Levon Helm “American Son”
To this day, I don’t understand how it works. It seems impossible that a person can play drums like that and sing like that. Does he have two brains? Are his arms robots? It makes no sense. We’re not talking about Don Henley, playing a straight 4/4 to girder his perfect voice. No. Levon Helm was almost the opposite of Henley. Levon swung and howled his way around deep pocket beats. His voice — inimitable, straining and lovely — sounded less like an instrument born from his throat and more like one spawned by his gut and his heart.
It never fails. Every time I listen to Levon Helm, the trick of it all still astounds me. I once read that George Harrison imagined Levon singing when he wrote “All Things Must Pass.” That comment, while unexpected, also gets to the heart of Levon’s magic — its natural beauty and its inevitable doom. And I cannot think of higher praise.
Listening to Levon’s early solo material helped resolve a lot of my feelings about The Band. It confirmed for me that Robbie Robertson sure could play guitar. And that Richard Manuel and Rick Danko sure could sing. But, also, that The Band was nothing without Levon. The inverse might also be true to some extent, but Levon’s replacement value was the highest of any of the members — and it’s not even close. Robbie’s solo records are interesting, ambitious and professional. Levon’s are pure, egalitarian magic and joy.
“American Son,” from 1980, was Levon Helm’s second solo album. The album is currently out of print. In fact, it’s almost an accident that it existed in the first place. On hiatus from The Band, Levon was starring in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” as Sissy Spacek’s father (he was only thirty nine at the time, which I feel speaks volumes about his soul’s age). For the film, he was asked to record a version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” The session went so well that he and producer Fred Carter Jr. decided to keep the band together for an album session.
Filled with electric piano, steel guitar, mandolin, harmonica and lots of drums, “American Son” is as much fun as any album by The Band. The songs are not originals. The peaks are not as high. But the playing is extraordinary. There’s this thing that seemed to happen whenever people played with Levon where the roll (and rock) of his grooves naturally arranged the band and the song. Like the musicians knew where and how to be by virtue of his movements and pacing. Like a conductor who uses his feet and his voice alongside his hands.
The album busts out of the gates with “Watermelon Time in Georgia” — a fun and funky country number with breathless stops and starts, Hammond organ and rollicking harmonica. “Dance Me Down Easy,” which follows, is more insistent — less roll, more rock — but it’s full on Hootenanny Rock, like a jug band, plugged in. Two songs in, you’re reminded why Levon’s the subject of so much obsession. Why he’s The Band’s loadstar. Why Dylan wanted that sound. Why everyone wanted that sound.
As its name and origin story suggests, “American Son” is, on balance, a Country record. “Violet Eyes” is a plaintive ballad, delivered with more nerve than most country ballads but also more sentiment than most Rock ballads. “Blue House of Broken Hearts” is a waltz-time, cry-in your-beer-number, where everybody has been there and done that and regretted it all and gotten over it — together.
“American Son” made very little sense to Nashville in 1980. But, many years later — with the benefit of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco and Kacey Musgraves and Jason Isbell — it connects the dots between Country, Outlaw Country and Alt Country. And yet, I’d be remiss if I further bury the sub-header: it’s likely that, in 2020, this record would not exist — at least not in the form in which it was originally released. There are at least two songs on the album that Levon couldn’t play in the twenty-first century. And given that the record is just ten songs and thirty minutes long, the twenty-percent issue requires mention.
“China Girl” — a song about (you guessed it) an American man in love with a Chinese woman is filled with pat, orientalizing tropes that are hard to defend. It not only patronizes, it other-izes. And, candidly, the song is not great enough to wrestle with much beyond that determination. On the other hand, I find “Sweet Peach Georgia Wine” to be a trickier affair. It’s a song about (you guessed it, again!) a grown man serving “ten to twenty one” because he fell for the sixteen year old daughter of the sheriff. Whereas “China Girl” has the stink of twentieth imperialism and globalization, “Sweet Peach Georgia Wine” sounds like an age old Southern fable. And through that lens, Levon is less like an actor or character and more like an archetype. It’s a better performance and a finer line, which also makes it more problematic.
For both of these cases, I like to consider the “Randy Newman Test.” When a song’s lyrics are thorny (or worse), I like to ask, “would I feel differently about this if Randy Newman was performing this song?” Would I more readily defend it as satire or a character study? In these cases, “American Son” fails the Randy Newman Test. No defenses or deflections matter. These songs are not satirical. Their motives are not sociological. The words are clumsy, if not a little ugly.
Levon Helm already had a lot of wear on his tires by 1980. Over the next thirty years, he’d travel fewer miles, but the tears would be great. He suffered physically, financially and personally. He battled cancer. He battled his bandmate. He broke up and reformed The Band. He settled in Woodstock. He turned his barn into the Midnight Ramble, and invited friends and acolytes to commune with him; all of which became fodder for a hard earned, much needed redemption story that culminated in 2007 with his Grammy for “Dirt Farmer.” All things must pass, but nearly lost in the sunset is “American Son” — the out of print, raucous, joyous, twenty percent flawed album that can be hard to consider but which is so easy to feel.