Readers and writers blog

I was going to write about something else today, but I’ve been feeling rejuvenated after attending a Levon Helm concert last Sunday at his home.

Besides revisiting songs of Helm with the legendary group, The Band, I’ve been listening this week to other songs of the past few decades, including a favorite from R.E.M. — ‘Everybody Hurts’* — that now has new meaning.

Not that I’m hurting. Hell, I’m feeling great after that concert. But there are lines in the R.E.M. song that give me pause anew — When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, hang on . . . If you feel like letting go, hold on.

Now I’ve been living in this suburban skirt of New York City for the past 16 years, and I lived here twice before in the mid-1970s and late 1980s, but I still don’t feel like I live here. I view my friends and neighbors not principally as friends and neighbors but as New Yorkers. The government here, even in our small town, is more complicated than necessary, people talk funny, and you can never tell whether someone is going to be friendly or rude. Except for waitresses — they call you ‘hon’ before they ask if you want more ‘cooawffee.’ It’s not that I particularly dislike the place. I’m just bemused by it, like it’s a foreign country.

I don’t know where I do belong. Certainly not in my native New Hampshire or any of the four other states where I’ve lived besides New York. But I do know I’m glad that I didn’t leave this outskirt for a third time, that when I’d had enough of it, I held on.

Because a coworker named Bonnie said she was sad that I was leaving again and wouldn’t I reconsider. I did. And a couple of years later, we were married.

And that’s who I went to the concert with Sunday. Bonnie has known Helm since 1993 when as a reporter for our local newspaper — although small, it’s the closest daily to Woodstock where Bob Dyan and The Band used to live — she hung out with the group on their trip to Washington for Bill Clinton’s first inaugural.

Helm knows a thing or two about holding on: After nearly three decades of uninterrupted success, he ran into a bad decade starting in the early 1990s — throat cancer that wasted his body, a fire that burned down his house and a series of bankruptcies that he’s trying to resolve by holding concerts at his rebuilt home and studio in Woodstock.

The studio is a timber barn built with mortise, tenon and pegs — not a nail to be found — and is heated during concerts by a big fireplace on one end as well as the studio lights and the bodies of the hundred or so people who can fit into the place.

Helm is noticeably thinner now, but you never would have known Sunday that a thing was wrong. And it wasn’t. Just as the concert was to start, he learned his latest album, “Dirt Farmer,” had won a Grammy award, his second of the evening. He also got one for lifetime achievement as part of The Band.

The previous day, his daughter, Amy, gave birth to a son. The boy is named Lavon, just as Helm was in his Arkansas childhood, before fame changed the ‘a’ to ‘e’ and shifted the stress from the second to the first syllable.

Helm’s voice is a little raspier these days, although still as strong as ever, and that huskier sound gives his singing even more authenticity and authority.

At the end of the concert, as he sang ‘The Weight,’ I stood by the fireplace and thought about who has taken a load off me. It was only four days before Valentine’s Day, and I’ll leave you to guess who I had in mind.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

* By the way, R.E.M. turned that song into one of the best music videos I’ve seen. (Don’t miss the very end.)