Allow me to rewind a bit.
In November 1978 a thirty-three-year-old progressive congressman named Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. I think he was one of the youngest people ever to be governor. He’d worked for our senator William Fulbright, and had taught at the university’s law school. Before he got married he’d roomed with our old friend Paul Berry, who had embarked on his own career in banking.
When it came time to choose a band to play Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial inaugural ball in January 1979, Paul suggested us. It turned out the governor was a Band fan, so it didn’t take a hell of a lot of prodding. That month, the Cate Brothers and I put a group together and played the “Diamonds & Denim Gala” in Little Rock. We met Bill and Hillary Clinton and helped our fellow Arkansawyers bring our new governor in with style. Bill Clinton was our governor for the next fourteen years, until it was time for him to move on in his career. But that’s when we first shook hands and said how ya doin’?
Cut to February 1979, and I’m speeding out of Nashville in the back of a station wagon with actor Tommy Lee Jones and a fifth of Wild Turkey. We’re on our way to the location in Kentucky where director Michael Apted is about to begin production on Coal Miner’s Daughter, a biopic based on Loretta Lynn’s best-selling autobiography. Sissy Spacek is playing Loretta, Tommy Lee is her husband, Doolittle Lynn, and—I can still barely believe it—the part of Loretta’s father, Ted Webb, the coal miner of the title, is being played by me.
The reason Tommy Lee and I are driving down together is because he’s supposed to teach me how to act during the ride. Believe it or not, that is the deal.
After The Last Waltz was released the year before, The Band scattered. I was the only one still living in Woodstock. Rick and Elizabeth Danko stayed in Malibu, more or less keeping an eye on Richard Manuel. Garth lost his house in a Malibu brushfire that also claimed the homes of Neil Young and other friends. Garth lost some of his instruments in the fire, as well as most of Richard’s possessions, which had been stored in Garth’s basement. Garth and his wife, Maud, then moved to Agoura, on the other side of the mountains. Robertson was fending off film offers in the wake of his chiseled performance in our movie, and there were rumors he was going to produce and star in a movie about carnival life, something he’d always been interested in.
I decided to remain in Woodstock. I loved the town and the people and the way of life too much to sell my house and relocate. Sandy and I would go down to Arkansas for a few months every year and rent a place, just to get away. ABC Records took the RCO All-Stars to Japan for a few weeks, and we sold out every hall we played. I knew I was going to love Japan when I noticed they had rice on their currency instead of emperors and statesmen. Farmers were almost revered. This was clearly a people who had their priorities straight.
At airport customs this young officer walked me right into a booth and performed a major search of my luggage. After scrutinizing my passport like a jeweler, he said, “You may go.” I said, “Nice doin’ business with ya,” and left. I’m walking toward the exit, and a little girl in a khaki uniform comes and says, “Excuse me, Mr. Helm, may I search your boots?” I said “Yes, ma’am, of course,” and she found my pocketknife. But that was no problem, and after we passed through two more rings of security, including .50-caliber machine guns mounted on army jeeps, it was hard to even find a policeman in Japan. I was already in love with the food, but the landscape and the people made a huge impression as well. The audience in Osaka wouldn’t let us go until we’d played some Band songs, which sent them into rapture and made me sad we’d never gone over there to play before. But Japan in those days was terra incognita for rock and roll bands. Coming back through Hawaii three weeks later, the U.S. customs officer said, “Mr. Helm, you’re not foolish enough to have any drugs on you, woudja?” And I said, “Buddy, after two weeks in Japan, you know I don’t have any drugs.” Because the country was dry as a bone.
Also in 1978 I went down to Muscle Shoals Sound studios in Sheffield, Alabama, to cut my second album for ABC, produced by Duck Dunn. We used that famous Roger Hawkins-Barry Beckett rhythm section they had there, plus Steve Cropper on guitar and the Cate Brothers on vocals. This album, Levon Helm, was released late in 1978 but didn’t make the charts without a tour to back it up. I was wondering what the hell I was gonna do.
That’s when I got the call that Michael Apted wanted me to read for Coal Miner’s Daughter.
I think it happened because my friend Brad Dourif brought Tommy Lee Jones to a Band concert when they were working on a movie called The Eyes of Laura Mars. Tommy Lee was a Texas boy who had been to Harvard and knew acting cold, and he and I got along real well from the start. So when Michael Apted was in Nashville working on preproduction for the Loretta Lynn movie, Tommy Lee kind of threw my name in the hat when they started having trouble casting the part of Ted Webb. Apparently they couldn’t find anybody in Hollywood that was “country” enough for the role. So I was proposed, and I think Conway Twitty might’ve put in a word to Loretta for me. Apted screened The Last Waltz and then had one of his people call me up. I figured that acting and singing were part of the same ball game and actually had the temerity to show up.
So I went to Nashville, and we sat in Apted’s office with the script. I immediately felt like a total fool. I’m reading Ted Webb’s part, and Michael’s reading Loretta’s part and calling me Daddy, and I’m calling him Loretta. I’m thinking, Why don’t they give this part to Brad? He’s the all-pro actor. My only acting experience had been in high school more than twenty years before, and I thought my reading sounded awkward and amateurish. In the end I just threw up my hands and had to laugh. Hell, I’d failed, but it was probably just a damn cameo anyway. Apted said thanks a lot, and I went back to Arkansas and told Sandy that I’d blown my “screen test.”
Three days later they called and said I had the part. I put down the phone, and Sandy said, “Lee, who was it?”
I said, “Honey, I feel like I’ve just rolled a pair of sevens!”
I was flattered as hell. If I’d had to sing or dance, I don’t know if I could’ve done it, but the part was such an honorable one. This man had labored in the mines for his family, and growing up in the cotton fields, I knew what it was like to bend over and sweat when you work. I felt that I knew what it was to work for the company store. I was also so scared of blowing it that I got real ambitious and researched the part until I felt I could be Ted Webb. I went up to Kentucky and met Loretta and her family. I talked to “Moonie,” Loretta’s husband, about Ted, studied photographs, and spent time with his son Herman Webb, Loretta’s brother, and tried to pick up on Herman’s ways a little. My main concern was getting it so that it didn’t irritate the family, that it would seem realistic to them. They were my most important audience. In the end it wasn’t a big transition because I’ve been around people like the Webbs all my life. Loretta’s parents were a little like mine. I knew that families like ours made up in love for one another what they might have lacked in material things. That was the feeling I wanted to create. Add the basic formality to people that makes life in the South a bit more pleasant, and that was the character.
That, plus the mines. Michael Apted arranged for me to spend a few days in a coal mine to see what it was like. They got out the obsolete brass dodgers and other old tools. I talked to the miners and their families to see what their lives were like. And I was real impressed. To be down there day after day takes a certain kind of nerve that I don’t have. We shot the mine parts of the film in a real mine, no props, and I was a little spooked by the claustrophobic conditions. Hang out in a coal mine for a couple of days, and you realize how strong these people have to be to survive.
So we’re driving to the location, and Tommy Lee is giving me the Jones crash course in acting.
“Levon, the most important thing you got to remember is, never look at the camera. It doesn’t exist. Forget about it. You know your lines [the cast had already sat down in Nashville and read through the script a couple of times], and Michael is gonna walk you through your scenes until you’re comfortable.
“Next, don’t move too quickly. There’s a rhythm, and you find it and plug into it. Don’t talk too fast either. You have to exaggerate your emotions to get your point across, but not too much. Let the director be the coach, and then do it your own way, and you’re gonna be great, man. Cause everyone’s excited about working with you. We’re all tickled you got that part.”
As the level on the Wild Turkey fell, Tommy continued to educate me about how to be on a movie set, how to deal with the assistant directors, the property masters, who to listen to, and who to watch out for. When we stopped at a little grocery in Kentucky, Tommy Lee started getting into it with the teamster who was driving us. I noticed the other customers were miners whose blue-gray eyes peered out of faces covered in coal dust. They were looking kinda funny at Tommy Lee, and I whispered, “Let’s get outta here now.”
Tommy thanked me the next day for saving him from himself. And by the time we pulled into the Suburban Motel in Whitesburg, Kentucky, Tommy Lee had managed to turn me into the beginnings of a movie actor.
They took me out to the location, and it was like going back in time. The film crew had rebuilt Butcher Hollow, Loretta’s hometown, completely, down to the number of corncribs behind the houses. Ted Webb’s house was re-created from old photos, but without the back porch and wall so the camera could come in. When the girls—Loretta and her sister—came in, they looked around and said, “No. . . no. . . out. . . that goes. . .” because the set designer had started out a little too fancy. Ted Webb didn’t own no brass bed. But eventually they got it accurate, down to the old newspapers lining the walls to keep out the cold.
We started work late in February and filmed for about six weeks, until old Ted Webb passes away. You had someone combing your hair, getting you dressed, telling you what you had to do, so it wasn’t any real problem. They had a terrific team of actors, and all of them helped pull me through. I even helped choreograph a scene where Tommy picks Sissy up and sashays her through the screen door after I give them my blessing to marry. It was a pretty nice dance move they did. Michael Apted was terrific. There was a difficult scene where I had to beat Sissy with a switch for staying out too late with Tommy Lee, a scene that seemed beyond my abilities at that time. I had to grab her and bring that switch down hard on her dress, and Sissy was so adorable that all the crew were scowling at me while I tried to play this right.
“Cut! OK, we’ll do it again.” And Michael would come over and say, in his veddy British voice, “It looks good, but if only you’d try it a little slower and mean it more. D’yew know what I mean?”
He actually made it fun for me to try to pull it off. He let us actors change words around a little to suit the way we spoke, and gave us enough slack to make something up. On the last take I brought that switch down like a whip and then broke it over my knee. I stomped through the door, like the scene called for, and the whole crew was making faces at me and whispering, “Booooo!” “Bully!” “Brute!” But it was a take.
I was sad when my character died and my part of the movie was over. I didn’t really want to get into the coffin for the big wake scene, but I also didn’t want to be thought of as superstitious or “difficult.” So I told Michael Apted he’d have to get in first to show me how to look. So he kind of warmed the thing up for me, good sport that he is. As the “mourners” gathered around to sing “Amazing Grace,” I had to sit bolt upright. It was like coming back to life.
“Cut!”
“It’s my funeral,” I told them, “and if you’re gonna sing ‘Amazing Grace,’ it’s gotta be the old-fashioned, traditional way.” And I taught ’em in my dead man’s makeup how to do it shape-note style like they would’ve back in the holler in those days. Some of the ladies they’d hired as extras turned out to be church choir singers, so once we got it off the ground it didn’t sound too bad. We rehearsed it a few times, then I got back in the coffin, and we shot the scene.
They wanted me to cut a version of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” for the movie sound track, and I had to swallow hard on that one and ask the producer how he’d like to follow the Blue Grass Boys and Elvis Presley. But I went into Bradley’s Barn Studios in Nashville with the Cate Brothers and Fred Carter, Jr., and after we did “Blue Moon” we figured why not put a little hay in the barn, so we cut twenty more tracks. Around the time Coal Miner’s Daughter came out in 1980, MCA (which had gobbled up ABC) released ten of these under the title American Son.
Coal Miner’s Daughter was a hit movie, and I got surprisingly good reviews. There was buzz of a possible Best Supporting Actor nomination by the Academy, but of course none was forthcoming. But I did manage to throw a scare into a few people all the same. I was and remain terminally modest about my acting abilities, but after that quite a few movie offers started to come my way, and for the next decade I took as many as seemed interesting. If there was a part for a country-type hick, I had a good shot at it. (And Playboy went and wrote that Levon Helm and Dolly Parton were the three best things to hit Hollywood that year.)
Five years after The Last Waltz I began to really miss The Band. I needed to be out playing music, so I teamed up with the Cate Brothers and went on the road, starting in Canada and then heading down to the States, where we played in theaters. The Cates, with my nephew Terry Cagle on drums, would open with a few of their own hits—“In One Eye and out the Other,” the ballad “Let It Slide”—and Ernie’s great vocals and Earl’s sizzling guitar would get everyone warmed up. I’d show up halfway through and get that double-drum attack going on things like “Milk Cow Boogie,” “Summertime Blues,” “Willie and the Hand Jive,” and “Bring It On Home.” At first we relied on Band material, but eventually we were doing only “The Weight,” which the customers basically demanded to hear, and “Evangeline,” familiar to our fans from the movie (and I got to play mandolin). I was more comfortable doing the American blues numbers I’d grown up with—Sonny Boy, Muddy—and the old rock and roll songs like “Short Fat Fannie.”
In 1982 I made an album for Capitol at Muscle Shoals and went on the road that spring playing clubs with the Muscle Shoals All-Stars. We’d get that jungle thing happening with “Willie and the Hand Jive,” and people would just dance. Rick Danko was restless too and went out as a duo with Paul Butterfield.
A few months later Rick came back to Woodstock to sell his house. We ran into each other outside Judge Forno’s Colonial Pharmacy on Mill Hill Road, and suddenly we realized we had to play music together. Rick is one of these people who is just so musical that he makes anyone who plays with him look good and feel better. Then Rick looked around and realized that Woodstock had shed its posthippie aura and had settled back into the quiet Catskill artists’ colony it had been for the sixty-nine years prior to the Woodstock Festival. He called Elizabeth in California and told her to pack up the kids and come on home. In early 1983 Rick and I did a club and college tour as an acoustic duo, playing a few Band songs (on the theory that sometimes less is more) and “Caledonia,” with Rick on guitar and me on harp and everyone in the house clapping along as the rhythm section. We sold out the Ritz in New York City and got booked into the Lone Star Café, one of our favorite places to play.
At five o’clock on a February evening Rick and I were doing our soundcheck when Bob Dylan strolled in wearing a cashmere coat and a big fur hat. He was between tours and said he was just hanging out in the Village when he heard we were playing. He said, “Whatcha playin’ tonight?” and I told him we liked to open with “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” one of his songs. He borrowed one of Rick’s guitars, I picked up the mandolin, and we played some old tunes together. He stayed until about nine o’clock, then disappeared.
Two hours later Rick and I were into “Short Fat Fannie,” the ninth song of our set, when we got word that Bob was hanging around the bar. Rick called him up to the stage, he took off his hat, and was handed a guitar. And amid the pandemonium of the packed house we played a rather liquid “Your Cheatin’ Heart” before launching into a funny medley of “Hand Jive” and “Ain’t No More Cane.”
We had a few laughs and a beer in the dressing room after the show, and then Bob was out the door, into the night. It would be a few years until we saw him again.
Muddy Waters died that year.
My film career was active enough in those days. I worked on the CBS series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and played the part of Major Jack Ridley, General Chuck Yeager’s sidekick in The Right Stuff. One night at the film’s desert location, I winked at Sam Shepard, who was playing General Yeager, and the two of us kind of drifted off into the shadows, where I lit a joint one of the crew had laid on me. Out of nowhere General Yeager himself walked over and said, “What are you boys doing, smokin’ pot?”
“Well, General,” I said, eager to change the subject, “I know you like to fish, but did you ever do any catfish doggin’ down in Arkansas?” Chuck Yeager just laughed at us and shook his head.
I’d usually try to see Richard when I was in California. He had stopped drinking in 1978, entered a detox program, and had been dry for several years. He seemed to be recovering from the behavior that had hurt him, and always would say something about getting The Band back together. “I thought we were just gonna take a vacation,” he said. “I never wanted to put The Band into some kind of time capsule. Let’s get back out on the road.”
Well, that was always my intention, especially since I’d seen how much the Japanese loved our music. I figured we still had some frontiers to conquer. Garth was busy working with a new band, the Call, and became an iconic presence on the new cable channel MTV, when the Call video “The Walls Came Down,” featuring Garth’s blistering synthesizer solo, went into heavy rotation. Robbie Robertson was working in Hollywood as musical director on Martin Scorsese pictures like The King of Comedy. When we re-formed The Band that summer, I said, “Let’s not invite him,” but I think Rick did call Robbie, and he passed. He told Rick he was afraid when we did The Last Waltz that people would think it was one of those phony show-biz retirements and that we’d be back with the Big Comeback someday, and he just didn’t want to do that.
But Richard told us he was gonna go nuts if we didn’t do something, and Rick and I... well, we never had it any different. Being on the road was our way of life, and we thought we should embrace it instead of running from it. As usual, Garth was the key. If he wasn’t willing, it wouldn’t happen. He was the one who made the rest of us sound a little more schooled, a little more polished. Yes, he grumbled about touring, but it was in his blood too, and eventually he said yes.
The question had always been who would replace Robertson if The Band got back together. My vote went to Earl Cate, whose skills and good taste with the Fender Telecaster were unmatched in my opinion. But the Cate Brothers Band was a family affair in more ways than one, and it came down to not wanting to break them up. There was also a brilliant young guitarist in Woodstock, Jimmy Weider, whom we’d known for years and all wanted to play with. So we hired Jimmy.
We called Harold Kudlets up in Hamilton, Ontario, and told him to book a tour of Canada for us. Then, so I wouldn’t have to actually rehearse, we hired three of the Cate Brothers Band and put The Band on the road as an eight-piece group.
“Jeezus, Levon!” the Colonel exclaimed over the phone when I told him about this. “You’re telling me that you’re replacing Robbie with a quartet?”
We debuted in Toronto in early July, selling out all six thousand seats. Then we swung around Canada, with the Cates opening by themselves before being joined by the four of us: Me, Garth, Rick, and Richard, who was older, a bit wiser, and in pretty damn good form. His falsetto singing on “I Shall Be Released” was incredibly moving, and “You Don’t Know Me,” performed as a tribute to Ray Charles, usually brought down the house. We did “Cripple Creek” and “Mystery Train,” and we could see that feelings ran high out in the audience. People sang along with these songs like they were old friends, and I think it was Richard who said to me after one show, “Levon, do you realize we have become these songs?”
I knew what he meant, even if I didn’t feel that comfortable with the idea.
People would always ask about Robertson, and Rick or I would explain that all of us were here because we wanted to be. If it doesn’t come from your heart, music just doesn’t work. Robertson was the only one who ever came out and said he wanted to hang it up. The most important thing was that the four of us were proud of the show. It was fresh. Garth was finding new sounds and playing the best of his life.
On July 21, 1983, in San Jose, we made our first U.S. appearance as The Band since The Last Waltz. We always felt good about playing the Bay Area, where we had been reborn as The Band, and did a couple of more shows and played the New York Folk Festival before taking the thing to Japan at the end of the month.
We sold out four shows in Tokyo, two in Osaka, and other towns like Nagoya and Sapporo. And I mean the Japanese kids poured enthusiasm all over us like we were part of their folklore. I thought things were going pretty good, and we were so impressed by how together the Japanese seemed to be. One night Richard told me, “Levon, these people have so much respect for each other it makes me ashamed to be Western.” There was actually a lot of tension because the Russians had just shot down the Korean airliner in the Sea of Japan, and people were pretty spooked.
We played theaters and clubs during the fall of 1983, and did a gig with the Grateful Dead at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse on October 22 before thirty-three thousand fans. We were pretty relieved that the press continued to be on our side. “The Band has context,” one of the local papers said after the show. “Their music sounded as deep as the Old Testament. If one of the great, noble stone faces at Mount Rushmore grew a heart, opened its eyes, and began to sing, the voice would have to be that of Levon Helm.” After a couple of sell-out shows at the Beacon Theater on upper Broadway in Manhattan, Rolling Stone wrote, “Perhaps most thrilling was the performance of the enigmatic, heartbreak-voiced Richard Manuel. Dark, handsome, and healthy-looking, Manuel romped through ‘The Shape I’m In’ and delivered the concert’s high point, a tender rendition of ‘You Don’t Know Me.’”
Film roles kept coming my way. If Hollywood needed a sheriff or father figure, sometimes I got the call. In 1984 I played opposite Jane Fonda in an ABC movie called The Dollmaker. We filmed a dope smuggler movie called The Best Revenge in southern Spain for a Canadian outfit; another project called Smooth Talk, with Laura Dern and Treat Williams; and I played a southern sheriff in a chase picture, The Man Outside, which was shot in Arkansas and had other members of The Band in cameos. Things were going pretty good. Then in the spring of 1984 the agent called and said they wanted me to play a U.S. marshal in a western based on Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. The script called for a couple of gun duels, so I went out back of my barn practicing quick-draw techniques with a .22 reproduction of a Colt .45 in a western-style holster.
Well, it ain’t easy to come out and say I shot myself in the ass with it, but that’s pretty much what happened. The gun went off in the holster, and I felt a searing pain as the bullet burrowed right behind my kneecap. First thing I thought was: That’s the leg you hit the bass drum with! Second thing: Levon, you’ve really done it this time.
Sandy was in the house, and this friend of mine was there. I told him, “We have to go. I have done it. I’ve really done it. Damn thing’s in there deep.” We loaded up pretty quick, I laid the bad news on Sandy, and she went white, although not as white as I was.
First stop was the pharmacy. Richard Young was there, and so was Jane, his wife. She put a piece of gauze over the back of this gaping hole in the back of my leg. Joe Forno, Jr., who was looking after Richard Manuel’s affairs, took over and got me to the hospital in Kingston. That started about ten real rough-ass hours. The first doctor who saw me shook his head and told us they might be able to save my leg. They took X rays and called the state police because it was a gunshot wound. Then they shipped me up to the big hospital in Albany. I spent the night with a slug in my leg, and in the morning the surgeon looked at me and said, “Mr. Helm, I’m gonna try to save your leg.” And I begged him to do just that. The nurse said they could give me a local or put me all the way out, and I told ’em, “All the way out, because what you all don’t understand is, this thing is on fire. It is on fire!”
I’d severed the tibial nerve, the main nerve running down the leg. They put it back together and repaired it, and said don’t play the drums for a couple of years—if you can play at all.
So I took some time off. That summer I played guitar in a septet we called The Woodstock All-Stars, with a wonderful local girl named Cindy Cashdollar playing dobro. “Singing the blues,” reported The New York Times of our Lone Star date, “the quality Mr. Helm expresses is a mixture of patience, true grit, and spiritual fire.” Stan Szelest was the real star of that band.
On Labor Day The Band played a memorial for our late friend Dayton Stratton on the tenth anniversary of his death after the ’74 Dylan tour. His wife, Lois, and eldest son, Randy, were carrying on the family business, and this was our first appearance in northwest Arkansas since the Hawks last played there in 1963.
The following year I sat down at the drums for the first time and realized I was going to be OK when I could play the “King Harvest” lick without too much pain. During the summer of 1985 we went on tour opening for Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but halfway through the tour we realized it just wasn’t paying with eight people in the group. The Cates went home, we kept Jimmy Weider, and continued as a five-piece through the rest of the tour. For me it was heartbreaking to see the boys go, but there was nothing I could do.
We were doing most of this stuff without any real manager. “There are no more real managers,” Richard Manuel would growl, and by that he meant the old-school types like Albert Grossman, who had a lot of power and looked after his clients. Albert and Richard were still connected, and there had always been talk of Richard writing and recording his own music. Joe Forno, Jr., was handling The Band’s business and tour affairs. Various people came and went in this era who called themselves our manager, but they never did much for us.
In October 1985 The Band was booked at a big outdoor show in Portugal. When we arrived at the soccer stadium where the Avante Festival was to be held, we noticed a lot of pretty red flags and bunting flying everywhere. It was a stirring sight. We learned later we had played for the annual youth picnic of the Portuguese Communist Party.
In November Richard went to his hometown of Stratford, Ontario, because his old band the Rockin’ Revols was reuniting after twenty-five years for a special show at the famous Festival Theater. Richard was nervous and excited. He’d rehearsed with his old mates the night before the show, and they realized they couldn’t even remember what they used to play. “Levon,” he told me later, “the people were just there. I could feel it, man. All the old crowd showed up, and there was this incredible teenage middle-age magic going on. People were yelling, ‘Richard! Richard!’ It was really something.”
Everyone wanted to see the Beak, as Richard was universally known in those parts. He performed beautifully for his people, and they welcomed him home with a huge, warm ovation. I know it meant an awful lot to Richard that he was able to return home in absolute triumph that night.
Then Albert Grossman had a heart attack on a February night eight miles over the Atlantic. When the plane touched down at London, Albert was pronounced dead. He was sixty-one years old.
They had a memorial service in Woodstock. Richard sang “I Shall Be Released,” and it tore everybody up. Robbie Robertson delivered a eulogy and said, “Every once in a while you meet a great teacher in life, and Albert’s been my teacher.”
Sitting in the back of the hall, John Simon wondered, What could Albert ever have taught Robbie except how to be a son of a bitch in business?
Albert was buried in a little grove behind the Bearsville Theater. In the summertime, young actors and actresses rehearse their lines in the clearing near his grave.
Albert’s death really got to Richard. It may have even seemed like an abandonment, because Albert was looking after Richard’s affairs, and I don’t think that Richard knew who to turn to anymore when things got bad.
The following month we headed down to Florida to play some shows. The guy who was booking us had scheduled it so we were traveling hundreds of miles between relatively small clubs. It was a lot of traveling and not much dignity. Everyone had a cold, and the crew started referring jokingly to this trip as the “Death Tour.”
We tried to laugh about it. We’d get to a club and set up, and someone would say, “Hey, Richard, how’s the piano?” Richard would pantomime hanging himself. The quality of the shows came down to Richard’s ability to perform. Could he sing the high notes to “Tears of Rage”? If he could, the shows were great. If not, no one liked them. He had started drinking since Albert’s death, and, to tell the truth, all of us backslid from time to time. Rick and Elizabeth Danko were trying to use their considerable influence with Richard to get him to slow down, and Rick said something to him like, “We’re disappointed in you.”
But Richard just growled, “Don’t nigger me, Rick!” He just wasn’t gonna be told what to do at that stage of his life.
On March 3 we arrived at an upscale fern bar called the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, outside Orlando, Florida. We set up and checked in at the local Quality Inn Motel. Rick and Richard both had their wives along; Garth and I were traveling alone. That night we played two sets for capacity houses of people who’d paid eighteen dollars apiece to get in. They went nuts over “Rag Mama Rag,” “Cripple Creek,” “Dixie,” and “The Weight.” Richard did “You Don’t Know Me,” and it made me want to cry.
After the show, Richard went up to Garth, who was busy packing his keyboards, and thanked him profusely for twenty-five years of good music and appreciation. Garth acknowledged this, but he was preoccupied with getting his fragile synthesizers in their hard cases so they could be shipped to the next gig. Back at the motel, Richard said good night to his wife, Arlie, and then came to my room, where we talked until maybe two or two-thirty. He wasn’t angry or too depressed, although he complained about the piano over at the lounge, and we did commiserate together on the hard touring conditions and the lack of respect it implied. He told me, “Levon, nothing hurts like selfdoubt. When you put that whammy on yourself, it can be real bother-some. And playing these little joints after playing in Japan, you just feel you’re slipping.”
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “You could get the feeling that you’ve slipped. But look: I like to think at the same time that every chance to play is a good time to test ourselves, then retest, and prove once again that it doesn’t matter. All we have to do is set down, give it some concentration, and do a dozen tunes, whatever it takes, until you get that same enjoyment that the kid gets when he falls into the end zone with the ball in his arms.
“We’re just musicians,” I told Richard. “We’re just working for the crowd. It’s the best we can do.”
Then we were just talking about songs and old movies on TV and people that we knew in common. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Around two-thirty Richard said he was going to his room for a few minutes and would come back to finish the movie we were watching.
Richard had left his room key in the room and woke his wife to get in. She said later he was annoyed and worked up about something, but I don’t what. He lay down on the bed, and she went back to sleep.
When she woke up later that morning, she was alone. Arlie said that she thought Richard had gone out to sleep on the tour bus, so she went across the street to get some breakfast and returned with a bag of coffee and pastries. She went into the bathroom and found Richard hanging from the shower rod. That was when she started to scream.
I was dead to the world. There was pounding on my door. It took maybe five minutes just to rouse me. When I opened the door I heard Arlie screaming, “He’s dead!!!”
I rushed into Richard’s bathroom and basically went into shock. Rick was holding back tears, and Elizabeth gave me a horrified look I’ll never forget. Richard had buckled his belt around his neck and looped the other end around the curtain rod, near the wall mounting where it would support his weight. Then he just sat down so hard that the screws had popped out of the mounting. But it had held, and Richard looked ghastly. I grabbed Richard and lifted him up while Rick got the belt loose. Then we carried him to the bed and got him down. I hit him in the chest, and I think Elizabeth tried cardiac massage, but hell, we knew he was gone. Paramedics arrived, and my hand shook violently as I lit a cigarette. Richard would have been forty-three in a few weeks. It was so sad and terrible to see this sweet, sad friend end like this. The tragedy was just overwhelming.
Soon the place was crawling with cops. They found an empty brandy bottle and an empty cocaine vial, and concluded that Richard had gotten drunk and committed suicide. Then the press got hold of it, and it was headlines all over the world the day after that.
When asked for a comment, Rick and I told reporters that we had no idea why Richard would end it all when we were selling out our shows, had just finished a movie, and were about to go into the studio to record.
But that wasn’t it at all. I knew what Richard had done. He wasn’t afraid of anything. I think he finally just got mad enough at the way things were that he sacrificed himself to shake things up, to make things change, to liberate himself from the earthly pain he lived with and expressed in his music. Richard had had a bellyful, and so he went right ahead and done it.
Because Richard was a true Christian man, you know? He knew that everything we’re doing down here is just the blink of an eye, or however it’s versed in the good book there. That’s the way Richard looked at it.
Richard had flirted, maybe halfheartedly, with the Reaper a few times before, and every time God threw him back to us. This time He decided to keep Richard Manuel for Himself. Wherever he is now, you can bet that Richard’s got a hell of a good band.
After the funeral in Canada, we actually went back on the road to keep some promises we’d made to club owners in Boston and New England. This was an insane thing to do, in retrospect, but Blondie Chaplin joined The Band and got us through until we could carry on no longer. We all attended a memorial for Richard in Woodstock, where his friends remembered Richard’s sensitivity, humor, concern for others, and his utter and total commitment to music. Our friend Happy Traum spoke sadly of the demons that had pursued Richard throughout his life, and people could only nod sadly in agreement.
And so we put that chapter of our communal history to rest.
Now there were only three of us left: Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, and me. I think we decided to let things drift for a few years until the right opportunities presented themselves. I hunkered down in Woodstock with Sandy, enjoying life and occasionally taking to the road with the Cate Brothers. After Richard’s death we had various augmented versions of The Band whenever called for. Fred Carter, Jr., played guitar on a tour we did in 1987 with Roy Buchanan opening some shows. I played some shows with drummer Max Weinberg of the E Street Band in 1987. Garth did a Band gig in Spain with the Cate Brothers one time because I didn’t feel like going. (We always figured it was still The Band if Garth showed up. Garth also played in Marianne Faithfull’s touring band around that time.) And after years of working on film scores, Robbie Robertson released a solo album featuring a song for Richard called “Fallen Angel.”
Paul Butterfield died that year. Then Roy Buchanan in 1988. All around us, we could see that a certain way of life was taking its toll.
I did a few more film roles and was lucky to get enough voice-over and commercial work as an actor to keep the cash flow interesting. When I wasn’t working I holed up with Sandy, and we usually had a couple of Arkansas boys living in the basement with standing orders to evict the stream of well-meaning but uninvited guests in constant search of Big Pink, The Band, and directions to the Woodstock Festival.
In 1988 our old and dear friend Ringo Starr checked into an Arizona clinic to dry out. When he came out, he got together with David Fishof, a New York agent, and they assembled a touring company called Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Review. Ringo was going to do his old Beatles songs and needed some friends who had enjoyed a few hits of their own. So Ringo and David put their heads together and hired what I considered a dream band: Billy Preston and Dr. John on keyboards, Rick Danko on bass, Clarence Clemons on sax, Joe Walsh on guitar, and Jim Keltner and me on drums. With Ringo, we had three drum kits set up onstage. We took this out on the road in the summer of 1989, and some reviewers said it was one of the best shows they’d ever seen. The old Beatles fans were very emotional toward Ringo, and when Rick and I would do a few Band songs, the amphitheaters and sheds that we’d sold out would simply explode.
But my elation of our success was tempered by the death of my mother that year. People who are close to me say that I’ve never gotten over it. Does one ever?
Ringo’s tour was rejuvenating. Rick and I felt excited about connecting so solidly with our fans. Some executives at CBS Records (which would soon be bought by Sony) thought the same way we did, and suddenly in 1990 The Band was offered a record deal. It felt like a real good second chance to get the people back on our side again, so we jumped at the contract and went to work at a studio near Woodstock with various writers, testing and recording songs.
I went home to Phillips County in May 1990 because I’d been invited to participate with Governor Bill Clinton in an unusual event.
The delta in May is green and beautiful, and it felt wonderful to be home. I went over to Turkey Scratch and saw our old family friend Sam Tillman, an eighty-year-old black retired farmer who reminded me that he’d had to put me over his knee once or twice.
So much in the delta had changed. Agribusiness had taken over the land, which was depopulated. The people now crowded into Helena and the other towns. All the farming is mechanized; the tractors have cold boxes so you can ride in comfort. You got Garth Brooks on the stereo. So much change, and yet still very much the delta of my roots.
Home is where they know you, and I had been asked to attend a ceremony at what was now called Historic Helena Depot. The Missouri Pacific railroad hadn’t run through old Helena in a long time, and a great organization called Arkansas Heritage was restoring the 1912 depot as the home of the Delta Cultural Center. On May 12 they brought an old caboose down the line and hoisted it with a crane so it would sit behind the depot as part of the exhibits. At ten-thirty that morning, Governor Clinton said to me, “So, Levon, which of us is gonna go first?”
I looked at the governor, a big man with a wide smile and knowing eyes. The guy was a good five years younger than me. He was wearing a dark suit, ‘cause this was official business. I’d just given him a couple of Band tie-dye shirts for his daughter, Chelsea.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“We have to say a few words. Why don’t you go first?” This was the first I’d heard about giving a speech. But they pushed me out there in front of several hundred people gathered around the depot. I looked around and saw so many people I grew up with and knew. I flashed back to the day Thurlow Brown’s big snake arrived in a broken crate at this old depot and they called Thurlow down to get it. I looked down Cherry Street, where Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson had walked. (Mr. Gist had just donated the building Sonny Boy used to rent for a Sonny Boy Museum.) Meanwhile, this red caboose was hanging in midair from a crane: totally surreal.
I just told the folks how my daddy had worked on that levee over there, and how his daddy probably had too. I told them how my parents had raised me and how the old levee camp music and swamp boogie that we liked to play down here had taken me all over the world, from Europe to Japan, but that the greatest honor I’d ever had was to be invited back to Helena that day to help dedicate a monument to the heritage we all shared in common. To me, that was the greatest.
When I finished, they were polite enough to applaud. I felt someone patting me on the back and turned. It was Bill Clinton.
By the end of 1990 we had gotten The Band the way we wanted it. As a peculiar facet of The Band’s penchant for teamwork, Richard had been both drummer and piano player, so it took two musicians to take his place. Randy Ciarlante was one of the best drummers I knew, and he was good enough to come on board to anchor us while I played my harp or the mandolin. For piano we tapped the great Stan Szelest, our former colleague in the Hawks and one of the best rock and roll piano players anywhere. Stan had some good songs he was working on, and he and Garth liked to play their accordions together. My father, J.D., was living with me that fall. We used to take him to Band shows, and sometimes he’d sing along on some old song like “In the Pines.” Those were good days, and I was full of hope that we were on our way into a whole new era.
Then we had a whole series of calamities.
In January 1991 Stan began to feel chest pains while rehearsing at my barn. Joe Forno was driving him over to the hospital when Stan suffered a heart attack and just died in the car. He was only forty-eight years old. We tried to comfort his wife, Caroline, as best we could, and she was a comfort to us as well, but it was a devastating blow. Then in April, a cruel month, Henry Glover died at age sixty-five. He’d been my mentor for more than thirty years, and it was a terrible loss for everyone who knew him. Only a few weeks later our barn burned to the ground. Faulty stove wiring was the verdict. The damn fire took near everything we had, although a concrete storage vault containing my archives and other important material survived intact. If Caroline Szelest hadn’t smelled smoke and woken us all up...
So J.D. returned to Arkansas to live with my sister Modena, and Sandy and I rented a house near Bearsville and tried to regroup. We had an album to do and gigs to play, so we invited Billy Preston into The Band. We’d known and loved this master musician—one of only two to play with both the Beatles and the Stones—for many years, and Rick and I had really dug his work on Ringo’s tour. Billy is a dancer, a showman who flashes lightning up onstage. His energy was just what we badly needed at that point, but then he had some legal trouble over in Malibu, where he has a ranch, and a California judge wouldn’t let him come to Woodstock.
That summer of 1991 Sony changed its mind. The executives who had believed in us thought they’d spotted a dismal trend in the lack of success of Robbie Robertson’s second solo album, as well as those of some other over-forty rockers who shall remain nameless. They bought out our record deal, and we didn’t have anything to say about it.
I tried not to let this stuff annoy me too much. We rebuilt the barn better than ever, this time out of good Catskill stone that isn’t gonna burn, God willin’. My daughter, Amy, is as beautiful as her mother and is beginning her own career as a singer. She’s got a great blues style and even got her picture in Rolling Stone with her old college band, Big Blue Squid. Meanwhile, Garth and I try to accommodate as many people as want to make the pilgrimage to Bearsville to record with us, and I’m in the fortunate position of turning down film roles and commercials that don’t seem quite right to me.
But anytime Ben & Jerry’s calls, I’m there.
We filled The Band’s piano chair with Rick Bell, another old friend from Canada. He was one of the Hawks that Albert Grossman had lured away to Janis Joplin’s great band many years before, so Rick is like family to us.
John Simon was recording a solo album in Woodstock early in 1992 for Pioneer in Japan, and some of us in The Band were helping him out when we realized that we had to work together again. Nobody, we understood, knew us like John. An independent record company in Tennessee called Pyramid Records picked up our option, so to speak, and that’s where that part of the story stands for now. John Simon is currently producing our next album.
Later in 1992 we got a call to appear at the big show in New York marking Bob Dylan’s thirty years of recording for CBS. We showed up at Madison Square Garden as a sextet: mandolin, two guitars, two accordions, and a trap drum. Backstage was like a reunion of our entire career, including John Hammond, Jr., Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Ron Wood, Johnny Cash and family, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, and many more than I can remember. We met a new generation of stars, like Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the guys in Pearl Jam. The stage band was Booker T. and the MGs, including Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper.
When it was our turn, Eric Clapton did us the honor of introducing us. He came onstage before we went on and said, “In 1968 an album came out called Music From Big Pink. It changed my life, and it changed the course of American music. Ladies and gentlemen, The Band.”
We walked out amid cheering. It had been many years since we’d faced down a crowd that big. We were all extremely proud to be there, because we all knew the debt we owed Bob Dylan could never be repaid. We were a bar band when he found us. We’d grown up and practiced our craft in honky-tonks and dance halls. We learned everything—songwriting, recording, stage shows—from watching him. It meant a lot for us to pay tribute to him that magical night.
There were six of us: Garth, Rick, Jimmy Weider, Rick Bell, Randy Ciarlante, and me. We did “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in a two-accordion arrangement. Afterward Danko and I barged in on Bob to thank him for inviting us. It had been ten years since I’d seen him. “Glad you could make it,” he said, shaking hands. “I’m gonna be seeing you again soon.” I was going to ask what he meant when they called him up onstage to do his songs.
* * *
And so that’s my story. I’m fifty-three years old as of this writing and still going strong. The Band works as much as it can, and when we come to your town to promote our new record, we’re expecting to see you there.
As for the other characters in our ongoing drama, let me see if I can summarize...
My daddy, Jasper Diamond, passed away in late 1992 at the age of eighty-two. My two sisters and brother, Mary Cavette and her sisters, Anna Lee Williams, Fireball Carter, and Mutt Cagle are all alive and well, thank God. But Harold Jenkins—Conway Twitty—passed on in 1993.
Ronnie Hawkins still lives up in “Mortgage Manor North” outside Toronto and still plays the bars up there. His son Robin and beautiful daughter Leah are in the band, and when the Hawk gets goin’ on “Who Do You Love,” that old rockabilly spirit comes alive. Hawk may be pushing sixty, but some things never change. Not long ago Rick and Elizabeth Danko were at the airport in Oslo, Norway, waiting for a plane to New York. At the other end of the lounge they heard a familiar voice going, “Yeah, these young girls only impress me when they bring their own apparatus!” Rick turned to Elizabeth and said, “Do you know who that sounds like?” Sure enough, it was Ronnie coming through town on one of his own Scandinavian tours.
Colonel Harold Kudlets is retired in Hamilton, Ontario. Morris Levy died in 1990 with jail time hanging over his head. The old Hit Man of Roulette Records never served a day, no matter what they said about him.
Woodstock is Woodstock again. As a friend of mine said the other day, “Woodstock is still great. The only reason that Butterfield and them aren’t hanging out here anymore is that they’re dead.”
Libby Titus, mother of my daughter, lives in Bob Dylan’s old house above Woodstock, and in New York, where she’s involved in the music business. Albert Grossman’s widow, Sally, still runs Albert’s Bearsville empire. Jane Manuel works for the organization.
Rick Danko works as a solo artist when The Band is inactive. He had to endure the loss of his son, who died of a breathing ailment while at college. He has since collaborated with folk singer Eric Andersen and Norwegian singer Jonas Fjeld, and remains my brother in arms. Garth Hudson keeps busy as a sound consultant to synthesizer manufacturers, and he’s working on computer software relating to the history of R&B and jump-band music. He and his wife, Maud, recently moved back to their house near Woodstock after years in California.
Robbie still lives in Southern California. His wife is a successful therapist specializing in drug and alcohol recovery. Robbie is in the music business, releasing albums and working on other projects, most recently one involving the late Roy Orbison’s last recordings. Every year he helps to induct great musicians into the nonexistent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that will supposedly be built in Cleveland some day.
It ought to be in Memphis, or—even better—Helena, Arkansas.
Not long after Bob Dylan’s thirtieth-anniversary concert, Bill Clinton of Arkansas was elected President of the United States. And as true sons of Arkansas, The Band had the honor of providing the musical entertainment for the “Blue Jean Bash,” an unofficial inauguration barbecue for twenty-five hundred Arkansawyers and Bill Clinton’s campaign staff, held in the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, three days before Bill took office.
We had a soundcheck in the hall—the largest indoor columned building in North America—on the night before the show. Artist Peter Max was hanging his giant posters, and the champion barbecue chefs who’d come up from Little Rock were preparing giant ice sculptures of razorback hogs. The Cate Brothers were on the bill, along with Dr. John, Clarence Clemons, Vassar Clements, Steve Stills, and other old friends. The Secret Service were all over the place, and it looked like the Blue Jean Bash was gonna have some visitors.
Around midnight I was playing drums with Randy Ciarlante and Porky, who plays with the Cates, when a figure crouched down at my left elbow. He had on a baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses. A hooded sweatshirt lettered “New York Americans” was pulled over his hat. It seemed that he was talking to me.
I looked again. It was Bob Dylan.
I knew he’d come. His manager had called Joe Forno a few days before to say that Bob wanted to be there with us when Arkansas took over the country.
And now Bob was saying, “So, uh, Levon, howya doin’? What’s up?”
I said, “Bob, anything you wanna do is fine with us, ’cause we really appreciate you coming by.”
Communication between us was more instinctive than anything else.
I said, “We’re just playing some blues, but, you know, if you call a tune we’ll be there.”
He thought for moment, and said, “How’s about ‘To Be Alone With You’?”
Bob showed up the next night and came on after the Hawk had finished “Who Do You Love.” The crowd screamed in delight when Bob walked out at the end of the show in his cowboy hat and went into “To Be Alone With You.” U.S. senators were dancing next to the stage! The finale was “I Shall Be Released,” and it seemed like everyone knew the words. Being the mischievous type, Bob Dylan didn’t sing along.
Yeah! That’s all she wrote. I’ve come a long way from Turkey Scratch, but in my heart I’m still Lavon, the hambone kid in the 4-H show. In fact, the main thing that still gets my juices flowing is to get over to the venue on the night of the job, wherever it might be, anywhere in the world. The man that’s running the joint knows we’re coming, and he invites me in and helps me set up my stuff. We play some music, and then he pays us. That’s the only way I ever wanted it.
As for The Band, we never sold millions of records or got attacked by groupies, but we’re still here. We never thought our “career” was more important than the music. That’s our whole story right there.
“They were grown men,” wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer, “who had climbed the mountain together, spoken to the gods, and returned to the valley, where they once again became mortal.”
Hell, all I know is that I haven’t had to cultivate cotton since I was seventeen.