vibrant, ailing, cranky, authentic rock-and-roll lion in winter. As we see in the resultant film Ain’t in It For My Health, which opened in New York on April 19 (on the first anniversary of Helm’s death) and later throughout the country, Hatley got all that he hoped for, and more.

Unexpected events drift in to fill Helm’s days and Hatley’s picture: the birth of Helm’s first grandchild, the opportunity to complete an unfinished Hank Williams song, a Grammy nomination for the first album he’d recorded in two decades, and a serious health scare. There is a wide array of privileged moments shown in this film: the sheer sweetness of Helm playing “In the Pines’’ for his tiny grandson, tension as Helm waits on a cold steel stool in a hospital examining room, a “who’da thunk it?” teaching moment when Helm holds forth on the venomous spurs on the legs of the duck-billed platypus, and the excruciating scene in which Helm twists in pain as a doctor inserts a tube into his nostril in order to examine his inflamed vocal chords. And there’s sheer awe whenever he sings, and that amazing voice, now banged-up and frayed, connects to the heart of an authentic America that lies buried somewhere under a million tons of junk culture.

But while biography may not have been what Helm wanted, and while biography may not have been what Hatley sought to serve, biography in the end would not be denied, and it’s the way the injured feelings from Helm’s past seep like the goo from a malfunctioning septic tank that gives the film its bite.

For those who don’t know, Helm was the drummer and one of the lead singers of The Band, a popular and influential group of the late sixties and early seventies. They leaped to legendary status when Martin Scorsese decided to tell their nearly unbelievable story (Canadian bar band to Bob Dylan backing band to critically acclaimed innovators and international arena headliners) against the backdrop of their brilliant final concert.

That film, The Last Waltz, is widely considered the best rock-and-roll film ever made. But what that film does not document is Helm’s great anger at the break up of The Band; he didn’t want The Band to end, resented participating in the movie, and hated that lead guitarist Robbie Robertson was pulling out. Over time his feelings intensified, particularly as money became an issue; he felt he didn’t get fair compensation for his participation in The Last Waltz, and he felt that Robertson unfairly took sole songwriting credit, along with the royalties that flowed from those credits, for songs that The Band wrote collaboratively. In the ensuing decades, as money troubles and more tragic events seemed to afflict all the members of the band except Robertson, Helm’s feelings hardened.

Helm, by all accounts, was one of the world’s great spirits. He was a generous, gregarious, upbeat person whose bottomless ability to express congeniality and remember names and share the spotlight earned him affection so warmly expressed that one starts to think people are speaking not of a human but of a beloved and recently deceased family dog. And Hatley’s film captures plenty of moments of Helm’s joie de vivre: gracefully obliging his doctor’s borderline inappropriate request for an autograph, joy-riding on his neighbor’s tractor, and taking the same delight in talking to a bus driver about interstate highway connections as he does in chatting with Billy Bob Thornton about sushi restaurants and Hawaiian pot.

But as the opening line from the Hank Williams song he’s working on says, “I’m living with days that forever are gone.’’ His “unresolved feelings’’ about The Band, as Helm’s longtime friend and collaborator Larry Campbell calls them, manifest in different ways. Sometimes he battles to contain them. Asked by Billy Bob Thornton about what happened to The Band, Helm half groans. “It was a goddam screw job,’’ he says, hoping that the fog of vagueness will discourage Thornton from tapping further against the thin crust covering thirty years of acid.

At other times, they erupt. Told about the Grammy committee’s offer, Helm sneers at “that Lifetime Achievement bullshit’’ with the disdainful eloquence that could only come from one who had studied real bullshit at a tender age. “What good’s it gonna do Rick or Richard?’’ he asks, invoking the names of his late bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. And sometimes he’s just inscrutable: he displays a moment of excitement when he announces to the friends and employees in his kitchen that his album has just won a Grammy. But as the hugs and back-slaps ripple around the room, a shadow falls across Helm’s face. What’s he thinking about? Absent friends? Missed opportunities? The venomous spurs of the duck-billed platypus? Whatever it is, it isn’t victory.

There are no answers in Hatley’s film, but why should there be, if Helm himself didn’t want to find them? Instead, he gives us a portrait of a man in full, a great artist and an ordinary person who understands that he is being cornered, and who is still fighting for the best of whatever life still offers him.

My friend Ken Smith and I were invited to the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn attend a screening of Jacob Hatley’s documentary about Levon Helm called Ain’t In It for My Health, a lovely, interesting portrait of a gregarious, cranky, still-workin’ rock icon in winter. The film, shot in 2008 amd 2009, captures the man in full–full of life, enjoying new experiences, struggling with money and health, wrestling with the past. After the screening, there was a performance by the Dirt Farmer Band–Larry Campbell, Amy Helm, Teresa Williams, Byron Isaacs and Justin Guip. The whole band was good, but Teresa was in unbelievably good form.

Originally published in The Huffington Post on April 9, 2013:

Anyone who spends any time watching cable television is bound to develop a fairly depressed view of the American character. Vain housewives, self-absorbed designers, responsibility-denying restauranteurs, narcissistic chefs, fascistic dance teachers, scheming survivors, snide judges–altogether we see a whining, insecure, blame-shifting, easily-insulted mass of humanity at its shabbiest. Throw in the political channels, where we see one party drowning in denial, and the other a prisoner of its own helplessness. Thank goodness we can still watch sports, where pampered millionaires continue to explore the frontiers of chemistry in an effort to fend off inevitable decrepitude. All in all, it is a sad spectacle.

But then one sees the example of Roger Ebert. With his long and rewarding career as a film critic, Ebert would have had a deserved moment of respect had he died soon after being diagnosed with cancer in 2002. Instead, Ebert survived long enough to enter the most inspirational period of his life. Ebert’s initial surgery proved insufficient; the resilient cancer demanded stronger, more damaging measures, surgeries and radiation blasts that weakened him, cost him part of his jaw, and left him disfigured, and unable to speak, eat or drink.

Many of us would have been demolished by these developments. Not Ebert. Writing “I should be content with the abundance I have,” he threw himself into his work, reviewing films at a prodigious rate (300 last year alone) and embracing new technologies to become a frequent blogger and tweeter. He focused not on what had been denied to him, but what he retained; in his final blog post, written two days before his death, his mind was on gratitude. “Thank you for going on this journey with me,” he told his readers.

A similar tale can be told about Levon Helm, the first anniversary of whose death will fall on April 19th. Helm enjoyed vast success as a member of The Band, the rock group of the late sixties and early seventies. But after the group broke up, his career plateaued, and personal setbacks accumulated. Late in the nineties, Helm, like Ebert, was diagnosed with cancer, and the radiation treatments he underwent put the cancer in remission but robbed him of his distinctive, emotionally rich singing voice. Again, many of us would have been despondent; Helm threw himself into his music, and formed a new band in which focused on his talents as a drummer. Then, facing bankruptcy, he began putting on shows for small audiences at his home in Woodstock NY. Called Midnight Rambles, the shows spotlighted not oldies but an array of American musical genres–blues, country, gospel, New Orleans, rock. Every one was unique. When Helm recovered his singing voice, the Rambles became a must-see–an unpretentious, generous icon, heading a hot band, before a small audience in an intimate space. The Rambles revived Helm’s career and reestablished his stature as an artist, and he kept performing with joy and fortitude through his final illness until less than a month remained. As in Ebert’s case, Helm’s spirit and courage during the decade after his death sentence inspired everyone who knew the story.

The same kind of emotions greeted the film Searching for Sugar Man, which last February won the Oscar for Best Documentary . The film told the story of a couple of South African music fans who undertook a hunt for Rodriquez, an American singer who was wildly popular in South Africa in the seventies, and whose sudden disappearance mid-decade led to rumors of a lurid death. The intrepid fanst racked down every available lead, and eventually discovered that Sixto Rodriguez not only hadn’t died in 1975, but was still living in modest circumstances in his native Detroit.

Through the vagaries of fate, we learn, Rodriguez never achieved a show business breakthrough in America, and through the avarice of others, he was denied the income from his stardom in South Africa. But as the documentary shows, he still had a full life. He did not wallow in self-pity, He did not lose himself in bitterness over the past. Instead, he built a life. He raised a family. He worked at a job where he was valued by his colleagues. He earned a college degree and ran for office. Overall, it’s fair to say that the intrepid fans who found Rodriguez were more absorbed by his past than he was. Nor did he become starry-eyed by the money that now came to him, but gave most of it away. A prisoner neither to his disappointment nor to his success, he remains the captain of his life.

Ebert, Helm, Rodriquez–models of stoicism. They are men who met disappointment and worse, and faced their challenges with determination and courage. We used to have a lot of role models like them, a lot of people who got up before dawn and packed their lunches and went to work in hopes of making the lives of their families a little easier. Somewhere along the line, a brasher, nastier role model took over, people who built monuments to their own success but who were never satisfied with it. But the last five years have not been kind to most of us, and many of us have had to respond by lowering our heads to the wind and pushing on. We work longer, we do with less, and we begin to admire people who, facing even longer odds, embrace life, and the abundance that they have. Maybe the Stoic Hero is back.

Written by Juli Weiner, encouraged by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair plugged my book this week with an article called “The Book of Levon Celebrates the Man in the Band.” Very nice indeed. Thanks to one and all. Here’s how it reads:

“Nearly a year after the death of Levon Helm, the Band’s twangy and tender-hearted polymath, Spy alumnus Jamie Malanowski has published an e-single about, among other things, Helm’s combative relationship with Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, his dislike of Martin Scorsese’s (otherwise generally beloved) Band documentary The Last Waltz, and the singer and drummer’s magnetic, generous, and unpretentious character.

“The Book of Levon also includes a rather wrenching portrait of Helm’s fearsome, fearless counter-attack against a decade-long sentence of throat cancer. The disease took his singing voice, but Helm took it right back. Malanowski writes:

“[I]ittle by little, Levon Helm’s singing voice returned. Gone was his strong tenor, replaced by something raspy and ornery, different but still authentic, still compelling. At first he sang only a little, harmonizing mostly; “He was thrilled that his voice was coming back,” says [daughter] Amy Helm, “but at the same time, he had doubts. Once you’ve done your time on the oncology floor for head and neck, when you’ve done your radiation, and you’ve walked through those hallways and met other people who’ve gone through the same treatment as you, you don’t take anything for granted. He was happy it was back, but he knew it could be gone again.

“But it is not gone again: in recordings and in books and even in the film he so despised, Helm’s voice will long outlive its malignant adversary.”

This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the year action by Richard Plepler, Steve Koepp, David McCormick and others, we begin 2013 on an upswing, and with hopes for better times to come. In the meanwhile, here are some jewels, personally chosen and wholly idiosyncratic, recovered from 2012:
1.) Love for Levon. Without a doubt, everything about the tribute concert to Levon Helm–reporting the story, meeting the people involved, attending the event, the reception to the article, what may happen yet–turned this into the best thing that I was involved with this year.
2.) Searching for Sugarman. This modest documentary about a real-life Cinderella made my heart leap with joy. A very inspirational story.
3.) Call Me Maybe. Carly Rae Jepson‘s unassuming, sweet, girlish, flirty hit was attractive enough, but the way it went viral and enveloped everyone from the US Olympic Swim Team to Colin Powell was delightful. The song never failed to bring a smile to my lips, especially in Jepson’s collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.
4.) The dauntless, rain-drenched performance of the young people of Royal College of Music Chamber Choir during the flotilla of the Queen’s Jubilee was simply stirring, especially when they sang “Land of Hope and Glory.”
5.) The presidential campaign as a whole this year was a fairly tedious affair, but the rousing Democratic convention, driven by one splendid speech after another culminating in Bill Clinton‘s masterful dissection/deconstruction/destruction of the GOP position was fairly brilliant, just as the Republicans’ ceaseless rhetorical self-destruction–“Oops”, “Nine, nine, nine”, “I like to fire people”, “legitimate rape”, “the 47 percent”–was the best long-running comedy series on TV.
6.) The Giants Win the Super Bowl. Just as in 2009, the inconsistent Giants managed to win four–or in this case, six–games that they could win but were not likely to, and managed, one play at a time, to walk off with the hardware.
7.) The Hour. A splendid, sophisticated, intelligent BBC series about a ground-breaking TV news magazine being produced in the early fifties. I love the way they can combine news judgment, inside baseball, and messy personal situations. Dominic West, Ben Whislaw and Romola Garai are just terrific. We also liked the posh Downton Abbey and the relentlessly vulgar The In-Betweeners. (I must say, I haven’t seen Homeland yet.
8.) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel. Having loved Wolf Hall, I feared its sequel would suffer by comparison. I shouldn’t have worried. Other enjoyable books this year: Watergate, by Thomas Mallon; Passage of Power, by Robert Caro; The Long Road to Antietam, by Richard Slotkin.
9.) I went to Lincoln fearing a Spielbergian historical romance, full of longing gazes and quivering lips and swirling strings. But while there was some of that, it wasn’t enough to sicken the whole deal. I give total credit to screenwriter Tony Kushner for his decision to hang this pageant on a moment that has been largely overlooked by historians, the passage by the House of Representatives of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery. Historians undercut the importance of that moment because there were other ways to accomplish Lincoln’s end, but that’s not the point: whether or not the vote had significant is irrelevant, it is a perfectly splendid motor for an historical drama.
10. Superstorm Sandy. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” Winston Churchill once said. I have no reason to dispute him, but I can tell you this: it’s a humbling thing to realize that the killer hurricane has come and gone and that you’ve been missed.

. . . listening to Allison Moorer and Steve Earle, Jon Levanthal and Rosanne Cash, and Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams sing songs about love, longing and happiness, at the Rubin Museum of Art on December 8th. Highlights: Larry and Tersea singing “If I Had My Way,” Allison singing a song about Alabama, and the entire cast singing the Bee Gees chestnut “To Love Somebdy.”

(from newyorker.com)

Leave it to Lucinda Williams, whose astringent lyrics have proven her capable of leaving no romantic notion unexamined, to ask the question of the hour. Sitting backstage at the Izod Center, in East Rutherford, before doing her turn at “Love for Levon,” the all-star tribute concert for Levon Helm, who died last April at seventy-one, Williams confessed to some confusion about the honoree. Helm was most famous for singing and playing drums in the Band, whose golden era ended in 1976. “Everybody is asking why he was important, and I don’t know what to say, because I never thought of most of these songs as Levon’s music—they were the Band’s. Did they do all this after Rick Danko died?”

The answer, obviously, is that there was no such reaction in 1999, after Danko, the Band’s bassist and singer, died in his sleep, at the age of fifty-six. Why, then, the outpouring of feeling for Helm? Oddly, Don Was, the esteemed musician and producer who served as co-musical director for the concert, had been pondering that very question. “Maybe it comes from reaching sixty,” speculated Was. “I’ve seen it before—Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson. All the jokes that people make about the I.R.S. or whatever. Suddenly you turn sixty, and that’s the stuff you’ve survived.”

Helm could serve as Exhibit A in Was’s argument, for, by the time he turned sixty, he was a veritable curator of stuff to survive. There were an abundance of garden-variety career disappointments, money setbacks, and legal problems maintaining a steady background behind larger crises. In 1986, after playing some club in Florida, longtime friend and bandmate Richard Manuel left Helm’s hotel room and hung himself in his shower. In 1991, Helm’s beloved home and recording studio in Woodstock burned to the ground in an electrical fire. In 1998, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and advised to get a laryngectomy; instead, he took twenty-seven radiation treatments that killed the tumors but robbed him of his voice. He faced each insult not only stoically—deprived of singing, he resolved to improve his drumming—but with an affability that was his signature. “I don’t care what kind of shitty mood you were in,” says Steve Berlin, the keyboard player and saxophonist for Los Lobos, “seeing Levon just brightened your day.”

Unfortunately, amiable perseverance alone is not enough, and by the end of 2003, Helm was facing foreclosure on his rebuilt home. With the help of his new manager, Barbara O’Brien, he began holding rent parties. These shindigs proved doubly useful: the earnings showed that he had regular income, which enabled him to refinance, and more importantly, their popularity gave Helm the idea of turning the parties into a regular show. Calling it the “Midnight Ramble,” after the almost-anything-goes medicine shows that would come through his Helena, Arkansas boyhood home, Helm tapped Larry Campbell, who had distinguished himself as the guitar-, mandolin-, and fiddle-playing sideman for Bob Dylan and others. Together with guitarist Jimmy Vivino, they built a band, one that eventually came to include Levon’s daughter, Amy, and Larry’s wife, Teresa Williams. They played songs from the Band’s repertoire, but also country, blues, gospel, Cajun, and rockabilly.

Soon, word began to circulate that Levon had a hot band that played at his house on Saturday nights, and before very long, Helm’s musical friends began sitting in: Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Dr. John, Phil Lesh, Norah Jones, and many more began making the trip to Woodstock, and the audience followed. “It was one of those ‘If you build it, they will come’ things,” says Campbell. “And they did.” Standing on Helm’s outdoor deck, he pointed into the woods that fronts the eighteen-acre property. “On Saturday evenings, you could stand here and see the headlights stretching all the way back to the highway.” Capacity was two hundred, tops, and the audience would pack around the stage, sitting with their backs to his fireplace, or peer down from the loft space under the great peaked ceiling. To help foster the down-home feel of things, the guests, who had paid a hundred bucks apiece, were asked to bring a dish to the potluck supper that preceded every show.

“There’s a lot of bullshit that surrounds the music industry,” says Jim James of the group My Morning Jacket, who played the Ramble twice, expressing a widely held sentiment. “But Levon always conveyed a great sense of community and spirit, and put the music first.” Then the real miracle occurred: Helm’s voice returned. Gone was his strong tenor, replaced by something raspy and ornery, the voice of old man who has something to say. In 2007, he went back into the studio and recorded an album called “Dirt Farmer,” co-produced by Campbell and Amy Helm, which won a Grammy. For an album recorded with friends and family, in the home he rebuilt after an inferno, in the studio seized from the jaws of foreclosure, with the voice reborn after cancer, the honor must have been like gilding on a lily.

The succeeding years saw more albums, more Grammys, more Rambles, and two grandchildren. Helm resumed a limited amount of touring, venturing farther afield each time. He began to think a little bigger: he talked about starting a kids’ music camp, about holding a blues festival.

But last Christmas, doctors found a spot on his liver, and though the problem seemed resolved, his back began to ache, and no chiropractor or painkiller could provide relief. On March 23rd, he and the group played in Tarrytown. “He was sitting backstage, saying, ‘Lord, all I want is these two hours,’ ” Teresa Williams said. “And then he went out and played great.”

A week later, the first of two Rambles featuring Los Lobos was cancelled because of back pain. The show on Saturday the 31st went on. Steve Berlin visited Helm in his bedroom before the show and found him looking very frail. “Larry told us that some nights when he would play only a couple songs,” says Berlin, “and I thought this would be one. Lo and behold, Levon came out looking like a million bucks, and played his ass off. It was beyond belief that that was the same man we had just seen shivering in his bathrobe.”

That was the last time Levon Helm performed before an audience. The following week, an M.R.I. revealed that his spine was riddled with cancer. Less than three weeks later, he was dead. “His last words to me before he left here,” says Campbell, “and his last words to Barbara and to Amy before he put on his oxygen mask, were ‘Keep it going.’ ”

Helm’s friends would be happy to comply with that injunction, but first there is the matter of a bank debt in excess of nine hundred thousand dollars, which threatens to again place the barn in foreclosure. Hence the concert in New Jersey last week, held in tribute spiritually to an artist and practically to his financiers. One hopes they were cool enough to grasp that they got an incredible show for their money. The program was more or less divided between the Ancients and the Moderns, with Warren Haynes, Gregg Allman, Mavis Staples, Allan Toussaint, John Prine, David Bromberg, Jorma Kaukonan, Joe Walsh, and Garth Hudson presiding over the proceedings early, and Jacob Dylan, Grace Potter, Ray LaMontagne, Dierks Bentley, Eric Church, John Mayer, and My Morning Jacket holding court late, with John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Hornsby, Mark Cohn, and Joan Osborne building a bridge in between.

Citing highlights would be like naming your favorite firework from a Fourth of July display. But as with such a display, the thrill was in the crescendo, with Joe Walsh’s rip-roaring “Up On Cripple Creek,” My Morning Jacket’s rousing “Ophelia,” and, penultimately, a powerful “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” featuring surprise special guest Roger Waters. Who remembered that Helm, Hudson, and Danko joined Pink Floyd in performing “The Wall” in Berlin, in 1990, after the Berlin Wall collapsed? It seems that after that show, Helm presented Waters with the hat off his head, and now Waters proceeded to wave the faded rose-colored relic high in the air. The crowd went wilder.

The show closed, as it had to, with “The Weight,” the enigmatic hymn that Helm’s definitive performance had invested with such gravity and grace. If you accept Garth Hudson’s count, fifty-seven musicians took the stage, with at least a dozen guitarists, four keyboard players, three drummers, and who knows who else backing up the phalanx of singers arrayed across the stage. The performance felt a little ragged in parts, as though everyone was not quite on the same Teleprompter, until a majestic piano solo by Hudson on one of the bridges restored order. At that point, the younger members of the congregation—Church, Osborne, Lamontaigne, and most especially, the powerfully piped Grace Potter—delivered a mighty final verse, whereupon everyone thundered in on the final chorus. With Mavis Staples howling, Lucinda Williams waving her arms, John Hiatt pumping his fist, Jim James throttling a quartet of maracas, and the guitarists strumming hard enough to start fire, the great assemblage roared to an exultant conclusion. The load that Levon Helm had so long ago lifted from Miss Annie’s slender shoulders and carried through his life had now been taken up by his friends, who bore it ecstatically into the night.

Meeting the media before the Love for Levon concert. Counter-clockwise from above: Allan Toussaint; My Morning Jacket; Dierks Bentley; the Clown Prince of Rock Joe Walsh, and the Dowager Princess; Ray LaMontagne; David Bromberg schmoozes, Johns Hiatt and Prine Fuse News; Lucinda Williams is fascinated by me; the great Garth Hudson.

Rehearsing the finale at the Love for Levon concert. Above, from left: John Hiatt, John Prine, Grace Potter, Roger Waters, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Lucinda Williams. Below left: John Mayer, Amy Helm, Teresa Williams, Larry Campbell. Below right: Gregg Allman, Bruce Hornsby, Warren Haynes and Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket

Above: Dierks Bentley, Eric Church, John Mayer, Amy Helm. Below left: Mike Gordon of Phish, Roger Waters, Lucinda Williams, Jim James, John Hiatt, Marc Cohn. Below right: David Bromberg, Mavis Staples, Joe Walsh.

Below: David Bromberg, Mavis Staples, Byron Issacs and Don Was in the hat.