Atlantic City Weekly

Black Crowes w/ The Levon Helm Band
Where: The Borgata
When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 8pm
How Much: $49.50-$59.50

OK, for those of you who have just tuned in, here are a few reasons why Levon Helm’s appearance at the Borgata this Saturday, Aug. 29 — where his band will be the special guest for the Black Crowes show (8pm) — is a local-interest story.

For starters, Levon Helm, 69, led the house band at the legendary Somers Point night spot Tony Mart’s in the summer of 1965. During that stint, Levon & the Hawks were approached by the one and only Bob Dylan to become his electric band and go on tour (and change modern American music forever). Tony Mart’s lost its house band that summer, but the world gained one of the greatest touring ensembles ever with Bob Dylan and the Hawks.

A couple years later the Hawks would become The Band, recording their debut album Music from Big Pink (1968) up near Woodstock, N.Y., following a number of informal sessions with Dylan, who was living in the Woodstock area while recuperating from a motorcycle accident and spending time with his young family.

Helm, the band’s southern drummer-singer, would wind up coming back to the Jersey shore area in 2003 to work on a Dixie Hummingbirds project (Diamond Jubilation) being recorded in a studio in the rural Scullville section of Egg Harbor Township (about 20 minutes outside of Atlantic City).

That’s when he and the studio’s owner, Jerry Klause of Margate, became close friends and Helm began building a tight and important relationship with Bob Dylan’s ex-guitar player and multi-instrumentalist/songwriter/producer Larry Campbell, who produced the Hummingbirds' album.

Eventually, Helm — who was battling cancer and persevering through dozens of radiation treatments — and Campbell began focusing on a series of intimate shows at Levon Helm’s barn/studio up in Woodstock dubbed the Midnight Ramble. The concerts, which have been going on successfully since 2005, attracting throngs of fans and an assortment of guest musicians, led to Helm’s 2007 comeback album, Dirt Farmer (Vanguard), which was co-produced by Campbell and took home a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

A few of the songs (“White Dove,” “Stuff You Gotta Watch,” “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had”) from those recording sessions at Helm’s barn wound up on this summer’s high-charting follow-up album Electric Dirt (Vanguard), also produced by Campbell and featuring most of the Midnight Ramble band members.

To bring things back for a moment to this weekend’s concert in Atlantic City, the Black Crowes’ latest album, Before the Frost …/Until the Freeze …  was recorded at Helm’s barn studio. The album, which received three-and-a-half stars in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, includes an “11-song set of ragged rockers and funky jams,” according to the magazine, in addition to a bonus set of nine “mostly acoustic, country-tinged tunes.” 

The Crowes’ Chris Robinson caught a Midnight Ramble concert in  the fall of 2008 and, as he told Rolling Stone earlier this year, “It was one of the best times I have ever had.”

The experience led the Black Crowes to record their follow-up to Warpaint at Helm’s space in less than a week this past winter. The album, due out on Sept. 1 on Silver Arrow, features Campbell on a number of instruments, including pedal-steel and fiddle.

Campbell is currently on tour with the Levon Helm Band and will be at the Borgata show on Saturday. Helm’s extraordinary band just opened for the Black Crowes in Boston and following the Atlantic City gig will play the Summer Stage in New York’s Central Park next week.

“Chris got the idea to do their next album at Levon’s,” Campbell tells Atlantic City Weekly. “He dug the whole Ramble vibe there ... and came up with the idea to do live recordings there and make that the record.”

Campbell, who recorded a solo album at Scullville Studios a few years back entitled Rooftops, says he and his wife, the sweet-voiced Teresa Williams, are currently planning on collaborating on a recording project. “Most of this year was taken up doing Levon’s record,” says Campbell. “That was the focus of what I was doing. And there is a bunch of other stuff in the works right now, but nothing has come to fruition yet.” 

He says he is looking forward to coming back to the Jersey shore area for this Saturday’s show.

“I really liked it down there when I was working at Jerry’s place [in Scullville] and him and I are very close," says Campbell. "He’s become a good business partner for me because his right brain works a lot better than mine.

“I really like the area down there too,” adds Campbell, “and it was really interesting to me to find out about that scene with the Band [Hawks] back [in 1965] because I didn’t know about any of that until I got down there and started doing some stuff.”

On the recent success of Electric Dirt, another gut-bucket helping of Americana with a few originals as well as tunes penned by Happy Traum, Muddy Waters, Carter Stanley and Randy Newman, Campbell says the outcome of all the work he and his cohorts up in Woodstock worked on during the first half of this year was a “delightful occurrence.”

“You never know,” says Campbell. “You spend all this time on these records, especially producing, and you get so excited that you end up relying on instinct to get it finished and objectivity sort of flies out the window. Every record that I’ve ever done as a producer, by the end of it, I’m thinking, ‘What the hell did I just do?’ You know? I know there’s something good in there somewhere — and when [the album] does well it’s always a surprise.