LEVON

A biography of the legendary drummer and pioneer of Americana.

Levon Helm (1940-2012) hailed from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, situated in a region where blacks and whites toiled side by side in the fields and shared songs as they did—and on Saturday nights, too, when nearby towns beckoned with their itinerant hucksters and song-and-dance players. “Today,” he remarked, “when folks ask me where rock ’n’ roll came from, I always think of our Southern medicine shows and that wild midnight ramble.” Helm mastered the guitar, mandolin, and other instruments early on, but it was as a drummer that he became known, playing in fellow Arkansan Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks, whose otherwise Canadian members eventually formed The Band. Tooze, previously a biographer of Helm’s hero, Muddy Waters, spins a story that is well known thanks to Helm’s own memoir This Wheel’s on Fire (1993) and band mate Robbie Robertson’s Testimony (2016). Tooze’s musical vocabulary is solid—“His drumming seems random here as he playfully intersperses parts on the ride and hi-hat with drags, all in an eighth-note groove”—and her reconstruction of The Band’s chronology is accurate, as when she notes that Levon came late to the sessions that would become the Bob Dylan/Band collaboration released as The Basement Tapes. She also notes that in its own day, The Band was not as beloved as it would become later; the group’s third release, Stage Fright, was its most commercially successful, for example, “even though the reviews were lukewarm.” A strong theme in the closing sections of the book, after the group broke up, was Helm’s animosity toward Robertson, whom he resented for controlling the publishing rights to The Band’s music and “cheating the remaining bandmates out of songwriting royalties.” As with the rest of the book, that story is well known—and still unresolved years after Helm’s death.

Tooze breaks little new ground, but the book is a reliable, readable life of an influential musician.