Levon Helm documentary "Ain't In It For My Health" - commentary by Ricki C.

Apropos of that new Robbie Roberston-centric documentary about The Band that’s currently making the rounds…….

This story originally ran in 2015. Don’t show up for the movie.

January’s presentation for the Reelin’ & Rockin’ at the Gateway series   – hosted by Brian Phillips & Colin Gawel – will be the Levon Helm documentary “Ain’t In It For My Health.”  Showtime is Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 8 pm, preceded by a 7 pm happy hour at the Gateway Film Center, 1550 N. High Street.  Admission is $5, proceeds benefitting 102.5 For The Kids.

There are only a limited number of ways to grow old in rock & roll.

There are lots of ways to die young in rock & roll: drug overdoses, airplane crashes, jealous husbands/wives, drug overdoses, accidental drowning, suicide, drug overdoses.  Did I mention drug overdoses?  From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain to Jeff Buckley, the adage “Die young and leave a pretty corpse” pretty much sums up the rock & roll ideal.

But growing old in rock & roll, that’s a different story: maybe you’re lucky and you’re Bruce Springsteen and you hold onto not only your hair AND your money, but your artistic integrity, too.  Or maybe you’re lucky like Pete Townshend of The Who and you get to spend your later years selling your ass to the highest bidder on endless “farewell” tours and CSI franchise theme songs.  Or maybe you’re not so lucky and you wind up as two-fifths or three-fifths of some mid-level 70’s band – say, Blue Oyster Cult, Foreigner or Kansas – dragging your ass around America playing the Hollywood Casino, Wing Zings, county fairs or Picnic With The Pops.

The subject of this week’s film – Levon Helm – falls somewhere in the middle of that growing old in rock & roll equation.   

“Ain’t In It For My Health” was filmed between 2007 and 2010, but not widely released until 2013, owing to various legal hassles.  (Parenthetically, I choose to believe these legal hassles probably pertained to Band member – and main songwriter – Robbie Robertson refusing permission for filmmaker Jacob Hatley to use The Band’s music in the movie.  I suppose I could have googled the reasons – or whatever you kids do nowadays – but I didn’t, so look it up yourself.)

Levon Helm died in the interim – of a recurrence of the cancer he battles in the film – on April 19th, 2012.  He was a road musician to the end.  One of his last shows was just north of us – in Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 19th, 2012 – exactly one month before he died.

There are only a limited number of ways to grow old in rock & roll.

Richard Manuel – piano player and one of three lead singers in The Band, alongside Helm and Rick Danko – died in 1986, at age 42, hanging himself from a motel shower rod after a gig in Florida.  Bass player and vocalist extraordinaire Rick Danko died in 1999, at 56, of heart failure: heart failure brought on by, in my humble opinion, decades of drugs, alcohol and road food.  Levon Helm soldiered on, making two of his best records – Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt – decades after Robbie Robertson unilaterally ended The Band’s career with 1976’s “The Last Waltz.”  (At the moment I am typing this sentence Robertson is probably sunning himself at his Southern California manse, rubbing shoulders with Martin Scorsese and living off his songwriting royalties, royalties from the tunes Manuel, Danko and Helm gave voice to.)    

I’ve seen a lot of rock & roll movies since “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964.  Some have been great, most are thoroughly mediocre.  This film – chronicling the final two of Levon Helm’s 71 years on the planet, roughly 55 of those years as a road musician and rock & roller – is absolutely one of my top five of the last 10 years.

And the opening shot – of a tour bus idling in pre-dawn darkness outside a Holiday Inn, ready to take Levon Helm and his band down another road to another gig – is worth the price of admission all by itself.  – Ricki C. / January 15th, 2015

By the way, I saw The Band when they were still called the Hawks, backing Bob Dylan on his first electric tour, at Vet's Memorial, November 19th, 1965, when I was in the eighth grade.  For a full accounting of that show, check out Bob Dylan & The Hawks on my old blog, Growing Old With Rock & Roll.  As stated in that piece, I either saw Levon Helm or Bobby Gregg playing drums that night - different Dylanologist books tell me different stories.  Myself, I have no idea, I was an eighth-grader that night, for Chrissakes.  All I know is, all of The Hawks - except for Robbie Robertson - had hair that was much too short by the prevailing rock & roll standards of the day.

And, all I know is, those six guys were BLAZING.  

Deadly Serious Fun - Five Scenes From "The Kids Are Alright" You Will See In No Other Rock Documentary, Ever - by Ricki C.

For ten years, from 2000 to 2010, I served first as a roadie and then as road manager for Hamell On Trial: a solo acoustic force-of-nature whom I described – and at times introduced onstage – as “A four-man punk band rolled into one bald, sweaty guy.”  The very first rock & roll conversation Ed Hamell and I ever had when I opened for him at Little Bothers in 1998 was about how we saw The Who three weeks apart back in 1969 as high school boys – me a senior in Columbus, Ohio; him a  sophomore in Syracuse, New York.  We both agreed unequivocally that it was the greatest rock & roll show we had ever seen.  We both agreed unequivocally that The Who in 1969 was rock & roll’s most perfect organism EVER, and that all of our musical standards of professionalism were based on that band, and those four men: Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle & Keith Moon.

I stand by that assertion to this day.  The Who – from sometime in 1968 when Pete Townshend started to write Tommy, to sometime in 1973 before Quadrophenia came out – were, quite simply, the greatest rock & roll band of all time.  I say this with apologies to my dear friend Jim Johnson – The Rolling Stones have been a great band for a good many decades – and my good friend Chris Clinton – Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band have been the world’s greatest rock & roll band from 1978 until sometime last week – but neither of them of are as good as The Who were at their 1972 peak, when they wrote & recorded Who’s Next.

And this movie – The Kids Are Alright – is a true testament to that band.

Five scenes from The Kids Are Alright that you will see in no other rock documentary EVER:

1)    A little perspective: The opening segment in The Kids Are Alright, The Who’s appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on September 15th, 1967, came three months after the June 1st release of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” ruined the concept of FUN in rock & roll and made everything DEADLY SERIOUS.  The Smothers Brothers really had their hearts in the right place – attempting to bring a little bit of the counter-culture to white-bread Sunday night television – and this night, bringing The Who in all their anarchic, gear-smashing glory to National Commercial television when there were still only three channels, they succeeded.  Deadly serious fun.  Keith overloads his blast-powder in the bass drum and in the ensuing explosion Pete’s hair gets singed, he loses some of his hearing, you can hear the audience GASP, Bette Davis faints backstage, and Keith gets knocked cold.  I was literally stunned, staring open-mouthed at the TV as this performance transpired.  I had always kinda liked The Who, now it was Luv, L-U-V.
 
2)    The short segment of Keith throwing his “Pictures Of Lily” drum kit into the audience (and, by the way, the audience THROWING THEM BACK) took place not at the “My Generation” smashing-the-gear-at-the-end-of-the-show finale of the August 6th, 1968, appearance at the Boston Music Hall, it took place THREE SONGS INTO THE SET, when an obviously, let’s say “over-exuberant” Keith Moon lost track of where The Who were in the show and started to forcefully dismantle his kit.  The show had to be stopped, the roadies had to regain all of the gear and reassemble the drum kit so the show could resume.  Deadly serious fun.

3)    The grainy black & white footage from some British teen program in 1966 when Pete Townshend opines – apropos of the musical quality of The Beatles – “When you hear the backing tracks of The Beatles without their voices, they’re flippin’ lousy.”  Again, a little historical perspective for the rock & roll youngsters: If you were a rock musician in 1966, you didn’t go on English television and badmouth The Beatles.  Deadly serious fun.        

4)    The compendium of gear-smashing sequences that flows from the Monterey Pop Festival appearance by the boys in 1967.  This is not play-acting.  This is not Kiss smashing a plywood guitar at the end of “The Act” after they were raking in millions from The Rubes In The Cheap Seats in the 70’s.  This is at least three seriously pissed-off young men taking out their aggressions on their instruments, and doing a damn fine job of entertaining the audience while they’re at it.  This is the only time Art ever successfully mixed with Rock & Roll.  This was Deadly Serious Fun.

5)    My favorite scene in the entire movie and, sadly, the one that I think tells the entire Story Of The Who in one glorious 30-second segment: right after “A Quick One Whiles He’s Away” Pete Townshend is pontificating – as he so often has, indeed to this day in 2014 – about how “The Who can’t just remain a circus act, doing what the audience knows we can do, until we become a cabaret act.”  It’s pretentious as hell, as Townshend so often was/is, and in the midst of it Keith Moon – feigning agreement in the Lofty Pronouncements being Uttered – proceeds to do a circus-act headstand on his conference-room chair, forcing Pete out of his Painfully Serious Overly Intelligent Rock Star Stance into trying to balance a brandy on Keith’s boot-heel and totally derailing Pete’s pomposity.  

Keith Moon died September 7th, 1978, just over four months after the May 25th performance that yielded takes of “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for this film.  The Kids Are Alright was released in May, 1979, and I think I knew even then that The Who without Keith Moon was never going to be the same again, that without Keith’s genius comic tempering of Pete’s pretentiousness, that everything was going to devolve to the Deadly Serious, and The Who would never be Fun again.  I was right.

In some ways this entire movie serves as a tribute to Keith Moon, and as a tribute to a simpler time in rock & roll: when guitars & drums, extreme volume, cool clothes, great songs and a cute blonde lead singer were enough for anybody.  In many ways, I have no problem with that.

If you think you’ve ever loved rock & roll music for even a single moment, you’ve gotta see this movie.  – Ricki C. / May 17th, 2014.

 

(So, Ricki C. has been on quite the Who bender this week, but if any rock & roll gluttons for punishment out there among you have a stomach for 2500 more words on the subject, check out Ricki's 2012 blog Shows I Saw In The 60's, part two - including his full account of the November 1st, 1969 Who appearance at Veteran's Memorial.  But first, a video.......) 

  

Director Wes Orshoski Talks to Brian Phillips about The Damned and Lemmy

Tomorrow night - Wednesday, August 19th - for the Reelin' and Rockin' film series at the Gateway Film Center we're screening Wes Orshoski's new work "The Damned: Don't You Wish We Were Dead." The "Lemmy" director shot me a call recently to chat about the film. In making the movie Wes unearthed some cool stuff I did not know, most notably how close The Damned came to being produced by noted recluse Syd Barrett. 

The reviews have been across the board excellent. Listen to the interview over on CD1025.com (or just click below) and then join us for the screening! Happy hour at 7pm in the Torpedo Room. Movie begins at 8. $5 admission, proceeds to CD1025 for The Kids.

Colin here, full disclosure: Wes is a longtime friend of Watershed, going back to the almost underage beer-drinking days at Frankie's in Toledo. He was hanging around rock clubs with a camera back when you had to use this thing called "film." I can personally vouch for his rock n roll bona fides. Nobody is more legit and it's no surprise critics the world over now rave about his movies. I'm a fan. Brian is a fan. Bono is a fan. Lemmy is a fan. And if you aren't already, you are going to be a fan of Wes Orshoski. Dig it.

Official trailer for the film THE DAMNED: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead, the authorized documentary of the punk pioneers.

Hard Core Devo Live @ the Gateway Theater Reelin' & Rockin' Movie Series This Wednesday - by Ricki C.

I never really had a lot of fan involvement with Devo.  One Friday night in 1976 a couple of my reprobate Service Merchandise buddies & I made a road trip to Akron to catch ‘em at a bar after I read a feature about them in New York Rocker (my rock & roll Bible after the sad, slow demise into irrelevancy that Creem magazine began in 1975 or so).

The Mothersbaugh & Casale brothers were all right that night, but included a synthesizer in the set, and I think our final conclusion was: “They’re kinda art-y.”  “Kinda art-y” was a kiss of death pronouncement in our West Side rocker eyes.  We were guitars ‘n’ drum boys.  

I will say this, though: in our current era of mega-bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones criss-crossing America playing their Greatest Hits to the classic-rock throngs in gynormous arenas & stadiums, I have to admire Devo for making a film of themselves playing their LEAST POPULAR SONGS from 40 years ago.  It's a pretty interesting and impressive concept.  (Although it is still "kinda art-y.")  

You can learn everything you have ever wanted to know about early Devo – before they became, in Colin’s words “just another pop band on MTV playing ‘Workin’ In A Coal Mine’ and wearing red flowerpots on their heads” – at this month’s Reelin’ & Rockin’ at the Gateway presentation of Hard Core Devo Live, this Wednesday, June 17: happy hour at 7 pm, movie to follow at 8 pm.  Be there or be a mongoloid.  (That is a Devo reference, do not send us PC letters at Pencilstorm.) – Ricki C. / June 13th, 2015

It's not gonna come as a surprise to anybody who reads Pencilstorm that Ricki C. is a grouchy, 62-year old who hates synthesizers (and art) with a passion.  That does not mean this Devo movie isn't great.  Give it a chance. - Colin G.