Levon Helm, key member of The Band, dies at 71

In this Nov. 27, 1976 photo, Levon Helm, of The Band, playes drums at the band’s final live per­for­mance at Win­ter­land Audi­to­rium in San Fran­cisco. Helm, who was in the final stages of his bat­tle with can­cer, died Thurs­day in New York. He was 71. (Asso­ci­ated Press file | John Storey)

MICHAEL HILL

Asso­ci­ated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. — 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 the 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.

“I am ter­ri­bly sad. Thank you for 50 years of friend­ship and music,” Hud­son posted on his web­site Thurs­day evening. “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.

Posted by AP News on Apr 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.