Canadian Music Hall of Fame

By James Sandham

Levon Helm (May 26, 1940, to April 19, 2012) was born Mark Lavon Helm on May 26, 1940, in Elaine, Arkansas. He grew up in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet west of Helena, Arkansas, and was the second of four children born to Nell and Diamond Helm. His parents had a deep love of music and encouraged their children to learn to play instruments and often took them to see travelling shows. Helm attended the first of these shows – Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys – at age 6. According to his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, the experience “tattooed [his] brain,” and he never forgot it.

By the age of 14, Helm was seeing performances by musicians such as Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. Helm remembered Scotty Moore accompanying the young Presley on guitar, with Bill Black doing duty on standup bass. The music was early jazz-fuelled rockabilly, and though the group didn’t have a drummer, the audience went wild. A year after that Helm would see The King again. Presley’s star still hadn’t exploded, but this time he had D.J. Fontana on drums and Black’s bass was electric. Helm couldn’t get over the difference – the added instruments changed the sound completely and people were jumping out of their seats to dance. Mississippi Delta blues had fused with thunderous, heart-pumping rhythms to create a hot new sound: rock and roll.

This was the music that Helm grew up on. By the time he was a high school junior he had formed his own rock band, The Jungle Bush Beaters. They drew their influence from Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. In fact, it was after watching Lewis’ drummer, Jimmy Van Eaton, that Helm actually began seriously thinking of playing the drums himself.

By the early 1960s the thought was a reality, and Helm was recruited to drum for Ronnie Hawkins, touring across Canada along with Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson. By 1965, though, Helm had split from Hawkins, and Levon and The Hawks (as the band was then known) were picked up by Bob Dylan to help him “go electric.” Dylan signed the group to tour, but when his fans didn’t respond favourably to the new sound, Helm was dropped for drummer Mickey Jones, thus initiating a two-year layoff during which Helm returned to Arkansas to work the offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

When Capitol Records gave the group a recording contract, however, Danko called up Helm and asked him to rejoin them. They were reunited at the band’s new residence in Woodstock, New York: a large pink house where they were writing and rehearsing new material. The result was 1968’s Music from Big Pink, which made The Band (as they were now calling themselves) a household name. Their self-titled follow-up came out the next year and is now widely considered a masterpiece. In fact, the album was preserved in 2009 by the National Recording Registry as it is considered “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” music that “informs or reflects life in the United States.”

In 1974 Helm met Sandra Dodd at a Sunset Boulevard pool; they would marry seven years later, on September 7, 1981. By that point The Band had already held their farewell concert, which happened at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1976 and was immortalized by Martin Scorsese in his film The Last Waltz. The concert included performances by Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, Muddy Waters, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, among others, and is widely considered the greatest rock and roll film ever made.

After their farewell show, The Band’s members went on to individual pursuits. Helm cut his debut solo album Levon Helm and The RCO All-Stars, in 1977, followed by the self-titled Levon Helm in 1978. His third solo album, American Son, was released in 1980, the same year he played Loretta Lynn’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter, the first of several films in which he’d act.

The Band was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1989. Over the next decade, they recorded three more albums: Jericho in 1993, High on the Hog in 1996 and Jubilation in 1998. By 1996, however, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer. He continued to play the drums, mandolin and harmonica, but further tragedy struck the group in 1999 when Rick Danko passed away the day after his 56th birthday.

Danko’s death marked the end of an era. Helm’s voice, on the other hand, would miraculously recover, and in 2004 he launched Midnight Ramble Sessions Volume I and II, a series of live performances at his Woodstock studios. His comeback album, 2007’s Dirt Farmer, would earn him a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album, and his 2009 follow-up, Electric Dirt, would win the inaugural Grammy Award for Best Americana Album. In 2011, Helm’s live album, Ramble at the Ryman, would win another Grammy in the same category.

On April 17, 2012, Helm’s wife and daughter announced that he was “in the final stages of his battle with cancer.” Two days later, Helm died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. His family posted the following message on his website:

Dear Friends,

Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.

Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration… he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage…

We appreciate all the love and support and concern.

From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy

Fans were invited to a public wake on April 26, 2012. Approximately 2,000 people came to pay their respects. A private funeral service was followed by a procession through the streets of Woodstock, and Helm was finally buried in the Woodstock Cemetery on April 27, 2012, next to Rick Danko. He will be missed.

By James Sandham

Hey there, music lover. Good to see you back on the blog. You know, I’ve been listening to a lot of Buffy Sainte-Marie this week. I started with her hits “Universal Soldier” and “Until It’s Time for You to Go” because I was on a bit of a ’60s revival kick last weekend – and the more I listened, the more I was like, man, I gotta find out who this woman is.

She sings about some really powerful themes – war, indigenous rights, crazy mystic stuff – and it turns out her life is just as diverse and mind-blowingly insane, and I mean that in best way possible. She’s packed more into her 71 years on earth than most people could hope to pack into a dozen lifetimes. For example, she’s not only a musician, singer and social activist – which seem to be her main claims to fame – but she’s also a JUNO Award winner and a Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee; she’s won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award; she’s taught digital music as an adjunct professor at several different colleges; and she also acted on “Sesame Street” for five years. What’s more, that’s only a small sample of what she’s accomplished in her life. Can we talk about how awesome Buffy Sainte-Marie is?

Let’s start at the start: Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot Cree Indian reserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. Her birth name was Beverly, and she was orphaned. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, who were related to her biological parents, adopted her, and she was raised by them in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she’d go on to study at the state university, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her bachelor of arts and doctor of philosophy there, in teaching and Oriental philosophy, and graduated in the top 10 of her class. And for most people, as far as academia goes, that would be a totally legitimate achievement and maybe they’d call it a day. But not Sainte-Marie: She went on to receive honorary doctor of laws degrees from the University of Regina and Carleton University, an honorary doctor of letters from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, an honorary doctor of music from the University of Western Ontario – and others! Awesome.

But what else was going on in her life while she was racking up her incredible knowledge? Well she was touring, for one thing: By the age of 24, Sainte-Marie had appeared all over Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia, and she was spending a fair amount of time in the coffeehouses of Toronto’s Yorkville district – which was hippies-ville back in the ’60s, not the “mink mile” of designer stores that it is now – and in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Often, in these places, she’d perform alongside other emerging Canadian folk singers such as fellow Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. She was kind of in the underground during this time, but many of her songs were covered by other people – “Until It’s Time For You to Go,” for example, was covered by Elvis Presley, Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond, among others – and turned into big hits. But staying in the underground didn’t last long, and by 1964 Billboard magazine was naming Sainte-Marie their best new artist. Very awesome.

There were, of course, parts of Sainte-Marie’s life that weren’t so awesome. For instance, she became addicted to codeine in 1963 while recovering from a throat infection; but even that was kind of awesome, because it inspired one of her best songs, “Cod’ine,” which was later covered by everyone from Donovan to Courtney Love. Other non-awesome things include being blacklisted during the Lyndon Johnson years, and then having Nixon come down pretty hard on her too, due to the Lakota uprising and the Siege of Wounded Knee in 1973. During that period, Sainte-Marie’s radio play was severely curtailed and she was advised not to talk about native issues on TV.

By 1976, though, things were getting back to being pretty awesome, and she was appearing regularly on “Sesame Street” along with her first son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, whom she famously breastfed in one episode. In ’79 she scored a film that was entered at the Cannes Film Festival, and life just continued from there. She started getting into the use of computers to record her music and visual art, kept going to school, had her music used in TV series and more movies, got married and divorced (four and three times, respectively) – including one marriage to a surfing instructor in Hawaii. In other words, she generally just kept being awesome, and today she lives in Hawaii, which is also pretty awesome.

“Cod’ine” by Buffy Sainte-Marie:

By David Ball

Even if you’ve never heard of him, chances are you’ve shadowboxed listening to his most famous song. And if the tune inspired your breakfast regimens to include downing a glass of raw eggs and jogging whilst wearing a ratty-looking hoodie, then all the better…

Maynard Ferguson, the world-famous jazz trumpeter and prolific bandleader who became a crossover pop star with the Rocky movie theme “Gonna Fly Now,” was born in Verdun, Que., on May 4, 1928. The 1997 Canadian Music Hall of Fame (CMHF) inductee began life as a performer when he was only four, encouraged to learn violin and piano by his musician parents. Before his 10th birthday he was introduced to the instrument of his calling via the cornet that he heard played at a local church. By age 13, Ferguson was a child prodigy and featured soloist with the CBC Orchestra and won a scholarship with Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, where he studied from 1943 to 1948. Ferguson left school in late ’48 and moved to the United States to join Stan Kenton’s orchestra, but they had disbanded, so the young trumpeter cut his teeth in other outfits led by Jimmy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet and Boyd Raeburn.

By January 1950, Ferguson finally teamed with Kenton in the bandleader’s new brass-heavy band, The Innovations Orchestra. However, he initially wasn’t the featured trumpeter despite his talent and near-unmatched high register range, which earned him the title of DownBeat magazine’s best trumpeter from 1950 to 1953.

Ferguson left Kenton’s band in 1953 and became a highly sought after – and busy – session player for Paramount Pictures, performing on 46 soundtracks, including The Ten Commandments and several Martin and Lewis films. After leaving Paramount in 1956, he fronted the short-lived all-star Birdland Dream Band (together for just two albums). After they disbanded, he led another big band for nine years which included ex-Dream Band core members Joe Zawinul, Jaki Byard, Bill Chase and John Bunch. The music they produced was the most important and best of Ferguson’s storied career. (All of the band’s recordings can be found on Roulette’s comprehensive Mosaic box set.)

The declining popularity of big bands in the mid-1960s forced Ferguson to perform and record more infrequently. He travelled to India, moved to England for five years and during his “exile,” released a number of pop-friendly experiments to mixed results, especially among jazz purists. But his M.F. Horn series was met with favourable reviews. He moved back to the United States in the mid-1970s where he continued to fuse big band jazz with pop and other fashionable sounds such as funk, rock and… shudder… disco.

Although always a top-notch soloist and concert draw, Ferguson returned to form, style-wise, in the late ‘80s with his traditional nine-piece bebop band, Big Bop Nouveau, to the delight – and no doubt, relief – of purists and his old fan base. He toured and recorded with Big Bop Nouveau until his sudden death on August 23, 2006. On an aside, my uncle Bill is a huge Maynard Ferguson fan, and my earliest jazz memories came from visits to his Kingston-area house in the mid to late 1970s (man, I’m old). Bill always seemed to have albums by Ferguson or another CMHF inductee, Moe Koffman, playing on his higher-than-high-end stereo. I can’t remember if I ever shadowboxed to the Rocky theme in his living room, but I probably showed up wearing a ratty-looking hoodie from time to time.

Strange, but true: I had a dream the other night where the late great Peter Gzowski showed me around CBC’s Toronto headquarters and, believe it or not, Don Cherry was nowhere in sight. Although I think I spied that Gerry Dee guy looking to sign autographs down by the main entrance.

“Red River Rally,” a four-hour all-star fundraising concert, was held on May 2, 1997, on CBC Radio’s “Morningside,” hosted by the venerable radio host Peter Gzowski. The special raised $450,000, with proceeds going to Manitoba’s Red River flood victims. Many of Canada’s top performers generously took part, including Tom Cochrane, Ben Heppner, Loreena McKennitt and Moxy Früvous (with pre-“Q” host Jian Ghomeshi). Other highlights included folk legend Murray McLauchlan (11-time JUNO Award winner and member of the Order of Canada) singing an emotional version of his “Red River Valley” and Valdy (two-time JUNO Award winner) unveiling a new song inspired by the unfortunate incident, “As the Waters Fall.” Several dramatic readings also took place by renowned actors Graham Greene, Sara Botsford, Linda Griffiths and others.

This wasn’t the first time the Red River caused damage and destruction. On May 5, 1950, 80-kilometre-per-hour winds caused waves to crash through the dikes protecting Winnipeg, leaving one dead and over $100 million in damage. One-third of the Manitoba capital’s citizens were forced from their homes.

On May 5, 1987, multiple JUNO Award winner Bryan Adams kicked off his North American tour in Shreveport, Loooosiania – of all places – in support of his underrated fifth album, Into the Fire. Adams and his band criss-crossed North America before taking the tour overseas to parts of Asia and Europe and ending things up in Switzerland.

Although Into the Fire was considered somewhat of a disappointment following the otherworldly success of his previous effort, Reckless, the album sold four million copies worldwide and spawned six singles, including the top 10 hit “Heat of the Night,” featuring a rare – and pretty darn good – Bryan Adams guitar solo. The title track (and its accompanying live-shot music video) is one of Adams’ best songs ever, too.

No worries, because their names are literally all over the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame anyway (I was there recently and took notes, literally)…

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell (both multiple JUNO Award winners and CMHF members) failed to show up at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 6, 1997. Their excuses were certainly intriguing: Mitchell couldn’t attend (Graham Nash accepted for her) because she had just found the daughter she gave up for adoption over 30 years earlier, and Young – inducted for his work in Buffalo Springfield – bailed because organizers refused to give him another free ticket to the event.

Mitchell with daughter Kilauren Gibb

Even if the ceremony has strict rules, you’d think one of rock’s most important artists of all time has earned the right to get another free ticket if he wanted one, no questions asked. Heck, he deserves a lifetime luxury box suite.

I hear the real reason for the ticket snub was that Young’s old Buffalo Springfield buddy, Stephen Stills, bought up the entire front row. I kid! Actually, Buffalo Springfield were joined in the Hall of Fame Class of 1997 with the members of Parliament-Funkadelic, all 16 of them, so seats to the event were definitely at a premium. We all lose though, because the ceremony’s celebrated end-of-night jam could have used Neil Young rocking it out on “Mr Soul.”

Next week: Bruce Cockburn and Jimi Hendrix

“Gonna Fly Now” by Maynard Ferguson