{"id":13060,"date":"2012-04-17T23:58:13","date_gmt":"2012-04-18T03:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=13060"},"modified":"2012-04-18T00:08:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-18T04:08:43","slug":"thank-you-levon-helm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/thank-you-levon-helm\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank You, Levon Helm"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A friend passed along this sad note on Levon Helm<\/strong>‘s Web site<\/a>. I knew Helm had been battling cancer, and he didn’t look like the picture of health over the last few years, but it saddens me to think that yet another member of a band that has meant so much to me since childhood, The Band<\/strong>, is about to cross maybe the greatest of divides.<\/p>\n

The Band’s second, self-titled album is one of the first albums my uncle gave me when I was a little boy. I played it to death and wore out the textured gatefold album cover with all the time I spent gazing at those beards, almost groping at the pictures of them recording such magical music in regular-looking surroundings. Robbie Robertson<\/strong> was The Genius, but Levon had the best beard\u2014and he sang “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” like his life depended on it. No, that’s not right: like the South’s legacy depended on it. I still get chills every time I hear that song. As a little kid the gave me a “living” sense of a significant piece of our nation’s history. A young Yankee felt a kinship with those ancient Southerners. I still do, despite the fact that I’ve hardly spent any time in the South excluding trips to tourist traps in Florida.<\/p>\n

When The Last Waltz<\/em> was released my childhood love of rock ‘n roll was rekindled in a big way. I started learning all sorts of nerdy things about The Band that I wasn’t aware of at the age of 6, including the band members’ Canadian roots, all but Helm’s, that is. He was the real-deal Confederate of my boyhood Civil War fantasies. Watching him sing with his head cocked, his shoulders hunched, and that half-smile was a revelation. I was used to seeing Ringo happily bashing away and singing “Boys” or whatever crowd pleaser he was assigned, but Levon was something else. He brought funk and fire to The Band that never came off hokey, the way the performances of a then-peaking Southern rock hero like Ronnie Van Zandt<\/strong> could to a private school-educated kid from the Northeast.<\/p>\n