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Lou Reed comes into sharp perspective in new Jim Higgins book

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Courtesy Trouser Press

Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground,

By Jim Higgins, 250 pages, paperback and e-book, Trouser Press, $20 *

Lou Reed (1924-2013) was the musical bard of New York as the quintessential East Coast big city. He’s worth comparing to Bob Dylan, the great musical poet from the Heartland – who’s certainly America’s greatest poet-musician. Still, it’s worth pondering such a comparison (Brian Wilson might be a West Coast comparable).

In his new book Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Jim Higgins assesses Lou Reed in depth and, for me, even invites such comparisons. Thus, he provides a deepening sense of a major artist’s experience and interpretation of his part of America, the oldest and most diverse part, no less.

Higgins is well known in Milwaukee as the book page editor and an arts writer for The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. He previously authored Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar.  

I am a Lou Reed fan but didn’t fully appreciate him until I read this book. Now I’ll continue to explore more fully his oeuvre. I’ve discovered a couple fabulous Reed albums I should’ve known about, The Bells, with the great jazz trumpeter/world-musician Don Cherry and The Blue Mask.

Higgins is a consistently insightful and skilled writer. For example, regarding The Blue Mask, he comments on Reed and Robert Quine on the first two songs: Hear “how gently and beautifully those two famously noisy guitarists are playing. It’s like their making lace out of quarter notes.”

Though a supreme wordsmith Reed invariably realized how important the music was to a song’s success.  His singing, sometimes stentorian, had a surprising range of expression, and his guitar was nearly comparable to, say, Neil Young’s as a singer-songwriter’s adjunct. 1

Lou Reed’s guitar was an important adjunct voice to his art. Courtesy Billboard

So, hats off to Higgins. However, with such a labor-intensive, inclusive survey of a long music career — 50 albums! — the author at times becomes rather workman-like, amid the weeds. He understandably spends a lot of time with specific songs, separating the wheat from the chaff and commenting on the chaff, perhaps fearing he’ll otherwise come off as too hagiographic?

He needn’t worry. His praise and criticism read largely as astute and he often qualifies by saying it’s his opinion or taste choice. And he dutifully acknowledges his predecessors: especially Reed biographer Anthony DeCurtis, and “dean-of-critics” Robert Christgau. So, he’s a knowledgeable and humbly likeable guide who educated me in the substantial depths of Reed’s extensive catalog. His appreciation of the ground-breaking Velvet Underground as a musical band is especially enlightening.

However, I wanted a bit more courage of convictions. He says the title song of Street Hassle “was Reed’s most deliberate attempt at a masterpiece to that point.” His detailed description almost amounts to an argument for “masterpiece.” Along with his comments, I’d call “Hassle” a masterpiece. The extended cello motif beautifully weaves together an 11-minute, three-movement suite, an urban tragedy: the first movement “Waltzing Matilda,” is romantic, the second, “Street Hassle,” cold-eyed about fatal “bad luck,” the third, “Slipaway,” a wrenchingly authentic cry over lost love. Using (uncredited) Bruce Springsteen’s husky voice to extend the chilling second movement feels brilliant, as a contrasting sort of monotone witness, which allows Reed’s voice the drama of spilling his heart in the last movement. Plus, Reed’s use of the phrase “slip away” takes on three very different meanings in each segment. Yeah, masterpiece, worth rehearing repeatedly.

Lou Reed and “The Banana Album” that made him famous as a cult figure, at least. Courtesy Newsweek

Higgins does fine justice to the career-launching “Heroin” from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album that secured the band’s fame. Rock music never had (nor has since) a more laceratingly honest and audaciously immersive evocation of drug addiction. And delusional: “and I feel just like Jesus’ son.” Higgins narrates the song’s tell-tale form: “ ‘Heroin’ begins as gently as a folk song, but speeds up four times in imitation of the rush the addict feels, ebbing each time to a doubled statement of defeat. (John) Cale’s electric viola drones throughout, until it shatters into shrieks during the final rush.” For me, a stone masterpiece, revealing early Reed’s courageous genius.

At times Higgins does go out on interesting limbs, asserting that Mott the Hoople’s take on “Sweet Jane” on All The Young Dudes is the best version of a signature Reed song. However, he then extolls The Cowboy Junkies’ far more tender rendition of “Jane,” so you have your pick of several recommended interpretations, another valuable critic’s task of digging through the music catalog. One provocatively bouncing limb he hits too timidly: He could’ve praised the potency of the song “Sex with Your Parents (Motherfucker), Part II” on Set the Twilight Reeling, which is a laugh-out-loud skewering of hypocritical right-wing holier-than-thous. More controversy over it would’ve been something to see.

As DeCurtis reported, Laurie Anderson’s tribute to her spouse in Rolling Stone for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is extraordinary, eloquent and fascinating though she says “he was kind, he was hilarious, he was never cynical.”

She must’ve cured him of that unless he was way misunderstood at times. And it’s amazing that Anderson apparently, in his eyes, was a woman “of a thousand faces,” whom he wanted to marry, as referenced in “Trade In” on Twilight. Given that desire’s impossibility she must’ve been a miracle soul mate. Over years before, Reed did unforgivable things to people he loved and treated sweetly just as quickly.

Anderson knew his badness, or of it, but their love lasted for 21 years until his death.

Also, I think the title song of Twilight hardly “strains for profundity,” as Higgins says. In a simple arrangement, it’s about learning to let go of regrets, accept himself “as the new found man” and “set the twilight reeling.” It may be too poetical for some but it takes plenty for anyone, especially this complex and troubled, to accept himself.

I understand the new found man as the man in the historical “new found land” ie: America. Like his image of Anderson, it’s a bit self-mythologizing but also humblingly honest. It’s also self-absolution, but saying as much to us. That’s all very Lou Reed, to me. The album’s most telling, acidic and profound song is “NYC Man,” with Oliver Lake’s lovely horn arrangement. It’s much more confessional than the title song, so Reed’s not really hiding behind his poetry, even if its dense, literary text is Dylanesque.

Among the book’s distinctive features is “Children of The Velvet Underground,” persuasively surveying the many artists influenced by Reed’s path-forging group, such as David Bowie, Jonathan Richman, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, and Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes.

Another group of valuable features (especially for iPod users) involves Higgins combing through the repertoire to come up with “One Hour with Lou Reed” in the 1960s (The Velvet Underground era) and likewise through the ‘90s, by choosing exemplary songs of each decade.

Three of his selected songs for “The ‘90s and beyond” are from Magic and Loss, an album serving as a nakedly poetic elegy to the agonizing cancer death of singer-songwriter Doc Pomus, seemingly the father figure in Reed’s life. Among the album’s numerous luminous moments Reed likens radiation treatment to “The Sword of Damocles hanging over your heard,” giving the man’s death mythical resonance. Higgins however, asserts that Magic and Loss is merely one half of a great album. Hmm. I just know when I first heard it, Reed carried me right through and, by its end, I was stunned into silent reverie, a bit like hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time. Deeply shaded with superb writing, this underappreciated album is a chiaroscuro masterpiece. Or perhaps “classic” is better if “masterpiece” seems too exalted a term for such a muted work.

Lou Reed and spouse Laurie Anderson. Courtesy Medium

Reed’s best songs and albums feel as real and poetically moving as any American sing-songwriter of his generation, in that sense comparable to Townes Van Zandt, or more recently the more storytelling James McMurtry, very different stylistic geniuses of yet another fecund American region of singer-songwriters, Texas.

Being married to an atmospherically avant musician-artist like Laurie Anderson helped Reed understand himself as a kind of literary musician-artist of substantial merit. He was unafraid to do a somewhat over-reaching album-length interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 2003), choked with notable actor-reciters and guest artists. To be sure, this was Lou Reed’s Poe, nobody else’s. As Melville said, “It is better to fail at originality than to succeed at imitation.”

Higgins’s valuable book expands the lens of perspective in our experience of our best songwriters portraying and illuminating America.

____________

* The Higgins book is available at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., in Milwaukee and directly from Trouser Press. Here’s a link to the author’s May reading from Sweet, Wild and Vicious, at Boswell, with a live interview with Journal-Sentinel music writer Piet Levy:

https://youtu.be/kUdP2I-f7K4?si=Uje371AqePKLh0N0

  1. Higgins delves into the underappreciated significance of Reed’s guitar playing. One of his nifty sidebar features is “One Hour with Lou Reed and his guitar,” listing ten songs that showcase his guitar work. The list includes the live version of “Heroin” from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, which Higgins suggests is his second favorite VU album after their debut album (known colloquially as “The Banana Album”).

Growing Hope for America: An anniversary revisit to the 25th Farm Aid in Milwaukee

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It’s one day removed from the date but I am honoring the anniversary of a great concert in Milwaukee history by posting my review of Farm Aim 25,  at Miller Park on October 2, 2010.

October 2, 2010 

Farm Aid 25 Does Heavy Hauling for America’s Family Farmers

MILWAUKEE — It took a quarter of a century for the players in this farm system to make it to the majors.

But Farm Aid 25 proved it ain’t no game though, heck, it was at least as fun as any Brewers outing, to judge from the 35,000 who rocked Miller Park Saturday, along with the many dedicated musicians who filled the ten-hour event.

Farm Aid 25 at Miller Park. Courtesy Onmilwaukee.com

The first Farm Aid drew 78,000 in Champaign, Illinois in 1985. Today it’s the longest-running concert benefit in the U.S, having raised $37 million over those years. And co-founders Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp – who all performed Saturday with style and passion – have been stars for decades. So the event’s 25th anniversary in its first major league stadium only served to remind people of a team effort as heroic as a two-outs, walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth.

The hero’s stance is somewhat different now. Farm Aid now does heavy work on the promotional tractor hauling the local sustainable food movement to public awareness. They’re helping push for organized family farming and healthy food choices as refurbished tools for economic revitalization of America through “family farm food systems” based on alliances, economic stewardship and well being of community and public health (see farmaid.org for more information on this)

They still proselytize for the ongoing plight of America’s family farmers in the face of corporate farming’s razing of the small farm business model. In the pre-concert press conference, Neil Young, Farm Aids’ resident corporate gadfly, asserted that big-business farms “create and spread disease and are inhumane to animals” and ravage the ecosystem.

Yet, as perennial good guy Nelson says, “We started out trying to save the family farmer and now it looks like the family farmer is going to save us.”

Farm Aid to mark 25th anniversary at Miller Park

Farm Aid co-founder Willie Nelson at Farm Aid 25 in Milwaukee OnMilwaukee.com

With a majority of this huge throng appearing to be under 30, the message seemed to connect with the generation that must take up the mantle of leadership.

Many of them sang along from memory to lyrics of musicians old enough to be pa or grandpa. While Mellencamp did his harrowing farm tragedy saga, “Rain on the Scarecrow,” even a young stadium security guard sang along, with his back to the stage and eyes diligently scanning the crowd.

Yes, there’d been plenty of tailgating beforehand, which kept attendance at a slow trickle-in though the early afternoon acts like Randy Rogers, Robert Francis, Jamey Johnson and the Blackwood Quartet. Among those, the act too many missed was Johnson, whose Moses beard and hair hang as long as his foghorn voice resounds deep, seeping into the darkest caverns of the heart, with deftly self-deprecating storytelling. His Depression-survivor song “In Color” deserves to be a widely-covered classic, though I doubt anyone could deliver such craggy authenticity as does Johnson.

Though now middle-aged thick and lovable-attire slob, Mellencamp can still ignite and work a crowd – into what Quakers call (not so) gentle persuasion: At one point he asked all of the cell-phone toting fans to immediately call a friend to “thank them for supporting Farm Aid.”

He even grabbed one fan’s phone and thanked a doubtlessly startled “Steve,” on the call’s receiving end.

Farm Aid co-founder John Mellencamp at Farm Aid 25. Courtesy milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

By then, the crowd seemed primed to attack the back forty, after a bracing but short set from Milwaukee’s own seminal roots rockers The Bo Deans, and a beguiling one from Philadelphia folk-soul troubadour Amos Lee, and another by the appealingly high-energy alt-roots rock Band of Horses, who are galloping up record charts these days.

Milwaukee’s own, The Bodeans, at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel.com

Yet the crowd perked up for the almost effortless charm of two young pop music phenoms, Norah Jones and Jason Mraz. The line-up’s only female act, Texas-raised singer-songwriter-pianist-guitarist Jones recently relocated to New York. She captivated with her sophisticated new look – punky page boy and fishnet stockings — and fluent eclectic flair, shifting from her sultry sweetheart mega hit “Come Away With Me” to Johnny Cash’s honk-tony beer lament “Cry, Cry, Cry” to her own increasingly dark and thoughtful originals.

Norah Jones at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel

By contrast, Mraz seems like his own brand of endless sunshine with a voice as boyish as Paul Simon’s but stadium-impact strong and with songs carrying a high melodic calorie count. He woos the listener like the boy Romeo next door, or the strapping young farmer down the road. He actually runs an avocado farm in California when not doing music or surfing. Too cool.

Between the Jones and Mraz sets, Jeff Tweedy — leader of the immensely popular and arty roots-rock band Wilco – delivered a curiously tepid solo set that suggested his true gifts are as a musical conceptualist/bandleader/songwriter.

You get the stylistic gist here — Farm Aid welcomes virtually all American music genres under its big farmer’s market tent. And to wit, many fans also partook of the outdoor Homegrown Market and chatted with farmers about their issues and tasty wares even through cold wind and some rain. That interaction is part of the important underlying purposes of this musical harvest.

Back inside, time-conscious bandleaders too infrequently introduced their faithful band members. But the show rarely dragged with Willie Nelson stepping in to add his “Texas herb” aroma to the sets of Jones and Lee, and with contemporary country star Kenny Chesney showing gleaming vocal pipes and sporting a New Orleans Saints cap instead of the expected ten-gallon hat.

And few complained about nepotism when Willie’s son Lukas Nelson scored a set, because he’s inherited the old man’s showmanship. No knockoff though, the younger Nelson’s style strives to virtually channel the ghost of short-lived blues rock guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan. His guitar-string biting impressed some, but made you wonder if Willie feeds the kid enough.

Dave Matthews, the Gen-X rock star who joined the Farm Aid board of directors in 2001 and is the fourth perennial headliner, started his duo set with guitar ace Tim Reynolds by unleashing Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which felt like a man reliving the song’s wild tale as a primal-scream dream. His intensity cranked the crowd up to a level that Mellencamp rode masterfully.

Yet, for this baby boomer, and surely many others, this all climaxed with Young’s set. He remains an uncanny blend of wizardly yet unpretentious song-storyteller/melody-spinner prone to deft feedback theatrics and spontaneous speeches. Few seem to care about farmers as much as he does. But an eloquent riff on being an aware consumer for small farm support –“read the label” is his mantra – immediately lost any hint of browbeating when Young launched into “Long May Young Run.” This is a gloriously warm-hearted salutation to a friend he last saw alive “in Blind River in 1962.” The winsome melody and sentiment seem to suggest – with a new line crucially added to the original lyrics – that the never-forgotten friend was a farmer.

Farm Aid co-founder Neil Young at Farm Aid 25. milwaukeejournal-sentinel 

Young’s always had a quirky a genius for balancing his fiery social consciousness with mournful, humane soul. Accompanied only by his own scruffy-scarecrow presence and solitary electric guitar, Young’s “Ohio” still seared into memories of the Vietnam war-era killing of four Kent State University student protesters by National Guard members.

Of course, Farm Aid always provides the salve of Willie Nelson to top off even reopened psychic wounds, and to send everyone home buzzed on musical vibe. That’s from toking up on ol’ Willie, twirling his smoky, behind-the-beat phrasing around another blessedly-crafted song. His concert-closing set ranged from tough blues-rock led by son Lukas, to reggae rhythms, to “one for Waylon.” On cue, all the headliners joined onstage to sing “Good-Hearted Woman,” a comfortable-as-worn-blue-jeans song by Nelson’s fellow progressive-country “outlaw,” the late, great Waylon Jennings.

Concert epics like this don’t get much more golden.

It was well after 11 p.m. and co-sponsor Direct TV had been telecasting the concert since Mraz’s set at 5, so one hoped the ideals and passion of this extraordinarily well-conceived and executed effort may spread like the winds of change, rather than like locusts or chemical farming-borne disease.

Time will tell. Meanwhile, long may Farm Aid run.

_______________

This review was originally published in YourNews.com, Madison edition

For videos about the Milwaukee event, go to www.farmaid.org.)

“Once Were Brothers” traces the mythical saga of The Band, through Robbie Robertson’s lens

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“We few, we proud, we band of brothers.” — Shakespeare, Henry V

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, a documentary film by Daniel Roher, plays at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, at the Oriental Theater, 2230 N. Farwell Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202 (414) 276-5140

__________

This story needed to be told again, on Robbie Robertson’s terms, even as it needs telling from all five. Three are gone, so Robbie the wordsmith stands best to speak here, anew and anon. And The Band started with him; it’s roots arose when he converged with Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. But this needed to be told because the Band lasted too short a time for the America it embraced and re-imagined, the nation that needed a band like this, to remind us who and what America was, and is, and might be.

For perhaps no other American vernacular band compressed more talent into one entity, like pages of a tattered book filled with dried and pressed leaves, shadows and light, and music of American spheres. It was a great North American band, comprising four Canadians and one Arkansan, who embodied “Canadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind,” as they regaled us on one of their late, great saga-songs.

We need this story because, well, as the venerable roots purveyor Taj Mahal asserts here, they are the closest we have to the American Beatles. Daniel Roher’s film provides classic and never-published photos and film footage of their life in Woodstock. N.Y. and at the house called Big Pink, on the road, and reflections from most band members, but mainly Robertson’s and those of his wife Dominique, their road manager and some celebrated others.

But Mahal’s claim begs examination, because the band’s peak years lasted less than the Beatles. Both bands emerged from, and remained rooted in, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly, blues, and country. Like their counterparts, the North Americans drew from British Isle folk sources as well. Stylistically where they diverged was when the Beatles embraced psychedelia. The Band arrived right about that time, but driven by older forces, and enamored of the rustic weirdness, oily charm, verve, wit and tragedy that would come to be called Americana, a genre they forged as much as anyone. As Robertson points out, “The rock generation revolted against their parents but we loved our parents.” They had a sprawling family portrait taken during the Basement Tapes sessions.

And yet their extraordinary quintet synergy also made for some of the bitterness that would ultimately arise, perhaps justified (more on that later).

“It was such a beautiful thing. It was so beautiful that it went up in flames,” Robertson reflects.

More on the Beatles comparison. Both had magnificent and glorious songwriting, though the Beatles were more diverse with three gifted writers, which may be their greatest claim, aside from the phenomenal impact they had on our culture. The Band had primarily Robertson writing songs, but they had that three-part harmony, probably the most fulsome and profoundly textured of any popular group, because these were also “three of the greatest white rhythm-and-blues singers in the world at the time,” as Eric Clapton comments.

“They have voices that you’d never heard before, and yet they sound like they’ve always been there,” rhapsodizes Bruce Springsteen.

Here, The Band has a leg up on the more famous British band, whose third and fourth singers were only serviceable, though George and Ringo had their moments.

The Band was also instrumentally superior, again, to almost almost any rock ’n’ roll band, especially in ensemble, given their kaleidoscopic versatility. Bassist-singer Rick Danko was capable with several horns and string instruments. Classically-trained Garth Hudson played organ, synthesizer, accordion, saxophones, brass, and piccolo. Drummer-singer Hudson also played mandolin.

Guitarist Robertson developed a style that startled and even intimidated many guitarists, even if he wasn’t the typical virtuoso pealing off chorus after dazzling chorus. Few pickers had a sharper rhythmic flair, or could make a guitar bite, sear, and jump for joy, almost at once. Richard Manuel played piano, clavinet and drums, and sang with the most soul-haunting voice of any of them. I’m probably forgetting a few axes. Clapton was so moved — “they changed my life” — that he forsook his two fellows of the psychedelic-blues-rock trio Cream at its peak, in hopes he could join The Band. “Maybe they’d need a rhythm guitar,” he says.

The band performs in the concert film “The Last Waltz.” (Left to right) Richard Manuel, piano and vocals; Garth Hudson, accordion, keyboards and saxes; Rick Danko, bass and vocals; Robbie Robertson, guitar; Levon Helm, drums; Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, vocals.

As for style, their playing and singing blended looseness and precision, defiant resolve and abandon, high humor and pooling sadness. They fully inhabited the characters dwelling in Robertson’s songs of American archetypes — dirt farmers, varmints, vagabonds, drunkards, Dixie fighters. “Virgil Cain is my name and I worked on the Danville train,” Helm sings on the forlorn, feisty epic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” “They reminded me of 19th century American literature, of Melville’s stories of searchers,” film director Martin Scorsese ponders.

Barney Hoskyns, biographer of The Band, has a similar reflection, by way of quoting the great American critic Greil Marcus: “…their music gave us a sure sense that the country was richer than we had guessed.’” Hoskyns adds: “If there was any band that could get to the heart of the mystery that pervaded rural life in America, then The Band was it. Nathaniel Hawthorne may have been right when he wrote of Americans that ‘we have so much country that we have really no country at all’,’ but The Band managed to create a sense of its adopted land that was at once precise and mythical.” 1

Courtesy Nebraska Furniture Mart

The Band’s first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, as well as Northern Lights-Southern Cross compare well to any Beatles album, as does, in its rough, eccentric ways The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan. Stage Fright and Cahoots are right in the ballpark. Rock of Ages is a masterful live recording achievement, and Scorsese’s The Last Waltz remains arguably the finest concert documentary ever made, studded with stars, and The Band’s last-ever live performance at Winterland in San Francisco, in its original incarnation, here sweaty and transcendent.

I saw them once, at Summerfest, on their last 1974 tour, and the power and glory remained, though the poisons that killed it all festered beneath the surface.

Robertson recounts his prodigious rise when, at 15, he wrote two songs recorded by Canadian rock ‘n’ roll star Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. “That band was my own personal Big Bang,” Robertson says. He soon joined the Hawks, and they reformed as Levon Helm and the Hawks.

Aside from his musical and literary genius, Bob Dylan is an astute aficionado and observer of American musical talent. When he heard The Band he knew they had to be his. He approached them and they invited to their basement studios in their communal Woodstock home “Big Pink.” Dylan was dubious at first of recording there, as they only had a small reel-to-reel, but once they got down to it, things began flowing. Dylan clacked away song lyrics on his typewriter and they rehearsed.

The Basement Tapes is among the most mythical informal recordings in pop music history, largely Dylan songs, immensely enhanced by The Band. Before long they were touring, yet this was early in Dylan’s plugged-in phase. His still-faithful-to-folk-roots fans consistently booed the electric music, for all its quality. This rejection eventually wore on Helm, who was beginning to sink into drugs and alcohol, as were several others, especially Manuel, a sensitive soul, who struggled with depression, and would soon self-destruct. In time, disillusioned Helm quit the group to become an oil rigger in the Gulf of Mexico.

Robertson soldiered on with the group though somewhat devastated by the loss of his soul brother and best friend. He addresses the nature of creativity, saying it’s often a matter of “trying to surprise yourself. For example, if you look inside the sounding hole of a Martin guitar you see imprinted” made in Nazareth, PA.” One day I saw that and thought, ‘I pulled into Nazareth, was a feeling about half-past dead.’ Then I heard these voices, ‘Take a load off Fanny,’” and “The Weight” was born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo

The Band performs “The Weight” with The Staple Singers, in “The Last Waltz.” YouTube

The Band’s Robbie Robertson (right) is interviewed about the new film “Once Were Brothers.” Courtesy The Toronto Star. 

Enter producer entrepreneur extraordinaire David Geffen. He convinced Robertson to move to Malibu, CA, and a oceanfront property, and before long he’d lured the band members out there which replenished them. The result was the 1976 album Northern Lights-Southern Cross considered by many their best album since their second. It included three classic new songs “Acadian Driftwood,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Ophelia” and no clunkers.

Robertson treads too lightly on the feud that developed between him and Helm. “Bitterness was setting in with Levon.” he muses. It had to do with the band members beginning to indulge in heroin. Robertson fortunately did not have an addictive makeup and was not chemically affected. But he does gloss Helms point of view which deeply resented all the royalties that Robertson received for their original music. Although Robertson wrote the majority of the songs, few bands could better fit the adage: The sum is greater than their parts. So there was a strong argument for all members sharing in some royalties.

Nor does Robertson address Richard Manuel’s devastating suicide in the film. So, it’s worth referring to Barney Hoskyns book Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, to give the subject some due. “The band had played capacity crowds for two shows which went well, despite the fact that Rick had complained to Richard about his drink. ‘We played a good show for good intelligent people,’ Rick said. ‘Talk was of the next show. That’s what we were all living for.’

 

After leaving the club, Richard headed back to the nearby Quality Inn and stopped by Levon’s room en route to his own. To Levon, he did not seem especially depressed. “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his bathroom.” Once in the room Richard finished off a bottle of Grand Marnier and his last scrapings of coke. Sometime between 3 and 3:30 AM on Tuesday 4, March, he went into the bathroom…

Richard Manuel. Courtesy Live for Live Music

Rick Danko was in shock, and denial. “I cannot believe in a million years that wasn’t a goddamn silly accident,” he said

“It seems much more likely that loneliness and a profound sense of failure combined to convince him of the futility of life,” Hoskyns writes.

The opening words of his prologue also address the fated artist. “Richard Manuel’s is the first voice you hear in the the first Band album Music from Big Pink (1968)…His aching baritone launches into the first reproachful line of “Tears of Rage.” As it arches over ‘arms,’ you can’t help thinking of Ray Charles, the singer who more than any other shaped this unlikely white soul voice from Stratford, Ontario… A month shy of his 43rd birthday, he could see nothing ahead but these depressing one-nighters, rehashing ‘the old magic’ in a continuing, fruitless struggle to moderate his intake of alcohol and cocaine.”

On that Tuesday morning in 1986, “he tied one end of a plain black belt around her neck, the other end around the shower curtain and hanged himself. The distance between ‘Tears of Rage’ and Richard Manuel’s lonely death at the Winter Park Quality Inn was the journey The Band traveled in their rise and fall as one of the greatest rock bands in America.” 2

Levon Helm drums and sings, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in “The Last Waltz.”

Once Were Brothers — an engrossing, touching and well-crafted film — understandably climaxes with two generous clips from The Last Waltz. The Band’s radiant final hurrah was on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, and includes Dylan, Clapton, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Dr. John, The Staple Singers, Emmylou Harris, Ringo Starr, Paul Butterfield, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, and a brass ensemble.

“Time is the most mysterious word of all,” Norman Mailer once wrote. The Band somehow traversed and encapsulated the mysteries of our time, Because “Life is a Carnival.” and because of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

____________

1 Barney Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, Hyperion, 1993 Quote of Greil Marcus from his book Mystery Train, 3-4 .

2 Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 384-85