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[Noah]

For a musician, the dust of the road becomes part of the skin. It gets into your hair, your nose, your eyes, your mouth, your voice, and your music. When Robbie Robertson talks about Molasses, Texas, and Timmins, Canada, he isn't boasting about the grime embedded in his pores; he's merely verbalizing the stories that his guitar has to tell. There was the time the Band went into the shantytown of Helena, Arkansas, to pay homage to Sonny Boy Williamson, 6'3", 70 years old, a blues man with a white goatee and tuberculosis who was spitting blood into a can on the floor next to him as he got the Band drunk on corn liquor and played with them until the police ran them out of town.

"The cops couldn't understand what we were doing there," Robertson remembers. "You've got to realise that this is near a place where they had hung 13 guys from a water tower a few years back."

There was the time the Band played Fort Worth, Texas, working in a gangster-owned club that had been bombed, burned, gassed, and robbed so often that nobody even bothered to lock it up at night.

"We had to wear guns and take turns staying through the night to guard our equipment," Robertson remembers. "One night, the police came busting in with dogs. The dogs nearly got us, and we nearly got the dogs. The next night, someone shot off a tear gas bomb in the club. It stunk up the place for four days. We would be playing, and the people would come in and their eyes would tear up."

www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/apr/24/levon-helm-interview-band