I'd have seen the Lioness in Winter Patty Griffin with her spirit dragon and devoted guitar shaman and musical soulmate David Pulkingham at a roadhouse on the banks of the Tallahatchie or Yazoo River or anyplace this size if I could so I came here. Levon's Studios. His Barn.
She took this pit stop on 7/3/22 out of reverence, out of affection, out of loving kindness.
Now, with Levon having moved on to the colossal Band up there some heaven away, maybe it's not quite the same. I can't know really as this was my first time there.
Maybe there was a time when the driveway wasn't riddled with potholes so deep you hurt knew your car was bottoming out repeatedly from bone rattling smackdowns. Maybe there was a time when you'd come a little early, asking to just park in the field that serves as their parking lot (and more joy for your undercarriage) and you weren't briskly told "no" and stared at until you turned tail and drove up to Bearsville to wait out the thirty minutes.
Where you chatted up a local who tells you're darn right Sandy doesn't want people there - she lives there! So she suggests you check out the Bearsville Inn bathrooms and you do and who's there? A mural of Levon that covers the wall floor to ceiling laughing at you: "well boy - why are you here when my home's open?"
And the hard things haven't changed even since the 1975 barn burnt down and was rebuilt that made it any less tolerable. Not easy to stand back up against a chimney no room to move while someone burns wood somewhere in July choking out us asthmatics.
And you get a sense this is the Cool Kids club and you ain't in it. Rules that seem more unfriendly at times than for the good of everyone.
Even the architecture was less warm and inviting and more austere in its hot box, no fan, no air conditioning, no windows for cross breezes to blow away the dismal stagnate ennui of heat. And all that crippled creaking and wooden groaning of ceaseless wandering dispassionate attendees routinely interrupting the quietest passages. Only recent times have brought us more distractions with selfish videoing with phone that have search and rescue klieg lights ruining the dark sanctuary.
But like Duane Allman's brother said after his sixth divorce: "maybe I've got something to do with this..."
Heck, maybe if Levon were to read this, he'd either grimace and tell me to get lost and grow up and lose the entitlement. This ain't Carnegie Hall (where I was in May)
Or maybe he'd chuckle and remind me what I'm missing. He'd point out this is more church than lounge. He'd say the spirits rise from uncomfortable behinds. He'd show me the holy by just pointing to the stage and saying simply: there's maybe two or three altars and launching pads to communal music like that left. You're looking at one, Son. Now you thank my Sandy kindly."
And the next day after Patty at Levon's, I stood at the Woodstock Field Stone in Bethel - closed.
Still I wandered on that field of rock and roll ghosts, envisioning a little piece of that heaven.
Even met a sweet older woman there who was a girl that summer of '69 weekend at the edge of the stage all three days.
"That peace and love thing?" She asked me. She whispered the answer beaming with pride..."It was real."
So when you go to Levon's, don't be tourist. Show some love for what's still alive there - and in you. And go not to remember but never to forget.
Make a memory of the night because like it or not, it'll eventually make a memory out of you.
History is made at night - the best kind anyway. Like Patty Griffin remembered the night they drove ole electricity down from some northern storm last time she was at Levon's, they just lit candles and sang away the darkness.
The heart aches for that kind of break: the break with the workaday spirit killing grind, where voices rising leave all that meaningless behind and bring back the promise we made to our selves running breathless just to run some summer's day with no clocks or bills: the promise we'd always keep the truth that the sweetest joy in life comes from music shared especially in those sparest of spaces where maybe, just maybe there's no call for you to show up early and sit in a field like a lump on a log but there's damn sure all the reason in the world for you to ramble in and join the chorus of what makes you....us.
So go and don't let the rough edges cheat you of an extraordinary experience. And show some gratitude for grace.
I suppose even if we were to make it into the hands of God one gentle day, we'd have to mind His callouses from working all those miracles.
God bless Sandy Helm for keeping Levon alive with the one thing that most times stands between us and a little more dying: music. There's no place like Helm. read more