Friday Listening: Carry Me Home
A 2011 Midnight Ramble with Mavis Staples and Levon Helm Becomes Immortal
Not all regrets are the same. If you devote time and energy to chasing live music thrills, for example, it’s almost impossible to catch every tour, every special one-off gathering of titans. Disappointment is inevitable. Some of the missed chances you shrug off. Some stay with you.
Among the top-tier regrets for me: Never making it to one of the Midnight Rambles, the Saturday night shows that the late Levon Helm started in 2004 as rent parties, to avoid foreclosure on his home and adjacent studio.
Performing in a barn that had been transformed into a recording facility, Helm, the legendary drummer and singer of The Band, and guitarist Larry Campbell would gather family and friends from the Woodstock New York community to roll through the wide world of American song. Word about the Rambles spread rapidly; within a few years the lowkey session (barn capacity: 200) became a tour stop for a wide range of artists, including Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Norah Jones, Elvis Costello and Mavis Staples.
Today Anti Records is releasing Carry Me Home, a live recording from June 2011 featuring Staples and Helm along with members of her touring band and his Midnight Ramble band. It documents the last time the two performed together; Helm died in 2012 after a challenging cancer battle.
It’s an archive drop that is essential listening on arrival — because this type of electrifying spirit-stirring performance doesn’t happen all the time, and is rarely sustained through an entire set the way it is here. Staples, long a national treasure, sings gospel jubilees (“Handwriting On the Wall”) and blues (“Trouble In My Mind”) with more looseness and abandon than she might allow herself in a larger setting. She’s plenty fierce — check the mixture of resolve and (alas, almost prophetic) dismay she brings to the opening track, Curtis Mayfield’s “This is My Country,” and the way she transforms Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” into a timeless and universal lament. Somehow, even in her stern “get-right” moments, Staples sounds like she’s having fun, rising to the spontaneity of the situation.
Here’s a sliver from the preshow rehearsal:
If Staples is having fun, that’s at least partly attributable to Helm’s steady, refreshingly uncomplicated train-on-the-tracks timekeeping. The looseness of the band is rooted in the wide-open, ambling looseness of Helm’s groove: Where some drummers impose their will by brute force, Helm asserted his authority more surreptitiously. His patterns move with the lightness of the ocean breeze. He begins by opening up musical “space,” and then encourages a communal conversation — between the players on stage, certainly, and also between elements of the styles they’re visiting. Even at this point in his storied career, Helm is exploring — the groove he sets up for “When I Go Away” has a hard-charging electric-blues-from-Chicago smack to it, while his crisp pattern on “You Got To Move” weaves in elements of old-time country and the relentless swing of zydeco.
There is so much richness here. Every performance is stirring. Every solo resonates beyond the fancy notes. Everything feels big, epic, made for eternity — and then you remember that it was no huge production. Just another Saturday night in a barn.
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