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It was a massive, intensely syncopated THUMP that at first overwhelmed everything else. Everyone knows Levon Helm is a great drummer, but this time he played like a star. He was working right at the heart of rock ’n’ roll—sometimes Richard Manuel joined him on a second set of drums, and while it was fun to watch, musically I couldn’t tell the difference. It was the authority of Levon’s beat that let Dylan, Robbie, and Garth Hudson sing and play with a freedom that with any less of a foundation would have seemed merely personal; with Levon there it was still personal, and also shared, sympathetic, dependent—on stage, and out in front of it.