This Wheel's On Fire: A Fascinating But Flawed Book

Not quite finished but far enough along to throw my two cents into the ring regarding Levon Helm's version of his life, The Band and the roots of Rock and Roll. Born Mark Lavon* Helm in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas in the heart of "Tornado Alley" seems as far removed from fame as you can get, so it just goes to show where dreams can take you when you apply yourself.

In addition to being a musician with The Band, the team of musicians Dylan selected to back him on his first tour when he went electric, Helm went on to have a career in Hollywood, playing Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter, and Chuck Yeager's pal in The Right Stuff among other things. What gives the book its chops is his eye-witness experiences during the emergence of rock and roll, and the manner in which black Mississippi Delta R&B crossed into the popular culture.

Helm's account of life as a boy in Turkey Scratch is as interesting as life in Woodstock making music with Dylan after his motorcycle crash. The houses on stilts, the floods, tornados and the amazing synthesis of black and white culture in shared rural poverty where music carried the human spirit aloft all proved formative for Helm. It was a period of history that will not be repeated as the times changed for rural farmers everywhere.

Like many musicians who got the bug to play, Levon Helm hung out in places he was too young to be and began performing as a guitar player at a very early age. When Ronnie Hawkins invited him to play with his band the Hawks, Helm headed north to Canada to where their rockabilly energy set them apart from everyone and everything.

The story is told sequentially about how this band was formed, one by one brought on for their talent as other dropped off -- primarily to settle down because these were some wild cats. Most of these fellows came from rough backgrounds, not quite the starched collar kids from prep school, and they weren't afraid to mix it up when necessary (drunk boyfriends of the girls who they seemed to attract like flies.) After six years of performing -- in Canada, the Deep South and the Jersey Shore -- Dylan contacted them to join him in a world tour. He was doing something new, a 2-part concert in which the first set would be acoustic and the second electric.

The Hawks had been Ronnie Hawkins' band, shaped after the back-flipping leader's vision of what a band should be, but eventually even Hawkins dropped out for a more domestic life. When the Hawks were recruited to surround Dylan with sound, their name became what we now know as The Band. Being associated with Dylan certainly helped strengthen their cred and a record contract led to songs most everyone is familiar with such as The Weight, Up on Cripple Creek, and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

You know from the outset it's going to be a sad book. Helm begins with the suicide of Richard Manuel, foreshadowing the stresses their success would bring them later in the story.

(L to R) Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel.

As with everything in life, nothing remained the same as circumstances evolved. Success did not make them happy as drugs and greed got in the way. This book is Helm's version of how the whole thing fell apart. Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz, produced by Robbie Robertson, proved to be the nail in the coffin for the group.

Here's an accurate review of the book at Amazon.com by someone named Marian:

"Technical writing flaws make This Wheel's On Fire hard to read in spots, but the description of a remarkable collaboration from the inside is brilliant. Any creative person will benefit from reading it. And, of course, mild through his description is of the legal/copyright betrayal of the other four by the guitar player, there's a hard lesson on view for creative people."

I picked up the book for a little more background for Dylan's latest Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes. Helm was there and pulls no punches. It sounds authentic and fair. The book gets mostly four and five star reviews at Amazon, but some of the problems I had with the book were shared by others a few times. Here's my short list:

1. At times confusing
The book is co-written by Stephen Davis, who frequently incorporates narratives and stories from other people who were there at various points. The problem is, on numerous occasions I didn't catch who was talking and it became confusing the follow. I got tired of the extra work required to try to figure it out.

2. A little too boastful?
I lost track of how many times Levon Helm stated that The Hawks were the best band ever, or statements to that effect. On one occasion he states that he believed they were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. This would be overlooked had he not also included numerous references to how good looking he was. (I may have been over-sensitive to this.)

The real power in the book comes from his candid assessment of the events that unfolded as the Band disintegrated. You could feel his pain.

And for anyone serious about a recording career, you'll gain plenty of insight on the importance of reading your record contracts and knowing your rights. All too often we can't see the dark side of success because we're blinded by the lights.

4.5 stars out of 5.

*Though born Lavon, so many people mispronounced or spelled his name wrong that he just went ahead and changed it to Levon. 
EdNote: Like all the members of The Band, Helm was a multi-instrumentalist. I have pictured him singing while playing drums, but he began with a guitar and took up mandolin while in Woodstock, among other things.
Photo source: Wikipedia / Heinrich Klaffs via Flickr

This Wheel's On Fire, Woodstock and Marketing the Basement Tapes

It's been a month since release of The Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes, and though I've yet to weigh in I'm tilling the soil and planting seeds. There's plenty of chatter these days with almost everything Bob Dylan does. He's become an icon of our culture (though he famously disdains labels, so as soon as I wrote that I wanted to take it back.)

For the past month I've been listening to RAW, the 2-CD version of this bootleg collection, as opposed to Complete, the full 6-CD version. Simultaneously I have been paying attention to the reviews, some in surprising places. I've already noted the New Yorker feature, and I can't imagine a release of any Dylan music without a Rolling Stone feature. I suspect that marketing data is available to show that any time they can find an excuse to get a Dylan cover they increase sales by 10%. Just guessing, because those are the only ones I buy.

What's interesting about the Rolling Stone cover and the New Yorker piece is that they both rely on photos which originally appeared as part of a Saturday Evening Post feature in which a photographer and journalist went up to see what was happening with regard to Dylan's recovery from his motorcycle accident. I have had a copy of that Saturday Evening Post for so long that you can see how faded the ink has become when you compare the two pictures here. Perhaps the Rolling Stone photo looks richer because it's been re-mastered somehow. You can certainly see that it's been recycled from the same shoot.

Well, as I was saying above I've been prepping to weigh in on this latest Bootleg Series and one of the ways I've been gearing up is by reading Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire, a book that I will also review during another space of time. Helm was one of the original members of The Hawks, the band recruited to join Dylan in his new "electric" phase. You may recall from Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 how these concerts generally unfolded. The first half of the concert would be Dylan solo, acoustic guitar strapped across his should, with a tight hold on his audiences. Part two would be Dylan pugged in, The Band (formerly The Hawks) producing a blistering sound that had the same effect in town after town: loud boos. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in Manchester culminated in one fan famously bellowing "Judas."

The tour began in the U.S. though before Dylan took it abroad, and with the exception of Texas, the results were the same everywhere, and Levon Helm really disliked it. He and the Hawks were accustomed to crowds embracing and loving their performances. Suddenly they were being disdained, almost violently. Ironically, Dylan loved it. Helm didn't say it this way but Dylan seemed to consider the publicity from this insulting treatment to be equivalent to writers who get tagged as "Banned in Boston."

Before they left the country Helm split the tour. Helm skipped about passing time in various ways including briefly bussing tables in Florida and working oil rigs off the Gulf coast. After Dylan's motorcycle accident Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and gang were invited up to Woodstock, as was Levon Helm, and something magical happened. The creative energy was uninhibited, channeled into a different kind of sound independent of performance driven material. Whereas the Hawks cut their teeth as performers, this was a whole different gig, hanging with Bob and just letting the juices flow.

Fast forward. One of the tunes Dylan and Rick Danko co-wrote was "This Wheel's On Fire." It later became the title of Helm's book about the history of The Band (and his personal history). It also became the selected song from The Basement Tapes for this promotional video narrated by Jeff Bridges and released today to promote the Bootleg Series Volume 11. Watch it here.