This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm

Author:Levon Helm
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2000-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

THE BAND

Here my story intertwines with that of the mother of my daughter.

I’d heard of Libby Titus before I met her because people said she was one of most beautiful girls in Woodstock. She was born Irene Justice in 1946. Her Russian father moved his family to Woodstock to work with his brother-in-law producing Batman comic strips for Stan Lee, and Libby was raised on Ohayo Mountain Road.

Cut to the summer of 1964. Libby, just out of high school and on her way to nearby Bard College, lands a waitressing job at the Café Expresso on Tinker Street, owned by Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel. Libby is eighteen years old, with a headful of dark, curly hair. She looks good. Here are a few of Libby’s memories of that era. She has her own acerbic point of view, so let the reader be advised to take them with a barrel of salt.

“There was incredible excitement that summer in Woodstock,” Libby says, “because Bob Dylan had moved to town, and suddenly Joan Baez was driving around in a low-slung green Jaguar, and the café was full of heavyweight bohemians from the Village and Chicago. Bobby Neuwirth. Sara Dylan—never had I seen anyone so beautiful, like a Brazilian Madonna. One night Victor Maimudes, Dylan’s road manager, took me up to Albert Grossman’s, which was the center of all this. I met Sally Grossman, so beautiful that her body could have been carved on a frieze. She was like a Byzantine hooker! So much life and passion, sexy clothes, everyone flirting. LSD hadn’t hit, so no one was out of their mind. It was so beautiful and innocent, that summer.

“Working in the café, I met and became friends with Mason Hoffenberg, this fantastic junkie who’d written the novel Candy with Terry Southern and was like the beatnik king of Woodstock. He was so smart and so funny that he made being a junkie somehow attractive.

“I only lasted a year at Bard, and went to New York and got a job at the Café Figaro on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, the very crossroads of the avant-garde in 1965. There I met Barry Titus, the handsome grandson of Helena Rubinstein, who invented makeup. He looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo, and swept me off my feet to his apartment on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-fourth Street. Our son, Ezra Titus, was born in July 1966. In the spring of 1968, having left my husband, my son and I moved into a nice apartment on Gramercy Park. Like everyone else I was trying to figure out what to do with myself.

“On July 4, 1968, Mason Hoffenberg comes by in a big white Cadillac and says, ‘Libby, wanna come to Woodstock to meet The Band? They’ll love you!’ So I left Ezra with his nanny and drove up to Woodstock with Mason. We pull into the driveway of this house on Boggs Hill, where Robbie and Dominique were living. I took one look at this gorgeous, pregnant French girl and bonded with her immediately.

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