This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band | Levon Helm, Stephen Davis

This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band | Levon Helm, Stephen Davis | great stuff

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This Wheel's on Fi...

	This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band Levon Helm, Stephen Davis Chicago Review Press, 2000 - 328 pages average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Levon's done a great job!

This was a very enjoyable book to read. Helm gives you his bio, early days in Arkansas, on the road with Ronnie Hawkins, the Canada connection, meeting Dylan, stardom, the Last Waltz, plus behind the scenes in rock music during the 70s and 80s.

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I loved this book for many reasons, i loved the southern feel and family history levon brings to the book and i just loved the story. I am a die hard band fan but i think it is just a good read in general, it gives you an insight into what it was like musically back then plus everything else, it was such a great time period it just makes me wish i had been born earlier instead of having the late 70's and 80's as my music of my youth which quite frankly did not have that much to offer.

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Proud and Talented: Levon pulls you behind the scenes

It could be said that Levon's writing style gets a tad hokey and that the chip on his shoulder could hardly get any bigger but the story of the songs and the formation of the Band make it worth reading.

Incendiary

I'm over the age of thirteen alright. Old enough, in fact, to have caught Dylan with his "back up band" at a show at the old Minneapolis auditorium in 1965. A few years later "Big Pink" came out and our whole crowd went crazy over it. It was different from anything we were listening to, and it was obvious that this was a group who cared about music and not hair, clothes, makeup, or guitar solos. These two records: Big Pink and The Band--changed our lives. They were truly works of art, the kind of stuff the critics call "seminal".
The things in the book that made the biggest impression on me were:

1. How hard Helm was on Robertson. I knew they were on the outs with one another but until I read the book I never knew exactly why. The songwriting credits: what would Robertson's take be on it?

2. The parts involving Sonny Boy Williamson ("Sonny Boy #2", or Rice Miller). Sonny Boy was a fabulous character and harp player, I had all his records, and Levon spent some interesting hours with him. Truly larger than life.

3. "The Last Waltz" and Helm's vitriolic portraits of Robertson, and to a lesser extent, Dylan and Scorsese. Sounds like these guys are motivated mainly by The Almighty Dollar, though Helm does alternately praise them, and then indict them by simply relating their actions. Dylan comes off at times as pretty calculating and mercenary, even though he himself praises the book. Robertson, if half the things Helm says are true, is truly, in the words of John Simon, a "cold dude", if not downright evil. Oh yeah, then there's the Neil Diamond thing. NEIL DIAMOND?? I remember I read that Neil was in the film, I nearly puked. What the hell does he have to do with The Band??!?
Read the book and you'll find out the real reason he is in the movie.

4. Richard Manuel. I guess some would say Richard "lived life to the fullest", which comes off as some kind of praise or acknowledgment of Richard being just too cool go on living. I don't see it that way. I thought he was a great musician and fine singer and all that, but it makes you wonder if the fall from the peak of success in the late sixties and early seventies was too hard to take. Helm makes it sound like Manuel offed himself not due solely to despair but because he--Manuel--wanted to "goose" everybody, to shake them up a bit and force them to do something different. Hmmm, sounds like some far-reaching attempt at justification of the suicide, especially in light of Helm's claiming to believe in God.

5. Drugs and booze and cigarettes. So sad to see that these guys and so many others just cannot, or will not take care of themselves. If they could do it over again, would they smoke, or smoke so much? Booze? Pills? Practically every photo or piece of footage you see of Helm shows him with a heater. Not surprisingly he gets cancer and barely survives, depriving us of one of the great rock voices. I would have liked to have Levon address the smoking issue, maybe going so far as to urge people not to smoke. See Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"; Helm appears as a crusty old desert rat, and it's good to see him still around. But he looks like a living mummy; no, make that a DEAD mummy! But maybe it was makeup! Then what about the heroin? The Band prided themselves on doing everything differently than the other rock acts, yet, they do heroin and coke and all the other crap, just like seemingly every other rock star. It's a slow suicide, just like what Manuel did, but it takes longer. These guys had wives and families, yet they did drugs and drank and God knows what else. Such a waste and so selfish. Question: Did Garth do drugs? He always seemed to be the smart and sober one.

This Wheels on Fire is a good title for the book, because it suggests being on a runaway vehicle that's going 100 miles an hour and is about to crash. Just notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode. When you think of it, it's pretty sad, actually.

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Dixie Boy makes good

Lavon is an excellent writer and the book is exciting. I lived in the Black Belt of Alabama and his book brought back memories of a warm sweet place that is like no other. I wished he had not used so many cuss words. I had no idea Robbie Robertson was such a stinker not giving his fellow band members royalties for the movie The Last Waltz. When I was 21 I toured for a week with a group called the Association and their music was good like The Band's and when my friend Brian Cole died from drugs it was very sad at 29 yrs old. I am sad that so many talented and gifted people use drugs. I think we all need a little Jesus in our lives.

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