The View from TUS: Aaron Reflects on Levon Helm

photo (c) 2011 Chad Anderson

If rock and roll plays a big enough part of your life to be visiting this page in the first place, you’re probably already aware of the truly great loss the musical community recently endured with the passing of Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm. Mr. Helm’s swaggering drumming, expressive, soulful voice, and personal resolve in the face of hardship (diagnosed with throat cancer in the late ’90s, Levon went on to recover and record three Grammy-winning solo albums) were a source of inspiration for generations of musicians I look up to, so many of my contemporaries, and myself.

Levon carried in his playing a powerful sense of self and honesty. If the true aim of technique is to provide a conduit between the interior life and intent of the artist and the experience of the listener, Levon was a technician of the highest order. You don’t need a terribly “trained” ear to understand the depth and power of his drumming: that earthy, flowing, joyful, dancing pulse, singing and weeping, sparring with and supporting the words and melodies around him.

What might touch me most about his playing, though, on every album, every track he ever did, is this sense of… person. A presence, a uniqueness, a touch that came through no matter who he was, no matter what the tune was about. To me, to play so many songs in so many subtle styles, over so many years through all he experienced, while perpetually having such a concrete and yet elusive individual fingerprint is a sign of something very clear. To hear both the song and Levon in such simultaneous, searing clarity means that he was, in that moment, totally in the moment, and on a very profound level. He was open to the music and desirous to share that elation, that sadness, that story, that little bit of the human experience, with whomever was listening. And Levon did so with an infectious sense of joy that was impossible to deny.

As a musician, music lover, and plain old regular human being, I’m truly grateful for that. Thanks for sharing, Levon.

-Aaron