Levon Helm, Drummer in the Band, Dies at 71
Levon Helm, who helped forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y.
His death was announced by a spokeswoman for Vanguard Records, for which he had recorded several albums. He had been suffering from cancer for several years.
In Mr. Helm’s drumming, muscle, swing, economy and finesse were inseparably merged. His voice held the bluesy, weathered and resilient essence of his Arkansas upbringing in the Mississippi Delta.
Mr. Helm was the American linchpin of the otherwise Canadian group that became Bob Dylan’s backup band and then the Band. Its own songs — largely written by the Band’s guitarist, Jaime Robbie Robertson, and pianist, Richard Manuel — spring from roadhouse, church, backwoods, river and farm; they are rock-ribbed with history and tradition yet hauntingly surreal.
After the original Band’s breakup in 1976, Mr. Helm continued to perform at every opportunity, working with a partly reunited Band and leading his own groups. He also acted in films, notably “Coal Miner’s Daughter,“ and in the 2000s he became a roots-music patriarch. His barn in Woodstock has been a recording studio since 1975, and in 2004 it also became the home of down-home, eclectic concerts called Midnight Rambles, which led to tours and Grammy-winning albums.
Mr. Helm’s drumming valued space over showiness. He gave his drums a muffled, bottom-heavy sound that placed them in the foundation of the arrangements, and his tom-toms were tuned so that their pitch would bend downward as the tone faded.
Mr. Helm didn’t call attention to himself. Three bass-drum thumps at the beginning of one of the Band’s anthems, “The Weight,“ were all that he needed to establish the song’s gravity; in “The Shape I’m In,“ he juxtaposed Memphis soul, New Orleans rumba and military tattoo. His playing was sturdy and self-effacing, dedicated to serving the song. But it also had a loose, improvisational feel, tersely responsive to the music.
In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time.
In a 1984 interview with Modern Drummer magazine, Mr. Helm described the “right ingredients” for his work in music and film as “life and breath, heart and soul.”
Mark Lavon Helm was born on May 26, 1940, in Marvell, Ark., the son of a cotton farmer with land near Turkey Scratch, Ark. In his 1993 autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band,“ written with Stephen Davis, Mr. Helm said he was part Chickasaw Indian through his paternal grandfather. He grew up hearing live bluegrass, Delta blues, country and the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll; Memphis was just across the river.
His father gave him a guitar when he was 9, and he soon started performing: in a duo with his sister Linda and in a high school rock ‘n’ roll band, the Jungle Bush Beaters. He also played drums in the Marvell High School band.
Mr. Helm was in 11th grade when the Arkansas-born rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins hired him as a drummer in 1957. He traveled with Mr. Hawkins to Canada, where the shows paid better, and Mr. Hawkins settled there. Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks played six nights a week in Ontario and released a few singles on Roulette Records.
In Canada, Mr. Hawkins gradually assembled the lineup that would become the Band. “He knew what musicians had the fire,” Mr. Helm once said. By 1961 Mr. Hawkins was backed by Mr. Helm, Mr. Robertson, Mr. Manuel, Rick Danko on bass and Garth Hudson on organ. They had trouble pronouncing Lavon, and Mr. Helm began using Levon instead.
In 1963, weary of Mr. Hawkins’s discipline, Levon and the Hawks left to start their own bar-band career. The blues singer John Hammond Jr. heard them in Toronto and brought Mr. Robertson, Mr. Hudson and Mr. Helm into the studio in 1964 to back him on the album “So Many Roads.“
Bob Dylan brought an electric band to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Members of that band had other commitments, and for a summer tour Mr. Dylan hired Mr. Robertson and Mr. Helm. At their first rehearsals, Mr. Helm recalled, his reaction was, “I couldn’t believe how many words this guy had in his music, or how he remembered them all.“ Before playing their first show, at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Mr. Dylan told the band, “Just keep playing, no matter how weird it gets.“
They polarized the audience and were booed, and while a subsequent concert at the Hollywood Bowl was better received, another band member, the keyboardist Al Kooper, chose to leave. At that point Mr. Helm told Albert Grossman, Mr. Dylan’s manager, “Take us all, or don’t take anybody.“ The Hawks became Mr. Dylan’s band.
They backed Mr. Dylan on a studio single, “Can You Please Crawl OuYour Window?,“ and toured with him through the fall. Mr. Helm quit the band late in 1965. “I wasn’t made to be booed,“ he wrote.
Mr. Dylan had a motorcycle accident in 1966 that ended his touring with the Hawks. While he recuperated in Woodstock the Hawks, who were on retainer, rented a big pink house in a neighboring town, West Saugerties, for $125 a month. For most of 1967 the Hawks, with Mr. Manuel playing drums, worked five days a week on music: writing songs with and without Mr. Dylan, playing them at his home and at the house they called Big Pink, and recording them on a two-track tape recorder in the basement there. Songs sent to Mr. Dylan’s publisher were soon bootlegged.
In the winter of 1967, the band summoned Mr. Helm to rejoin them. With Mr. Manuel on drums, Mr. Helm picked up mandolin, although he would soon return to drums.
Mr. Grossman got the Hawks their own recording contract with Capitol in February 1968, initially under the group name the Crackers, a name Capitol didn’t like. There was no band name on the LP label or front cover of “Music From Big Pink,“ the group’s debut album, which simply had a painting by Mr. Dylan as its cover. (The songs had been written at Big Pink but recorded in professional studios.) The LP label read “MUSIC FROM BIG PINK” along with the musicians’ names, while inside the album cover, the musicians were listed under the words “THE BAND” “The name of the group is just our Christian names,“ Mr. Robertson insisted in a September 1968 interview. But the band became the Band.
Released on July 1, 1968, the year after “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,“ “Music From Big Pink“ was “rebelling against the rebellion,” Mr. Helm wrote. There were no elaborate studio confections, no psychedelic jams, no gimmicks; the music was stately and homespun, with a deliberately old-time tone behind the enigmatic lyrics. Sales were modest but the album’s influence was huge, leading musicians like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead back toward concision.
Adding to its mystique, the Band didn’t tour until 1969 because Mr. Danko broke his neck in an auto accident. It made its concert debut as the Band at Winterland in San Francisco in April 1969.
By then, the Band was well into recording its second album, simply titled “The Band,“ which would include the Band’s only Top 30 single, “Up on Cripple Creek.“ The album was universally hailed, and the Band played a summer of huge pop festivals, backing Mr. Dylan at the Isle of Wight and performing in August at Woodstock. In 1970, Mr. Helm and the songwriter Libby Titus had a daughter, Amy; she survives him, along with his wife since 1981, the former Sandra Dodd, and a grandchild.
The Band would never match its two initial masterpieces. By the time the group started recording its 1970 album, “Stage Fright,” members were drinking heavily and using heroin, and there were disputes over songwriting credits and publishing royalties, of which Mr. Robertson had by far the greatest share. The collaborative spirit of the first two albums was disappearing. But the Band’s career had momentum; it toured internationally and a live album, “Rock of Ages,“ reached the Top 10 in 1972. In 1974, the Band made a studio album with Mr. Dylan, “Planet Waves,“ and toured with him; “The Basement Tapes,“ a collection of songs with and without Mr. Dylan from the Big Pink era, was released in 1975.
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