I have a few notes from years ago when Levon Helm died and I’m realizing now that I must have written them just after having taught “Sonny’s Blues.” A story that, for reasons I may get into, leaves me on the verge of tears, even in class, when to cry in front of students would embarrass me and, surely, shock them. But it has happened; it also happened that I cried in the car the morning I heard about Levon…
I read about it on the internet, early Wednesday morning, a day after it had been posted on his Facebook page: “Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.” I read it on his official website, and then in countless news outlets on the internet, each quoting that familiar but haunting phrase, “in the final stages.” Levon Helm had not died; but he would die soon. It wasn’t long before I read a public note from Robbie Robertston, one of Levon’s bandmates from The Band, which read that he had been to see Levon in the hospital; “it hit me really hard,” Robertson wrote. Garth Hudson, the other remaining member of The Band, wrote that he was “too sad for words right now” and directed people to a video of blues singer Alexis P. Suter performing Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
The clip, or at least what I think to be the clip Garth shared, is still around on YouTube, as the comments under it seem to confirm that it’s the right one, a two-minute-and-fifty-four-second rendition of the first verse and one chorus of Dylan’s song, Garth himself sitting in, recorded live on stage on November 27th, 2010 (on a phone, perhaps), the location not specified anywhere on the page, gray-bearded baseball-capped Garth in a back corner, stage right, hunched a bit over the keys of a baby grand, swaying, playing softly, only really discernibly audible in the first few seconds of the recording because the mix isn’t great, the lead player’s orange Gretsch solid-body (a beauty) turned up too much – a nice fat tone, but one that dominates. The song nearly stops midway through the first verse, I wrote that Wednesday, as if to warn of the coming storm. Then Suter, a bass-baritone from Brooklyn whom, I learn, Levon had become a fan of and had invited up to Woodstock often to open for him, just belts it. The room is small but the sound is massive and Suter is an effulgent presence on stage, clad in vestments and beads, voice oceanic in depth, eyes closed in commune with whatever it is that grants musicians special access to our pilomotor response systems, her arms outstretched wide like Cristo Redentor.
In the car that morning – and this is still Wednesday, Levon “in the final stages,” his manager reading messages to him sent by fans – I wanted to hear the music, and I turn now again to my notes: I grabbed Dirt Farmer on the way to the car but soon realized that for as much as I enjoyed Levon’s recent albums it was the old Levon I needed to hear, the Levon of The Band at perhaps my personal favorite moment of their career, the one I had gone back to and still return to the most often, one of those moments that led me to join up with a few other like-minded folks for a number of years to make music, music, we thought, like The Band’s, writing and crafting and performing songs at spots in neighborhoods such as Allston and Union Square, even recording a few, two albums to be precise – music I remain proud of having made, the making of which I do miss, as it was an electrifying experience to collaborate on art like we did in those days (so different from this one-man-show of writing), the feeling of a current running through a band on stage or even maybe more palpably in relaxed practice sessions, all feeling loose and free, and yes, an electrical circuit seems to be the right analogy for what was coursing around and how. I recall a practice running really late into Friday night, Saturday morning even, late enough so that the edges of the workweek had been sanded down by a few hours of playing, drinking, smoking, in the rented and shared practice space on the second floor a dingy old building converted and divided up into these rooms for bands (“an older, nondescript building – nearing the end of its useful life,” a City planning and redevelopment website reads about the address now), a room more like someone’s basement with the gear all set up. We decide to run through a song, one we played a lot, an original tune in the twelve-bar-blues form, and it starts as it normally does, all of us, guitars, bass, keys, drums, playing our parts. But something happened at some point in this running-through of this song that despite my circling around it up to now I will try to convey: it was as if I (and, I think, not just I) had moved outside of myself and had actually joined or entered the space of the music because I felt lifted unto something – something I had never touched or glimpsed or even imagined existed before – as the song rolled onward, our extending what normally was the guitar-solo section (what felt like) indefinitely, because linear and even musical time were forgotten. The music in that room seemed to be creating new space in the world, space that I inhabited first in the form of being lost, lost in the playing of my arranged part like I was supposed to, the song chugging along well, but then – and this is what is astounding, this is what I can call to mind even today and be right back in that dingy room – I found myself, found myself anew, found myself by alighting upon an utterly new part to play within the new whole, the new world I was now in with the song. Even more amazingly, this all happened, I swear to you, while I was suddenly noticing the others all finding and playing their own new things, variations on the normal parts, riffs and rolls and runs that were each their own individual pieces but also of which this new world was built. We hit the last beat together and to a person burst into laughter, for we all felt and knew what had just happened. If you were to tell me that while listening then to the warm hum of my last open chord resonating I was in fact floating downward a few inches back to that mangy short-pile rug, I would believe.
The song I needed to hear that Wednesday morning was “Don’t Do It,” The Band’s reimagining of Marvin Gaye’s 1964 Motown single “Baby Don’t You Do It,” not the well-known version in the first scene of The Last Waltz but rather the ferocious one that appeared as the opener on Rock of Ages, a live album composed of recordings from a three-night stand in New York in 1971, which I possessed in the form of the 2001 remastered two-CD expanded release, always, in those Case-Logic days, close at hand. So in goes disc one. I skip Robbie’s introductions of the horn players, and Levon’s snare pops an upbeat, Rick rips a syncopated line on his fretless, the maple and ebony humming hot and alive from the very first 16th-note, Levon’s two snare shots on the 2 of the 3-2 clave and we’re off, a sort-of drawling Bo Diddley beat, a rhythm that somehow feels less propulsive than it might, less driving, less about rushing through life and more about the moments within the rhythm as spaces for love, the spaces Levon leaves for others through that beat, the beat itself alluding to The Band’s previous life as The Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins’s band, Hawkins who both covered and lifted material from Bo Diddley right there in early days of rock and roll, Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” recorded by Hawkins and the Hawks in 1963, a wild, pulsing cut. The Band would play both “Who Do You Love” and “Don’t Do It” at The Last Waltz, the tunes, one can start to see, suggesting so much about their alluvia of influences and references, from the early rock and roll of Diddley, just one remove from the blues, to the Motown soul of Marvin Gaye, The Band’s version of the latter elevated by the shining New Orleans horn arrangements of Allen Toussaint on the Rock of Ages track I needed that morning.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in thee,” goes the eighteenth-century Anglican hymn from which The Band borrowed the title of their live album. I am watching Aretha Franklin sing “Rock of Ages,” a 2016 performance, spacious and soaring, Aretha on piano at New Bethel Baptist in Detroit (about a twenty-minute drive from where my brother and I grew up just outside the city), Darryl Houston on organ, and this being the church where Aretha started singing as a child and the home of the congregation of whom her father was pastor for decades, she is, by the end, overcome and in tears. From off camera someone asks, “Ms. Franklin” – she is still seated at the piano – “can you tell us why you chose ‘Rock of Ages’?” She replies, “I just felt it,” then a pause, “in my spirit today.” Yes: there is a moment right after singing “water” in the third line that she abruptly stops, says, “one more time,” starts over, but in starting over she gives us a vocalise for about twenty seconds (with one brief knowing look towards the camera), no words sung just rich grand piano and sweet organ behind a pure ethereal stream of voice.
“Rock of Ages”: surely a wink by The Band, a pun on rock and roll, right? A legend surrounds the composition of the hymn by Augustus Montague Toplady, who, it was said, found shelter from a storm inside a rock, a cave in Burrington Combe, North Somerset, England, where he jotted down the first verse, another of the improbable stories that arise connected to powerful music and musicians, and I’m thinking here of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, of Daniel and the sacred harp, of David and the secret chord – all tales which try to make sense of the at-times incomparable force of music by suggesting its sources are not of this everyday human world.
There is a religiosity that some of The Band’s music seems to be reaching towards, with Garth’s organ stylings for one (he was an organist in an Anglican church when younger), but also surely in the references to “saints and sinners,” the Sea of Galilee, Cain, pieces of silver, sacred harp, the devil, judgment day, Luke, Go Down Moses, Nazareth, that last one – those last few, actually – occurring in Levon’s first lead vocal recording for The Band, “The Weight,” their best-known and maybe most-beloved song, the fifth track on Music From Big Pink, The Band’s first album, recorded and released in 1968. Before he sings, though, we hear his drums, three big hits on the floor tom, three warm and full reverberant thuds, “thud” originally meaning a blast of wind, the word only later taking on its common meaning now of a heavy sound, the sound of weight, Levon’s signature thuddy drumming thus combining the physical and the spiritual. Then Levon again, “I pulled in to Nazareth”: there is an entire world in how Levon phrases “Naz-areth,” hanging on the soft first syllable of that Arkansan dactyl then slinging the final two downhill, like decelerating up a hill on the way from Turkey Scratch to Helena, then over, rolling back down the road, the song’s theme.
I love the song, but I have never found its lyrics or its story fully coherent, honestly – though maybe seeking coherence is to miss the point of the set of vignettes, some of which circle around a few main ideas, the road, as I mentioned, as a metaphor for life and the consequent, inevitable world-weariness of suffering: “My bag is sinking low,” “. . . feelin’ about half past dead, / I just need some place / Where I can lay my head,” yes, the weight of the title, the word itself functioning figuratively since the fourteenth century – the burden we all carry in life, the burdens that make us human. “The heavy and the weary weight,” Wordsworth writes in “Tintern Abbey,” weight receiving the stress of the iamb, “of all this unintelligible world,” describing what is lightened for him in the “serene and blessed mood” brought on by beauty, those “beauteous forms” and their “power of harmony” that he turns to in “hours of weariness,” “when the fretful stir / Unprofitable and the fever of the world / Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.” The power of this song for me – and few songs (I’m thinking hard here) can get me the way this one does, can give me a few lightened minutes on a dark day when I am rueing my own shortcomings (this is figurative in my thinking: but have I turned away the weary traveler who needed a night’s rest?) the way this one can – resides less in the cryptic lyrics, despite what I sense is their deep ethical point about love in the form of taking the burden from another (“Take a load off, Fanny . . . and put the load right on me”), and more in the arrangement and performance of the song on Big Pink.
Where to start: the chord progressions in the verse and chorus are familiar and either bring you back home or at least stop in there, and the tones are warm and natural, notable in their original context, folks like to point out, for the absence of electric guitar or a solo. No, it’s something else, and I go right to the chorus, almost anthemic, though that doesn’t get at the real source of its force. “Take a load off, Fanny / Take a load for free / Take a load off, Fanny / And . ..”: yes, it’s the “and,” of course, because this “and” is actually three, Levon, Rick, Richard, staggered in harmony, carrying it over to the next line, “Put the load right on me,” the texture of that vocal arrangement like the texture of life, voices both individual and collective at the same time. This is what is so compelling about The Band – their multiple voices, multiple lead vocals, frequent harmonizing, starting right here with “The Weight,” not just the polyphonic chorus but the very structure of it, as Levon sings the first three verses, Rick the fourth, and then it’s all-in on the fifth and final. Oh, there’s more, too, especially if you listen to Bob Clearmountain’s remix released in 2018 over and over as I have done, often, it seems, just to hear those little aleatoric elements, those small bits of human feeling around the edges of an arranged and rehearsed song: Rick’s extra “for free” in the second chorus (1:39), echoed later by Levon’s own rogue “for free” in the final chorus (4:13), but most of all, perhaps, Richard Manuel’s sweet birdlike falsetto-humming pouring out after the first (1:02), second (1:51), third (2:40), and fifth choruses (4:26, 4:33).
I think often of the photos of The Band from those days, primarily Elliot Landy’s indelible work for Big Pink and as well as The Band, their 1969 sophomore record, known as “The Brown Album” due to the sepia tones of the cover, the years when they were at their very peak, cultivating a specific and compelling identity, up in old rural Woodstock, hanging around in living rooms and basements (including Bob Dylan’s) with drugs and drink, disconnected by choice from the counterculture, making music as beautiful and eternal as the countryside surrounding them. I think also, because I must, because it’s true, that during these same basement and living room sessions with that same drink and drugs the seeds of future discord were being sown, a tale as old as time, really, the tale of flaws (ambition, envy, fear of change, self-centeredness), substance abuse, disease, and the precariousness of the bonds of our human brotherhood. I think of the way some of these common human things have affected people who are dear to me, and how they have affected me. Looking at Landy’s photographs now, I am especially taken by those done with infrared film, their haunting confirmation of there always being more there than one can normally see, of the sense that light is not merely light.
“I heard of this famous harp years ago / Back in my home town,” Levon sings in the first verse of “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” an underappreciated, beautiful, haunting, complicated masterpiece from Stage Fright, The Band’s third record, released in 1970 and probably marking the end of their run of true greatness (a quick look at the track listing of Cahoots, their next one a year later, reconfirms this). With Levon’s lead vocals here, the “home town” of the song becomes Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, in the Lower Delta, a spot – Turkey Scratch, that is – that claims not only Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm (b. 1940) as its own but also blues guitarist Robert Lockwood, Jr. (b. 1915), Lockwood, I am reading, the only guitarist to learn how to play the blues directly from Robert Johnson himself (Johnson having been romantically involved with Lockwood’s mother), Johnson, of course, so the myth goes, having made that Faustian bargain at the crossroads of Highway 49 and Highway 61 in Mississippi in order to obtain otherworldly prowess on the guitar, the utterly compelling and haunting playing in those legendary late-30s Texas sessions. Was Robbie thinking of Johnson with this tune? I wonder if he was aware of Levon’s having grown up listening to the famous King Biscuit Time radio broadcast out of Helena (surely he was aware, to some extent, given how much of Levon’s background makes it into The Band’s songs), a widely popular show hosted by Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson II: so it’s Lockwood on the airwaves from Helena, Levon listening in from Turkey Scratch to the closest human link to – an embodiment of – Robert Johnson’s magical blues stylings. Daniel’s tragic story in the song is a version of the Johnson myth: Johnson’s guitar is Daniel’s harp, which he purchases with all his silver and, we learn in the final verse, his soul, as “no shadow did he cast.” One of the variations Robbie adds to the myth is Daniel’s regret, his realization that he’s made a profound mistake in exchanging his soul for the sacred harp, and his turning to his family for help, when, in the song’s most pointedly sorrowful detail, they turn him away. His dad just tells him he’s “lost in sin,” while his brother, man, his “dear brother,” wants nothing to do with Daniel’s ways: “Back to his brother he took his troubled mind / And said dear Brother, I’m in a bind / But his brother would not hear his tale / He said, Old Daniel’s gonna land in jail.” What is so compelling about Robbie’s version of the tale is that it traces two stories simultaneously: how selling out for music can fracture the very human bonds that make music transcendent; and how the parallel quest to escape the weight of the world through what what Sonny, in Baldwin’s story, tells his brother is a semblance of control, through heroin, will break the bonds as well, break the user, break the brother, the glow of the harp illusory, hollow, but sadly, tragically necessary for some, though utterly unintelligible to those spared by the darkness of the disease.
Daniel’s blues are like Sonny’s blues: each was unable to find a rock for shelter and needed a brother to take the heavy and the weary weight off of him for a spell. Daniel needed his brother to hear his tale, to listen; Sonny’s brother tells us, “I realized, with this mocking look, that there stood between us, forever, beyond the power of time or forgiveness, the fact that I had held silence – so long! – when he had needed human speech to help him.” A fierce rebuke, this, that forces me, every single time I read it – right here and now as well as in those class sessions when I have to hold my breath – to confront silence I myself have held. Baldwin’s narrator again: “I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. I wanted to talk about will power and how life could be – well, beautiful. I wanted to say that it was all within; but was it? or, rather, wasn’t that exactly the trouble? And I wanted to promise that I would never fail him again. But it would all have sounded – empty words and lies.”
A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound. The church closed down in 2014, I read on the internet, and the building was sold; another denomination now occupies the space and as I watch a video on their website in the hopes of seeing this organ that looms so large in my memories of church, I see that even though the basic layout of pews and sanctuary remains, where those organ pipes once reached up to the lighted vaulted ceiling above, a large and flat screen is now hung. After Garth’s organ comes an acoustic guitar, which reading around I learn is actually Levon strumming a twelve-string to set the rhythm, then some thudding, apparently Richard playing tom-toms with his hands while Levon kicks the bass drum and sings lead in the verses, handing off to Richard for the parts in Daniel’s own voice, sharing the song in other words, the chorus just an aching, haunting harmony of human voices, the arrangement of this timeless world with Robbie’s tingling autoharp accents and mournful lead guitar and Rick’s sad, sad country fiddle building momentum like a coming storm.