ON VALENTINE’S DAY in 1975, a hundred or so hardy souls huddle together on Woodstock’s frigid village green to witness an unusual event. America’s greatest living blues man, McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield, is being presented with the keys to the town. “To see the whole town turn out for Muddy, right on the green, was really something,” Levon Helm will recall years later. “He got out of the car, and everybody started applauding. And I swear he had a tear in his eye.”
Helm has just wrapped a two-day recording session with Waters at the Turtle Creek barn. For the Band drummer, bringing the Chicago blues man to Woodstock is almost the crowning moment of his own career as a musical disciple. To him, Waters is the real, unvarnished thing, a high priest of the blues. “He had a face like a king,” Bobby Charles, whose song “Why Are People Like That” will kick off The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, will say. “He was a king.”
The Turtle Creek sessions, produced by former King Records legend Henry Glover for his and Helm’s new production company RCO, are also a bracing tonic for a Southerner who feels sated by the overly sweet life of Southern California—a chance for Helm to get back to his roots not only with Waters but with Paul Butterfield, who jammed with Waters as a teenager. Joining those three men in the barn are Garth Hudson, who plays organ and accordion on the album, and the Band’s go-to horn man, Howard Johnson.
If Helm has enjoyed the fringe benefits of Bob Dylan’s Tour ’74—not to mention the Malibu lifestyle that Dylan has plugged the Band into—in his gut he feels uneasy about all of it. The problems the group suffered in Woodstock are only exacerbated in California. “Levon knew it was all wrong, and he wanted to get the fuck away from it,” Libby Titus will say. “On the surface it was all so beautiful, and underneath everything was so rotten.” (Titus’s own addiction is in full flow at this time.) By the spring of 1974, not only have Titus and Helm split—Titus taking up with Mac Rebennack, Helm with his future wife Sandy Dodd—but Helm has come to believe that Robbie Robertson was only lobbying for the Band to switch coasts out of self-interest. Long intrigued by film, Robertson now has an in with Martin Scorsese, whose Mean Streets was coproduced by Jonathan Taplin. “Robbie was obviously very ambitious and socially very adroit,” says Peter Coyote. “At Emmett Grogan’s wedding he was wearing a turtleneck sweater and jacket. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is a very sophisticated guy; this isn’t Scruffy Eddie on the hill at Woodstock.’”
A blues titan comes to the Catskills, February 1975
The Band’s other members have found it trickier to adapt to the chic milieu of Malibu. “We were like fish out of water,” Libby Titus will say. “It was a floating gold iceberg, white beach houses and $3,000-a-month rents, but it was all completely unreal.” Especially displaced is Richard Manuel, who was never cut out for the Hollywood rock lifestyle and who has begun a chaotic relationship with new girlfriend Arlene Litvak. “Richard was renting a place Goldie Hawn owned at Point Dune, near where Dylan had his domed house,” says Ronnie Lyons. “He tried to kill himself several times there. He almost burned the house down after trying to set himself on fire. Then he shot himself in the head with a BB gun. I don’t know how he went so crazy.”
Nor is it just Manuel who experiences the dark side of La-La Land. Rick Danko will tell Al Aronowitz that someone came to his house and killed himself right in front of his second wife, Elizabeth. “They were rolling in the excess of the time,” says Peter Yarrow. “Not all of them. There was sane Robbie, and there was Garth. But Rick was one of the looniest people I’ve ever known. The results of improvident living had come home to roost.”
BY THE TIME Muddy Waters’ Woodstock album was released in April 1975, Levon Helm had returned to L.A., where Robbie Robertson was finishing up a new project: the exhumation of the fabled basement tapes, hitherto available only in selections on bootlegs like Great White Wonder. Did Dylan want those tapes released, or had Robertson pressured him into doing the Band a favor? And was the double album Columbia released in June 1975 an authentic document of what Garth Hudson had taped at Big Pink?
In time it transpired that Robertson had not only cleaned up the sound but overdubbed new parts onto the original reel-to-reel tracks. More disingenuously still, the songs featuring Helm postdated the 1967 basement recordings and were taped either at the Wittenberg Road house he shared with Rick Danko or during demo sessions for Music from Big Pink. (Robertson and engineer Rob Fraboni even remixed tracks such as “Yazoo Street Scandal” to make them sound muddier than they actually were.) Yet “the Historic Basement Tapes” made for a rollicking good listen all the same, vindicating the underground hype that had followed them around for seven years. The best Dylan songs exuded the spirit of stoned glee that he and his Canadian henchmen experienced as they opted out of the Summer of Love. Though the Dylan cognoscenti bemoaned the absence of “I’m Not There,” “Sign on the Cross,” and “I Shall Be Released,” reviewers warmed to the soaring choruses of “Goin’ to Acapulco” and “Open the Door, Homer.”
Robertson was simultaneously supervising sessions for the Band’s next album. Both projects were worked on at Shangri-La, the group’s new studio-cum-clubhouse at Zuma Beach, though getting all five of them together under one roof proved as challenging as it had in Bearsville. It was no coincidence that the opening song on Northern Lights–Southern Cross was a coded commentary on heroin addiction called “Forbidden Fruit.”
Touring the album in early 1976 turned out to be the last straw for Robertson. Fired up by the sideline career he’d started as a producer—working with Neil Diamond on Beautiful Noise—the Band’s de facto leader felt growing resentment from Helm and growing alarm at the state of Manuel. “I was really concerned about Richard,” he told me. “His health was failing. And it was like, ‘We’ve got to figure out how to avoid putting him in situations he can’t live up to.’” Tired of being the group’s only grown-up, Robertson pondered ways to wind the Band down: “I said, ‘Maybe we should take a period of time and really concentrate on writing and helping Richard getting his health organized.’” Perhaps he even realized that Los Angeles was not the wisest choice of environment for Helm and Danko, let alone for Manuel. “The whole atmosphere over the music scene at that time, there were some dirt clouds going over,” he said. “I was seeing a lot of people in bad shape, and we weren’t doing so good ourselves. I just thought, ‘We’ve gotta get off the road.’”
In the summer of America’s centennial year, Robertson aired the idea of a farewell show that would give him the exit he needed. His bandmates may not have grasped the full implications of the event he was planning with Bill Graham at Winterland, where the Band had played its first show. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we have this celebration where we do something really musical with a bunch of our friends that we really love?’” Robertson says. “It all just felt really good, and it started out that it was just going to be Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan. And then it was like, ‘Well, if we’re gonna invite them we should invite him and her . . .’ So it naturally grew and then took on this thing of wanting to represent the different flavors of who we were.”
Through Jonathan Taplin came a meeting with Scorsese, who instantly said yes to the idea of filming the Thanksgiving Day show. Everyone except Helm was excited. “It wasn’t really his thing,” Robertson says. “He was just going along with all of this.” Ironically, many viewers of Scorsese’s film of the Last Waltz thought that—for all the camera’s feasting on Robertson’s smoldering good looks—it was Helm who stole every scene he was in. “He was the one who garnered all of the Band charisma,” says Robbie Dupree. “He was the one who always said something that was quotable, while Robbie just appeared to be lip-synching.”
What really irked Helm about the Last Waltz was the last-minute decision to shoehorn Neil Diamond into the show. (“What the fuck is he doing there?” asked Albert Grossman, who’d flown in from New York.) For Robertson to justify Diamond’s inclusion because it “represented that Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building period” was one thing; to ask that Muddy Waters’ contribution be trimmed to make room for him made Helm apoplectic. In the end, both men got to perform—as did Dylan, Paul Butterfield, Bobby Charles, Mac Rebennack, Van Morrison, and others who’d spent time with the Band in Woodstock—but Helm never forgave Robertson for getting his priorities so wrong. And it only further convinced him it was time to return to Woodstock, where—in Libby Titus’s words—he’d “staked out this swampy Ponderosa off Plochmann Lane.”
By the spring of 1977, when the Band’s lamentable last album Islands was released, Helm’s new RCO studio had been built on the Plochmann Lane property. He’d also pulled together the RCO All-Stars, comprising Butterfield, Rebennack, the three surviving members of Stax powerhouse Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and a group of horn players led by Howard Johnson. Helm was as happy as a pig in clover. “What a group that was,” says Geoff Muldaur. “How did that not work? You hear that music, and you go, ‘Well, there’s the best band in the world right now, so . . . where are they?!’” The answer to that riddle was that most of those All-Stars, like Helm himself, had succumbed to the slothful self-indulgence so endemic to late-seventies Woodstock. It was easier to tread water rehashing good-time blues songs—while abusing the usual cocktails of drugs and alcohol—than to attempt something vital or innovative.
The supporting cast of Woodstock hangers-on didn’t help. “The thing that struck me about the place,” says Kasim Sulton, “was all these wannabe rock stars and wannabe managers and wannabe drug dealers. The vast majority of those people wanted to present themselves as having a fabulous time when really they were just mooching off somebody else. It wasn’t so much nepotistic as incestuous. I was twenty-two and had just come from New York City, and now I had to spend my time in this bucolic do-nothing town where if you weren’t an alcoholic or sleeping with somebody else’s wife, you weren’t accepted. So naturally I became an alcoholic and started sleeping with somebody else’s wife!”
Levon and his All-Stars at the RCO barn, 1978
When Village Voice writer Perry Meisel came to town in early 1976 to visit his friend Dolph Menzies—a roadie who was house-sitting Helm’s unfinished RCO studio—he found the experience deeply disillusioning. Where once a “hip tension” had reigned in Woodstock, with Dylan’s and the Band’s doors necessarily closed to outsiders, the departures of the town’s biggest stars had exposed the sad reality behind its rock dreams. “Woodstock seems to have been woven out of so many contradictions that it couldn’t have held on for long in any case,” Meisel noted. “The sweet country setting got cancelled by big city tensions; the ambience of a retreat by the prevailing deference and cool; the number of musicians by a lack of studios and clubs in which they could play. And, to top it off, a massive pop investment in the myth of Woodstock got cancelled by the dearth of real musical activity there. No wonder the air festered and people began to clear out.”
When Meisel went to the Bear for dinner with Menzies, he observed that the place was “full of flannelled scenoids who converse in a quiet, cool hush like the one that prevails in the deserted roads of the village.” Returning to Manhattan the next day, he wondered if what he’d witnessed wasn’t something like the death knell of rock’s sixties promise. “I wondered why I kept hanging out and kept playing,” he wrote, “even after the music and the people had both become absurd.”
AT THE BEAR, Perry Meisel had waited twenty long minutes for Paul Butterfield to vacate the men’s room. The thirty-three-year-old harmonica master may not have been absurd, but he was a pale shadow of the force he’d been in 1965, or even in 1973. After Better Days unraveled, he got to make his first solo album. Produced at Bearsville by Henry Glover, the big-budget Put It in Your Ear featured an all-star scrum of musicians supplying slinky grooves behind him. But the songs—whether funky, slushy, or just routinely bluesy—were dull, with only the weary Southern-soul ache of Bobby Charles’s “Here I Go Again” offering redemption. Butterfield simply wasn’t a strong enough singer to carry the material, and there was too little harmonica on the record. When Ian Kimmet met him for the first time, he was ballsy enough to say he didn’t like Put It in Your Ear. “[Paul] looked me right in the eyes and asked, ‘You didn’t like my record with Henry Glover?’” Kimmet recalled. “[He said,] ‘Do you know who he is?’”
To Kimmet, Butterfield “seemed asleep” in the late seventies. “He was at the bar at the Joyous Lake 24/7,” says Valma Merians. “He couldn’t play the blues until he got sad and stoned, and then you’d have no idea how he would play.” Old friends were appalled to learn that Butterfield’s addiction had progressed to a full-scale heroin habit. “It blew my mind how he got into the drug thing when he’d been so down on drugs,” says Barry Goldberg. “It was as if he’d dwindled down egotistically in Woodstock and lost his identity.” Lynne Naso remembered Butterfield as “such a beer guy, Chicago-Irish all the way.” When she visited him in Woodstock, she was “horrified and terrified” by his drug use and tried to help him get straight.
“Paul’s insides were dissolving,” says Jim Rooney, who drove all the way from Nashville after hearing that Butterfield was close to death. “He wound up in the Kingston hospital and almost bought it. He suffered from an Irish disease I call ‘terminal cuteness.’ He always thought he was exempt, but eventually he was only fooling himself.” Diagnosed with peritonitis, Butterfield underwent several grueling operations at the turn of the decade and was forced to wear a colostomy bag. “One time I saw my dad get upset, so I followed him around the back of a club he was playing,” says Gabe Butterfield. “I said, ‘Dad, are you alright?’ And he goes, ‘Fuck off!’ And I noticed that he was opening his shirt and emptying his bag in the gutter.”**
Through all of this, Albert Grossman stayed loyal. “On the few occasions I saw him with Butterfield,” says Danny Goldberg, “Albert treated him with the greatest respect as someone who, regardless of whether he was making money from him or not, was to be regarded as a major figure. And when I knew Butterfield as a Bearsville artist, he was long past that.” Mark McKenna witnessed Grossman’s pain up close: “He really loved Paul, and it broke his heart to see him fall apart the way he did. But Albert never presumed to tell people how to live their lives. His philosophy was self-reliance.”
In the fall of 1978, Ian Kimmet set up a Butterfield appearance on the German TV show Rockpalast with a band featuring Buzzy Feiten on guitar. “It was a spirited performance, but Paul wasn’t fit, and he didn’t have any material ready when Buzzy arrived for rehearsal,” Kimmet says. “We edited the entire performance down to perfection back in Woodstock, but when we listened to it, Albert said it was substandard.” Grossman tried to rekindle the Butterfield magic with the help of Todd Rundgren. “Paul comes in, and Todd says, ‘Whaddya got?’” remembers Kasim Sulton. “Paul says, ‘I don’t have anything.’ Todd says, ‘Well, we’re supposed to record something.’ So Paul says, ‘Why don’t you guys come up with something?’ Todd goes, ‘Oh my God, this is just torture.’” Butterfield was in such poor shape that he even declined an opportunity to support Eric Clapton on a European tour.
As a last throw of the Bearsville dice, Grossman packed Butterfield off to Willie Mitchell’s studio in Memphis. He had signed up the Hi Records producer as Bearsville’s executive director of Memphis operations in 1979. “I did a lot of projects with Willie,” says Ian Kimmet. “He liked coming up to Woodstock, and we looked after him here. In Memphis it sounded exactly like the old Hi Records, but we had moved on. Things were bolder and brasher.” Butterfield’s 1980 album North-South was neither bold nor brash, just sterile and irrelevant. Only the slow closer “Baby Blue” sounded like authentic Butterfield. “It would have been nice to say to Paul and Albert, ‘Let’s wait a year and get some good tunes together,’” said Elizabeth Barraclough, who accompanied Butterfield to Memphis. “[But] Albert was always ready to go with an artist if he said he had the songs together. [His] final word was often, ‘I don’t care—let them make the record. And if it doesn’t work out, well, whatever.’”**
Back in Woodstock, Butterfield saddled up with Rick Danko, who’d returned to the East Coast after the failure of his self-titled solo debut.** Through the early eighties, the two reprobates played numerous gigs together, usually in any northeastern bar that would have them. “My dad and Rick loved each other,” says Gabe Butterfield, “but they were not a good couple.” Paul Mozian, who booked gigs for them at venues such as New York’s Lone Star Café, says Butterfield was forever scamming: “He’d say, ‘Mozian! You got fifty bucks?’ And I’d say, ‘After the first set, Paul.’ Rick, no matter what shape he was in, could always perform. Butterfield I was never so sure about.”†>†
Butterfield eventually left Woodstock, though not without a protest. “He didn’t want to sell his house, but he had to,” says Gabe Butterfield’s wife, Liz. “When the listing agent showed up at the front door, Paul opened it in his underwear with a shotgun.”
HAVING MADE THREE undistinguished albums of his own—and after surviving a bitter custody battle with Libby Titus over their daughter—Levon Helm began talking about a Band reunion in early 1983. The very notion appalled Robbie Robertson, who felt it made a mockery of the Last Waltz, but he opted not to block the Band Is Back tour that kicked off at the Joyous Lake on June 25, 1983. “Instead of coming up with new material they just repeated all their old material,” John Simon said. “Whereas the audience when they first came out was intellectual-thinking people, . . . the younger people were just, ‘Play “Take a Load Off Fanny”!’ It had gotten to be what I call the vomit-and-sawdust crowd.”
By the following spring, Richard Manuel too had returned to Woodstock, with Arlie Litvak in tow. Both were in bad shape; Manuel even thought he had AIDS. “They were almost like poor stepchildren,” says Mark McKenna. “Richard used to come up to the studio, very meekly, and say, ‘Is anybody working today? Can I play the piano?’ And we’d say, ‘Sure, of course.’ Honestly, they were just adrift. The music business in its infinite wisdom had passed them by.”
“There were some times when it didn’t seem like very many people were pulling for us at all,” Helm said in 1998. “Except when we would go and play, and the people that showed up to hear us play wanted to hear ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘King Harvest’ and all those old songs. That’s what got us through.” Intermittent gigs didn’t make a lot of difference, though, when Danko and Manuel were struggling with heroin habits. “I came home one time about three in the morning, and Richard was loading up his car with boxes,” remembered Al Aronowitz, whom Grossman had installed in one of his Turtle Creek cabins. “I didn’t realize what it was until I got into my house and saw that he’d stolen my record collection.”
Aronowitz believed Danko had burgled him too. “I was in Al’s apartment, and he was showing me a picture of Dylan and Lennon together,” says Stan Beinstein. “Rick came over and started to noodle on this Mexican guitaron that Al had. Al said, ‘You took something from me.’ Danko said, ‘I didn’t take nothing.’ Al said, ‘You’re a fuckin’ liar.’” Though Aronowitz became notoriously bitter in his later years—often grouching about how Dylan had cut him off—he certainly didn’t deserve to be robbed by junkies. “I didn’t talk to Rick for a long time after that,” he told me. “We were supposed to be friends.”**
Ian Kimmet was present when Manuel told Grossman that Robbie Robertson was going to produce a solo album for him. “Albert just rolled his eyes at me,” Kimmet says. Yet it was thanks to Grossman that Manuel underwent detox and eventually stayed sober for a period. For a while he held down a regular spot at the Getaway Lounge on Route 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties. There he specialized in his favorite Ray Charles songs—and in Tin Pan Alley classics like Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets”—going so far as to tell the Woodstock Times that he was “irked to the point of telling [my bandmates], ‘Fellas, this is it, I’m going on with my own career.’”
“It was like they never really left Turkey Scratch in Arkansas or some barnyard in Ontario,” says Jonathan Donahue. “Rick and Richard went crazy, but they probably would have been crazy whether they had a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand.” For Michael Friedman, who’d known them since 1969, Danko and Manuel were “two of the nicest people” he’d ever known: “There were no pretenses or phony bullshit with them. I felt so bad when things went wrong for them.”
In the summer of 1985—with Garth Hudson and his Mormon wife, Maud, having made their own move back to Woodstock from L.A.—the Band toured as support to Crosby, Stills & Nash. Depressed that they were resting on their laurels and not moving forward, Manuel had already fallen off the wagon. Now he was drinking to dull the futility every alcoholic knows. “The last time I saw him was at a dealer’s house,” says Jeremy Wilber. “What I remember most is these big gleaming store-bought teeth he had. They were just so out of place.” The following spring, the Band set off to play two shows in a lounge on the outskirts of Orlando. “It didn’t look good to me,” says pianist-producer Aaron “Professor Louie” Hurwitz, who’d worked with them for a year. “They didn’t look too healthy.” In the early hours of March 4, after playing a second set at Winter Park’s Cheek-to-Cheek Lounge, Manuel hanged himself in his motel room. “He was one of the greatest singers ever,” says Peter Yarrow. “The loss of him was crushing to all of us.”
For Helm, the suicide was proof of the sheer unfairness of Robbie Robertson taking the lion’s share of the Band’s royalties. For the rest of his days, the drummer railed against the guitarist for not doing right by his musical brothers. “That’s really what broke the Band up, and made everybody go to drugs and dope and death and nuts,” he said in 2000, the year Robertson landed a plum gig as a “creative executive” at David Geffen’s new DreamWorks label. “[It] made everybody into a has-been.”
For years the opposing camps have continued to debate the rights and wrongs of the Helm/Robertson feud. With some validity, those on Robertson’s side point out that it was he who got up in the mornings and wrote (most of) the songs; those on Helm’s think a “band” is by definition a collaborative entity. “One guy writes the song, but they all add something to the process,” says Michael Friedman. “It was very uneven and very unfair, and I’m sure Albert made more money than anybody except Robbie.”
If anything, Paul Butterfield was in worse shape than even Richard Manuel had been. “A lot of people worried about [Paul],” Bonnie Raitt said. “The eighties were a very rough decade for a lot of us. Our kind of music was completely off the air. We really felt disenfranchised.” But where Raitt bided her time—and stopped drinking and snorting—Butterfield piled it on. “He looked terrible and seemed very weak,” Sally Grossman recalled of a dinner with him at Deanie’s early in 1987. “He kept falling asleep at the dinner table. After he left, I called Rick Danko and told him I thought Paul was very close to death.”
She wasn’t wrong. On May 7, at age forty-four, Butterfield overdosed and died in an apartment in North Hollywood. “I went to his funeral in Westwood,” said the L.A.-based writer Eve Babitz, who’d had an affair with him. “It was a huge gathering—the entire music business was there. All the people that loved Paul, his family and all the women in his life.” Sally Grossman told Mark McKenna that it was a Buddhist ceremony. “Apparently they tried to burn a picture of Paul in a fire,” McKenna says. “But it wouldn’t burn.”
* There was a grim but unheeded warning for Butterfield when, in mid-February 1981, Mike Bloomfield was found dead—dumped by his drug buddies in the front seat of his car—after overdosing at a party in San Francisco. Just three months earlier, Bloomfield had joined Bob Dylan onstage at the city’s Warfield Theatre to perform “Like a Rolling Stone.”
* Another Bearsville artist who made the pilgrimage to Mitchell’s studio was Jesse Winchester, whose Talk Memphis (1981) at least spawned a minor hit in “Say What.” For Winchester it was actually a homecoming: he had spent his formative years in the city of Sun, Stax, and Hi.
* Recorded at Shangri-La, 1977’s Rick Danko featured three cowrites by Bobby Charles—including “Small Town Talk”—and four by Emmett Grogan. “Emmett moved into the Band’s bailiwick because they were the hippest guys he had access to,” says Peter Coyote. “But they were also junkies, and I’m sure he was their connection.” A year after the release of the album, Grogan was found dead of a heroin overdose on the F train to Coney Island. Bob Dylan, always partial to an outlaw, dedicated Street Legal to his memory.
† “An unsuccessful alcoholic doesn’t have any fun,” Danko quipped in October 1980. “A successful alcoholic looks forward to not having any fun.”
* Aronowitz, Bearsville’s Vinnie Fusco wrote, “has been defamed, humiliated, persecuted, tormented and driven insane, [but] Albert Grossman has just rescued him.” Fusco’s letter was included in the photocopied Blacklisted Masterpieces of Al Aronowitz, launched at the Bearsville Theatre in June 1981. “Tom [Pacheco] came and sang me some of his songs,” Aronowitz wrote of the evening. “Listening along with me was my old friend Levon Helm.” Pacheco opened his 1997 album Woodstock Winter with the nostalgic “Hills of Woodstock,” a song that described Grossman as “a feudal lord . . . smiling most inscrutably.”