Atlantic City Weekly

KING HARVEST: Helm, second from left, with daughter, Amy, left, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams.

Kids need to see real people playing real songs on real instruments," Levon Helm, 67, told the New York Times earlier this year. "There's too much phoniness in the world."

There's not a hint of spuriousness, however, on Helm's new album Dirt Farmer (Vanguard), the long-time member of the Band's first solo studio outing in 25 years.

Dirt Farmer was co-produced by the multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (a former member of Bob Dylan's band) and Helm's daughter, Amy, a member of roots-gospel group Ollabelle. Both contribute their musical talents as well on the album, which was recorded in Helm's home barn studio in Woodstock, N.Y., the artist enclave where the iconic musician has lived since the late 1960s. That the new album was recorded at Helm's barn is notable not only for the organic, down-home sound of the new release, but also because most of the building burned to the ground in 1991.

"I never thought you would be able to hear the sound of the barn studio again," Helm writes in the liner notes for Dirt Farmer, a project that follows a stretch of some pretty hard road for Helm. About six years after the fire, already struggling with financial problems, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Now, a decade later, and following 28 radiation treatments, Helm is back, cancer-free and singing again. His new collection of old folk, gospel, blues and Appalachian tunes, exquisitely peppered with a few contemporary songs, has been widely praised as his best album effort since his heyday with the Band, the original formation of which split in 1976.

Featuring lush backing vocal harmonies, top-notch musicianship and a loving production team, Dirt Farmer, released Oct. 30, has sparked a sort of renaissance for the musician who has not only successfully battled cancer, but also from the threat of losing his voice forever.

At one point, the owner of that legendary twangy yelp of a singing voice, which fueled classic band songs like "The Weight," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek" thought that he might not ever sing a note again. "He just thought that that was it, 'I'm just going to be a drummer for the rest of my life,'" says Campbell.

During the period after his radiation treatments, although he couldn't sing, Helm could still play the drums. So, he put together a couple of different bands and hit the road. Eventually, to raise some much needed funding to save his home and get out of debt, Helm put together a series of intimate barn concerts that came to be known as the Midnight Rambles. Different musicians would sit in on the sessions, including occasional guests like Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris and Nick Lowe.

"I had been playing with Levon at these Rambles up at his house in Woodstock [since early 2005] and Amy had wanted to do a record with Levon," Campbell explains during a recent phone conversation. "The original idea was to do a duet record with Levon, and Amy asked if I would co-produce it with her and I said [yes], of course. And then it morphed into this thing [where it] started with these songs that Levon grew up with. Then it became something larger than that."

Among the many songs recorded during the sessions for Dirt Farmer were several, such as "Little Birds," "The Blind Child" and "Single Girl, Married Girl," that Helm learned as a youngster growing up on a cotton farm in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. The album's musicians -- including Levon Helm (on drums, guitar, mandolin and vocals), Amy Helm (vocals, drums, mandola), Campbell (guitars, fiddle, dulcimer, mandolin), Teresa Williams (vocals), Byron Isaacs (bass), Brian Mitchell (piano), Glenn Patscha (pump organ) and George Recelli (percussion) -- also recorded tunes from contemporary voices like Steve Earle ("The Mountain") and Buddy & Julie Miller (the gorgeous closer "Wide River to Cross"). Throughout the recording process, Campbell knew he was experiencing something special.

"Just hearing him sing," says Campbell. "You know, that voice, when I heard years ago that he had lost it, I thought it was a tragedy for American music. And when I realized that voice was back, to me it was like hearing that the Beatles had just gotten back together."

Campbell says that he feels Dirt Farmer captures some of the magic that made the early Band albums so powerful.

"On all those great Band records, they always sound like they were just done for the love of doing the music and that there was nothing contrived," says Campbell. "It just sounded like a bunch of guys hanging out having a good time ... and oh, by the way, let's push the record button and see what happens. And this is exactly how [Dirt Farmer] was made.

"There was a point," adds Campbell, "when we realized that this was everything we hoped it would be. We were really trying to get at the essence of Levon, the way that you haven't really heard since the first couple of Band records. And when we started to see other people's reactions, and ours too, we realized that, yeah, we got it. It's certainly a different approach than those records, but the essence of who he is is there as bright and shiny as it was on those records. And we started sensing that when we were about halfway through this thing. It was magic to us. It just felt right."

Some of that magic started brewing right here in South Jersey.

"I've known Levon for a while, since working with Dylan," says Campbell, who served as Dylan's guitar player from 1997-2004. "We had just finished the Love and Theft album with Bob [in 2001] and I had done the Patty Blee record."

Campbell appeared with fellow Dylan band member Tony Garnier on the South Jersey singer-songwriter's debut, Disguise, for the Egg Harbor Township-based label, Treasure Records. Around this time, Jerry Klause, the label's president, began discussing ideas with Campbell about recording with one-time Band members Levon Helm and Garth Hudson at his studio in Scullville.

"That's when I first met Jerry," says Campbell. "We got along really well. So after Patty's record we were thinking of something we could do with Garth and Levon. We thought it would be great to get those two together and just do a record and one thing led to another."