This Wheel’s On Fire – Levon Helm & the Story of The Band
Levon Helm and Stephen Davis

The Band.  I was always fascinated by this “most unusual” of rock groups.   I don’t know why exactly – they weren’t especially popular in the South – and it’s a stretch to even call it rock music.  Of all the classic albums I wore out in my youth, none were Band records.  But they were taken very seriously by a lot of influential folks and they burned brightly from 1967-1976.  Their early recordings, especially The Band (the Brown Album) and Music from Big Pink, were universally hailed as nothing short of brilliant.  Filled with a mix of humor, political correctness, and first-rate musicianship and described as genre-bending Americana, The Band’s records sold huge.  They played at Woodstock, backed Bob Dylan, made the cover of TIME Magazine, and were the personification of unique.  The folkies & hippies loved them and the New York intelligentsia went ape too.  Oddly enough, Alabama college boys like me didn’t exactly love them.  They had no Whipping Post, no Locomotive Breath, no Layla.  It would take time for The Band to sink in.

The Band consisted of Levon Helm, a hillbilly drummer and singer from Arkansas, and four Canadians – Rick Danko (bass and vocals), Richard Manuel (keyboards and primary vocals), Robbie Robertson (lead guitar), and Garth Hudson (keyboards, accordion, horns).  They broke into the music business in the 1960s as The Hawks, a backup band for Rockabilly pioneer Ronnie Hawkins.  Big old Ronnie, another Razorback redneck, had fallen into a seemingly lifetime gig in Toronto and his little band clamored to perfection by playing 300+ shows a year.  Inevitably, The Hawks outgrew “the Hawk”.   As Dylan’s producer, Albert Grossman, took a special liking to Robbie during some NYC recording sessions, the boys, according to Levon’s account,  soon loaded up the Pontiac station wagons and moved their base of operations to a Bohemian enclave about 100 miles north of Manhattan….Bethel, Saugerties, Woodstock area…full of poets, rockers, and artists of every type.  Armed with a new name and new song ideas ready to be recorded and believing that they were the best band in America, the music flowed like a river from Big Pink, a soon-to-be-famous split-level rental.  Within months, they were gushing with money, sex and narcotics – the rock and rollers’ Holy Grail.  It’s a fascinating, though not always objectively told, story about some rather ordinary players who achieved some extraordinary success.   The story of The Last Waltz, in particular, is compelling because, according to a bitter Levon, this spectacle not only marked an ending to the group but essentially burned the bridge between him and Robbie forever.  And worse, the breaking up sealed the fate of poor Richard, who drank himself to death over the next ten years.  Rick Danko, too, had died by the time the book came out.  Old Levon clearly yearns for those glory days – like most true musicians, he’s only really happy when he’s playing.  The Band was a magic act for a few good years.  And This Wheel’s On Fire is a marvelous account.    GD