This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Maybe the greatness we heard in his voice, that catch in it, came from all that pain. To this day, we don’t really know.

  By that time I’d been messing with heroin for a while, and it was a good time to stop. A lot of good people were going down. So I made it my business to make a move away from some bad habits. The key was to move, to have somewhere to go. So I went home to Arkansas, where I knew I couldn’t get any more when I ran out. My mom looked after me, and I basically checked into her house, consulted a couple of doctors, and went to bed for the four or five days it took.

  Back in Woodstock I started building my barn on the land I’d bought a few years before, down the lane from the house I was renting for Libby and the kids. Designed and built by my friend Ralph Shultis, the barn had living quarters, a studio, and a place to make films or TV shows. We were living on royalties, so the money came in spurts, and that’s how the barn got built. I think the electricity and the heating got turned on during that long, cold winter of 1972-73.

  At the same time, I began to feel the pull of California, at least in terms of The Band’s immediate future. Let’s go out and cut a record, I said to the others. I figured it would help us shake off the Albert Grossman legacy and maybe give us a new lease on life. It was definitely getting to be time to make a move. Besides, you couldn’t get sushi back east in those days.

  We came out of retirement in July 1973 because some promoters put together a hell of a payday for us to play a supposedly small festival at a racetrack in Watkins Glen, New York, with the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. The promoters guaranteed ticket buyers each group would play for three hours, with a massive jam at the end. A hundred thousand tickets had been sold, but six hundred thousand kids showed up, making the whole thing even bigger than Woodstock. In fact, Watkins Glen might have been the biggest single show in history in terms of audience.

  I think we rehearsed for the show in Woodstock. Richard didn’t like to rehearse, and neither did I, but it had been more than a year since we’d all been together, and Robbie had a new song, “Endless Highway,” that he wanted to debut at this show. (We usually rehearsed on the road, where it could take four or five shows before it all came together.)

  They flew us into the Watkins Glen site by helicopter, but right until showtime it looked like the show might not happen. The county authorities kept trying to shut it down for the usual reasons—clogged roads, sanitation—but the townspeople wanted the income and wanted the show to happen. In the last days before the festival, the county made the organizers buy tons of crushed gravel, and they laid out a little town on ninety acres, with roads and paths marked off by little flags. Then they made ’em truck in five hundred portable toilets. On the day before the show, the county said it had to have seventy-five grand worth of storm fencing. Every time the town did what it was supposed to, the county would find another five violations, but the organizers were going for it and had enough money to solve their problems.

  We got to the site, and I asked about the soundcheck. Bill Graham, who was staging the show, pointed to the steep hillside overlooking the racetrack. There were already tens of thousands of kids out there—healthy, happy, eating their picnics, and throwing Frisbees. Bill said they’d been there since the day before.

  I said, “Well, we’d like to tune up, rehearse a couple of our numbers.”

  “What the fuck do you want me to do?” Bill shouted, gesturing toward a quarter-million kids. “Ask ’em to move?”

  So we went out and tuned up in front of the crowd, and they loved it. We accomplished in ten minutes what usually took us three times as long. Then the Allmans played for an hour, then the Dead. These were just the soundchecks, but the kids already had enjoyed a nice little show.

  It was a pretty good atmosphere. “Hell of a lot better than Woodstock,” Richard growled.

  The Grateful Dead played the matinee, and we went on about six o’clock on a beautiful summer’s evening, just as the earth was cooling after a real hot day. We were somewhat abashed as we faced an audience none of us had even remotely envisioned, more than half a million people, and a funny thing happened. We started playing, a little nervously, but it was starting to build after maybe half an hour. Then I heard Rick Danko yell, “That’s it!” and saw him unstrapping his fretless bass. Raindrops splashed on my cymbals, and Robbie and Rick were running for the wings, hands off the instruments, lest they be shocked.

  Jack Wingate, a friend of ours from Garth’s hometown in Ontario, was standing at the side of the stage and happened to have a fifth of Glenfiddich scotch whiskey, which he encouraged us to taste. Then it began to rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. We were starting to get bummed out because it looked like Watkins Glen was gonna be another Woodstock-style mudbath. So we’re waiting, and Garth has a couple of sociable pulls on this whiskey his homeboy has, and all of a sudden the roadies are shouting and scrambling, and Garth climbs into his organ seat and starts to play by himself. It was extra-classic Hudsonia: hymnody, shape-note singing, gospel, J. S. Bach, Art Tatum, Slim Gaillard. Cool stuff. The immense throng of kids loved this, and then... the rain petered out. Just like that. It seemed clear to me that master dowser Garth had stopped the rain. We went back, synched up with Garth, and launched into “Chest Fever.” When they heard the drums, half a million kids started to dance. What a sight! When I changed the tempo slightly, I could see a million knees wobble. Watkins Glen—burned into my memory.

  “Why don’t we just do our old nightclub act?”

  I forget who said it, but that’s how we came up with our next record, Moondog Matinee. It had been two years since our last studio album, and we needed to resurface. Contractual obligations had to be met, but some workshop tapes didn’t pan out, and nobody had any new songs, so we went into Bearsville Studios that summer and cut some oldies. A lot also got cut at Studio A in the Capitol Tower in Hollywood, a famous room used by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole with large orchestras. I remember some consternation when we heard that John Lennon was doing the same thing at the same time with Jesse “Indian Ed” Davis on guitar and Phil Spector producing, but this was an indication of the low level of creative feeling in 1973 and an instinctive need to get back to rock and roll’s purer roots.

  I sang on Fats Domino’s “Saved” and Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” prophetic in light of our subsequent relocation to California. We also pulled together a long arrangement of “Mystery Train,” shades of Elvis Presley (credited to Junior Parker and Sam Phillips), with an additional verse written by Robbie Robertson. Richard sang Allen Toussaint’s “Holy Cow,” Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Gonna Come,” and a bunch of others. Richard was “in a period,” as Rick would say, which meant that he was drinking pretty hard, but once he got started, man: drums, piano, play it all, sing, do the lead in one of them high, hard-assed keys to sing in. Richard just knew how a song was supposed to go. Structure, melody; he understood it.

  As I’ve said, there was very little collaboration among us after Stage Fright in terms of creating new songs, but we still worked hard when we had to. We all decided we wanted to try to get an arrangement of “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and we ended up getting a pretty good cut. Garth made me up one of those hoses that you sing through while holding the guitar. He rigged it up, put it in my mouth, and he’d play the thing with me while I sang. That’s where we got the “lonely frog” voice the song requires. We brought in a local friend, Billy Mundi, to play the drums while I sang, because I wanted to play that bass line. I ended up playing bass on “Mystery Train,” with Billy and Richard playing drums and going backward against each other. And when we needed an extra track, Garth supplied us with an interpretation of “The Third Man Theme” from the movie of the same name.

  Moondog Matinee was named in part as a tribute to Alan Freed’s rock and roll radio show, but the title also referred to the torrid afternoon shows we used to do in Toronto for the teenage-girl crowd ten years earlier, a much simpler time. T
he album was released later that year, after it had been mixed in California and wrapped inside a painting depicting the five of us loitering in a cityscape that was half Helena and half Cabbagetown, the old Toronto neighborhood where Robbie had grown up. Capitol released “Ain’t Got No Home” as a single, with the original “Get Up Jake” on the flip side, but it only got to No. 73. By then we were off on another vector entirely.

  During the summer of 1973 we’d been hearing rumbles that a young record executive named David Geffen was pursuing Bob Dylan. Bob had refused to renew his long-term contract with CBS, and had gone off to the Mexican desert to film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, leaving things hanging in the air. We heard that Geffen had offered Bob a lot of money and his own label. Instead of returning to New York when the movie was wrapped and the sound track cut, Bob stayed in L.A. and leased a house.

  The writing was on the wall.

  Around this time, David Geffen came to Woodstock. The word was that he wanted us to sign with his Asylum label, and we would do an album and tour with Bob. David invited me to dinner, but I passed. Then I heard that he had flown off to Paris with Robbie and Joni Mitchell. Next thing we knew, Robbie had put his house on the market and had moved his family to California.

  I’d been saying for a year that California was the logical next step. The music business had relocated to sunny Los Angeles, and we needed to be there to survive. So The Band pulled up stakes and left Woodstock in October 1973. I set up Libby and the children in a house near the beach in Malibu, rented a suite at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica for myself, and traveled between California and the Catskills, where I was intent on getting my barn up. I still had strong feelings about Woodstock, and I figured we were going to need that barn someday.

  It was easier for some of us to leave Albert Grossman than it was for others. He was important to us as a friend and businessman—it couldn’t have happened without him—but we were growing in different directions. Albert was cozy in Bearsville, but we were having the sunshine and wealth of Southern California dangled before us. We also realized we were still a few records away from the end of our deal with Capitol. We had more years on us now, and most of us had children to think about. I thought things had seemed a little too cozy between Albert and Robbie, and that helped to get me through the transition out of there.

  So we moved to California and set up a new regime. Instead of an old-fashioned manager like Albert, we had a team of bean counters: lawyers, accountants, advisers. We all employed people to keep tabs on things and exercise fiduciary responsibility so we wouldn’t have to. No one in The Band really wanted to play that role.

  Robbie and Richard sold their Woodstock houses. Garth kept his, and so did I. I stayed at the Miramar Hotel or over in Malibu. Rick was back and forth a lot before deciding to bring his family out to California.

  “My original idea,” he explains, “was to move to California for about three months. Instead we came out and stayed eight years! I remember I got totally drunk on the plane coming out. Levon and Libby were renting a house belonging to Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in the Malibu Colony. I had directions to our house farther up the beach, but I had to stop at a pay phone near the Colony and call Levon. ‘Help,’ I told him, ‘I’m lost.’ Because I was jet-lagged and hungover. ‘Tell me where you are,’ he said, and I described the place. Levon said, ‘Hold the phone,’ and tapped me on the shoulder about a minute later. It was good to see him.

  “He said, ‘Son, your place is another twelve miles up the road, but whynchoo brings these kids on in, and we’ll get ’em fed and bedded down, and you can go to your house when you’re feeling a little better.’ That’s how we arrived in California.”

  Nobody’s done what Bob Dylan’s done for us over the years. He helped Rick and Richard write those songs and was part of our workshop. Bob Dylan knew that The Band was not in great shape, and he wanted to help us out of the sense of goodness he felt for us. Bob could’ve had his pick, but he chose us out of loyalty. I think we all had a big meeting on November 1 in California. Management was giving us our marching orders: We were going to record an album with Bob Dylan for Asylum. Then we were going to tour with him in early 1974 for six weeks, for which we’d each get several hundred thousand dollars plus a share of the recording and publishing money from a double live album, also to be released on David Geffen’s label. That, we were told, was the deal.

  “Hey,” I said. “Uh, wait a minute! What about our contract with Capitol?”

  Levon, they said, don’t you remember? Your contract specifies that you can do outside work as Bob Dylan’s backup band.

  “I know that,” I told them. “It’s just that we have three more albums due Capitol under our deal. Can’t one of these records with Bob come out on Capitol, so we can get our obligations over with sooner and get on to the next part of our lives?”

  They looked at me like I was crazy and shook their heads. When I was out of earshot, our management boys asked one another, “Why can’t Levon be happy?”

  I didn’t like the setup, but I couldn’t fight it. I didn’t have the strength to do personal battle with David Geffen and our own people, whom I bluntly accused of making things come out in everyone’s favor but ours in the long run. You’ve got to choose your battles in life, and this was one I knew I wasn’t equipped to win at that time.

  Bob Dylan was nervous about his first tour in eight years. The struggles, bitterness, and disappointment of 1966 seemed worlds away, and then some. Bill Graham had it booked, and the money was astronomical for the time. People were saying it would be the biggest tour ever mounted. We started to prepare for the campaign with marathon rehearsals, thirteen hours at a stretch, and then in early November we took three days out and cut Planet Waves at Village Recorder in West Hollywood amid super secrecy. (The studio had been reserved in the name of Judge Magney and the Jury.) It was basically an organ-harmonica-guitar album, one of those speedy deliveries. Bob had a few songs and wrote the rest in the studio. He liked keeping it real simple. We’d run through ’em once, and then Bob wanted to cut. I play mandolin on “Forever Young,” one of the few things we recorded twice, and Richard plays some nice drums on “Never Say Goodbye.” The record was done quickly, and then the year turned, and suddenly we were back on the road with Bob Dylan again.

  It was a much different story this time.

  Tickets for the tour went on sale by mail in December 1973. They got five million letters requesting an average of three tickets apiece, and estimated that 4 percent of the American population wanted to see the shows: forty concerts in twenty-five cities during January and February 1974. Bill Graham had been planning rock’s most ambitious tour ever for several months and had kept it secret by reserving the biggest halls in the country—Madison Square Garden, Chicago Stadium, the Los Angeles Forum—while refusing to say who would be playing. We were assured privacy, traveling from city to city on Starship One, a converted 707 jetliner redecorated as a flying Las Vegas lounge—complete with bar and private compartments. Bill Graham and his staff weren’t even allowed to fly on our plane, lest Bill’s rambunctious temperament ruffle the atmosphere. The tour publicist was told to stay at a different hotel than the rest of the tour, in order to keep the press away.

  Dayton Stratton, our old buddy from Arkansas, was hired to help with security. He was doing pretty well from his clubs in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and I’d just got a chunk of tour money, so we each chipped in and bought a plane of our own, a good-looking Beechcraft six-seater. Dayton was an experienced pilot. It had six-cylinder Lycoming engines, good power, good speed, and that’s how we got up to frigid Chicago for the first shows of the tour on January 3, 1974.

  The shows were designed to run about two and a half hours. The first hour was Bob and us, then Bob alone, then The Band alone, with a big group finale and encore. We’d rehearsed for two days right after Christmas in the empty L.A. Forum, but felt very unready when we hit Chicago, despite a long soundcheck that morning where we r
an through the whole show except for Bob’s part alone.

  We understood that people were excited by Bob’s comeback from a long public absence, but we were astounded anyway when we walked onstage in the darkened hall in Chicago and saw the entire audience stand and hold up their flaring lighters in a roar of tribute to Bob. Imagine nineteen thousand candles in the dark, people calling and whooping. It was a moment, I’ll tell you. I could see the normally taciturn Dylan was moved. He walked over to the drums and looked at me, about to say something, but instead he turned back to the microphone and launched into an old song of his called “Hero Blues,” which caught everyone off guard, including us.

  The stage was a jumble of amps and old furniture—a rolltop desk, carpets, bunk beds, and Tiffany lamps—that looked like some old Klondike prospectors’ camp. Bob was in jeans, an old suede jacket, and a white shirt whose tails were hanging out. Then we did “Lay Lady Lay,” “On a Night Like This” (from the new, unreleased album), “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Stage Fright,” which Rick sang playing fretless bass while Robbie tore up the lead guitar and Bob played rhythm guitar, his back to the audience. Then it was “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Leopard-Skin Pillbox-Hat,” and “Share Your Love,” which Richard Manuel sang in his best whiskey-and-cigarettes voice while Bob played the harmonica. Bob got his third standing ovation of the evening when he started “All Along the Watchtower,” and then Richard sang “Endless Highway” as Bob left the stage. He came back in a pair of shades and did the tunes that got us booed at Forest Hills back in ’65: “Ballad of a Thin Man” (with Garth playing those same mysterious organ fills for Mister Jones there) and “I Don’t Believe You.” When he finished, Bob stepped up and said, “Back in fifteen minutes,” and we collapsed into the dressing rooms in total exhaustion. The amount of energy that playing for those big audiences required was incredible. I know I felt wrung out like a sponge. I noticed my hands shaking when I lit a cigarette.