Levon Helm, September 2011

Difficult as it is to believe, it was a year ago this week that Levon Helm left us. I just returned from the Village where I saw Ain’t in it for my Health, a recently released documentary that chronicles the musician’s final few years. The film is remarkably candid about the disputes with Robbie Robertson over royalties and credits, which contributed to The Band’s breakup in the mid-1970s and were never financially or emotionally settled even at the time of Helm’s death; the health issues that took away his voice and strength; and the related fiscal woes that led him to start the Midnight Rambles ten years ago. The film also captures the struggles we individuals face in handling the burdens of advancing age. Somehow, Helm managed all this with a palpable determination and grace. Of course I have him on the turntable right now. Here is a reprise of last year’s tribute:

The other night I was sitting on the sofa when the voice of Levon Helm wafted from the other room. The Hayfoot was watching a video clip of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Instinctively I got up and went into the bedroom, where we watched it lying down. Like so many other songs sung by Helm–”Up on Cripple Weight,” “Don’t Do It,” The Weight”–it never fails to move. Sadly, the voice has been silenced; Helm died of throat cancer in New York City on Thursday. The drummer was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Elaine, Arkansas and grew up in nearby Helena. When he was a teenager Helm became the percussionist for Ronnie Hawkins. The two Arkansans eventually ended up north of the border and playing in a unit known as Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. After breaking off from Hawkins, the unit morphed into Levon Helm and the Hawks. Soon they were backing Bob Dylan just as the Hawks. Eventually the five members of the group–Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson–went out on their own as simply…The Band.

The group released its first album, Music From Big Pink, in July 1968. Big Pink was the group’s rented communal house in upstate New York. The album is notable for many reasons. First, it was a fully realized piece of work, created by musicians who had already woodshedded for a number of years. Released during the worst excesses of the Age of Aquarius, Big Pink manages to avoid the indulgences of the era. The reason for this, I believe, is because Helm especially was so grounded the American Songbook. You can’t have been a musician growing up in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s and 1950s and not absorb its traditions. The first music group Helm saw in person was Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in 1946, the incarnation of that band that included Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. He was six years old. Helm later saw Elvis play in person several times–Memphis being less than an hour’s drive from Helena–before the man who would be King was a cultural phenomenon.

Tradition meant a great deal to Helm and to everyone in The Band. 1968 was a year of turmoil throughout the world. A short list of incidents include: the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior and subsequent rioting in hundreds of American cities, the Events of May in Paris that almost overthrew the French government, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June. And that is just the first six months of the year. At a time when the battle cry for many baby boomers was “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” the group members pointedly posed with their extended family wearing their finest for what would be a widely disseminated group photo. Roots.

The Band’s original incarnation dissolved in 1976 after the famous Winterland concert filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as The Last Waltz in 1978. The breakup was probably inevitable given the tension, creative and otherwise, between Mr. Helm and Mr. Robertson. Helm later went on the road with other iterations of the lineup but to less effect. He was first diagnosed with cancer in the late 1990s and fought the disease, with periods of remission, up until the end. Helm was always an active musician, but in part to pay his medical expenses he was especially productive over the last several years of his life. Two of his finest efforts came during this period: Dirt Farmer (2007) and Electric Dirt (2009). He was proof positive that a rock star can age gracefully if he acts his age and stays himself.

With some artists it is just a lifelong thing. Thankfully for us.

(image/Parker JH)

I was having coffee with a friend from work the other day when we got on the subject of Steve Jobs. I posited that a great deal of the credit given to Jobs over the years, especially after his death, was misplaced. My intention was not to denigrate Steve Jobs but to emphasize that technological breakthroughs are not so much the products of any one man’s genius as they are the incremental advancements of our knowledge. In other words the iPhone did not spring fully formed from the mind of any one person, but was the product of many individuals working, often anonymously, to help reach a point where it could happen. I suppose the reason we don’t think of it this way is because it is easier–and lazier–to attach the name and face of one person to a product or idea and leave it at that.

One of those anonymous people died last month. John E. Karlin of Bell Labs died on January 28th at the age of 94. Among other things in his long and active life, he was the researcher in charge of developing the touch tone telephone.

I remember being a young kid and asking my dad, a mid-level manager at Ma Bell, why our new bush-button phone had the * and # symbols. He explained that in the coming years these features would allow us to use our telephone in ways we couldn’t just yet. They were there not for today but for future use. I was around five, which would make this about 1972. (The story has stuck in my mind for four decades, but my dad no doubt forgot it five minutes later. I guess that’s the nature of childhood memory.) Today we never think about them anymore because cell phones are ubiquitous, but the touch tone phone was part of American family life–at least my American family life–for decades. How many first dates were dialed on the family phone hanging in the kitchen? And you’d better use the egg timer if it’s a long distance call. In my teenage mind we “arrived” when we got one that had the long cord. Now we could leave one room and enter the adjacent one! The trouble was, if you walked too far you might dislodge the cord from the jack and disconnect. How long ago was that in the grand scheme of things?

It is interesting that its development was as much psychological as it was technological. One of the biggest obstacles was to develop the device in a way that people would easily remember the seven digit number. And yet we eventually carried dozens of such numbers in our heads and could dial them off whenever we wanted. Fittingly, 2013 is the 50th anniversary of the push button phone.

Thank you, John E. Karlin and team

(images from top/Ben Schumin and Retro 00064)

. . . and my father-in-law, Manoharan, who also passed on in 2012

Bernard Lansky, one half of the Lansky Brothers, the clothiers who dressed Elvis starting in the 1950s through his death in 1977, has died. Lansky helped define postwar cool for generations of black and white musicians, up to and including the present day. It is a quintessentially American story. Like Nudie Cohn, the Lanskies were Eastern European Jews who started small in the clothing business, did well, and eventually rendered their services to some of the buggest names in film and music. Besides the King, The Lansky client list included Carl Perkins, ZZ Top, the Jonas Brothers, Johnny Cash, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Kiss, Dr. John, and Count Basie to name a few. It was Bernard Lansky who dressed Elvis for his Louisiana Hayride and Ed Sullivan appearances, and Lansky who selected the white suit and blue shirt in which Presley was buried. The Lanskies opened their original Beale Street shop in 1946 selling World War 2 surplus items. A version still exists today. Sad to know that one more person connected to the Elvis story is gone.

The Cold War presidents in Hyde Park, November 1962

Laura Delano, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, Ralph Bunche, and Robert Wagner attend the Hyde Park funeral, November 1962

Eleanor Roosevelt died fifty years ago today. Among other achievements in her long and productive life she served at First Lady longer than any person in American history. Each of the last two years the Hayfoot and I have taken the train north of the city to Hyde Park. We skipped this year because the Park Service is undertaking major renovations and we thought we would wait until next summer. Next summer if it’s not too hot we may hike some of the grounds. What struck me about Eleanor after visiting Val-Kill was how modern she was, and I mean that in every way. Grover Cleveland was in the White House when she was born; when the Great War started she was nearing her thirtieth birthday. After the White House years she l still lived another seventeen years, writing, speaking, traveling the world, and always aware of events. The output of books, letters, and newspaper columns is inconceivable. I would write more but I don’t have to, this excerpt from an upcoming dual biography puts things into perspective.

(images/NARA)

I did not learn until yesterday that Richard Current died on October 26. He reached the century mark, passing on three weeks to the day after his 100th birthday, but a person’s death is always surprising. Current was part of the intellectual tradition just prior to and after the Second World War that debunked many of the myths we believe about Abraham Lincoln. At the same time he admired the 16th president a great deal. Anyone who takes on the bloviating Gore Vidal (for his terrible historical novel Lincoln) deserves a gold star. Lincoln’s Loyalists is one of the more important monographs in my understanding of the war; I had always known there were Southern dissenters against secession, but I did not know the scope and extent until reading his book. I see my copy on the shelf in front of me right now.

Not only did LL change how I think about the war, but how I spoke about it as well. Before reading Current I might have said “The South” did this or “The North” did that. “The South,” however, did not secede or fight the Civil War any more than “The North” fought to preserve it. Today when writing or discussing the war I speak of “The Confederacy,” or “the Union Army,” or “Southern Unionists,” etc. etc. It’s not a pedantic observation. Words matter. Subtlety and complexity are important if we are to understand truly. This is just one of the lessons reading Richard Current gave me.

Was so sad to learn this morning that Andy Williams has passed on.

That was Elvis’ mark–he conveyed his spirituality without being able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in his simplicity.

–Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Today is the 35th anniversary of Elvis’s death. I remember the day vividly. My parents had divorced two years earlier and my dad visited us every Tuesday and Saturday. August 16, 1977 was a Tuesday, and as you might imagine that was a large chunk of the conversation that evening. Neither my mom or dad were that into the King, or even rock ‘n roll for that matter. People reached adulthood much younger during their time and they missed the phenomenom by a few years.

I am a third of the way through Last Train to Memphis. What I love is the way Guralnick stays out of the way and lets the story tell itself. He is not writing about a myth or cultural artifact, but about a person. This is something too often forgotten when we discuss the life of Elvis Presley. I attached “Polk Salad Annie” because my favorite Elvis songs have always been the ones with which we are less familiar. Enjoy.