This Wheel’s on Fire
Author: Levon Helm with Stephen Davis
Release: October 1, 2013 (Updated Edition)
Tagline: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band
Publisher: Chicago Review Press (Updated Edition)
Genre: Music, Biography, History, Business, Entertainment
ISBN-10: 1613748760
ISBN-13: 978-1613748763
Synopsis: Levon Helm’s journey from his origins in the Southern United States, to Southern Canada, and international music influence.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: In ‘This Wheel’s on Fire,’ Helm adds needed voice to The Band’s end
Quotes and Lines
My story is recalled and written from my perspective on the drum stool, which I’ve always felt was the best seat in the house. From there you can see both the audience and the show. Along the way we’ll check in with friends and family, and I thank them for their memories and the ability to share them. In the end, though, the story must be my own, with apologies in advance to those I neglect to mention or damn with faint praise. Memory Land can be a pretty painful address at times, but in any inventory of five decades of American musical experience you’ve got to take the good with the bad.
All this old-fashioned agriculture has vanished, of course. My youth in Arkansas was really the last of it. In the 1950s field hands were replaced by the big mechanical cotton pickers and choppers they came out with. That whole world of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, field hands and waterboys, is ancient history now. It exists only in the long memories of those of us who lived it.
That’s how I started out. I was nine years old when I knew I wasn’t meant to be a cotton farmer.
I also played drums with the twenty-five piece Marvell High Band (until summarily relieved of duty for constantly playing in double time).
…our policy was not to tour if we could help it. The policy was to keep making music using the methods and work habits that had kept us productive through the basement tapes and the Big Pink era.
“We got healthy when we came to Woodstock,” Rick [Danko] told him. “To us, getting healthy was getting up in the morning instead of going to bed in the morning.”
“I’m here to tell you that it’s a crying shame to see what success can do to some people. I’m sure it wasn’t the best thing that could have happened to the band.” Danko
People would always ask about Robertson, and Rick or I would explain that all of us were here because we wanted to be. If it doesn’t come from your heart, music just doesn’t work. Robertson was the only one who ever came out and said he wanted to hang it up.
The Band’s story had been “owned” by Robbie Robertson. He had been the group’s public spokesman from the 1968 debut of Music from Big Pink to The Last Waltz in 1978, and then on through the publicity around his early solo career in the 1980s. For Levon, this book developed into an opportunity to reclaim the group’s history from a different perspective–the drummer’s chair, the best seat in the house. It was his last chance to tell a different version, closer to the truth, about some crucial issues that had been buried or ignored in the semi-official propaganda that had entered the canon as the accepted story of The Band.