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Levon Helm on "The Band Reborn – or – The Last Waltz that Wasn’t" (Relix Revisited)

Here’s a look back at our piece on The Band’s return in 1983…

Seven years after they played their last waltz together, the Band is back in business and on the road again. Sort of. Four of the Band’s original members – Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel – recently concluded a sold-out tour of clubs and small halls. Missing in action was chief songwriter Robbie Robertson, the guitarist whose distinctively precise playing is as elemental to the Band’s sound as Helm’s laconic keyboard fills. In Robertson’s place stood no known guitarist named Earl Cate. Robertson’s Band without the man who wrote and played on classics like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”? Why did he refuse to join the others on the road?

Robertson’s decision to stay home in Los Angeles, Looking after his career in films, is obviously a tender topic with Levon Helm:

“Maybe,” the drummer, singer and de facto leader of the Band offered, “maybe he just wanted to leave it the way it was, and not think about it. He should have it the way he wants it.”

Levon Helm looks as lean and friendly as the salt-of-the-earth character he played to perfection in the movie Coal Minder’s Daughter. He’s been the most active Band member since the breakup. In addition to winning critical praise for his portrayal of Loretta Lynn’s father in Coalminer, Helm has released several solid solo albums and has toured regularly with the Cate Brothers Band. He returned to acting last year as Jane Fonda’s co-star in The Dollmaker, an as-yet unreleased TV movie about an Appalachian family’s forced move to the city. (“I got the father role again”).

But his return hasn’t dimmed his passion for making music. He describes the reunion as an inevitable event, the inertia that had built up since the breakup without Helm’s infectious enthusiasm for the project.

Enthusiasm for the reunion is something Helm shares with bassist Rick Danko, who still looks and acts boyish after all these years. Danko moved east from Malibu, CA. nearly two years ago and settled near Helm in Woodstock. Until then, he’d kept a fairly low public profile, releasing a solo album, touring a bit with friend Paul Butterfield and for a time with Richard Manuel. But he came east, he and Helm joined forces and began touring in the summer of 1982.

That tour, said Helm, is where the Band reunion began:

“We’ve always had offers to get back together, but when Rick and me started playing together, that started a lot of speculation,” Helm recalled in the gentle, almost courtly drawl of his native Arkansas. “So when the offer went out this time, all of a sudden there were four of us instead of two that felt like playing.”

Helm feels that adding the Cate Brothers Band to the lineup will improve the overall performance of the new Band.

“We’ve got more voices now, thicker harmonies. It allows us to change around more on our instruments.”