JUNE 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Rosemary Benson creates the voices of the major and minor figures in this biography of Levon Helm, drummer for The Band. She delivers a convincing voicing of Helm's soft Arkansas dialect and even mimics incidental characters such as saxophonist Bobby Keys and folk singer Happy Traum. Author Tooze's excellent research keeps the biography interesting (odd fact—Helm loved to gobble frozen marshmallows), and Levon’s fans will appreciate Tooze's balanced approach to The Band's breakup, which bypasses the rationalizations and justifications of the Helm and Robbie Robertson memoirs. If you're a fan of audiobooks about musicians—or just a fan of The Band— you'll enjoy this. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
A dazzling, epic biography of Levon Helm––the beloved, legendary drummer and singer of the Band.
He sang the anthems of a generation: The Weight, Up on Cripple Creek, and Life Is a Carnival. Levon Helm's story––told here through sweeping research and interviews with close friends and fellow musicians––is the rollicking story of American popular music itself.
In the Arkansas Delta, a young Levon witnessed blues, country, and gospel hit in a head-on collision, as he put it. The result was rock 'n' roll. As a teenager, he joined the raucous Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, then helped merge a hard-driving electric sound with Bob Dylan's folk roots, and revolutionized American rock with the Band. Helm not only provided perfect in the pocket rhythm and unforgettable vocals, he was the Band's soul.
Levon traces a rebellious life on the road, from being booed with Bob Dylan to the creative cauldron of Big Pink, the Woodstock Festival, world tours, The Last Waltz, and beyond with the man Dylan called one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation.
Author Sandra B. Tooze digs deep into what Helm saw as a devastating betrayal by his closest friend, Band guitarist Robbie Robertson––and Levon's career collapse, his near bankruptcy, and the loss of his voice due to throat cancer in 1997. Yet Helm found success in an acting career that included roles in Coal Miner's Daughter and The Right Stuff. Regaining his singing voice, he made his last decade a triumph, opening his barn to the Midnight Rambles and earning three Grammys. Cancer finally claimed his life in 2012.
Levon is a penetrating, skillfully told tale of a music legend from Southern cotton fields to global limelight.
JUNE 2021 - AudioFile
Narrator Rosemary Benson creates the voices of the major and minor figures in this biography of Levon Helm, drummer for The Band. She delivers a convincing voicing of Helm's soft Arkansas dialect and even mimics incidental characters such as saxophonist Bobby Keys and folk singer Happy Traum. Author Tooze's excellent research keeps the biography interesting (odd fact—Helm loved to gobble frozen marshmallows), and Levon’s fans will appreciate Tooze's balanced approach to The Band's breakup, which bypasses the rationalizations and justifications of the Helm and Robbie Robertson memoirs. If you're a fan of audiobooks about musicians—or just a fan of The Band— you'll enjoy this. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-17
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.
