With songs like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," ''The Weight"
and "Up on Cripple Creek," The Band fused rock, blues, folk and gospel
to create a sound that seemed as authentically American as a Mathew
Brady photograph or a Mark Twain short story.
In truth, the group had only one American — Levon Helm.
Helm,
the drummer and singer who brought an urgent beat and a genuine
Arkansas twang to some of The Band's best-known songs and helped turn a
bunch of musicians known mostly as Bob Dylan's backup group into one of
rock's most legendary acts, has died. He was 71.
Helm, who was
found to have throat cancer in 1998, died Thursday afternoon of
complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
New York City, said Lucy Sabini of Vanguard Records. On Tuesday, a
message on his website said he was in the final stages of cancer.
Helm
and his bandmates — Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie
Robertson and Richard Manuel — were musical virtuosos who returned to
the roots of American music in the late 1960s as other rockers veered
into psychedelia, heavy metal and jams. The group's 1968 debut, "Music
From Big Pink," and its follow-up, "The Band," remain landmark albums
of the era, and songs such as "The Weight," ''Dixie Down" and "Cripple
Creek" have become rock standards.
Early on, The Band backed
Dylan on his sensational and controversial electric tours of 1965-66
and collaborated with him on the legendary "Basement Tapes," which
produced "I Shall Be Released," ''Tears of Rage" and many other
favorites.
Dylan said on his website Thursday: "He was my bosom
buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or
any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about."
Hudson said on his website that he was "terribly sad."
"Thank
you for 50 years of friendship and music," he posted. "No more sorrows,
no more troubles, no more pain. He went peacefully to that beautiful
marvelous wonderful place. ... Levon, I'm proud of you."
The son
of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Helm was just out of high school when he
joined rocker Ronnie Hawkins for a tour of Canada in 1957 as the
drummer for the Hawks. That band eventually recruited a group of
Canadian musicians who, along with Helm, spent grueling years touring
rough bars in Canada and the South.
They would split from
Hawkins, hook up with Dylan and eventually call themselves The Band —
because, as they explained many times, that's what everyone called them
anyway.
In some ways, The Band was the closest this country ever
came to the camaraderie and achievement of the Beatles. Each of the
five members brought special talents that through years of touring,
recording and living together blended into a unique sound.
The
tall, lanky Robertson was an expert blues-rock guitarist and the
group's best lyricist, his songs inspired in part by Dylan and by the
stories Helm would tell him of the South. The baby-faced Danko was a
fluid bassist, an accomplished singer and occasional writer. The
bearish Hudson was a virtuoso and eccentric who could seemingly master
any instrument, especially keyboards, while the sad-eyed Manuel's
haunting falsetto on "Whispering Pines," ''Tears of Rage" and others
led Helm to call him the group's lead singer.
But for many Band
admirers, that honor belonged to the short, feisty Helm, whose
authoritative twang once was likened to a town crier calling a meeting
to order. He not only sang "Dixie Down," he inhabited it, becoming the
Confederate Virgil Caine, "hungry, just barely alive," his brother
killed by the Yankees, the South itself in ruins. It was the kind of
heartbreaking, complicated story and performance that had even
Northerners rooting for the proud and desperate Virgil.
"The
Weight" and many other songs were true collaborations: Helm's voice was
at the bottom, Danko's in the middle and Manuel on top. Helm — the
group's musical leader on stage — played drums loose-limbed and funky,
shoulders hunched and head to the side when he sang.
But the
group, especially Manuel, struggled with drugs and alcohol. While Danko
and Manuel shared songwriting credits in the early years, Robertson was
essentially the lone writer for the last few albums. By the middle of
the decade, Robertson, especially, was burned out and wanted to get off
the road.
They bid farewell to live shows with a bang with the
famous "Last Waltz" concert in 1976. Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni
Mitchell and Dylan were among the stars who played the show in San
Francisco, filmed by Martin Scorsese for a movie of the same name,
released in 1978.
"The Last Waltz" is regarded by many as the
greatest of concert films, but it also helped lead to a bitter split
between Robertson and Helm, once the best of friends.
Robertson
became close to Scorsese during the production, and Helm believed the
movie was structured to make Robertson the leader and advance his own
movie career. They rarely spoke after, despite efforts by Hawkins and
others to intervene.
While Helm would accuse Robertson of being
on a star trip, Helm, ironically, was the more successful actor, with
acclaimed roles in "Coal Miner's Daughter," ''The Right Stuff" and
other films. And no one who watched "The Last Waltz" could forget
Helm's performance of "Dixie Down," shot mostly in closeup, his face
squeezed with emotion.
In his memoir, "This Wheel's on Fire,"
Helm said some hard feelings about Robertson also included his getting
songwriting credits on Band songs that other members considered group
efforts. Robertson would deny the allegations. On his Facebook page
this week, he revealed that he had been devastated to learn of Helm's
illness and visited him in the hospital.
"I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together," Robertson wrote.
Without
Robertson, The Band reunited in the 1980s but never approached its
early success. Manuel hanged himself in a Winter Park, Fla., hotel room
in 1986. Danko died in his home near Woodstock in 1999, a day after his
56th birthday.
Highlights from the '90s did include playing at a
Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992 and a
collaboration among Helm, Danko and Keith Richards on the rocker "Deuce
and a Quarter."
While Helm's illness reduced his voice to
something close to a whisper, it did not end his musical career. Beset
by debt, in 2004 he began a series of free-wheeling late night shows in
his barn in Woodstock that were patterned after medicine shows from his
youth. Any night of the bi-weekly Midnight Rambles could feature
Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello or his daughter Amy on vocals and violin.
He
recorded "Dirt Farmer" in 2007, which was followed by "Electric Dirt"
in 2009. Both albums won Grammys. He won another this year for "Ramble
at the Ryman."
Original members of The Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.