Levon Helm (1940-2012) Dick Clark (1929-2012)
Levon Helm (1940-2012) Dick Clark (1929-2012)
Where’s Don McLean when you need him?
Not exactly; I could argue that Dick Clark was as important to American music as any musician but that’s neither right nor wrong. He was in there, though. He was definitely in there. From my point of view it was Dick Clark among many others who shaped the American music industry in the late 1950s and the 1960s. This is not ancient history, ducklings; people just five years my senior remember well how American Bandstand (which was then a daily afternoon television show) pointed the way, if you wanted to follow it, from your parents’ music to something very different.
Levon Helm followed a very different path…no, that’s not right. Both of them were trailblazers not so much so that others might follow but because the pre-blazed trails didn’t suit. I suppose the basic difference between the two was the number of people who could follow Clark and get it absolutely twisted up. Many watched dear old Bandstand for the fashion and new dance fads as opposed to those the music. Some took all, everything Bandstand had to offer. For a kid in a rural town such as the one I grew up in Bandstand was a rare peek into another world. That the Philadelphia kids probably dressed differently from their normal lives for their turn on Bandstand didn’t really come across.
Levon at that time was an Arkansas boy with a jones for all things musical. Rockabilly as it was called never really permeated the mainstream American psyche save for a few one-off hits and eventually the great Southern Rock run of the 1970s but it seemed to suit Levon fine. Rockabilly is as close as anyone will ever get to a genre-descriptive for Levon’s music with The Band and in his solo years. It is, like all genre-labels, absolutely incorrect.
The right descriptive for Levon’s music as well as The Band’s, for my money, is “American”. Yeah, there were four Canadians and one Arkansan in there but it is literally, to me, the sound of America; the ultimate melting pot of music. I will include Canada as part of the Americas since it is though it is most definitely not part of the United States. American is the whole f’n continent, people, both hemispheres. That music drips America, warts and nasty underbelly and all.
It is more simply just beautiful.
I don’t know now and I can’t be bothered to do the research to find out if The Band or any of its members ever appeared on American Bandstand. I wouldn’t bet on it either way, to be honest. From time to time the guests on American Bandstand would blow one’s mind though never as much as the time John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas show in the 1970s for a full week. I have decided that one is the ultimate mind blower with a few other contenders in the mix and let it go.
You could get to the fringes of the music industry where so much of the really good stuff is from Bandstand if you tried or if like me you just couldn’t help yourself. You could listen to a hit record like, say, Joan Baez’ “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, discard the vocals as I have never been able to really love her voice and wonder where the hell that song came from.
I found out where that song came out and I found The Band. Man, it was beautiful.
You couldn’t find two more opposite people in the music business than Dick Clark and Levon Helm. I don’t honestly know if Dick Clark ever really loved music but he knew a hit when he heard one and that remains for me his greatest claim to fame; the man had ears in the music industry sense. Clark used to routinely be scourged in the press for having the wrong people on his show; people of color at first which of course would end American civilization in the opinions of some. Same with teenaged hoodlums and scantily clad women and on and on and on; highly uptight people kept announcing boycotts and Clark’s viewership like went up.
You could argue Clark’s show became too mainstream and you’d be right; they booked the people who had hits instead of the music that grabbed your guts and made you pay attention for at least four minutes. The mainstream blanderizes everything and that’s a stone cold fact. But from time to time there’d be a literal ray of sunshine in the “I didn’t see that coming” sense and Bandstand grabbed that as well; it was a hit and that was that.
The Band never had hits. The Band simply made the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. The lyrics, mostly courtesy of Robbie Robertson were at best stream of consciousness and utterly amazing. No, they’re not singing about your first boyfriend or your first kiss. They were snapshots with no captions. The music was a mélange of country, folk, rock, Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, rockabilly, blues and probably a dozen other styles; in other words it was what they liked and they liked a little of everything. As do I; let me show you my collection of Breton folk and pop music.
They didn’t belong on American Bandstand no matter who covered the song. Bluntly, there weren’t a lot of covers because the music was so idiosyncratic and utterly right you were better off leaving it alone.
I know hand on heart the first song I listened to by The Band was “The Weight”. If I knew what it was about I would tell you. I don’t. Nobody does. Sad-assed music writers have expended beaucoup words on that song and not one of them got it right. It’s what the song does to your brain and heart and soul and if any of them could define this in a way appropriate to all they’d be songwriters, amirite?
For me it’s the whip crack, razor-sharp and somehow tired if not weary voice of Levon Helm that did the initial grab; the first words over that incredible music:
I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ‘bout half past dead
I just needed some place where I could lay my head
“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”
He just grinned and shook my hand and “No” was all he said
I remember my eyes filled with tears and to this day I can’t tell you why. Maybe because I had the feeling I get when something really profound has just entered my ears regardless of its’ origins; that feeling is what I call ‘home’ though it doesn’t mean that at all. That’s just the best I can do.
Last summer, early summer before the North Carolina sun cranks it up to ‘punishing’ I was outside mucking about the yard as I am wont to do. I had my wee box on the steps and I had The Band going.
I sat down on my brick steps to rest my bum and take a moment. Drink some water, have a look around. Behind my house there are acres of fields; to the north are more fields and a fine old red tin barn. It’s about as bucolic as you’d like, really.
Through the fields, about three-quarters of a mile from my side door there is a small town, population under three-thousand. Downtown is a few blocks square and like all small towns or cities for some reason it is a misery in the summer. The sun saturates all that paving and cement and brick work and gets amplified a hundred times in all of the wrong ways there are.
That small city is much like the place I ‘saw’ when I first heard “The Weight”. Granted, all you have to do is get yourself out of all that paved nonsense to feel just a little better, in the shade, under the trees, but it’s getting there that’s the hard part.
I sat on my steps drinking water from my canteen and crying a little. I wasn’t sad or desperate or tired. It was all just kind of perfect in its own way.
At my age I lose two or three real icons of my youth a year. I remember when they were young men and women, young punks in the minds of so many. Trouble makers and hand on heart again I do love a troublemaker. I think I hold those remaining so close in my heart because they will go, we all go and I do not want them to go. I don’t want them to suffer, I don’t want them to become shadows of their pasts but I don’t want them to go.
I don’t live in the past, though. I wondered today if my music collection contained more dead artists than living. I am happy to say it does not and it does contain music by people who will likely outlive me. I won’t have to bury them; I won’t have to mourn them I hope. People still die young.
The number of people who ran home every day to see American Bandstand is dwindling. Even I don’t remember those days. By my era Dick Clark was as well known for hawking Clearasil as for opening a window to millions, showing them that there was more beyond their immediate surroundings.
Levon Helm went on making brilliant music for much longer than he did with The Band. If The Band defined ‘hippie’ to some that definition was shattered by acrimony, law suits, death and suicide. Only Robbie and Garth are left now.
I would see tweets from Levon’s account talking about the upcoming or most recent Midnight Ramble, the shows he put on up near Woodstock which mixed a crazy brew of artists that turned out some fine damn music, Levon at the drum kit playing along. I would smile when I saw those tweets; you couldn’t keep the old man down. So much of The Band’s music is about people on the edge of surrender, knocked down at least once too often to the point of feeling there really was no point in trying anymore. Then they’d go on because, hell, what else was there to do?
I didn’t want to see that tweet today. I knew it was coming, we all knew it was coming. Robbie Robertson found out in time to get himself to Levon’s bed side and I am peculiarly grateful for this. I really believe in many of the real hippie ethics, the ones that got lost in the media’s presentation of it all being nothing but sex and drugs. Ugly damn business got into The Band and it did not end well. For that I’m sorry. That Robbie was able to share a little love and time with his old friend is a truly beautiful thing.
So, I’m old and the world is getting older but no wiser and Levon and Dick are gone and it sucks, you know? It does. The music has never sucked; dozens if not hundreds of artists have made my life richer and fuller than it would otherwise have been. I winced when I read of Dick Clark’s death and wept when I read of Levon Helms’. I could have cut all of this down to that, tweeted it and been done. But I couldn’t; I had more to say.
Catch a cannonball just to take me down the line
Cause my bag is sinking low and I do believe it’s time
To get back to Miss Fanny, you know she’s the only one
Who sent me here with her regards for everyone
Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free
Take a load off Fanny and you put the load right on me
Godspeed
Where’s Don McLean when you need him?
Not exactly; I could argue that Dick Clark was as important to American music as any musician but that’s neither right nor wrong. He was in there, though. He was definitely in there. From my point of view it was Dick Clark among many others who shaped the American music industry in the late 1950s and the 1960s. This is not ancient history, ducklings; people just five years my senior remember well how American Bandstand (which was then a daily afternoon television show) pointed the way, if you wanted to follow it, from your parents’ music to something very different.
Levon Helm followed a very different path…no, that’s not right. Both of them were trailblazers not so much so that others might follow but because the pre-blazed trails didn’t suit. I suppose the basic difference between the two was the number of people who could follow Clark and get it absolutely twisted up. Many watched dear old Bandstand for the fashion and new dance fads as opposed to those the music. Some took all, everything Bandstand had to offer. For a kid in a rural town such as the one I grew up in Bandstand was a rare peek into another world. That the Philadelphia kids probably dressed differently from their normal lives for their turn on Bandstand didn’t really come across.
Levon at that time was an Arkansas boy with a jones for all things musical. Rockabilly as it was called never really permeated the mainstream American psyche save for a few one-off hits and eventually the great Southern Rock run of the 1970s but it seemed to suit Levon fine. Rockabilly is as close as anyone will ever get to a genre-descriptive for Levon’s music with The Band and in his solo years. It is, like all genre-labels, absolutely incorrect.
The right descriptive for Levon’s music as well as The Band’s, for my money, is “American”. Yeah, there were four Canadians and one Arkansan in there but it is literally, to me, the sound of America; the ultimate melting pot of music. I will include Canada as part of the Americas since it is though it is most definitely not part of the United States. American is the whole f’n continent, people, both hemispheres. That music drips America, warts and nasty underbelly and all.
It is more simply just beautiful.
I don’t know now and I can’t be bothered to do the research to find out if The Band or any of its members ever appeared on American Bandstand. I wouldn’t bet on it either way, to be honest. From time to time the guests on American Bandstand would blow one’s mind though never as much as the time John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas show in the 1970s for a full week. I have decided that one is the ultimate mind blower with a few other contenders in the mix and let it go.
You could get to the fringes of the music industry where so much of the really good stuff is from Bandstand if you tried or if like me you just couldn’t help yourself. You could listen to a hit record like, say, Joan Baez’ “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, discard the vocals as I have never been able to really love her voice and wonder where the hell that song came from.
I found out where that song came out and I found The Band. Man, it was beautiful.
You couldn’t find two more opposite people in the music business than Dick Clark and Levon Helm. I don’t honestly know if Dick Clark ever really loved music but he knew a hit when he heard one and that remains for me his greatest claim to fame; the man had ears in the music industry sense. Clark used to routinely be scourged in the press for having the wrong people on his show; people of color at first which of course would end American civilization in the opinions of some. Same with teenaged hoodlums and scantily clad women and on and on and on; highly uptight people kept announcing boycotts and Clark’s viewership like went up.
You could argue Clark’s show became too mainstream and you’d be right; they booked the people who had hits instead of the music that grabbed your guts and made you pay attention for at least four minutes. The mainstream blanderizes everything and that’s a stone cold fact. But from time to time there’d be a literal ray of sunshine in the “I didn’t see that coming” sense and Bandstand grabbed that as well; it was a hit and that was that.
The Band never had hits. The Band simply made the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. The lyrics, mostly courtesy of Robbie Robertson were at best stream of consciousness and utterly amazing. No, they’re not singing about your first boyfriend or your first kiss. They were snapshots with no captions. The music was a mélange of country, folk, rock, Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, rockabilly, blues and probably a dozen other styles; in other words it was what they liked and they liked a little of everything. As do I; let me show you my collection of Breton folk and pop music.
They didn’t belong on American Bandstand no matter who covered the song. Bluntly, there weren’t a lot of covers because the music was so idiosyncratic and utterly right you were better off leaving it alone.
I know hand on heart the first song I listened to by The Band was “The Weight”. If I knew what it was about I would tell you. I don’t. Nobody does. Sad-assed music writers have expended beaucoup words on that song and not one of them got it right. It’s what the song does to your brain and heart and soul and if any of them could define this in a way appropriate to all they’d be songwriters, amirite?
For me it’s the whip crack, razor-sharp and somehow tired if not weary voice of Levon Helm that did the initial grab; the first words over that incredible music:
I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ‘bout half past dead
I just needed some place where I could lay my head
“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”
He just grinned and shook my hand and “No” was all he said
I remember my eyes filled with tears and to this day I can’t tell you why. Maybe because I had the feeling I get when something really profound has just entered my ears regardless of its’ origins; that feeling is what I call ‘home’ though it doesn’t mean that at all. That’s just the best I can do.
Last summer, early summer before the North Carolina sun cranks it up to ‘punishing’ I was outside mucking about the yard as I am wont to do. I had my wee box on the steps and I had The Band going.
I sat down on my brick steps to rest my bum and take a moment. Drink some water, have a look around. Behind my house there are acres of fields; to the north are more fields and a fine old red tin barn. It’s about as bucolic as you’d like, really.
Through the fields, about three-quarters of a mile from my side door there is a small town, population under three-thousand. Downtown is a few blocks square and like all small towns or cities for some reason it is a misery in the summer. The sun saturates all that paving and cement and brick work and gets amplified a hundred times in all of the wrong ways there are.
That small city is much like the place I ‘saw’ when I first heard “The Weight”. Granted, all you have to do is get yourself out of all that paved nonsense to feel just a little better, in the shade, under the trees, but it’s getting there that’s the hard part.
I sat on my steps drinking water from my canteen and crying a little. I wasn’t sad or desperate or tired. It was all just kind of perfect in its own way.
At my age I lose two or three real icons of my youth a year. I remember when they were young men and women, young punks in the minds of so many. Trouble makers and hand on heart again I do love a troublemaker. I think I hold those remaining so close in my heart because they will go, we all go and I do not want them to go. I don’t want them to suffer, I don’t want them to become shadows of their pasts but I don’t want them to go.
I don’t live in the past, though. I wondered today if my music collection contained more dead artists than living. I am happy to say it does not and it does contain music by people who will likely outlive me. I won’t have to bury them; I won’t have to mourn them I hope. People still die young.
The number of people who ran home every day to see American Bandstand is dwindling. Even I don’t remember those days. By my era Dick Clark was as well known for hawking Clearasil as for opening a window to millions, showing them that there was more beyond their immediate surroundings.
Levon Helm went on making brilliant music for much longer than he did with The Band. If The Band defined ‘hippie’ to some that definition was shattered by acrimony, law suits, death and suicide. Only Robbie and Garth are left now.
I would see tweets from Levon’s account talking about the upcoming or most recent Midnight Ramble, the shows he put on up near Woodstock which mixed a crazy brew of artists that turned out some fine damn music, Levon at the drum kit playing along. I would smile when I saw those tweets; you couldn’t keep the old man down. So much of The Band’s music is about people on the edge of surrender, knocked down at least once too often to the point of feeling there really was no point in trying anymore. Then they’d go on because, hell, what else was there to do?
I didn’t want to see that tweet today. I knew it was coming, we all knew it was coming. Robbie Robertson found out in time to get himself to Levon’s bed side and I am peculiarly grateful for this. I really believe in many of the real hippie ethics, the ones that got lost in the media’s presentation of it all being nothing but sex and drugs. Ugly damn business got into The Band and it did not end well. For that I’m sorry. That Robbie was able to share a little love and time with his old friend is a truly beautiful thing.
So, I’m old and the world is getting older but no wiser and Levon and Dick are gone and it sucks, you know? It does. The music has never sucked; dozens if not hundreds of artists have made my life richer and fuller than it would otherwise have been. I winced when I read of Dick Clark’s death and wept when I read of Levon Helms’. I could have cut all of this down to that, tweeted it and been done. But I couldn’t; I had more to say.
Catch a cannonball just to take me down the line
Cause my bag is sinking low and I do believe it’s time
To get back to Miss Fanny, you know she’s the only one
Who sent me here with her regards for everyone
Take a load off Fanny, take a load for free
Take a load off Fanny and you put the load right on me
Godspeed