Levon Helm passesaway at age 71
Canadians had a special place in their hearts for Arkansas musician and singer Levon Helm, who passed away Thursday in a New York hospital after a decade-long battle with cancer.
Helm, 71, was the only non-Canadian member of The Band, the groundbreaking 1970s roots rock ensemble that took a generation by storm when Bob Dylan chose them to back his controversial move from acoustic folk to rock ’n’ roll in 1965.
“He had a wonderful sense of home and family,” Toronto guitarist, producer and singer Colin Linden, a musical trail mate of Helm’s since 1988, and founder of the Canadian roots rock band Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, said from his home in Nashville.
“But he was fascinated with the stories he found in other places, and he found his own sense of romance in Canada.”
Like thousands of other Canadians who’ve been keeping vigil via Facebook, Twitter and musicians’ news groups since Helm’s daughter, Amy, and second wife, Sandy, posted last weekend that the musician was in the “final stages,” Linden was taken by surprise.
“I saw him just a few weeks ago, and he was looking stronger and better than he had for ages,” Linden said. “I was making plans to play with him in Nashville May 6. He and Amy were staying with us.”
Helm had apparently made a remarkable recovery from throat cancer surgery and treatment in the late 1990s. His voice, with its characteristic Arkansas twang, was strong, even strident, in recent sold-out Midnight Ramble concert performances with his all-star band in the barn adjoining his home in Woodstock, N.Y., and on his 3 Grammy-winning folk-roots albums, Dirt Farmer, Electric Dirt and Ramble at the Ryman, in 2007, 2009 and 2011, respectively.
Even Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitarist and songwriter, who was estranged from Helm for many years over song credit and royalty disputes after they parted ways in 1976, was taken aback by the news.
In a Facebook post Thursday, Robertson, 68, wrote, “I was shocked and so saddened to hear that my old band mate, Levon, was in the final stages of his battle with cancer.
“It hit me really hard because I thought he had beaten throat cancer and had no idea that he was this ill.”
Robertson said he made arrangements to see Helm in hospital on Sunday.
“I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together.
“Levon is one of the most extraordinary talented people I've ever known and very much like an older brother to me. I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever.”
On his website, The Band’s organist and sax player Garth Hudson, a neighbour in Woodstock for most of the past 40 years, posted, “I am too sad for words right now. Please continue praying for Levon and family.”
Toronto-based Australian expat bass player Terry Wilkins, who played several gigs with Helm in 2002, calls him “the best drummer I’ve ever heard, and an inspiration to every drummer who came after him.
“No one plays like Levon. If you analyze what he does, it has all the components of cliché. It looks and sounds very simple. But what he accomplished was beyond technique. Just watching him at work was an education, a workshop.
“Given his size — he was quite skinny and not very tall — Levon was larger than life.”
Helm last appeared in Toronto at Massey Hall in March 2011, fronting his Midnight Ramble band, which included daughter Amy on guitar and vocals, multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (formerly Dylan’s guitarist and band leader), and a five-piece horn section, playing blues, country, gospel, New Orleans R&B as well as hits by The Band.
Helm first made a home in Toronto in the early 1960s with fellow Arkansasian Ronnie Hawkins, a regional rockabilly star in the U.S. who is credited with having brought rock ’n’ roll to Canada.
Helm was the drummer in Hawkins’ band the Hawks, which eventually reeled in teenaged blues guitarist Robbie Robertson, singer/pianist Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and keyboards virtuoso Garth Hudson — all from Ontario — and for a time ruled the all-age rock bars and on Yonge St., attracting huge audiences and setting musical standards that remain legendary to this day.
“Levon was my right arm, my left arm and both of my legs,” Hawkins, 77, said Thursday from his home in Peterborough, Ont.
“He got into my band in 1957 through our first guitar player, Jimmy Ray Paulman, who knew more songs than either of us.
“Levon was the best rhythm man I’ve ever seen,” Hawkins said. “He had no schooling in music, but he already had a reputation by the time he started with me.
“He was a jokester, too. He laughed at everything. And it wasn’t long before he was running the band.”
After quitting Hawkins to join Dylan, at the time the greatest musical force in America since Elvis Presley, The Band subsequently established itself as a power in its own right with a string of international hits that included “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Chest Fever” and “I Shall Be Released,” before calling it quits with an epic farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976, The Last Waltz, filmed by famed director Martin Scorsese.
Manuel, who was born in Stratford, Ont., committed suicide in Florida in 1986. Danko, from Simcoe, Ont., died of drug-related heart failure in 1999.
Helm, who grew up on an Arkansas farm and developed a passion for ensemble blues bands and Appalachian ballads at an early age, sang lead vocals and played mandolin on many of The Band’s best-loved songs.
He was “genuinely humble about his contributions to their body of work,” said Linden.
“He always served the emotion of the song, whatever style it was. He was an exceptional interpreter, and gave every song its heart and soul. I have met very few players who were so completely, so naturally musical as Levon. He was very open minded, and never saw the difference between one kind of music and another.
“And he hated arbitrary timekeeping in the studio, click tracks and metronomes. A song had to breathe naturally, or he wasn’t happy.”
Though Robertson is credited with having written The Band’s hits, Helm’s narrative voice, melancholy tales of the post-Civil War South and handed-down family yarns provided many of them with historical substance and a peculiarly authentic lyrical flavour.
It was Robertson’s failure to acknowledge Helm’s contribution, recounted in the drummer’s 1993 autobiography This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, that caused the rift between the former musical sidekicks.
Helm also developed a sideline career as an actor in movies, with memorable roles in Coal Miner's Daughter, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Right Stuff, and In the Electric Mist, among others.
The characters he played were generally stoic, taciturn, good-natured types who got on with their work despite personal hardship and cruel tricks of fate. They reflected the kind of behaviour Helm exhibited in real life when he lost his uninsured home and studio in Woodstock to a devastating fire in 1991, and, nearly bankrupt, faced his first cancer scare just a few years later.
“Even then he was making plans to rebuild his barn and put together an all-star band that people would come to Woodstock to see,” Linden said.
In recent years Helm’s Midnight Rambles have grown from folksy, family jamborees to must-see, high-ticket concerts featuring a who’s who of guest artists, including Hudson, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Kris Kristofferson, and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who married Helm’s first wife, singer Libby Titus, Amy’s mother.
“He was well into his fourth career, and at the top of his game,” said Wilkins. “It’s the best time to begin the next adventure.”
Canadians had a special place in their hearts for Arkansas musician and singer Levon Helm, who passed away Thursday in a New York hospital after a decade-long battle with cancer.
Helm, 71, was the only non-Canadian member of The Band, the groundbreaking 1970s roots rock ensemble that took a generation by storm when Bob Dylan chose them to back his controversial move from acoustic folk to rock ’n’ roll in 1965.
“He had a wonderful sense of home and family,” Toronto guitarist, producer and singer Colin Linden, a musical trail mate of Helm’s since 1988, and founder of the Canadian roots rock band Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, said from his home in Nashville.
“But he was fascinated with the stories he found in other places, and he found his own sense of romance in Canada.”
Like thousands of other Canadians who’ve been keeping vigil via Facebook, Twitter and musicians’ news groups since Helm’s daughter, Amy, and second wife, Sandy, posted last weekend that the musician was in the “final stages,” Linden was taken by surprise.
“I saw him just a few weeks ago, and he was looking stronger and better than he had for ages,” Linden said. “I was making plans to play with him in Nashville May 6. He and Amy were staying with us.”
Helm had apparently made a remarkable recovery from throat cancer surgery and treatment in the late 1990s. His voice, with its characteristic Arkansas twang, was strong, even strident, in recent sold-out Midnight Ramble concert performances with his all-star band in the barn adjoining his home in Woodstock, N.Y., and on his 3 Grammy-winning folk-roots albums, Dirt Farmer, Electric Dirt and Ramble at the Ryman, in 2007, 2009 and 2011, respectively.
Even Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitarist and songwriter, who was estranged from Helm for many years over song credit and royalty disputes after they parted ways in 1976, was taken aback by the news.
In a Facebook post Thursday, Robertson, 68, wrote, “I was shocked and so saddened to hear that my old band mate, Levon, was in the final stages of his battle with cancer.
“It hit me really hard because I thought he had beaten throat cancer and had no idea that he was this ill.”
Robertson said he made arrangements to see Helm in hospital on Sunday.
“I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together.
“Levon is one of the most extraordinary talented people I've ever known and very much like an older brother to me. I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever.”
On his website, The Band’s organist and sax player Garth Hudson, a neighbour in Woodstock for most of the past 40 years, posted, “I am too sad for words right now. Please continue praying for Levon and family.”
Toronto-based Australian expat bass player Terry Wilkins, who played several gigs with Helm in 2002, calls him “the best drummer I’ve ever heard, and an inspiration to every drummer who came after him.
“No one plays like Levon. If you analyze what he does, it has all the components of cliché. It looks and sounds very simple. But what he accomplished was beyond technique. Just watching him at work was an education, a workshop.
“Given his size — he was quite skinny and not very tall — Levon was larger than life.”
Helm last appeared in Toronto at Massey Hall in March 2011, fronting his Midnight Ramble band, which included daughter Amy on guitar and vocals, multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (formerly Dylan’s guitarist and band leader), and a five-piece horn section, playing blues, country, gospel, New Orleans R&B as well as hits by The Band.
Helm first made a home in Toronto in the early 1960s with fellow Arkansasian Ronnie Hawkins, a regional rockabilly star in the U.S. who is credited with having brought rock ’n’ roll to Canada.
Helm was the drummer in Hawkins’ band the Hawks, which eventually reeled in teenaged blues guitarist Robbie Robertson, singer/pianist Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and keyboards virtuoso Garth Hudson — all from Ontario — and for a time ruled the all-age rock bars and on Yonge St., attracting huge audiences and setting musical standards that remain legendary to this day.
“Levon was my right arm, my left arm and both of my legs,” Hawkins, 77, said Thursday from his home in Peterborough, Ont.
“He got into my band in 1957 through our first guitar player, Jimmy Ray Paulman, who knew more songs than either of us.
“Levon was the best rhythm man I’ve ever seen,” Hawkins said. “He had no schooling in music, but he already had a reputation by the time he started with me.
“He was a jokester, too. He laughed at everything. And it wasn’t long before he was running the band.”
After quitting Hawkins to join Dylan, at the time the greatest musical force in America since Elvis Presley, The Band subsequently established itself as a power in its own right with a string of international hits that included “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Chest Fever” and “I Shall Be Released,” before calling it quits with an epic farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976, The Last Waltz, filmed by famed director Martin Scorsese.
Manuel, who was born in Stratford, Ont., committed suicide in Florida in 1986. Danko, from Simcoe, Ont., died of drug-related heart failure in 1999.
Helm, who grew up on an Arkansas farm and developed a passion for ensemble blues bands and Appalachian ballads at an early age, sang lead vocals and played mandolin on many of The Band’s best-loved songs.
He was “genuinely humble about his contributions to their body of work,” said Linden.
“He always served the emotion of the song, whatever style it was. He was an exceptional interpreter, and gave every song its heart and soul. I have met very few players who were so completely, so naturally musical as Levon. He was very open minded, and never saw the difference between one kind of music and another.
“And he hated arbitrary timekeeping in the studio, click tracks and metronomes. A song had to breathe naturally, or he wasn’t happy.”
Though Robertson is credited with having written The Band’s hits, Helm’s narrative voice, melancholy tales of the post-Civil War South and handed-down family yarns provided many of them with historical substance and a peculiarly authentic lyrical flavour.
It was Robertson’s failure to acknowledge Helm’s contribution, recounted in the drummer’s 1993 autobiography This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, that caused the rift between the former musical sidekicks.
Helm also developed a sideline career as an actor in movies, with memorable roles in Coal Miner's Daughter, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Right Stuff, and In the Electric Mist, among others.
The characters he played were generally stoic, taciturn, good-natured types who got on with their work despite personal hardship and cruel tricks of fate. They reflected the kind of behaviour Helm exhibited in real life when he lost his uninsured home and studio in Woodstock to a devastating fire in 1991, and, nearly bankrupt, faced his first cancer scare just a few years later.
“Even then he was making plans to rebuild his barn and put together an all-star band that people would come to Woodstock to see,” Linden said.
In recent years Helm’s Midnight Rambles have grown from folksy, family jamborees to must-see, high-ticket concerts featuring a who’s who of guest artists, including Hudson, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Kris Kristofferson, and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who married Helm’s first wife, singer Libby Titus, Amy’s mother.
“He was well into his fourth career, and at the top of his game,” said Wilkins. “It’s the best time to begin the next adventure.”
