by Levon Helm
THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE
LEVON HELM
AND THE STORY OF THE BAND
LEVON HELM WITH STEPHEN DAVIS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Helm, Levon.
This wheel’s on fire: Levon Helm and the story of The Band / Levon Helm with Stephen Davis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55652-405-9
1. Helm, Levon. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Band (Musical Group). I. Davis, Stephen. II. Title.
ML419.H42A3 1993
782.42166′092′—dc20
[B]
93-4413
CIP
MN
Copyright © 1993 by Levon Helm and Stephen Davis
Afterword copyright © 2000 by Levon Helm and Stephen Davis
All right reserved.
Originally published by William Morrow and Company, New York.
This edition published by A Cappella Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-55652-405-9
Printed in the United States of America
15 14
Isn’t everybody dreaming!
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel.
“IN A STATION”
RICHARD MANUEL
CONTENTS
Prologue
Time to Kill
Chapter One
The Road From Turkey Scratch
Chapter Two
The Hawk (Out for Blood)
Chapter Three
Take No Prisoners
Chapter Four
Levon and the Hawks (One Step Ahead of Land of 1000 Dances)
Chapter Five
Dylan Goes Electric
Chapter Six
Something to Feel
Chapter Seven
The Band
Chapter Eight
Divide and Conquer
Chapter Nine
The Last Waltz
Chapter Ten
The Next Waltz
Afterword
The Most Fun I’ve Had So Far
Acknowledgments and Sources
Index
Prologue
TIME TO KILL
The Band had always had a pact that if one of us died on the road of a heart attack or an overdose or a jealous boyfriend, or whatever might kill a traveling musician, the others would put him on ice underneath the bus with the instruments and haul him back to Woodstock before the police started asking questions. This flashed through my mind as I ran half-dressed down the motel corridor at nine o’clock on the morning of March 4, 1986, in Winter Park, Florida.
Richard Manuel and I had been laughing for years at stuff that wasn’t even funny anymore, when he went and took his own life. We were on what had been jokingly called the “Death Tour” because the gigs were in small places hundreds of miles apart. We tried to approach it with good humor, but I know Richard felt we weren’t getting the kind of respect we were used to. This was ten years after The Last Waltz, fifteen years after we were playing the biggest shows in American history, twenty years after Bob Dylan had “discovered” us, and twenty-five years after Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America. It had been almost thirty years since I’d left my daddy’s cotton farm in Phillips County, Arkansas, to seek my fortune on the rockabilly trail.
For sweet, ultrasensitive Richard Manuel, the trail ended on a spring morning in Florida.
Richard’s wife, Arlie, was screaming hysterically, “He’s dead! Oh my God, he’s dead!” Rick Danko and his wife, Elizabeth, were already in Richard’s room, and I heard Rick kind of gasp and say, “Oh, no, man …” I went inside: The room was in disarray, the bed unmade, the TV on, an empty bottle of Grand Marnier on the dresser. The light was on in the bathroom. Suddenly I got a terrible sense of pure dread and felt surrounded by the chill of death. I wanted to run the other way as fast as I could, but instead I walked to the bathroom door and looked in.
What I saw just broke my heart. That’s for damn sure. It would’ve broken yours too.
Five days later Rick and I and Richard’s brothers carried his metal casket into Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford, Ontario. Richard had been raised a Baptist, but the bigger church was needed to accommodate his last sold-out show. The organist was Garth Hudson, who set the tone of the service with his old Anglican hymns. My mind was wandering through the prayers and the Scripture readings. Jane Manuel, Richard’s ex-wife, and her children were there, dozens of Richard’s relations, and many friends from our days in Toronto. It was hard to see so many beloved sad faces on such an occasion. I never did like funerals.
Robbie Robertson had been asked to deliver a eulogy, but he didn’t show up. Friends of Richard’s remembered his laughter, his jokes, his scary driving, his love for music. Then Garth played “I Shall Be Released,” which Bob Dylan had written for Richard to sing. Through all three verses there wasn’t a dry eye in the church.
I had a funny experience while Garth was playing. I was thinking about Richard and asking myself why, when I clearly heard Richard’s voice in the middle of my head. It came in as clear as a good radio signal. And he said, “Well, Levon, this was the one action I could take that was gonna really shake things up. It’s gonna shake ’em up and change things round some more, because that’s what needs to happen.”
Now, to understand this—and I think I have come to an understanding—you would have to know what Richard had been through, although that would be hard to convey. In fact, you’d have to know what we all had been through: the story of The Band, from 1958 until today. Because from then to now we went through the best of times as well as times that were full of pain and disappointment. But those bad times are important. They give you a chance to practice, listen, take stock, have a life, get your feet back on the ground, and maybe you’ll live to tell the story.
That’s what this book is all about. My story is recalled and written from my perspective on the drum stool, which I’ve always felt was the best seat in the house. From there you can see both the audience and the show. Along the way we’ll check in with friends and family, and I thank them for their memories and the ability to share them. In the end, though, the story must be my own, with apologies in advance to those I neglect to mention or damn with faint praise. Memory Lane can be a pretty painful address at times, but in any inventory of five decades of American musical experience you’ve got to take the good with the bad. So draw up a chair to my Catskill bluestone fireplace while I roll one, and we’ll crack open a couple of cold beers. The game’s on the cable with the sound off, and I’m gonna take you back in time, specifically to cotton country: the Mississippi Delta just after World War II. We’re gonna get this damn show on the road.
Chapter One
THE ROAD FROM TURKEY SCRATCH
Waterboy! Hey, waterboy!
That’s my cue. It’s harvesttime, 1947, and I’m the seven-year-old waterboy on my daddy Diamond Helm’s cotton farm near Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. My dad and mom are working in the fields along with neighbors and black sharecropping families like the Tillmans and some migrant laborers we’d hired, seasonals up from Mexico. My older sister, Modena, is back at the house watching my younger sister, Linda, and my baby brother, Wheeler. Since I’m still too young for Diamond to sit me on the tractor, my job is to keep everyone hydrated. I got a couple of good metal pails, and I work that hand pump until the water runs clear and cold. I run back and forth between the pump house and the turn row, where the p
eople drink their fill under a shady tree limb. I learned early on that the human body is a water-cooled engine.
It was hard work. The temperature was usually around a hundred degrees that time of year. But that’s how I started out, carrying water to relieve the scorching thirst that comes from picking cotton in the heat and rich delta dust.
I was born in the house my father rented on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, near Elaine, Arkansas. The delta is a different landscape from the one you might be used to, so I want to draw you some sketches of the old-time southern farm communities I grew up in, when cotton was king and rock and roll wasn’t even born yet.
I’m talking about a low, flat water world of bayous, creeks, levees, and dikes, and some of the best agricultural land in the world for growing cotton, rice, and soybeans. When the first Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, the delta’s cypress forests sheltered Mississippian Indian tribes—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez—who constructed giant burial mounds related to astronomy and magic. I’m descended from them through my grandmother Dolly Webb, whose own grandmother had Chickasaw blood, like many of us in Phillips County.
In the 1790s Sylvanus Phillips led the first English settlers across the Mississippi River into eastern Arkansas. They were mostly immigrants from North Carolina, the Helms probably among them. They laid out the town of Helena, seventy miles downriver from Memphis, in 1820. It grew overnight into a pioneer river port full of keelboats, flatboats, stockboats, and ferries. The river was a mixed blessing, rising and falling annually so that levees had to be built and maintained.
Helena rose in the steamboat age, along with Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi, and Memphis. The town earned a brawling reputation early on. In the 1840s Helena was described in the New York press as a notorious den “where all sorts of nigger runners, counterfeiters, horse stealers, murderers and sich like took shelter again the law.” An apprentice steamboat pilot named Sam Clemens, later better known as Mark Twain, saw Helena’s riverside slums and dark saloons filled with gamblers, idlers, and thugs. Tied to the landings were the boats of slavers, minstrel shows, itinerant doctors, whiskey dealers, brothel keepers, and other businessmen of the American frontier.
During the Civil War, Phillips County was ardent rebel country, producing seven Confederate generals, more than any other county in the South. To me that says a lot about the place. There’s a Confederate cemetery atop Crowley’s Ridge, overlooking Helena and the river. Union artillery controlled river traffic with four batteries of cannon on top of the ridge there. A few thousand poorly armed rebel farmboys tried to dislodge those Yankee guns during the Battle of Helena in 1863. Charging up the naked hill under withering fire, most of them died trying. I used to visit the quiet, leafy graveyard when I was a boy.
Think of endless cotton fields, gravel roads, groves of pecan trees, canebrakes, bayous, pump houses, kudzu vines, sharecroppers’ cabins, tenant farmhouses, flooded rice fields, the biggest sky in the world, and the nearby Mississippi, like an inland sea with its own weather system. Think 110 degrees in the shade in the summertime. Cotton country. We were cotton farmers.
Cotton was labor-intensive even after the Civil War, with the result that Phillips County lies in what used to be called the Black Belt, meaning the population is maybe 80 percent African-American. That’s why the delta is known for its music. The sound of the blues, rhythm and blues, country music, is what we lived for, black and white alike. It gave you strength to sit on one of those throbbing Allis-Chalmers tractors all day if you knew you were gonna hear something on the radio or maybe see a show that evening.
My father, Jasper Diamond “J.D.” Helm, was born in Monroe County, Arkansas, in 1910. The Helms were farming near Elaine in 1919 when the famous Elaine race riots broke out. Some black tenant sharecroppers around Elaine couldn’t live on low crop prices that amounted to peonage, so they started a union and withheld their cotton from the market. A bunch of Ku Kluxers from around Helena drove over and shot up one of their meetings. Things took off from there, and quite a few people from both races were killed before federal troops from Little Rock, Arkansas, put a stop to it. Someone put out a rumor that all the white farmers and their families were going to be murdered by the rioters. My daddy remembered waiting with his father and brother on the front porch of their farm, pistols and shotguns at the ready. “If they show up here,” my grandfather told his sons, “don’t shoot till I say so, and we’ll fight ’em as long as we live.” But the riot never did come down the road that day.
My grandfather Helm died when my father was just a boy, so I never knew him. But I was close to my mother’s father, Wheeler Wilson. He was a logger as a younger man, working for the Howe Lumber Company and Plantation. After they cut down that first-stand cypress forest after the turn of the century, there was nothing left except that rich delta soil, so many of the loggers became farmers. Wheeler kind of went back and forth between logging and farming for many years. He liked dirt farming, but he didn’t have any education except the kind you get from being pencil-whipped by the mortgage bank. Sometimes he’d prefer to stay in one of the lumber camps and work. There’d be a big corral of mules back in there, some tents, maybe a few small buildings. I’m talking about the country now, south of Elaine. The road finally stopped at a little place called Ferguson, where you had to turn around. It was the end of the line, Bubba! But Wheeler liked it in that timber camp. He’d trap and hunt on the side, file saws, make a pretty good living. Then in the spring, when they started turning that dirt over and the air was filled with it, he’d go back to farming.
Wheeler wasn’t afraid of anything and took nothing from nobody. One year when he was farming he got in a fight with a local man named Levy Doolittle over a crop. Mr. Doolittle had come to the farm to argue over a field of corn, and Wheeler told him, “There’s the damn crop. Go ahead and take it, or d’ye want me to cut ’n’ shuck it for ya too, ya damn fool!” Well, they took it a little farther than a cussfight. They done broke it down and started firing at each other. Luckily, no one got seriously hurt. Mr. Doolittle might have been grazed slightly; just a little birdshot from a distance, nothing meant to kill. Meanwhile, Mr. Doolittle was firing back at Grandpaw Wilson, who was standing in his doorway, and splinters and wood chips were flying. I guess it was something of a standoff, at least until Mr. Doolittle saw Grandmaw Agnes hand Wheeler a couple of double-ought buckshot cartridges, at which point Mr. Doolittle ran backward over the levee. They didn’t see him again until it was time to go to court, where they all ended up. The lawyers kept it up almost that whole winter. “Well, Mr. Wilson, you say you don’t recollect firing at Mr. Doolittle when he had his back toward you; just how do you explain this?” They held up some kind of jacket with the back shredded to ribbons by shotgun pellets. And Wheeler said, “Well, the only thing I can think of is, somebody hung it over a bush and shot the hell out of it.” Of course everyone hee-hawed, and the judge gaveled ’em all out of there. They’d wasted enough time with that bullshit anyway. So Wheeler told me to never get involved with a lawsuit. Even when you win, you lose.
He hated the Ku Klux Klan. I’m real proud of that. One day when he was farming he heard that some of them were trying to organize in the area. He put his shotgun in the back of his wagon and found a bunch of ’em on the porch of the general store. He went right up and said, “Excuse me, sirs, but have any of you all seen any of them goddamn Ku Kluxers?” No one said anything, so Grandpaw prompted ’em a little. “Those sorry sheet-wearin’ sons of bitches.” They still didn’t say a word. “Well, if you see any of them Ku Kluxers, you tell ’em Wheeler Wilson’s looking for ’em, and you can tell ’em where I live.”
Wheeler was a scrapper, damn sure was, and I like to think I might take after him a little. He came up just as pure as anyone came up in those parts and always noticed that when he wanted to get a loan for farming, he went through the same door as any black man, any yellow man, any kind of man. And he also noticed the banks would outpencil
him every time, and he didn’t like it. Because he was white, he stood up to ’em more than once and ended up in court over it.
His attitude, and my mother’s, toward people is what gave me a big advantage in life. It saved me from having to wear that whole damn load of racism that a lot of people had to carry. My mom, God love her, she was one of those Bible people. She thought it was wrong to bother anybody, regardless of race, color, or religion. It just wasn’t a Christian thing to look down on anybody, and that’s what she taught us.
People called my daddy by his middle name, Diamond Helm. In 1932 he was a twenty-two year-old cotton farmer during the week and a musician and entertainer on the weekend. Diamond played guitar in a little band with some friends at house parties that charged two bits a head for dancing. They had white lightning in quart fruit jars—you only needed to inhale the vapors, and it’d make your hair hang down.
Diamond met Wheeler Wilson’s beautiful blond daughter Nell at one of these parties. They were married on June 9, 1933, at the Baptist church in Elaine. My sister Modena was born a year or so after that, and I came along in the spring of 1940. I was baptized Mark Lavon Helm.
Not long after that, Nell and Diamond moved to a tiny rural farming community called Midway, because our long dirt road intersected with the hard gravel road about midway between the village of Turkey Scratch and the town of Marvell, all about twenty miles west of Helena. My younger sister, Linda, was born two years after me, with my baby brother, Wheeler, waiting several years after that to make his appearance.
So that’s where we grew up, way back off the hard road, miles through the cotton fields, almost all the way to Big Creek. Don’t even think about electricity. We might have used a battery-powered radio until I was ten years old. Our nearest neighbors were Clyde and Arlena Cavette and their three girls, Mary, Tiny, and Jessie Mae. Their farm was just a couple of miles away, and our families shared two sets of intermarried relatives, so we were all raised together as closely as possible, and Mary is still my closest friend.