Levon

March 30, 2020
Tooze (Muddy Waters) keeps a steady beat in a straightforward chronicle of the life of Band musician Levon Helm (1940–2012). Drawing on interviews with Helms’s daughter, Amy Helm, close friends, and his music director Larry Campbell, Tooze traces Helm’s life from his Arkansas childhood where he grew up listening to soul, country, blues, and gospel on the radio. By the time he was 15, he was playing drums in the Hawks; guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, and pianist Richard Manuel joined the band, and in 1964 the four musicians left to form their own group. They moved to Woodstock, N.Y.—in the famous pink house of their first album’s title, Music from Big Pink—and added multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson to the band. Tooze methodically traces the rapid rise to fame of the Band through perceptive and judicious summaries of each of the group’s albums. By 1976, the group had disbanded, and Helm, after being treated for throat cancer, eventually built a barn on his Woodstock property where he would host and record his famous Midnight Ramble sessions—“a musical and communal gathering wouldn’t forget.” Tooze’s well-paced history serves as a solid companion to Helm’s memoir This Wheel’s on Fire.

April 1, 2020

For this full-length biography of musician and actor Levon Helm (1940-2012), Tooze (Muddy Waters) relies on extensive interviews with her subject and his friends and family, tracking his life from his upbringing in Turkey Scratch, AR, and his stint with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. The author follows the Hawks' various line ups until they coalesced with drummer Helm, guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, and keyboardists Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel. The group split with Hawkins, backed singer Bob Dylan, and rose to stardom as The Band, which ironically embodied Americana despite the Canadian backgrounds of all members except Helm. After describing Helm's growing animosity toward Robertson and the breakup of The Band, Tooze outlines Helm's solo albums, his acting career, the reformation of The Band without Robertson, and the drummer's death from throat cancer. VERDICT This meticulously researched book offers music fans a thorough introduction and adds to current material, including Helm's autobiography This Wheel's on Fire, Barney Hoskyns's Across the Great Divide, and the film Ain't in It for My Health.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
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.

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May 1, 2020
The dominant force of The Band, one of the most collaborative of the great musical groups to emerge from the 1960s, was most certainly Levon Helm (1940-2012), the only American (and Southerner) in the group. His earthy, twangy vocals trace back at least to the Civil War, and his propulsive, deceptively complex drumming powered such classics as Up on Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Helm gets his due here?it's about time?in a biography that spans his impoverished but richly lived rural Arkansas boyhood through his salad days with Ronnie Hawkins and then The Band, that group's bitter dissolution, and Helm's final, wonderfully redemptive solo albums, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt. Helm was also a helluva guitar picker, by the way. Tooze makes unmistakably clear that, yes, Helm was uniquely gifted, but it was also his unceasing efforts to improve his craft?he attended Berklee College of Music after his first tour with Bob Dylan?and the joy with which he shared it that defined his greatness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)