There’s an implied humility to a group deciding on calling themselves, very simply, the Band. They got their start as the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins in the late ‘50s before getting upgraded to backing up Bob Dylan throughout the mid ‘60s, so for the better part of a decade they had already been known collectively as “the band.” With their own debut album in 1968 Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon Helm just made the title official with a capital B, they had a monumental effect on the history of rock and roll, but director Jacob Hatleys “Ain’t in It for My Health” focuses in on the rich past and present of the group’s drummer, and only American member, Levon Helm.
The film opens with a candid scene that catches Helm giving specific directions to his tour bus driver. The legendary singer and drummer knows the highways, backroads, and byways of America better than the guy paid to be behind the wheel, it turns out. As we’ll see, Helm’s the real deal, salt of the earth, and his story is one that alternates between creative highs and one particularly bitter betrayals that casts a long shadow over the body of work he’s left behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yVOn1udgic
The title, Ain’t in It for My Health, is presented as Helm’s credo as a musician. If you’re going to pursue that line of work to its logical end, you sign away a good chunk of security in order to fulfil your creative calling. Joining up with any band, much less the Band, is “not a career choice you make based on how long you want to live” we’re told, but the filmmakers go to great lengths to impart the indignities of advanced age that Helm is forced to endure. It’s painful to watch him white knuckle through doctors probing his vocal chords through his nose, but it’s even worse to listen in as his voice goes out on him during performances. Helm would pass away just a few years after the filming of this documentary, but his 2011 live album Ramble at the Ryman would win him another Grammy before he left us. Despite the understandable inability to let bygones be bygones with Robertson, Ain’t in It for My Health provides ample proof that Helm was much more than what defined him as an artist.
The Fat Angel Sings 