Gigantic.39

Levon, Garth, & Co.

The landscape was flooded with suburban ranches to accommodate the growing IBM workforce in the 1960s. Besides a slightly pink tint to the siding, there was little to distinguish one ranch house in particular in West Saugerties.

When The Band posed for their most iconic press photos in front of Big Pink, we notice their classic attire, but not the obvious fact that the coolest home recording studio in America was a ho-hum middle class ranch house.

At any rate, Big Pink lived on in quiet obscurity, and was functioning as some sort of record distribution business in the 90s where our friend Raissa was working. She invited a few of us over to check it out.

I think it was me, Donnelly, LaFalce, and Marinoff. There wasn’t much to see, though there was a grand piano looking out on the backyard. Donnelly sang spiritedly while I knocked out The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Probably our little excursion was nothing more than a field trip. Then again, it’s also possible that Donnelly and I unknowingly opened some kind of mythic portal.

The very next day, Jonathan and I met with a feller named Professor Louie to see what it would take to get Levon to record with us. Louie gave us a laundry list of people we’d need to hire in order to work with Levon, including Louie. It seemed at first like maybe we were getting scammed, but we rolled with it.

It happened very quickly, a team assembled the next day at NRS Studio, another middle-of-the-road ranch house, this one out on the Hurley Flats.

Louie and Scott would engineer. There was also Louie’s wife Marie, drum tech Randy, bass player Mike, Band manager Butch, Levon’s daughter Amy and, of course, Levon.

Basically, instead of Levon coming into our world, it was Jonathan and I who were being brought into his. I immediately came to see the wisdom of this, and how this was the only arrangement that was going to make this possible.

I tentatively stepped into a conversation Levon was having with Butch. They seemed to be talking about Steven Seagal. Through some minor miracle, I managed not to tank the evening by making some stupid ponytail joke before I realized they were actually singing his praises.

“That Steven Seagal’s a real good guy,” Levon said.

Turns out Seagal had just cast Levon in a recent film, Levon was still pretty stoked about it (Fire Down Below, if you’re interested.)

It was a laidback evening, but we got down to business. Four musicians in a circle. Jon on my left, bassist Mike on my right. I was on a Hammond with a real Leslie cabinet. Levon was directly across from me, not eight feet away, looking me in the eyes and smiling the whole time as he drummed along, like he was enjoying himself. It was kind of unreal.

We did maybe three takes of Opus 40, then went into the booth to see what we had.

“I think we got it,” Scott said, and that was that, but the evening continued.

Since they were there, Marie and Amy added some soulful backing vocals which would become a prominent feature, as would Amy’s whistling which would eventually close the song.

My organ solo, which I’d come up with on the spot, turned out to be one of my best. It has one minor flub on it. Over the course of the next year, over eighty percent of the song would be overdubbed. I refused to swap out my solo, insisting that the one I performed live with Levon remain in the mix. The flub is there to this day.

We wound up going back to NRS Studio a lot that summer. When Garth came in to record with us, he didn’t bring an entourage, it was just Garth. He recorded some sax parts, among other things.

Everyone teased me that I was the Garth of Mercury Rev, maybe that’s how Garth and I developed a minor kinship for a while. I sat down with him at the piano, hoping for a few tips.

“You wanna start with just your thumbs,” Garth told me in his gravelly voice, hovering his own thumbs somewhere above middle C.

“Why do you wanna do that?”

“Well, do it, and you’ll find out.”

I’ve attempted many times to play with just my thumbs. I’m still trying to figure out if this was genius advice, or just a little bit crazy.

NRS Studio being out on the Hurley Flats played into the magic of the experience. The Lenape had lived here for thousands of years. They knew the Esopus floodplain created as fertile a soil as exists anywhere. Even when I was a kid, before I learned about the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) I could feel the ghosts here stronger than anywhere.

Garth would stay in touch with us. He and his band would play with us in New York City and over in London.

We probably would’ve eventually worked with Rick, too, if he had lived long enough. One night at his show at The Lake in Woodstock, he invited me backstage and welcomed me like a friend.

“Hey Adam, whaddah you think of my new guitar?” he said.

He takes this five thousand dollar guitar off his neck and hands it to me, like it’s no big deal. What was I supposed to do? I gave it a little strum and handed it back.

“Uh, sounds pretty good!”

I had just grown a beard for the first time. His buddies backstage all had that old Woodstock vibe, beards and big pot bellies. I could feel them appraising me, like, “Well, the belly still needs some work, but the beard’s okay, the kid’s alright.”

My education as a musician has come in fits and spirts, but something definitive changed through working with The Band. As generous as it was for them to share their talents with a younger band, they opened the door for us in other ways as well.

Basically, though our styles and levels of expertise did not exactly match up, they were gracious enough to recognize us as the real deal, and in essence passed the torch to us.

Nominally, I’d been a professional musician for all of a year and a half. Thanks to Levon and Garth, I joined the club.

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Post Script

To give you an idea how distinctive Levon Helm’s style is, when Greg Calbi mastered the album a year later and heard the drums on Opus 40 for the first time, he openly mocked us for having ripped Levon off, until we informed him that it was the man himself.

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