Just over the wire from MSNBC:
Levon Helm, singer and drummer for the Band, died on April 19 in New York of throat cancer. He was 71.
“He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon surrounded by his friends and bandmates,” Helm’s longtime guitarist Larry Campbell tells Rolling Stone. “All his friends were there, and it seemed like Levon was waiting for them. Ten minutes after they left we sat there and he just faded away. He did it with dignity. It was even two days ago they thought it would happen within hours, but he held on. It seems like he was Levon up to the end, doing it the way he wanted to do it. He loved us, we loved him.”
In addition to his musicianship with The Band, Helm was also an accomplished actor in supporting roles as Sissy Spacek’s father in A Coal Miner’s Daughter, and as the wingman to Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, with a stick of Beemans (the official gum of test pilots) always at the ready.
Incidentally, as someone who wasn’t a fan of The Band and its mythology in the 1970s, what’s the deal with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down?” Its pro-Confederate lyrics are the very definition of politically incorrect. Is it granted a pass by the left because of The Band’s association with Dylan? Does it help that it’s describing the end of the Confederacy? Or are fans simply listening to the melody and the dynamics of the song and not paying attention to the lyrics? (When I saw the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, play at a Northern California winery five or six years ago, I got a chuckle out of couple of thousand Bobos in Paradise, few of which are likely NRA members, shouting every word of Junior Walker’s “Shotgun;” presumably Robbie Robertson’s song gets a pass as well.)
May you rest in eternal peace, Levon Helm.
You (and The Band) had a sound all your own; and all I have to do is replay ‘The Last Waltz’ to remember just how special you were.
Thanks, and Deo Vindice!
RIP, Levon. He was the real deal.
Rest in Piece Levon.
As for The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, I lived for 5 years in Columbia, SC. Levon was from Arkansas. They view the Civil War quite differently down there. Even those who say that slavery was the cause & that it was the wrong reason to fight.
An uncommon, but still existent bumper sticker: Yankees 1, Rebels 0, halftime.
I always saw The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down as an artistic imagining, not pro-Confederacy. A quite nice imagining of the losing end.
True. Though I could never figure out why a bunch of Canadians were so interested in, and arguably sympathetic toward, the post-Civil War South. Neil Young, their countryman, certainly wasn’t. Levon Helm was from Arkansas, but I don’t recall him being the driving force behind the Band’s Dixie orientation.
Of course, I also have trouble understanding how Creedence, bunch of guys from Berkeley, thought being “Born on the Bayou” was something to be proud of.
And then there’s Vanilla Ice…
And there was New Yorker Jesse Colin Young’s cajun phase, the Rolling Stone Mississippi music and we could probably make quite a list.
I guess Canadian Robertson wrote the Dixie song. I think the Band felt their musical roots, and themselves, as some Southern end Appalachian Okies from Muskogee but who smoked weed. “The Last Waltz” looks like a hippie hoedown.
Well, it was the 60s. Lots of role-playing going on back then. And I guess some people were looking for something simpler and more authentic than what society seemed to offer. Maybe finding their inner cracker was part of the search.
At least the swamp/country/southern rockers weren’t Cornpone Communists – unlike some folk singers I could name…
I just read an excerpt of “This Wheel’s On Fire”. Helm recalls his childhood in Arkansas and talks about how his maternal uncle hated the Klan and would fearlessly confront them. He also talks about how his devout mother believed that judging people by their skin color was incompatible with Christianity and taught her children likewise. Given that upbringing I doubt Helms endorsed “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as a peon to the Confederacy.