Up on Cripple Creek, he’s seventy…

Back in college, some bright bulb on the management of the campus radio station had the idea of making me a disc jockey.

Oh, right.  It was me.

Trouble was, I knew zip about music.  I knew what I liked.  Pretty girl singers with big voices who made me feel that I’d just spent a wild weekend with them that had broken my heart and turned my world upside down.

But I figured whatever listeners I had might not want an All Linda Rondstadt All the Time morning show.

Breaking things up with some Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, and Nicolette Larson didn’t seem like the answer.

So I set out to edumacate myself.  I started reading Rolling Stone.  I quizzed all my musically knowledgeable friends and dormmates and combed through their record collections.  And I spent spare time in the station’s library pulling old albums whose psychedelic covers seemed familiar---as in the sort of thing I remembered seeing around the houses of my friends who had teenage big brothers and sisters---and whatever some hipper DJ who seemed clued in to things beyond the Top 40 had played and I hadn’t hated.

Then I found this.

And for a while, a week at least, my education stopped in its tracks and my few listeners were treated to a morning show that was no longer All Vaguely Country Rocker Girl Singers Lance Is Love With All The Time but a show that had become All The Band All The Time.

No one complained.

Levon Helm lives in my neck of the woods.  Yesterday was his seventieth birthday.

Video by Tim Malcolm and John Petrel of the Times Herald-Record.

Nice story by Steve Israel and John Desanto:

Down in the cotton fields of Turkey Scratch, Ark., in a house without electricity and a water pump out front, little Levon Helm just couldn't get the music out of his head.

First, his daddy, Diamond Helm, would sit him on his lap and sing old songs like "Sittin' On Top of the World." Later, young Levon would put a wooden box between his legs and, with daddy on guitar, sister Linda on washtub bass and mother Nell singing, he would slap a beat to old songs like "Little Bird." And when traveling music shows like F.S. Wolcott's Rabbit's Foot Minstrel Show came to town, everyone in the Helm clan would be there.

So when it came time to work those cotton fields, Diamond Helm — on his Allis Chalmers tractor — would often find Levon sitting there, daydreaming of making his own music like Little Richard, that new rock 'n' roller he heard shouting up a storm on the radio, which was powered by a two-foot-long battery. And his daddy would look at him and say:

"'Let a business thought run through your head, son; let a business thought run through your head,'" Levon recalled at his Woodstock home. "He wanted me to be a scholar or something, not a musician."

Read the whole article.  Related stories and photo galleries here.

Comments

[SusieMadrak]

I first saw the Band when I was 15. It was my first "real" concert (i.e. I got to go by myself). Levon was awesome then, awesome now.

[dwgs]

Nice, thank you.
Pssst, I don't think it's Emily Lou... ;-)

[Zach]

and he shall be Levon.. and he shall be a good man..

[Epicurus]

My first encounter with The Band was listening to Music from Big Pink...over and over and over...I had just never heard anything quite like them, before or since. A terrific tribute to a legendary group; thanks, Lance1

[AZrider]

Random points: Been listening to them since the 70s. Tried to see them three times and they cancelled the concerts. Good song about Levon sung by Marc Cohn, "Listening to Levon." He also does a nice piece on one of the Los Lobos albums, "The Ride" or "The Neighborhood," can't remember which one... That "good man" Levon was another character.

[Nancy Nall]

Fun fact to know and tell: He played Loretta Lynn's father -- excuse me, "daddy" -- in "Coal Miner's Daughter." Totally believable as a Kentucky hill dweller. And you can see him in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" as the old man who asks to be put out of his misery.

And yeah, I liked "Up on Cripple Creek" too.

[Linkmeister]

If you'd had an All Linda Rondstadt All the Time morning show I'd have listened quite happily.

Get a copy of Before the Flood, if you haven't already. Live Dylan and The Band, 1974.

[Dave the H.]

Here's one of those "credit for cool only in my own mind" stories: Second year in college, up in Binghamton, New York, and we drove down to NYC to hear The Byrds at Carnegie Hall (yes, great combo). And after that concert, we went to the record store next to Carnegie Hall, where they had just gotten in The Band, that second album.

Well, I had loved Music From Big Pink, so of course I bought The Band. We drove back up to school into the night, and arrived back early morning.

I played The Band on the record player in my dorm's rec room. And the "cool in my own mind"?

I was the first person on my campus to have and to play that great album by The Band.

Hey, we were intense about our music.

Dave, who got to meet Levon's daughter Amy a couple of years ago after an Ollabelle concert and she was as graceful and friendly as her singing is emotion and joy

[actor212]

I never really "got" The Band...or New Riders or the Dead or any number of bands of that era, altho I'm a huge Dylan fanatic, but barely listen to the Basement Tapes...but I can respect anyone who grew to age seventy and still looks like he can lace them up and play.

Rock on, Levon.

[Beel]

Check out the "When I Paint My Masterpiece" from probably early '90s, with Danko and Helm on lead vocals. It's easily seen at YouTube.