This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  This was when I decided that it was all over. Time to terminate this mission before someone got hurt. I was also afraid Richard and I might die from laughing. Rick turned toward us, his chin stuck up in the air, arms outstretched and dripping, encrusted with dead deer shit from his neck to his belt. He was standing very still, in cruciform position, to keep the mess from spreading anymore.

  “Levon,” he asks, “you got any water?”

  “Only in the radiator,” I told him.

  “Yeah, and we’re savin’ that to scald down some of this venison meat,” Richard said.

  “C’mon, fellas!” pleaded Rick. So Richard and I drove to the house. Richard filled a five-gallon bucket with fresh water, and I got a clean shirt and jacket for our meat cutter. Then we hurried back for the finale. Rick used the water and towels we’d brought to clean himself up and put on the dry clothes. He was determined to finish butchering the meat. I figured the shock of the impact had spoiled the meat with adrenaline, so I didn’t want any.

  “Call the mayor and give it to the school lunch program,” Richard suggested.

  “Hell, call the governor and donate to the jail,” I told them. “Tough meat for tough people.”

  But Rick had decided what to do. “We’re gonna take it to Deanie’s and get Stubby, the cook, to make up some chili!”

  “It’ll make a lot of chili,” Bobby agreed.

  “It’s got too much hair on it for me,” Richard said. “I like my meat clean.”

  I thought about this. “Some good hairburger won’t be any worse than that sweet-and-sour tomcat meat we ate at the Chinese restaurant the other night,” I told them.

  “No need to waste this deer,” Rick concluded. “By tomorrow night there’ll be free chili for all of us!”

  And that’s what they did. They say Stubby made good chili out of that deer. I never tried any because who needs food when you can live on laughter? You boys care for another furburger? No, thanks, I like mine rare.

  Cahoots, released in October 1971, got mixed reviews. The Los Angeles Times headlined, CAHOOTS VICTIM OF EXPECTANCY GAP. “For anyone other than The Band,” wrote critic Robert Hilburn, “Cahoots would be hailed as a splendid album. But the expectancy level will keep the enthusiasm level down. That’s the price you pay for recording two masterpieces.”

  A less charitable reviewer (Greil Marcus) said Cahoots sounded like Robbie Robertson had undergone a lobotomy. It was significant that one of the titles of Robbie’s songs was “Where Do We Go From Here?”

  Significant because nobody knew. The money was coming in, but we had an array of lawyers and accountants, and as I’ve said, there was unhappiness with Albert because now the publishing deals were going down with different companies set up for each musician instead of one company with equal shares for all, like there should have been. Now the old pencil-whipping started to really come down, and it was felt that Robbie was getting more than The Band. Greed was setting in. The old spirit of one for all and all for one was out the window. But hindsight—twenty-twenty, as usual—reveals that some of us were in denial. None of this was talked about much among the five of us, so resentment just continued to build.

  John Simon joined The Band on tuba and electric piano as we did a major U.S. tour in November 1971 to support Cahoots. Taj Mahal opened for us, and we used the shows to warm up for a live double album we intended to record back in New York over three days of shows at the end of the year. I remember we even had a mini-riot one night in Washington, DC, when five hundred kids rushed the stage during the intermission, trampling the seats down in front. During the confusion five hundred more kids without tickets broke through the gates. In San Francisco Bill Graham—more relaxed than in his Winterland-Fillmore days—introduced us at the cavernous, sold-out Civic Auditorium. As usual we played our best in the Bay Area, opening with “Life Is a Carnival” and mixing new songs like “Shoot Out in Chinatown” into our set. After a standing ovation—I never got tired of those—we finished with “Don’t Do It.”

  After the shows, I’d go back to our hotel and call Libby. I’d tell her to put the receiver in our daughter’s crib, next to her little mouth. Then I’d just sit for an hour or so and listen to Amy breathe while she was sleeping. That was my main anchor in those days.

  “It’s the end of the goddamn era, isn’t it?” Robbie Robertson said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Sure feels like it,” I agreed.

  A few months earlier we’d been sitting with our ladies after a good French dinner at Robbie’s house.

  “Let’s make a live album and close it down for a while,” I suggested. “In fact, let’s make it a damn double, because we’re so far behind in the amount of records we’ve delivered.”

  “We could get some horns,” Robbie said.

  “Have Allen Toussaint come up and write some charts.”

  There was a silence while we thought about this. We might have been on our third bottle of Chateau Margaux.

  “Maybe we could get Bob,” Robbie suggested. “He was great at that Bangladesh concert. Maybe he’d do a couple of things with us.”

  Everyone thought a live double album was a great idea. Maybe this could be a way of making the perilous transition between the original Band and the uncertainties of the future. That’s how we all looked at it.

  I forget who made the call to Allen Toussaint, but this master musician from New Orleans—maybe the greatest arranger-writer-producer the Crescent City ever gave us—agreed to come up to Woodstock in the cold of December to write some charts for shows we were planning to record. Tall, dignified, said to be as reclusive as we were, Allen checked into Albert Grossman’s guesthouse and stayed there because it started to snow as soon as he arrived—the first time he’d ever seen the stuff. We asked what we could provide for him. Did he want a piano? He said he needed herbal teas, a tape recorder, some chart paper, and the heat to be turned way up. The horn charts Allen produced during the week he stayed with us were like crowning our music with spiritual gold, like having a great wizard travel from a far-off land to bestow his wisdom on us.

  At the same time, as the December days got shorter and the series of shows at the Academy of Music in New York got closer, we all got nervous. The horns were, after all, an experiment for us. What if we walked out with a big brass section, and the purists in the audience got annoyed? We didn’t want “Across the Great Divide” to sound like a cocktail-lounge orchestra from hell. We all felt we were trying to cross a pretty thin wire, but the first time we heard those horns in rehearsals we were basically ecstatic. I mean, we were flying with sheer pleasure to hear our music with this extra dimension.

  As it happened, we needn’t have worried. The shows sold out: three thousand seats per show over three nights. John Simon, Doc Pomus, Bobby Charles, and Dr. John—Mac Rebennack from New Orleans—appeared with us or helped pull it all together. We played the first half by ourselves, and after intermission we were joined by some of the best horn players in New York: Joe Farrell and J. D. Parron on saxes, Snooky Young on trumpet, Howard Johnson on tuba, and Earl Mclntyre on trombone. Garth Hudson played solos on both tenor and soprano, and it all sounded incredible. We revived “Get Up Jake,” our outake from The Band. We finally got a cut we liked on “Don’t Do It” after having tried and failed in the studio a couple of times. Garth was sailing through long improvisations on the intro to “Chest Fever.” He could soar forever if we let him, taking the audience through Bach, gospel, jazz, nickelodeon, Anglican; whatever he came up with. On New Year’s Eve we got one of these mediations on tape, and when the record came out Garth titled it “The Genetic Method,” after a scholarly paper he’d been reading about classifying tribal music in primitive lands.

  The final night we worked was New Year’s Eve. We started the show very late because we wanted to be onstage when 1971—a hard, hard year for all of us—faded out. So we played an old samurai movie and went on about eleven. At midnight Garth interrupted “Chest Fever” for a bit of “Auld
Lang Syne.”

  We finished those shows with Chuck Willis’s “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes.” After the last encore on New Year’s Eve, Bob Dylan came back onstage with us. The crowd had already been with us for three hours, but they roared as Bob came on in an old corduroy jacket, and strapped into a solid-body guitar. We ripped through a bunch of unrehearsed tunes that Bob called during group huddles onstage while the crowd shouted out hundreds of requests. We ended up doing “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” (Bob had written this song during our “basement” period, but this was the first and maybe last time he ever performed it), and “Like a Rolling Stone,” which Bob introduced by saying, “We haven’t played this one together in six years.” Actually, we’d played it in England two years before, but I didn’t care either.

  The crowd loved it, and feelings were running high. They shouted along on the chorus—“How does it feel?”—and even our new horn section came back onstage and sang with Bob on that final number.

  After the show I said to Bob, “When are we gonna go on the road together again?”

  He looked surprised. “I’m thinking of touring with the Dead,” Bob said.

  “Well, keep us in mind,” I told him. “We’re gonna take some time off now, but maybe we could make it work like tonight, you know, but in a much bigger way.”

  “Let’s think about it,” Bob said.

  The road was dark and cold as Richard Manuel and I rode out of Manhattan in the limo that night. We crossed the Hudson over the brightly lit George Washington Bridge and headed up the Palisades Parkway toward the mountains. It was near dawn when I got home, and I took off my boots and tiptoed across the floor so as not to wake Amy. I sat at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette, and thought about the shows we’d just played. Were we gonna get a good live album out of them? I thought about what Bob Dylan had said. Little did I know it would be almost two years before we saw him again. In fact, we were so fried that it would be eighteen months before The Band played its next show. Our next album of original songs was four years down the road.

  January 1972.

  I knew it was time to get out of Woodstock for a while. People were getting drunker, and drugs were everywhere. A sense of foreboding filled the air. The town was struggling under the post-Festival onslaught of hippies, runaways, and burnouts, and The Band was fighting. Robbie and Dominique had fled to Montreal. Rick and Grace were getting divorced. Richard was retired. Garth was building his house. The winters were long, and I felt like we musicians were just waiting around for the reading of the will.

  Every day we’d hear about new and different publishing deals, until it got so that people were having more fun and making more money publishing songs than they were actually writing them or trying to write them. I think that’s why there were no more classic Band songs after that, because people weren’t willing to put in that time developing the music and not get something from it. The whole story changed from a musical endeavor to something you couldn’t quite deal with. Greed reared its ugly head at every turn. I had told off Albert Grossman, and we no longer communicated. I was just biding my time until a better guy came along.

  Fortunately I found something to do. I’d always had a complex about my total lack of musical training—beyond several million hours of field work. But I’d talk to other drummers I admired, and some of them had had a lot of schooling. They could write down their ideas. I was still young enough to act on this desire for some formal training, theory, exercises, the bare rudiments of a musical education. My friend Lindsay Holland got me enrolled for a semester at the distinguished Berklee School of Music in Boston under my real name, Mark L. Helm. I shaved off my beard, and nobody knew me. It was perfect, and two hundred miles from Woodstock, where no one would have to worry why Levon couldn’t be happy with the way things were.

  Libby remembers: “We moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, renting a flat in a house on Bryant Street owned by the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. Levon went to Berklee every day. He set up his practice drums in the basement of the house, muffled by layers of Kotex pads so as not to disturb the professor upstairs. It was a cold winter, so we just kind of huddled in the house. Sally Fitzgerald gave me books by Flannery O’Connor, and I passed them along to Levon, who stayed up all night reading. In the morning he’d say, ‘Libby, she’s so heavy.’

  “Levon adored his daughter. He completely bonded with Amy and was a very attentive father, especially in Cambridge, with no pressure from the band or the road. He loved to cuddle with her. He talked to her, took her with him, played the drums with her on his lap. He admired her. She was an adorable little girl who understood what she was told and said funny things. So that whole period was our most idyllic time together.”

  No one quite believed that I’d gone back to school to learn to play the drums. I think they sent John Simon up to Boston to check out this rumor.

  “I thought it was amazing that Levon was studying,” he says. “Remember, this was the guy that Rolling Stone had just called the best drummer around. I went to class with him, and he was incognito. The instructors called him Mark. He wanted to refine his technique, and instead of taking some master class, he went back to basics and was learning it all over again. I thought it was extremely interesting.”

  Rick Danko: “When I was young I either worked too hard or I didn’t work enough. Either stayed away from home too long or stayed home too long. As we’re getting older, we’re coming closer to figuring that out. So now we’re talking about our first sabbatical: ’72, ’73. Since I wasn’t recuperating from any accidents, it was a wild kind of time. It was funny to have too much time on your hands.

  “Levon had checked into Berklee, and Robbie was in Montreal, where they were thinking of buying a house. I went up and looked at a big estate (it was sixty thousand dollars then; you couldn’t touch it for ten million dollars today) but decided the winters in Montreal were too damp. The winters were damp on the peninsula I grew up on in Ontario; it was drier in Woodstock. I thought, If I’m not here, I’d rather be somewhere warm. I produced an album for Bobby Charles from New Orleans at Bearsville. I think everyone played on it except Robbie, who was out of town. Then I went to Florida and worked on benefit shows for dolphin research. We had a couple of trailers on some burnt-out land on Key Biscayne, a lagoon with a couple of dolphins, and some deep-freezes stocked with blue mackerel. We ended up letting the dolphins go, but we had some fun and kept the Secret Service guessing, because this was near the house of President Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and they used to watch us through the binoculars and try to figure what we were up to.

  “This whole period... thank God everybody changes. We all had a habit, something we were going through. We learned that success is like an animal. When there’s no limit, you do whatever you want, and that not only happened to The Band, it happened to almost everyone we knew who had this kind of success. Some people deal with it, some people don’t. Over the years we might not have dealt with it right, but we’re still here, still communicating with one another. If there’s any long-term example to be set, I hope we get to set a few yet!”

  Rock of Ages, the double album recorded in New York the previous year, was released in the fall of 1972. It was the most fun I ever had making a Band record and one of our biggest hits: six months on the Billboard charts, Rolling Stone’s Album of the Year, and the single, “Don’t Do It,” even cracked the Top Forty. Normally, we would have toured to support the album, but it was felt that playing the same songs in the same places would have been so much spinning our wheels. No one was up for it, so we just let it lay. “I loved Rock of Ages,” says John Simon, “because it really summed up the whole era of The Band. I’d played on the Cahoots tour and, like a lot of people who worked with them, hoped the Band would get back to work playing shows. But it didn’t happen. I spoke to Robbie about this. He said, ‘I don’t wanna go on the road, because I
just had a long talk with Levon, and I really don’t wanna get busted with a suitcase full of heroin. And have you seen Richard? I don’t think Richard could go on the road even if he wanted to.’

  “So instead I joined Taj Mahal’s band for two years. He’s a wonderful musician, and was just getting into his Caribbean heritage and mingling it with the blues. He taught me how you live the blues: viscerally, not intellectually. It was a great experience for me, but it would be a while before I was able to link up with my friends in The Band again.”

  Richard at this stage of his life was a totally maximum guy. He loved cars, and was known and loved by every cop in the mountains, famous for driving his Ferrari at 140 miles per hour on Route 87 and back roads alike. Part of it was the sheer joy of the chase. Once he tried to outrun a state patrolman in that Ferrari of his. He was about ninety seconds ahead of the cop when he got to his house. Richard drove into the garage, closed the door, ran upstairs, and got in the shower. When the cop knocked on the door, Richard answered in a towel, dripping wet. “Couldn’ta been me, officer,” he said in that voice that came from deep within his chest. “I just got up.”

  The cop didn’t believe it and didn’t want to back off. Finally Richard closed the session by dismissing him with: “How can I miss you if you don’t leave?”

  I know Richard blamed himself that The Band wasn’t working. He was in very poor condition in 1973. Jane left him for a time, and Mason Hoffenberg was living in his house, supposedly to make sure the drug dealers didn’t victimize him too much. Albert was trying to get Richard to record, but it wasn’t working. It looked like Richard was going to drink himself to death, but I didn’t know what to do. We had an unwritten code, for better or worse, that we didn’t interfere in one another’s lives. This was before the days of crisis interventions. His own pain was in turn painful to behold, like a person whose skin had been burnt off. He’d say, “Aw, man, I’m too wasted to work. I know I’m holding up The Band, but what am I gonna do?” Bob Dylan went up to talk to him in this period but wouldn’t go in the house because there were dog droppings all over the floor. We were all frightened that Richard would kill himself in his car, but when he did have another wreck the car dealers refused to rent him another one.