Levon Helm, September 2011

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)

Musician Earl Scruggs has died. Scruggs was fortunate to see the musical style he helped create return to its rightful place in our culture not once but twice in his lifetime. Bluegrass had been overtaken by rock ‘n’ roll by the late 1950s when young, white kids began listening to the music of the 1920s and 1930s in suburban ranch houses and college dormitories across the United States. Thus the Folk-Blues Revival was born. Those country, folk, and blues musicians fortunate enough to be alive to see the renaissance suddenly found an audience they never previously enjoyed, or at least had not enjoyed for decades. When George Wein produced the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 he made certain Scruggs and his band were on the bill.

The beatniks listening in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, and their younger siblings still at home playing Leadbelly records on their hi fi’s, were going by a false premise. Mistakenly, the coming-of-age baby boomers believed they were returning to more pure and authentic musical styles. In reality, the songs of the Depression and the Roaring Twenties had been written, recorded, and marketed to the public with a great deal of thought and sophistication. The middle-aged bluesmen and folk singers were probably a little bemused by the whole thing, but there is something to be said for letting people believe what the want to believe.

The Second Coming came in 2000 after the release of the Coen Brothers’s O Brother, Where Art Though? The critically and commercially successful film brought bluegrass to yet another generation. Suddenly, Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, and others were again in the public eye. In part, it is what we have to thank for the popularity of such acts as Gillian Welch. That duo is itself a testament to the institutionalization of the music. David Rawlings is a New Englander from Rhode Island, and Welch herself grew up in California where her parents were staff writers on the Carol Burnett Show. The two met when studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Though its antecedents go back further, bluegrass itself dates to the mid-twentieth century. The term itself comes from the name for Bill Monroe’s ensemble, the Blue Grass Boys. Scruggs was one of the hundreds of musicians who passed through the temperamental, occasionally violent, and often angry Monroe’s band over the decades, and he was easily one of the most influential. He and Monroe alumnus Lester Flatt left the band in 1948 and founded the Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs did not create the famous three-finger style of banjo playing, but he did perfect it. Bluegrass is an astonishingly versatile music that is doing well today in the twenty-first century in large part thanks to Earl Scruggs and his colleagues. Thankfully, he lived to see it.

Etta James has died. Incredibly the singer who began her career over half a century ago was only seventy-three. James was a diva in the time before that word meant more than “female singer.” She was known primarily as an R&B singer because of her work with Chess Records, but she was so much more than that. Jazz, blues, soul, gospel, rock & roll, and whatever else struck Ms. James’s fancy were all part of her body of work. As Duke Ellington would have noted approvingly, Etta James was Beyond Category. Unfortunately the public was not always so quick to catch up, with deleterious effects on her career.

Etta was about more than the music, however. With her curves, dyed platinum hair and feline eyes she oozed female sexuality in a way that was aggressive but never vulgar. Let’s just say it never would have occurred to Etta to flash her vagina in public the way so many of today’s singers and actresses do.

We will miss you Etta.

Johnny Otis, the man who discovered her, died on Tuesday at ninety. Like James, Otis worked in many genres. He started as a big band leader but was also one of the pioneers of early rock & roll. It was Otis who produced Leiber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton before it was covered by Elvis and others.

George Whitman, owner of Paris’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore, has died at 98. I visited this Left Bank institution a few years ago and remember walking quietly through the stacks to avoid waking sleeping boarders. Famously, people were permitted to sleep in the shop in exchange for a few hours of labor in the store. The shop was directly across the Seine from Notre Dame and specialized in English language materials. Whitman was a great influence on the expatriate community that flocked to Paris in the 1950s. Acolytes included George Plimpton, a founder of the Paris Review, and Lawrence Ferlingetthi, who modeled his San Francisco establishment City Lights Books on the Paris bookstore. Whitman will be buried in Pere Lachaise.

(image/Celebrate Greatness)

Jerry Leiber, one half of the songwriting team that gave us such hits as “Hound Dog, “King Creole,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” to name a very few, has died.  What you notice when people such as he pass on is how young they were.  Leiber had been in the business for almost six decades and was still only seventy eight when he passed on.  More on the creative tension between various songwriting duos here.

(Image/Library of Congress)