Word: levon
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...Joyce as a young man. With the bare trace of a smile visible under his mustache, his eyes often closed in what seems to be creative ecstasy, he stands punching out notes and laying out funky phrases like "the mathematical guitar genius" Bob Dylan used to say he was. Levon Helm approaches his drums with what is, in rock music, unparalleled subtlety and restraint. On bass, Rick Danko occasionally puffs his cheeks as if he were playing a horn. At the piano, Richard Manuel looks like a teen-ager masquerading as a pirate...
...Dylan and their parents, the group had paid respects to two of the major forces in their musical lives. All five took to music young, and they were brought up singing and playing hymns and folk songs with their families. The only American, Levon, was playing mandolin, drums and guitar in his early teens, and once won first prize at a county fair, accompanied by his sister on a homemade washtub bass. Rick Danko, whose father is a Simcoe tobacco farmer, was given a mandolin at five and soon joined his three brothers at Saturday night musicales...
...money side, things were grim. The group occasionally had to work together in grocery stores, one buying something like a loaf of bread while the others tried to steal what they could. "We didn't have nothing to eat," Robbie explains. "And no money." One night, really desperate, Levon and Robbie decided to stick up a crap game with a pot that often ran to $7,000 or $8,000. With masks made of pillow cases they moved out on their mission ?only to find the game had broken up early and everybody was gone...
Somewhat distrustfully, the members of The Band have acquired a few of the trappings of big success. Their new Woodstock houses, perched on hills outside the village. A new recording studio. Levon's zippy gold Corvette. Garth's stately black Mercedes. Before tasting that success themselves, they faced?vicariously through Bob Dylan?the kind of assault on time, privacy and spontaneity that fame and personal success can make on pop musicians...
...country. White music has always been very ricky-ticky, steppity-step, plunkety-plunk-banjo. You could always imagine a stiff collar behind it. Country music was played by white people, and blues was played by black people. And when it interchanged, it became something else, which is what Levon's father sings like. He sings blues with a twang, with that different accent, with a different bump on a different place. The new Rolling Stones album sounds like a bunch of blues-oriented cowboys, man, no doubt about...