{"id":189,"date":"2012-04-20T02:34:44","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T02:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=189"},"modified":"2012-04-23T22:23:26","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T22:23:26","slug":"levon-helm-and-the-band-a-speculative-fictional-fragment-and-a-tribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=189","title":{"rendered":"Levon Helm and The Band: A Speculative Fictional Fragment and a Tribute"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0<\/strong>Levon Helm in his prime. Photo courtesy of stereogum.com<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cListen to this,” Ed said to his\u00a0hirsute companion. “A guy named Robbie Robertson of a group called simply The Band wrote it. He\u2019s from Canada. But the singer is from Arkansas.” <\/strong><\/p>\n

The singer, Levon Helm, deftly and\u00a0powerfully massaged a drum beat, as he sang in the voice of the post-war Southern man, Virgil Caine:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLike my father before me, I will work the land<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

And like my brother above me, who took a rebel\u2019s stand<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Just eighteen, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave, <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I swear by the mud below my feet, You can\u2019t raise a Caine up when he\u2019s in defeat. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The night they drove Old Dixie down and all the bells were ringing<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The night they drove Old Dixie Down and all the people were singing,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

They went, Na, Na, Na-na-na \u2026and a Yankee laid him in his grave.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cVirgil Caine was his name, and he worked the Danville train,\u201d Melville repeated. \u201cAh yes, that is strong, deep bitters.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

As Ed’s CD played, horns blared and billowed, evoking both a plaintive dirge and a fanfare in a sequence of heaving choruses. The singer\u2019s Southern accent and impassioned singing seem to be a genuine brother\u2019s lament. The music felt strangely hybrid yet so old and familiar that Ed was not surprised when Melville\u2019s old sailor\u2019s body began softly nodding to the musical waves and the rhythmic verse. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ed also knew that this song expressed the Southern pain and tragedy that this Northern writer had considered and articulated so deeply in writing Battle Pieces. <\/em>That\u00a0<\/em>against-the-grain poetry and prose collection strove to\u00a0explore the courage\u00a0and the brutality of both sides, and to\u00a0mute the North\u2019s patriotic victor\u2019s pride, to consider the people and culture now defeated and the unfathomable loss, even as the horrendously bloody war would end American chattel slavery and restore the Union called America. <\/strong><\/p>\n

But Ed also sensed that The Band\u2019s brave, fraught song\u00a0aligned with Melville\u2019s larger philosophic stance — that collective wartime goodness rarely exists without the old sins, like pride and contempt, lurking close behind the victor\u2019s glories, ready to obscure charity and compassion\u2026”The glory of war falls short of its pathos — a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From Melville\u2019s Trace or, the Jackal<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

******************************<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cWhere do we go from here?\u201d is another line from a song by The Band, whose three great singers are gone: Richard Manuel (to suicide), Rick Danko and now Levon Helm, who died April 19, after a long, arduous battle with throat cancer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The loss may feel palpable from the innards of musically sentient Americans and countless music lovers worldwide.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps no musical group in the history of pop culture had such three distinctive lead voices — as individual song interpreters and as a two-and-three part harmony as strong and sinewy as a Redwood, as deep and filled with currents of mystery as the Mississippi, and often sounding as alive and as old as those mighty trees and river way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet the simple singularity of the group\u2019s name was born less of self-importance than self-effacement. They\u2019d wanted to call themselves The Crackers, until Capitol Records, their new record label, nixed that. Nevertheless, in time, the unadorned, generic name they chose grew to signify the ultimate and definitive band.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Besides The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down <\/em>(a hit for Joan Baez) the great songs of The Band,\u00a0 -mostly penned by guitarist Robbie Robertson\u00a0 \u00a0– unfurl in the memory like the exposed underside of America, our history set slightly askew and mythical, yet feeling vividly true: The Weight, Tears Of Rage, Chest Fever, Rag Mama Rag, Unfaithful Servant, It Makes No Difference, Stage Fright, Up on Cripple Creek, When You Awake, Life Is A Carnival, Acadian Driftwood, Ophelia<\/em> etc, and some stunning covers and collaborations, including Bob Dylan\u2019s I Shall Be Released, Nothing was Delivered, This Wheel\u2019s on Fire, and When I Paint<\/em> My Masterpiece<\/em>; and 4% Pantomime<\/em> with Van Morrison, Don\u2019t Do It<\/em>, Mystery Train<\/em>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Acadian Driftwood<\/em><\/strong> was the Canadian epic to complement the song about Dixie driven down — this one a heartbreakingly somber saga of displaced ethnic northerners.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right at the height of the popularity of psychedelic music,\u00a0The Band had suddenly redefined the possibilities of American vernacular music, in a musical language that almost any American might understand and feel. They laid the groundwork for the magnificently detailed and complex grains of today\u2019s roots music — R&B, rockabilly, blues, gospel, bluegrass and country, melded and ringing, from church steeples to gambling dens, to dusty carnivals and highways.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most music fans know they did it at first by playing for years with Arkansas-born\u00a0 rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, mastering their many instruments and deepening soul on the road. After forming their own band led by Helm, sharp-eared Bob Dylan heard and hired them, as his back-up band after losing the Butterfield Blues Band players who electro-shocked Newport\u00a0 Folk Festival\u00a0in 1965. The Band reformed on their own terms and produced two instant classic albums, Music from big Pink and The Band, <\/em>and\u00a0did one of the\u00a0first great DIY albums of a new era, The Basement Tapes,<\/em> recorded in the bowels of their legendary Woodstock house, Big Pink.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0The Band’s story would culminate all too soon, it seemed, in their last live performance, a celebration shared with their many gifted musical friends. This ultimate farewell concert was captured brilliantly by Martin Scorsese in the film \u00a0The Last Waltz<\/em> in 1976. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Some may know Helm for his credible role as Loretta Lynn\u2019s father in the 1980 film Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Through those transformative music years, Helm —\u00a0 the band\u2019s sole American among four Canadians \u2013 provided the deeply Southern authenticity to this greatest of North American bands. The group appeared on the cover of TIME in 1970 and a\u00a0 career climax was perhaps playing at Watkins Glen, NY, in 1973 with the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, before 600,000.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was uncanny that four Canadians could mine, comprehend and interpret the hoary complexities, contradictions and beauties of \u201cOld, Weird America,\u201d as Greil Marcus once put it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Canadian author Jason Schneider addressed what The Band accomplished as a socio-cultural breakthrough: <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should rock-and-roll still be the cause of social divisions? \u00a0Was it not true that what they and Dylan had been doing to entertain \u00a0themselves at Big Pink was no different from what generations of \u00a0North Americans have been doing for hundreds of years? Once this became clear, ideas of conflict between young and old, and unity based on anything other than shared humanity, seemed utterly incomprehensible.\u201d 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet the voices and music <\/strong>emanating from that musical Eden in Woodstock c<\/strong>arried shards of all the\u00a0crazy stuff that fed all those conflicts. Helm played with funk, swing, power and precision, which propelled the group though its many layered scenarios and strange interludes. So the music, deep as it often felt, rarely ever became ponderous.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arkansan Helm\u2019s singing sometimes had the sharp pitch of a man carrying bales of pain and secret treasures, and then the haunted wail of a coyote at dusk. The mixed metaphor is intentional. He had a skill that seemed wholly, yet beyond, human. This was an unmatched musical genius one could hear and witness as he played and sang at once, like few musicians ever have. He sometimes seemed like a slightly super-human beast of ambidextrous burden.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He also played mandolin on occasion. And he smoked heavily.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Helm\u2019s solo career almost died when throat cancer struck in the late 1990s. His comeback was astonishing and deeply moving to behold, considering the all the 28 radiations and the\u00a0affliction evident in his singing. Yet he played on, to raise money for his treatments, and produced several wonderful albums including Levon Helm\/Ramble at the\u00a0Ryman<\/em>, Grammy winner for best Americana album\u00a02011.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A crafty smile always seemed hidden somewhere in Levon Helm\u2019s most anguished expression. He was a shrewd artist of many\u00a0layers, but the soul’s real deal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If this reads like a eulogy to The Band, that is because the group\u2019s voices are stilled, even if their two greatest pure musicians — classically trained multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson and the searing guitarist and songwriting master Robertson — remain alive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But those two provide the majestic backdrop and deep story that will now only be retold in the electronically reborn past of The Band\u2019s indelible legacy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite the bitter tragedies of Virgil Cane\u2019s South and of Acadian Driftwood<\/em>, the song co-written early on with Dylan, \u201cTears of Rage,\u201d strives towards pan-generational redemption:<\/strong><\/p>\n

We carry you in our arms\/ on Independence Day\/ and now you\u2019d throw us all aside\/ and put us on our way. \/ Oh, what dear daughter \u2018neath the sun\/ would treat a father so\/ \u00a0to wait upon him hand and foot\/ and always tell him \u201cNo?\u201d\/ Tears of rage, tears of grief\/ why am I the one who must be the thief?\/ Come to me now, you know\/ we\u2019re so alone\/ and life is brief.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

1 Jason Schneider, Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music \u2026from Hank Snow to The Band,<\/em> ECW Press, 2009, 277.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0— Kevin Lynch<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u00a0 \u00a0Levon Helm in his prime. Photo courtesy of stereogum.com \u201cListen to this,” Ed said to his\u00a0hirsute companion. “A guy named Robbie Robertson of a group called simply The Band wrote it. He\u2019s from Canada. But the singer is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-33","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}