Good night, Tab

Perhaps you had to be there, at that time, at the right age. I was a teenager in the 1950s and Tab Hunter was a big freaking deal. Looking back on it now, I don’t really understand why except perhaps that time became known as "The Era of the Teen Idols." I can’t say I ever sought ought a movie simply because Tab Hunter was in it -- the only Hunter movie I remember going to see was Damn Yankees and that had nothing to do with Tab Hunter. In fact, at one point Hunter really made me mad. He recorded this song called Young Love, a cover version of a tune done much, much better by country singer Sonny James. But Sonny James wasn’t a household name. He wasn’t a teen throb. So Tab Hunter’s awful version of this song climbed to No. 1 on the charts. James’ far superior recording of the same tune did OK, but to this day I blame Tab Hunter for stealing the glory from Sonny James. Still, Hunter’s death last night seems like another nail in the coffin of a time I do hold dear, a simpler time, certainly a more innocent time. It was, however, a far more sexually repressive time — I joke now that the only person who really had any fun during the 1950s was Dwight Eisenhower. But there you have it. That was Tab’s time.

My three favorite Harry Dean Stanton movie scenes

Remembering Jonathan Demme

I am terribly saddened about the news concerning the passing of director Jonathan Demme who died this morning in New York City from esophageal cancer and complications from heart disease, During a 13-year period that stretched from 1980 to 1993, I’m not sure there was a filmmaker who could match him. Just consider these titles: Melvin and Howard (1980); Swing Shift (1984) featuring Christine Lahti’s breakout, Oscar-nominated performance; Stop Making Sense (1984), the best rock music documentary ever (I rank it above The Last Waltz, because Waltz was edited out of sequence and featured added, staged — thus non-documentary — footage, as well as Woodstock, which glamorized what, anyone who attended will tell you, was a natural disaster); Something Wild (1986, a tour-de-force from Melanie Griffith and one of the best, if not the best, debut performances ever from Ray Liotta); Swimming to Cambodia (1987); Married to the Mob (1988) and then the two films that sealed the deal, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1993).

He seemed to slide into the shadows after that, although I thought his remake of The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, while not great, was far superior to most remakes and much better than I expected it to be. Then he completely, albeit briefly, emerged from the shadows in 2008 with the wonderful Rachel Getting Married, which, in effect, was Demme telling the world "In case you think I no longer have what it takes, then take this."

No one ever slipped from the end of a film to its credits better than Demme did here in Something Wild.

Ray Liotta stealing scenes in Something Wild.

Saying goodbye to two dear friends I never actually met face-to-face

Last night I learned about Monday’s death of Leonard Cohen and then I discovered Robert Vaughn died this morning. Both were 83.

I’m not sure of the cause of Cohen’s death or why his family waited until yesterday to let the rest of the world know about this tragic loss. I do know his son Adam said "My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records [his latest and recently released album is called You Want It Darker). He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor."

I have too many favorite Leonard Cohen songs to single out a single one as a No. 1 favorite: Dance Me to the End of Love, Ain’t No Cure for Love, Bird on the Wire, Everybody Knows, Suzanne, Hallelujah, Democracy, I’m Your Man, So Long Marianne, First We Take Manhattan, Closing Time. But I’m going to single one song out because it contained a line that could only be delivered effectively by Cohen himself and a line that always made me laugh out loud each time I heard it. The song is Tower of Song and the line is "I was born like this/I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice." The first time I heard him perform this song live a strange thing happened. The audience didn’t laugh, they cheered. It was if they were rising up in unison to let Cohen know "We know your voice has deteriorated from what it was, that it now sounds course and perhaps scratchy, but we don’t care. Not one bit. We love you anyway and we’re with you all the way." See for yourself in the clip below and also listen to it through the very end so that you can learn from him the secret to the mysteries of life. There’s another great verse in this song that, to me, perfectly combines Cohen’s fascination with actual politics, sexual politics, religiously-influenced prophecy and self-doubt as well as his self-induced paranoia: "Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure/The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor/And there’s a mighty judgment coming but I may be wrong/You see, you hear these funny voices/In the tower of song."

Vaughan, unfortunately, will probably be remembered by most as the star of the popular 1960s television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. To me his best performance was as war veteran Chester A. Gwynn in the movie The Young Philadelphians and my favorite Vaughn performance came with his expertly crafted villain Walter Chalmers in Bullitt.

What may not be known by many about Vaughn was that he had a doctorate in communications from the University of Southern California. His PhD dissertation, which he later transferred into book form, bore the title Only Victims; A Study of Show Business Blacklisting.

Vaughn was an active progressive liberal and became the first popular American actor in the 1960s to come out publicly against the war in Vietnam. Along with Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, he founded an organization in 1968 called Dissenting Democrats to promote the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy.

Vaughn died of "acute leukemia" in his Connecticut home just 11 days before his 84^th birthday.

Goodnight, Maureen

Maureen O'Hara

Aug. 17, 1920-Oct. 24, 2015

Good night, Mike

One of the truly great ones says good-bye. I never met Mike Nichols, but I marveled at him beginning with his days as half of the comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I remember standing in line waiting to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the rain in New York City and being stunned by the fact that this was a work of a first-time director. His directorial touches in only his second film, The Graduate, are still being taught in film school and the ending of that film shows how you can say so much without saying anything. I also think he never received the credit he deserved for films such as Silkwood, Catch-22, and Primary Colors. I don't think he was America's greatest contemporary director, I reserve that honor for Martin Scorsese. But he's certainly in the group portrait.

George Hamilton IV: July 13, 1937 - September 17, 2014

A passing worth noting

Frankie Valli (left) and Bob Crewe at the Broadway opening of Jersey Boys

Bob Crewe died Thursday and not much has been mentioned about it. Maybe it’s because Crewe was one of those "behind-the-scenes" music geniuses.

He is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. If he had only written one song, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, it would have qualified him for the Hall, but he, along with co-writer Bob Gaudio wrote most of the big hits made famous by Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. He also wrote a song Bob Dylan recorded during his "basement tapes" sessions, although Dylan’s version of the song has never been released.

Crewe’s first major success came in 1957. He had started his own record label, XYZ, and one of the groups he signed to that label was The Rays. In 1957 he and Frank Slay Jr., a pianist from Dallas, co-wrote a song called Silhouettes, which The Rays recorded. The song was picked up by the larger Cameo Records label and climbed as high as No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. (The song came a hit again in 1965 for Herman’s Hermits and that’s the above-referenced song Dylan recorded.)

On the B-side of the Rays recording was another Crewe/Slay composition called Daddy Cool which became a Top 10 hit in 1957 for The Diamonds.

That success led Crewe and Slay to be signed with Swan Records and while there Crewe produced such hits as Lah Dee Dah for Billy and Lillie and Tallahassee Lassie for Freddy Cannon.

He teamed with Gaudio in the early 60s. Gaudio, at the time, was regarded somewhat of a boy wonder in the music business. At the age of 15, while singing with a group called The Royal Teens, he co-wrote its only hit, Short Shorts. Crewe’s and Gaudio’s first collaboration, Sherry, in 1962 for The Four Seasons. They later wrote (and Crewe produced) such additional Four Seasons hits as Big Girls Don’t Cry, Rag Doll, Walk Like a Man and Bye, Bye Baby (Baby, Goodbye), Together with Sandy Linzer and Denny Randall, Crewe wrote my favorite Four Seasons hit, Let’s Hang On.

In the mid 1960s, he discovered a band called Billy Lee & the Rivieras. He renamed the group Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, which scored major hit singles with Crewe’s arrangements of such songs as Devil With a Blue Dress On and Jenny Take a Ride.

Crewe’s last major success came in 1975 when he co-wrote with Kenny Nolan the song Lady Marmalade that became a No. 1 hit for Labelle.

Crewe was featured prominently in the Broadway musical Jersey Boys about The Four Seasons.

In April of this year Crewe, who had been in declining health for several years, checked himself into a Scarborough, Maine, nursing home. He was 83 when he died there Thursday.

“It depends on who’s in the saddle”

 

This is not only my favorite scene from the movie The Big Sleep, but simply one of my favorite scenes from any movie. The double entendres flow faster than the drinks from the bar. Perhaps it’s because the source material was a novel by the great Raymond Chandler or maybe because the film’s screenplay was written by no less than William Faulkner. But I can’t think of anyone who could have played it better than Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

Bacall was 20-years-old when the scene was filmed, Bogart 45. And their chemistry was obvious. They began an affair when she, at the age of 17, made her first film with Bogie To Have and Have Not; were married right around the time of the release of The Big Sleep; and remained married until Bogie’s death from cancer in 1957.

I’m not sure why Bacall, who died today from a stroke at the age of 89, never received the credit due her as an actress. Perhaps it was because he made it seem so natural. "Was she acting or just being Lauren Bacall?" She received only one Oscar nomination, for supporting actress in the now mostly forgotten The Mirror Has Two Faces. Many observers, myself included, considered her a cinch to win the Oscar that year, not only because her performance warranted it, because it could have also been considered a lifetime achievement award. However, she was upset by Juliet Binoche (The English Patient). In my opinion, she could have also been nominated for her performance in The Shootist.

She did receive accolades from her peers, however. So the story goes, Bette Davis, who played Margo Channing memorably in the film All About Eve, went to see Bacall in the same role in the Broadway version of the film, Applause, and told Bacall "You know you’re the only one who can play this role."

Her acting abilities did earn her a pair of Tony Awards, for the aforementioned Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981).

Not only that, she inspired millions of men to whistle.

Robin Williams

I found myself spending a week in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, not an uncommon occurrence for me at the time, and as a chronicler of all things rock ‘n’ roll I usually spent my evenings there on or close to Sunset Blvd., where I would invariably run into this guy known as the mayor of that boulevard. He would take me to some club and introduce me to a band no one had ever heard of, but, always, within a few months, would have a record at the top of the charts.

On one particular evening, however, I didn’t want rock ‘n’ roll, so I ventured into the Improv on Sunset. Not that I expected to see anything special – it was open mike night for amateurs – but it was a place where I knew I could relax, have a drink or two, and be friendly to my expense account (there was no cover charge on open mike night for amateurs).

None of the amateurs I saw that night struck me as overwhelmingly special in any way, but, suddenly, during one of the many breaks between comics, a man burst through the front door, walked directly up to the stage, grabbed the microphone and took over. It was Robin Williams. He was opening the following week in Las Vegas and he decided to test his act for the first time on a live audience that night at the Improv.

I never watched Happy Days, so I never saw Williams’ introduction to the American public. And, for some reason, I could never become a fan of Mork & Mindy. It seemed "too cute" for my tastes. But I don’t know if I had ever laughed as hard as I did watching that maniac do his stuff that night at the Improv, especially when he went into his Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen bit. Absolutely inspired lunacy. I love comedy that crosses the line into anarchy and I had not seen comedic anarchy like that since the Marx Brothers.

I must also admit that I wasn’t as enthused with many of William’s early motion picture performances as a lot of others. When he went into his John Wayne shtick in Dead Poets Society I thought to myself "I saw him do that exact same bit that night at the Improv." Same thing with Good Morning, Vietnam. I was in Vietnam when Adrian Cronauer was broadcasting to the troops there and, trust me, Adrian was nothing like the way Williams portrayed him in the film. Williams the actor was doing Williams the comic, not Cronauer, in that film. But Williams did grow on me as an actor, especially in some of the thrillers in which he appeared during the early years of this century – films like Insomnia and, in what I regard as his best performance,  One Hour Photo.

But, to me, the brilliance of Robin Williams came across live on stage, from those magical nights like that memorable one at the Improv, to his appearances on Johnny Carson’s show and, most of all, in the performance he gave at a now defunct concert hall in far East Dallas, a joint whose name escapes me at the moment. Many great comics are often imitated by those that follow in their wake. But Williams, who died yesterday, apparently a victim of suicide, was one of a kind. He defined "unique." He patterned himself after no one else, and no one since has come close to duplicating his style – I don’t think any aspiring comic has even had the nerve to try.

And I guess that’s as good a definition of "greatness" as you can find.

Good night, Eli

My two favorite pieces of trivia about the great Eli Wallach are (1) he attended the University of Texas because of its comparative "low" tuition and (2) he turned down the role of Maggio in "From Here to Eternity," a part that provided a comeback for one Frank Sinatra.

Farewell to an acting legend

Most people, when they hear the name Peter O'Toole, immediately associate that name with Lawrence of Arabia. I guess I do as well, but Lawrence is not my favorite O'Toole film. That distinction is shared by not one, but three films, one he made in the mid-1970s (The Ruling Class) and the other two he made in the early 1980s (The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year). And my all-time favorite O'Toole moment is when, in Year, her utters one of the most famous lines in cinema history: "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star." My second favorite is the scene in Ruling Class when he's telling the patrons of a British pub how bones snap when a person is hanged and he breaks into the song Dry Bones.

He was, a movie star of the highest order who was also one of the finest actors ever captured on film.

He was nominated for an Oscar eight times, but never won (although he was awarded an honorary one in 2003). Although I thought he should have won for Lawrence (you can count on one hand the number of scenes in that epic adventure that he isn't in), but I can't raise that much of a stink that Gregory Peck beat him out for the much-loved To Kill a Mockingbird. I grumbled a little louder when Rex Harrison won in 1964, the year O'Toole was nominated for Becket (it was even a bigger crime that O'Toole's co-star in that film, Richard Burton didn't win). But I was incensed when O'Toole was nominated for The Lion in Winter and Cliff Robertson (c'mon, Cliff effing Robertson?) took home the trophy. In true O'Toole style, I went out and got raging drunk with a couple of writing buddies the night of that travesty.

O'Toole's early education came in Catholic schools in the English city of Leeds. Writing of that time, he said “I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood – the black dresses and the shaving of the hair – was so horrible, so terrifying. Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day." You just gotta love the guy.

O'Toole later won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was in the same class with Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford. He was regarded as a superb Shakespearean actor on the English stage. He made his first appearance on British television in 1954 and in film in 1959 with a small part in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. But then came Lawrence (1962), a part he played after Marlon Brando and Albert Finney turned it down. His performance in Lawrence was ranked No. 1 in Premiere magazine's listing of the 100 Greatest Performances of All Time,

O'Toole officially retired from acting in July, 2012 and he died today in a London hospital. But the performances he leaves behind reinforces the reason why anyone who cares a whit about great acting must own a DVD player and, at least, eight O'Toole titles. I'm not going to tell you which ones they should be. You won't go wrong with any of them.

A look at the greatest leader of the last half of the 20th Century

Goodnight, Lou

I first came in contact with Lou Reed in 1967 with the release of that great album The Velvet Underground & Nico, which contains the song in the above video. It is my favorite Lou Reed song, although I will admit enjoying walking on the wild side with Lou. I am going to miss him. Lou Reed died today, six months after undergoing a liver transplant.

Good Night, Charles

I don't know if the films have ever seen a better character actor than Charles Durning. The man melted into his roles, both serious, as Big Daddy (for which he won a Tony) in the 1989 Broadway revival of Cat in a Hot Tin Roof, his breakthrough part as the corrupt policeman in The Sting, and, of course Dog Day Afternoon; and comic, Tootsie and O, Brother, Where Art Thou? among them.

He was nominated for nine Emmys, two Oscars and he won a Golden Globe. In 2008, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild.

Durning died yesterday of natural causes in his New York City home. He was 89. The following is my personal favorite Charles Durning movie moment.

Good Night, Jack

Jack Klugman, an acting everyman, died yesterday at the age of 90 in his Los Angeles home with his wife of four years, Peggy. Most everyone will associate Klugman with (1) his role as the sloppy Oscar Madison in the television series, The Odd Couple that ran from 1970 to 1975; or (2) starring in the title role of Quincy, M.E., which ran on television even longer than The Odd Couple, from 1976 to 1983.

But I will always remember him as Juror No. 5 in 12 Angry Men.

Good night, Coach

Former University of Texas football coach Darrell K. Royal, 88, died this morning after a short but ultimately debilitating fight with Alzheimer’s. The majority of those who knew Royal knew of him as Texas’ coach from 1957 to 1976, who won three national championships, 11 Southwest Conference championships and 167 football games. He was known as the coach who introduced the flip-flop offense in the early 1960s and somewhat later and far more famously the Wishbone Offense which dominated the college game from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

But I got to know him as a confidant during my years at UT and immediately after at United Press International.

I dropped out of college for five years in the mid-1960s and embarked on a global odyssey that took me to, among other places, South Vietnam where I became a war correspondent for a number of U.S. newspapers. Now this was back before the North Vietnamese had entered the fray and the conflict was strictly between the South Vietnamese government that had been installed by the United States and the Viet Cong rebels. It was easy to see right from the beginning which side would emerge victorious and, as a result, I became an avid opponent of U.S. military involvement in the country.

I brought that opposition with me when I returned to the United States and finally to the University of Texas, where, as a journalism major, I first resumed my position as a sports reporter for The Daily Texan, the university’s newspaper, and finally as the paper’s managing editor.

In that latter position I came under heavy pressure by my colleagues who also opposed American involvement in Vietnam to de-emphasize football coverage in the newspaper. I always had the main story on the University’s Saturday football game on the front page of the Sunday Texan. Their argument was football was trivial during times like these and that football coverage should be eliminated completely or at least reduced to a small story inside the paper.

My stance was simple and straight-forward: Any campus event that attracted 50,000 people (Memorial Stadium was a lot smaller back in those days) was a major news story and the front page was reserved for the day’s major news story.

After I graduated, however, and went to UPI my influence in that area disappeared. The views of the antiwar faction at the Texan obscured their news judgment.

UPI, in those days, had a coaches football poll. Each week, an invited group of college football coaches submitted their choices of the nation’s Top 25 college football teams. Every Sunday night during football season, Coach Royal would call the Dallas UPI office and give me his Top 25. And because he knew of me and my efforts while at UT, we would spend a lot of time talking about the current state of university journalism, which greatly saddened him. The coach only cared about how the team was covered in two publications, The Daily Texan and the Dallas Morning News, and so what was happening at the Texan was literally breaking his heart. Ivan Maisel, a sportswriter who formerly worked for the Morning News, crafted an excellent obituary of The Coach this morning.

Coach Royal was known for his folksy style ("We gonna dance with the one who brung us.") but what I will always remember Royal for was that he earned the respect of everyone he came in contact with.

Good night, Ernie

Still one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, I guess because I feel Marty's pain.

Ernest Borgnine, the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx butcher, in the 1955 film Marty, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Good night, Doc

From an e-mail I received last night from The New York Times:

Doc Watson, the guitarist and folk singer whose flat-picking style elevated the acoustic guitar to solo status in bluegrass and country music, and whose interpretations of traditional American music profoundly influenced generations of folk and rock guitarists, died on Tuesday in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was 89.

Mr. Watson, who had been blind since he was a year old, died in a hospital after recently undergoing abdominal surgery, The Associated Press quoted a hospital spokesman as saying.

Mr. Watson, who came to national attention during the folk music revival of the early 1960s, injected a note of authenticity into a movement awash in protest songs and bland renditions of traditional tunes. In a sweetly resonant, slightly husky baritone, he sang old hymns, ballads and country blues he had learned growing up in the northwestern corner of North Carolina, which has produced fiddlers, banjo pickers and folk singers for generations.

His mountain music came as a revelation to the folk audience, as did his virtuoso guitar playing. Unlike most country and bluegrass musicians, who thought of the guitar as a secondary instrument for providing rhythmic backup, Mr. Watson executed the kind of flashy, rapid-fire melodies normally played by a fiddle or a banjo. His style influenced a generation of young musicians learning to play the guitar as folk music achieved national popularity.

"He is single-handedly responsible for the extraordinary increase in acoustic flat-picking and fingerpicking guitar performance," said Ralph Rinzler, the folklorist who discovered Mr. Watson in 1960. "His flat-picking style has no precedent in earlier country music history."

Good night, Levon

I’ve already said my piece about Levon Helm a couple of days ago but I wanted to share this, written by Michael Elliott of Time magazine:

Levon Helm, who died in New York on April 19, age 71, from the cancer that he had been fighting for more than a decade, was one of the most celebrated rock drummers of the last 50 years. He uniquely embodied two sets of folk memories in his music, one of the pop culture of the 1960s, and another of an older, lost America of dirt farmers, train robbers and civil war veterans scratching out the foundations of the republic. And somehow he managed to do this all while continually winning the passionate devotion of new fans in our linked but atomistic nation almost until the moment he died.

Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm was born to a family of farmers in Arkansas in 1940 and started playing with local groups while he was still at school. He joined the band of Ronnie Hawkins, a Canadian rockabilly singer who was popular in the south; when Hawkins moved back to Toronto, Helm went along, and was soon joined by local musicians Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. After breaking with Hawkins, the band became Bob Dylan’s backing musicians, as Dylan made his epochal switch from folk music to electric rock. When Dylan moved to Woodstock, New York, after his motorcycle accident in 1966, the band recorded hours of tapes with him in the Catskills town. Initially, Helm wasn’t with them; disillusioned with music, he’d gone back to Arkansas, but when The Band, as they were now known, got a recording contract, the other members summoned him north again. Together, they put together one of the seminal works of popular music.

Music from Big Pink — the famous house in Woodstock where the boys played and lived — came at just the right time. In Britain, getting ready for college, I must have heard it first in the fall of 1968, when if you had any sort of soul you knew that rock music was taking a turn for the worse. The fun, smart, three-minute-at-most stuff that we’d listened and danced to for years was being ousted by the "progressive rock" of bands whose names one shudders to remember, full of a thin pretentiousness; listening to it was like reading a John Fowles novel that never ends. Big Pink was different. Knowing nothing about its tangled roots in musical forms from soul to country to gospel and R&B, there was something wonderful about the way its songs were at easy on the ear, rhythmically complex — that was Levon — and, the same time, just bloody strange (right: The Weight).

My friends and I were completely hooked. We listened to Big Pink and The Band’s second "brown" album until we knew every note and drum beat by heart, and when Stage Fright arrived in Britain in 1970, two of us raced to the local music store in Oxford to hear it in a soundproof cubicle (yes, kids, that’s how we once did consumer testing), nervous that it might be a fall from grace. As if. Have you listened to The Shape I’m In lately?

After three years of obsessing about The Band, I finally got to see them at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1971, an extraordinary night which had the useful side benefit of reducing my girlfriend’s bragging rights. (She’d seen The Band accompany Dylan at the legendary 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, as she reminds me to this day.) But inevitably with time, my passion faded a bit. More albums came, I bought all of them, bought them again on CD, watched Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz, but was no more than vaguely aware that Helm and Robbie Robertson had had a bitter falling out. Manuel committed suicide, Danko died in Woodstock, and it seemed as if the story of The Band was going to turn into one of those all-too-common, dark chapters in the history of rock.

Then, a few years ago, a friend mentioned to me that Levon, who had survived a serious bout with cancer and for a while lost his voice, was in the habit of getting a knockout band together on Saturday nights in the barn-cum-recording-studio at his Woodstock house. My wife and I went up the river. And all I can say is: if you were one of the lucky ones who caught a Midnight Ramble, good for you; if you never did, shoot yourself. "In decades of dogged concert-going," my friend Clive Crook wrote in the Financial Times in 2009, "this reviewer cannot remember an evening as uplifting or as satisfying."

Before an audience of about 150 crammed into the barn — hipsters up from the city mixed with locals with a lot of off-road miles on their clock, members of both groups slipping out into the country air for a smoke — Levon led a band of all the talents. There was Dylan’s long-time guitarist Larry Campbell and his wife, the singer Teresa Williams; Levon’s daughter Amy; keyboardist Brian Mitchell; the best horn section ever; and guests like Steve Earle, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Graham Parker, and countless more. One evening last year, as four hours of music drew to an end, an enormous bear-like figure shambled on to the stage, white beard halfway down his chest, and took to the piano for the Ramble’s traditional closing number, which was, of course, The Weight. That was Hudson, then 73.

What made the evenings memorable, though, was not just the music. It was the happiness. (Everyone was encouraged to bring a dish to a potluck that we all ate outside, so the Rambles were half-revival show, half-picnic.) And there was not the slightest doubt who made everyone feel so good. Levon, grinning like a cat who’d found a pail of the thickest cream in the Catskills, sat to one side of the stage (except there wasn’t a stage — you sat on top of the musicians) driving the band through New Orleans blues and rags, rockabilly, Band songs, covers of the Grateful Dead and Dylan, and traditional folk numbers. In later years, he didn’t sing much — the cancer, I guess, was never really licked — but he hummed and murmured, picked up the mandolin every now and again, and just spread an air of infectious joy over the whole proceedings. Once my wife and I nervously took our world-wise daughters, then 21 and 19, to a Ramble — Levon’s 70^th birthday party, as it happened. They quickly tagged this whole Woodstock deal as their parents’ aging hippie thing, so I was a bit apprehensive when I asked them at the end how it had all gone down. No worries: "Awesome!"

The band that Levon put together for the Rambles produced three albums: Dirt Farmer, Electric Dirt, and last year, Ramble at the Ryman, recorded in Nashville. Each of them won a Grammy, insofar as that mattered. What really counted was that a whole new audience was finding a voice that managed to be sorrowful one moment, fun the next, rolling through old ballads from the eastern mountains, new songs about events long ago, clever takes on Band classics and a heartbreaking version of Buddy Miller’s Wide River to Cross. You should buy them all.

A while ago, after a particularly epic Ramble, I decided that if one man and his friends could reliably make so many people find joy, I wanted as much of it as I could. So I’d buy a house in Woodstock. I found just the place, too, an 18^th century farmhouse on the edge of town, a bit knocked about, with deer munching in a backyard that must have been a petri dish for Lyme disease, but with floors and bookshelves made from a dark, old, cherry tree. My family, who are much more sensible than me, pointed out that the whole idea was nuts, and I reluctantly agreed.

Still and all, it was a mistake. If I’d gone mad that weekend, we would all have had a few more evenings remembering how magical popular music can be, before Levon Helm crossed his own wide river.