Remembering Levon Helm

Off of this mountain

The Economist, Apr 25th 2012, 15:34 by J.F | ATLANTA

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/04/remembering-levon-helm

IN 1968, a year after George Harrison moaned and twanged his sitar and a year after the Grateful Dead released the first (or second, or really what does it matter) of their interminable psychedelic "rock" albums, and a year before a dirty-hippie puff-in forever sullied the name of a perfectly pleasant upstate New York town, Bob Dylan's back-up band rented a pink house near that same town, and produced one of the greatest rockalbums ever recorded. Like most great art, the album's sound was at once radical and inevitable. It blended country, blues, soul and folk music into something uniquely and enduringly American, which was all the more surprising given that only one member of the band was American. The rest were Canadian. The band was The Band, and the American's name was Levon Helm. He died last Thursday, aged 71.

The Band had been touring with Mr Dylan for three years when they decided to record an album of their own, but they had been together much longer than that. They began coming together in 1958 as part of The Hawks, a back-up band for Ronnie Hawkins, a country-rock singer who found acclaim in Canada. They struck out on their own in 1964 as the Levon Helm Sextet, then called themselves the Canadian Squires and then Levon and the Hawks. So by the time they finally made Music From Big Pink, they had been playing together, more or less, for a decade. It showed. They sounded comfortable together. Each member played multiple instruments. While other bands dabbled in eastern religion and esoteric pronouncements in their lyrics, The Band opted for an idiosyncratic, Southern-influence Americana. There were Biblical echoes in "The Weight" (reference to Nazareth) and "Daniel and the Sacred Harp", and Southern gestures in "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

Three of the five members shared singing duty: Richard Manuel, who had a keeningfalsetto; Rick Danko, who had an intimate, nervous, Canadian-accented tenor, and Levon Helm. Helm had a dulcet Arkansas accent that gave The Band a measure of authenticity, particularly on Southern-influenced songs. He also had a huge, warm, haunting, bearish voice that seemed to start about two feet below the stage. His drumming was tight but inventive. If their songs showed a strong country influence, Helm's drumming had that tight, driving, Stax/Motown syncopation that pushed their sound forward. The Band lasted until 1976: Martin Scorsese captured their last performance in "The Last Waltz," arguably the best concert film ever made, about which Helm had some strong opinions. The impression he gives in that article is the same as the one he gave in "The Last Waltz": that for him the music was not just the main thing, but the only thing.

He dabbled in acting after The Band broke up, turning in a strong performance as Loretta Lynn's father in "Coal Miner's Daughter". Ultimately, though, he returned to the music. He lived in up in Woodstock, New York, and in the last decade of his life hostedperformances at a barn on his property. Two months before he died, Marco Werman of PBS recorded an interview with him, and more importantly recorded Helm singing "Ophelia". He had nearly lost his larynx to throat cancer some years earlier, and had to learn to sing again. His voice turned thinner but sharper: a clarinet rather than a trombone. In this performance he was shrunken, peering out over his microphone with wide, wet, gentle eyes as he sung, but he was also smiling, and you had the sense watching him that you were watching a man in his natural place.