IZOD CENTER, EAST RUTHERFORD NJ, WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 3RD, 8:00 PM

(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.