Cigar Box Banjo (23 page)

As the tunes for
Way Past Midnight
coalesced and neared done-ness, David began to think about what they lacked, how to fill the particular emptinesses. He heard some howling slide guitar, for example, on some of the songs, and conscripted his friend Colin Linden to play. Colin Linden is, among other things, part of the trio who started Blackie and the Rodeo Kings in tribute to Willie P. Bennett. (I first met Colin when he was a kid, too young to play the bars but already something of a sensation and a mainstay at Toronto’s non-alcoholic coffee houses.) So Colin added slide guitar, but he did not go to David’s studio in order to do so. Colin lives in Nashville these days, so what happened was, David sent down the audio files via the electronic airwaves (I have an imperfect understanding of such things, as you may have gathered), and Colin went into his home studio and laid down some tracks. He recorded each song three or four times. I happened to be present at David’s studio upon the music’s return from its southern sojourn. D.G. very excitedly set his machines to playback, and we listened to “Gladstone Hotel.” Colin’s mandate was to supply a solo for that one, but he’d given us a choice of four, and on that first listening, all the solos burst forth from the speakers with bitch-slapping exuberance. I’m still a little shaken from the experience.

The music still lacked keyboards, until one night my cell phone rang and David said, “Guess who’s playing keys on the CD? Richard Bell.”

I have to admit, I expressed ignorance.

“Janis Joplin?” David demanded. “The Band?”

That last invocation was very intriguing, of course, because The Band has long represented (to me and most of my friends) the apotheosis of musical synthesis, a big gumbo pot bubbling away with everything from gospel to liturgical music to rockabilly to, yeah, the Toronto Sound, redolent, as noted, of Hammond B-3s and Fender guitars.

Richard Bell joined The Band in 1991, replacing Stan Sze-lest, who had replaced the original keyboardist (and owner of that weepingly beautiful voice) Richard Manuel. Richard Bell played on The Band’s last three CDs, often cited as a co-writer.

I’m going to give you a short biography of Richard here. You will meet him shortly, but when you do, there will be too much manic energy, too great a barrage of stale jokes and mystifying impersonations, for me to get this information in. Richard’s father, Leslie Bell, was a choral arranger and leader. I remember Richard once telling me how his father would take him around, when he was a small boy, to concerts and clubs, listening to singers, auditioning them on the sly. Richard began to play piano as a very young lad and soon proved himself to be exceptionally skilled. As a teenager, he was conscripted by Ronnie Hawkins to play in the Hawks. Richard continued to play in various groups, gaining greater and greater repute amongst musicians, if not the general population, ultimately forming the Full Tilt Boogie Band, which played behind Janis Joplin. You know what happened there, but this is not yet the time to ruminate upon untimely deaths, so I’ll push on and relate how Richard ended up in upstate New York, in Woodstock to be precise, hanging around and playing with people like Bob Dylan, John Sebastian (former leader of the Lovin’ Spoonful), and, as mentioned, The Band. The Band, of course, are the most famous of the Ronnie Hawkins alumni. Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and drummer Levon Helm formed the Hawks, then left to back up Bob Dylan’s reviled electric adventures, ultimately gaining worldwide fame in this new incarnation. I would make the case that The Band are therefore the best-known exemplars of the Toronto Sound (there are certainly elements there—Hudson’s roaring organ, Robertson’s sweet guitar), except for the fact that Levon Helm’s contribution, stuff pulled out of the dirt away down south, was too profound.

BY THE time we met Richard Bell, he had ended up back in Toronto, caring for an elderly mother. He was playing with various groups—Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Blue Rodeo. I’m happy to report he added a little combo called Porkbelly Futures to the list, and that explains why, one afternoon in 2005, he was headed with us toward New York, New York, travelling, as we tended to in those days, in a number of vehicles, leaving behind a carbon footprint worthy of a herd of brachiosauri.

Everybody was agreeable when Richard suggested we overnight in Woodstock. The town is only about eighty miles shy of the Big Apple, but none of us thought that we should press on. Woodstock has much history attached to it. Most members of my generation were either at the famous Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969 or thwarted in their over-weaning desire to attend by such a complex orchestration of happenstance as proves the existence of an all-powerful but capricious Lord Almighty. Or so they say. Myself, I had no idea it was even going on. Since I was sixteen years old and interested pretty much only in music, my ignorance is testament to something, likely a single-minded devotion to cheap alcohol—“Come alive for a dollar five!”—that kept me well insulated. So I wasn’t at Woodstock, and I don’t believe I know anybody who was, and besides, Woodstock happened down the road from here, Max Yasgur’s farm being more properly in Bethel. But it was not that particular history we were interested in.

We pulled into a property, gently rolling and nicely manicured. There were a couple of big, impressive buildings there, but the biggest and most impressive was a huge barn. “It burnt down a couple of years ago,” Richard told us, “so Levon rebuilt it.” Richard sauntered in his leisurely manner toward the large house we’d parked some distance from, looking around with the air of a country gentleman. The rest of us looked around more apprehensively; after all, we had alerted no one to our arrival. We were interlopers, and we were on the grounds of a man who has probably had to deal with a great many interlopers. Given that this man grew up in a place called Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, we thought it likely he would employ a shotgun while doing so. Richard continued his saunter, apparently without such concerns.

Mind you, Richard never had a lot of concerns. His pace was a step slower than everyone else’s. “You go on ahead,” Richard seemed to be saying to the world, “I’ll meet you up there.” This had a musical equivalency. Many times in rehearsal, we would begin a tune only to have Richard wave us off. “I think that’s too fast,” he’d say. “Just my opinion.” He often qualified things as just his opinion, even though we were willing to put an awful lot of credence in his opinion. After all, he was the guy who’d played with Janis Joplin, The Band, Bobby Dylan himself.
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So we’d slow things down. The musical lesson Richard was teaching us—the life lesson as well, come to think of it—was this: it’s a little bit harder to be funky when you slow things down, but it’s a whole lot funkier.

A lady at the main house gesticulated toward the rebuilt barn, which seemed to be made out of a wood as dark as the sharp/flat piano keys. We went in there, led by Richard, and encountered a hubbub of activity, young men installing baffles and sound-proofing, making adjustments to the recording studio in that grand outbuilding. They all told us that Levon was around, but no one seemed to be sure where, exactly, so we milled and tried to stay out of the way. Richard moved over to an old piano, rolled his knuckles across the keys. Something about the sound arrested his attention, and he sat down on the stool and started playing a kind of syncopated stride. That drew forth his old friend.

Levon Helm, shorter than one would expect and as lean as a piece of jerky, appeared out of the shadows. The two men embraced, and as Richard introduced each of us, Levon croaked out quietly, “Hey. Hi. Good to know you.” He had had throat cancer for a couple of years, had recently endured an operation, so his famous voice was present, but faint and transparent, a kind of sonic hologram.

“Oh, hey, Lee,” remembered Richard, “I got one for you.” And then, as if he were presenting Levon with a precious gift— and perhaps he was—Richard told a very bad joke.

Richard seemed to feel that jokes should provoke not laughter but a weak groan, even the facial ashening that comes with disbelief: how did such a joke ever come into being? Why would anyone repeat it? Not only that, but quite often it was a joke that one had heard, from Richard, many times before. This personality trait—a warped gregariousness, a Bizarro World sense of humour—was constantly evident. In rehearsal, for example, you could call for the running down of some sad threnody, it would be counted in, and Richard would send forth a spirited version of “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.” (You all know that song, by the way, even if you think you may not. It’s the music played off the top in many Warner Brothers cartoons. Try singing the words in the title to the tune of the most familiar of cartoon themes, and you’ll see whereof I speak.) Richard also had little bits of shtick that issued forth unprovoked. For example, he would, and did, shout “Hey, lady!” at regular intervals, in imitation of Jerry Lewis.

So he told Levon a joke, and Lee laughed good-naturedly, and he began to show us around the studio.

AS WE had driven into Woodstock, along the winding road to Saugerties, Richard had nodded toward a bend and informed us, “That’s where Dylan had his accident.” It was a fairly innocuous-looking bend, nothing that would ever earn a nickname like Dead Man’s Curve, but it is where Bob Dylan famously had to lay down his motorcycle. It is not clear what exactly happened; Dylan has claimed at various times that he hit an oil slick, that he happened to glance into the sun and was blinded. It is likewise not entirely clear how serious the accident was. His wife, Sara, was following behind—Dylan was taking the Triumph into the shop for repairs—and she drove him to his doctor’s office, an hour away. That would make a case for the accident not being very serious. However, Dylan spent a full six weeks convalescing at the residence of Dr. Thaler, which would appear to support the popular belief that the accident almost killed him. Then there are those who opine that those six weeks were spent getting Dylan off various drugs, maybe heroin, certainly methamphetamines.

What is undeniable is that the accident was life-altering. Dylan had just come off a nine-month world tour made especially wearying by the negative reception he was receiving for the electric nature of his music. His accompanying musicians were the Hawks, the four Canadians and one Arkansan who had backed up Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins in the clubs and roadhouses of southern Ontario. At the time of his accident, Dylan was due to embark on a sixty-four-date American tour that had been arranged by his manager, Albert Grossman. So I can understand how laying down one’s bike might seem like the best option. “The turning point was back in Woodstock. A little after the accident,” Dylan later recalled. “Sitting around one night under a full moon, I looked out into the bleak woods and I said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’”

D.A. Pennebaker had shot thousands of feet of footage of Bob Dylan on tour, and one of the projects Dylan now undertook was to edit the stuff, which he called “miles and miles of garbage.” There’s a metaphorical rightness in this, I hope you’ll agree, a man sifting through the chaos of his life, trying to fashion it so it makes sense and has purpose. (Even though the resultant film,
Eat the Document
, would appear to lack both attributes.) The other thing Dylan took to doing was visiting the big house in east Saugerties where three members of The Band—Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko—lived. (Robertson lived nearby, and Levon Helm was restless, moving here and there.) Not only that—Dylan came armed with songs, old folk songs he’d remembered, songs by Hank Snow, Harlan Howard, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The Band was game, but a little skeptical. “The whole folkie thing was still very questionable to us,” Robbie Robertson said. “It wasn’t the train we came in on.”

I myself would argue—and will—that having altered the course of popular music back there at the Newport Festival, Dylan was doing his best to redress the issue. In demanding that The Band join him in an informal survey of the folk song, he was reminding everyone—especially himself, of course— what the nature of the song is. In the songs he composed, sometimes in collaboration with members of The Band, that nature made itself manifest. Let me support my case by example. If we posit that the ideal folk song is democratic in spirit, with a simple but compelling tunefulness that invites participation, it is significant that two of the songs arising from this period, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “I Shall Be Released,” almost immediately became mainstays at singalongs. Indeed, I have probably joined in more often on the chorus of “I Shall Be Released” than on any other song. The Blue Skies Festival, that meatless celebration of our commonality described earlier, ends with the performers joining the organizer onstage to render that song en masse
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Naturally, this had its effect on the musicians who constituted The Band. Their first album,
Music from Big Pink
, is an homage to the popular song, or so I believe. A song like “The Weight,” although lyrically opaque, is evocative of some older and simpler world, peopled with characters with names like “Crazy Chester” and “Miss Mosey.” In effect, we may say, Bob Dylan had come full circle.

I AM thinking now of a day in late April, 2007. It was a special day, because Richard Bell visited Porkbelly Futures in the studio. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so in recent weeks, but it was the first time I’d been there when he did. You see, I was, at that time, very uncomfortable with the notion of death, and Richard had cancer, multiple myeloma. I had been to visit him only twice during his stay in the hospital. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong at first, although it was very apparent that something was. Richard’s friends and family came in great agitated clouds, some of them flying in from very far-flung residences. Indeed, the nurses in charge of that ward were mystified at the number of visitors who came looking for Leslie Bell. (It turned out Richard’s actual given name was the same as his father’s, which we hadn’t known until we tried to locate him in the labyrinthian hospital wings.) We heard a story that one nurse had turned to another and wondered, “Who is this guy, the Pope?” Sometimes Richard’s visitors would find him sedated, impossible to reach. Other times he’d struggle for the strength to cough up words, words he needed to tell more bad jokes.