Levon Helm remembers Sean Costello
June 11th, 2008 by Chad Radford in Music newsLevon Helm was a hero and a friend to Sean Costello, the subject of last week’s CL cover story, Sean Costello, 1979-2008. During the making of the Sean Costello CD, which was released in 2005 by Artemis Records, Costello spent time some time entrenched in the singer/songwriter scene in New York where he performed with Helm’s daughter Amy in the band Ollabelle.
Costello also spent some time recording at Levon Helm Studio in Woodstock, New York. Some of that session work appeared on his self-tiled CD. The following phone interview with Helm was conducted on Friday, June 6 at 7:45 p.m.
Over the phone, Helm talks with a warm, grandfatherly rasp punctuated with a deep, Southern accent. The Memphis native’s slow, articulate tone stands out when he emphasizes every syllable in words like “thee ate er.” His personable and down home demeanor hardly come across like the air of a man who, after a 25 year hiatus, received a Grammy for his ‘07 release, Dirt Farmer.
How did you first get to know Sean Costello?
Sean had worked with my daughter Amy in the band, Ollabelle. Atlanta was Sean’s hometown, but he was also a hometown hero around Memphis. He won awards there and a lot of my friends thought he was the biggest and best thing since Stevie Ray and a lot of my friends really thought that he was going to inherit that crown. That’s the kind of music maker he was. Sean came here and did some recording with Olabelle. That’s how he and I got acquainted. He was good enough to come up here and help me do some recording of my own as well. I got to play with him on a couple of things and he even leant his voice for my recordings, when I was trying to get mine to a better singing position. He was a great singer.
Did you sing on some songs for Sean’s self-titled CD?
I tried to. It was during a time when I was trying to start singing again. We were trying to sing harmony parts for each other. Sean was a real good background singer. He was just a natural born music maker and never played a bad song yet. I haven’t had the heart to do it yet, but after a while I’m going to go downstairs and start to review some of the stuff that he did when he was up here.
You have some unheard music that he recorded there?
Yeah, he was recording with Johnny Johnson, Steve Jordan and Jon Smith and some people like that. It didn’t matter how much of a heavyweight the player was, Sean was one of ‘em too.
You live and work at a studio in Woodstock, New York, correct? Levon Helm Studios?
That is correct, sir. That’s where Sean did quite a bit of his recording when he first brought his band to New York.
We get a lot of traffic recording here. We did Dirt Farmer here, and since then we’ve done Carl Carlton & the Song Dogs… Katherine Russell did her last album here. Larry Campbell produced it. It’s got a real good, clean, acoustical, old-fashioned unplugged kind of feel to it.
Do you do any engineering or production work?
Oh heavens no! I leave that to the professionals. Me sitting at the engineering knobs would scare the hell out of anyone in the room. I like to peek over my engineer Justin Guip’s shoulder. And I have had the pleasure of working with some real good engineers here over the years — Paul Diaz, a fellow Atlanta man. With someone like him around, it would be embarrassing to be caught in the engineering seat. But I do like to peek over their shoulder and help give them the courage of their convictions.
When was the last time you saw Sean?
It had been a while. I went to Atlanta recently, but I didn’t get to see him. I had been expecting to see him come swinging back through New York with his band. The invitation was always open to him because he did so much to help me get started recording again. He brought the best out of whoever he was playing with. That’s why he was able to play with the Johnny Johnson’s and the Jon Smith’s and the Steven Jordan’s and really come up to their level. Everybody knew what Sean Costello was as a player.
Sean had some down time as well, between the Sean Costello CD and We Can Get Together.
It is a mean old world and when one of those record companies does what they did when Sean was on Artemis… Or when they let someone go, it automatically creates a minimum two-to-three year period that you just flounder around, trying to get through it. But it don’t surprise me about Sean, regardless of all of that, that he made a good record.
We Can Get Together is pretty solid. There are 12 songs on the CD, nine of which are originals, and they’re pretty progressive in terms of songwriting. He’s not just connecting the dots but going out on a limb with a pretty original approach to his songs, and you don’t get a lot of that with the blues in 2008.
No you don’t. Not nearly enough. And it takes someone like Sean Costello to do a cover and do it well. Sean was accepted by so many good musicians because he could slip in with the best of them and be authentic. One of the ideas we were talking about before we got on the phone today was to round up some recordings from one of the Rambles we did and see what kind of program could be made out of it. There’s some good stuff in there.
What’s the “Rambles?”
The Midnight Rambles are music shows that we do just about every Saturday night. We have a band that I play with and there’s probably eight or ten of us and we use horns and voices and everything else. Then there is another band, like Olabelle or another good band from about 8 o’clock to midnight. We have music and a pot luck supper and a popcorn machine and we have just about all the music that you can stand.
Is it open to the public?
Absolutely. We’ve done it on the road a few times and we’ve done it at the Beacon Theatre a few times and in Knoxville, and we played the Ryman down in Nashville. But we usually just do it right here in the studio. That’s where we can sound our best and make people comfortable. It’s a lot of fun. You need to come up here and check it out. We got some with Sean, and brother that kid could play… We’re not just selling a pig in a poke here. He was good and if we can really put that together in a good package and maybe make it something for his fan club, or something that would benefit the foundation that his mother started, that would really be something.
A lot of people really like what he did and he’s hailed as a genius by most everyone who knew him or saw him play. He was on a lot of people’s radars, which made this a difficult story to write, considering the manner in which he died.
A lot of people want to believe what they think. It would be real easy for someone in your position to start pointing the finger and say ‘Oh he was a dope fiend! He finally got too much. Case closed.’ Then people could sit around and point fingers and drink beer and talk about how great he was and cry in their beers and shit. But you know and I know that there is a lot more to it than that. But really, when you get right down to it, it wasn’t yours or my business. It was between Sean and the good Lord. We don’t know what was done or said.
People want to put notoriety on it and give it more drama than was really there. He was one of those artists who knew that playing music was a calling. It wasn’t just a damn job, it was a calling and he had no choice. It’s sinful not to, if that’s what you’re supposed to do. Whiskey, dope and wild wild women didn’t kill him and that’s for damn sure. It’s easy for people to shoot their mouths off. It sure is. I had some teachers over at Berkley College who told me that all of these things are occupational hazards.
It’s a rough business.
It sure is.
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