This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Somehow we crashed to a finish. An assistant murmured they’d call us, but of course they never did.

  Next we went down to Philadelphia to do American Bandstand, which Dick Clark broadcast over the ABC network. This was the MTV of the fifties: Every weekday across the country millions of kids tuned in to watch Dick’s teenage dancers do the latest steps and to catch the newest acts. Since they figured we were from the country, the set was dressed like a western saloon. They also put garters on our sleeves, gave us cowboy hats, and plastered us with makeup. What the hell, we were gonna be on TV, that’s all we knew. (The other act on the show besides us was actor Chuck Connors, star of TV’s The Rifleman. Dick and his kids thought they’d seen it all by then—Jackie Wilson, James Brown—but they appeared stunned when Ronnie began to do double backflips as we lip-synched our way through “Mary Lou” and “Forty Days.” Lip-synching had tamed a lot of acts on Bandstand, but it didn’t stop the Hawk. He went wild anyway, and “Mary Lou” went on to sell 750,000 records.

  We were back in New York in September 1959 to appear on Alan Freed’s huge Labor Day show at the Brooklyn Fox. We did two or three shows a day, and there were so many stars I hung out in the wings watching between sets. Jackie Wilson headlined with his latest release, “You Better Know It.” Jimmy Clanton did “My Own True Love.” Several up-and-coming acts were on the bill: Dion and the Belmonts, the Skyliners, the Crests, the Mystics. Fifteen-year-old Johnny Restivo did his hit, “The Shape I’m In.” The Tempos, from Pittsburgh, did their huge hit of that summer, “See You in September,” after which Bo Diddley, a Freed road-show regular since 1955, came out and killed everyone with “Crackin’ Up” and “Say Man.”

  Bo Diddley’s band had only three pieces: Clifton James on drums, Jerome on maracas (“Bring it on home, bring it to Jerome”), and Bo on guitar. Without a piano, Bo tuned his guitar by ear, which always gave problems to bandleader Sam “The Man” Taylor. (Mr. Taylor took Lloyd Price’s band and augmented it with his own, going up to thirty instruments sometimes. This was the first time I ever saw two drummers on a stage, sitting side by side. Lloyd’s man played his snare drum turned on a sharp angle between his legs and swung his sticks like hammers, mallet style. Sam’s drummer played in standard cross-sticking style. Spider, the bass player, played a stand-up bass right at the drummers’ shoulders. When the three of them bore down, it didn’t swing, it swung.) While Bo Diddley and the band were working the house, Sam searched for the key they were in. When he found it, he’d adjust the mouthpiece of his saxophone to sharp or flat to allow for Bo’s “by ear” tuning. Then he signaled the band, holding up two fingers and one across in the shape of an A, then gave a thumbs-up to tell them it was on the sharp side. Now they were ready for the big final chord. On Bo’s last chop t’chop chop, the whole outfit meshed with Bo’s band, and the drummers roughed it up and crashed out on Clifton’s downstroke. It was a lot of power, a big chord blasted out by everybody, and it made my hair stand up. (One night I overheard one of the horn players tell his buddy, “You never know what key lurks in the heart of Bo Diddley.”)

  That show was an education. We did our songs and watched the kids go nuts as Ronnie camel-walked and did his backflips. Afterward, on the way back to Canada, we realized we were the only rockabilly-style act in the show. Dion had drawn the biggest response. The writing was on the wall, and we read it. The music we were playing was on its way out.

  That September our third single, “Wild Little Willie,” was released, and Morris Levy sent the band off to do promotional tours, playing record hops. We’d go to Detroit or Cleveland and pile into a station wagon with an electric piano, a set of drums, and a couple of amps. There’d be five hundred kids dancing in a high-school gym, where we’d set up and play three or four quick songs. Then we’d throw all the stuff back into the car, and dash off to another record hop on the other side of town. Sometimes we did several of these a day. This was how you promoted yourself back then, but after a while it stopped being exciting to the Hawk or any of us, especially since we weren’t paid for these dates. (After one of these shows, the local promo man suggested we go out for a pizza pie. “Hey, Levon,” whispered Willard in the backseat, “what the fuck is a pizza pie?”

  “Shut up, Willard,” I hissed. “D’you want him to think we’re a bunch of hicks?” But that was indeed when we Arkansas boys had our first pizza.)

  Right there was when things began to change. Luke, our guitar player, had a wife in Arkansas who wanted him home, and he started to talk about leaving the band. But we kept pushing all that autumn. We ran back to Toronto to play the Friar’s Tavern, then down home for a swing through Fayetteville, a couple of frat parties at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, then over to Little Rock to play the Club 70 and a dance at the National Guard Armory, where things could (and often did) get out of hand. In mid-September we were back on the Jersey Shore around the time Roulette released our first album, Ronnie Hawkins. On September 16 the Hawks, without Ronnie, were booked into Bell Sound in Manhattan to record a couple of instrumentals under our new producer, Mr. Henry Glover.

  Henry was an old-time record man and an Arkansawyer to boot. He had helped Syd Nathan build Cincinnati’s King Records into America’s first major independent label, becoming the first black record executive while producing early sessions by James Brown, Little Willie John, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Lulu Reed, and the Delmore Brothers. Henry wrote songs as well: “Honky Tonk,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and later “California Sun” and “Peppermint Twist,” after he’d cut Hank Ballard’s original Twist dance records.

  Something clicked between Henry and me. I tried to put myself under the wing of this A&R genius (he’d talked Little Willie John into cutting “Fever”), and for the next twenty-five years we would depend on his counsel and advice.

  So we were at this session alone, working on tracks without vocals. After we’d cut a couple of instrumentals on his new four-track machine, Henry came into the studio and said, “Lavon, you know you’ve got a hell of a band here. If you boys ever decide you want to do something by yourselves, I hope you’ll come talk to me about it first.”

  This meant the world to me at the time, because Henry wasn’t just a rock and roll maven. Since coming to New York to work with Morris Levy at Roulette, he’d been involved with jazz artists like Sonny Stitt, Lockjaw Davis, Sarah Vaughan, and especially Dinah Washington. Henry knew good music when he heard it, and if a veteran music man like him thought we could cut it on our own, well, maybe we could someday—if the need arose.

  We were back in Wildwood, New Jersey, that weekend when something funny happened. Playing nearby was Ronnie’s cousin Dale Hawkins, best known for the 1957 hit “Suzie-Q.” Dale’s band had an incredible guitar player from Louisiana, Fred Carter, Jr., who played as well as Luke and maybe even a little better. Well, Ronnie and Dale had a little reunion—“Shor good to see ya agin, cousin; how many years has it been anyway?”—but as soon as Dale left the room, Ronnie tried to hire Fred Carter, Jr.! “How much ya makin’ with Dale, son?” he asked. Ronnie knew Luke’s days in the Hawks were numbered, so he offered Fred more money, and besides, Ronnie had a couple of hit records. Dale wasn’t too pleased, but Fred showed up in Canada shortly afterward. For a while, before Luke went home for good, we had a two-guitar attack that I thought was incredible. Where Luke played classic rockabilly style, Fred had developed a plectrum/finger-picking technique that became known as the Louisiana funk sound. Check out “Suzie-Q” to see what I mean. It wasn’t easy to hire Fred, though. We might have had to pay him $150 a week.

  We spent most of October 1959 in Toronto, playing the Le Coq D’Or and the Concord Tavern and working out songs for Ronnie’s next album, which we would cut later in the month back in New York.

  This was when we began to notice a local kid hanging around our bandstand. He was young, maybe fifteen at the most. He’d do anything to make himself useful—haul amps, help set up, run for coffee—and after several week
s of seeing him every day, I noticed he usually had a guitar case with him. He didn’t cause any problems, so it was OK by me, I guess. His name?

  Robbie Robertson.

  Chapter Three

  TAKE NO PRISONERS

  Rosemarie Crysler was a beautiful Mohawk Indian girl from the Six Nations reservations above Lake Erie. After World War II started she came to Toronto to live with an aunt and met a guy named Klegerman, with whom she had a son in July 1943, Jaime (pronounced Jamie) Robert. Mr. Klegerman was a professional card player and gambler, as his son later described him. He was killed while changing a tire on the Queen Elizabeth Way between Toronto and Niagara Falls when his son was a baby. Robbie’s mom married a Mr. Robertson, and they both worked in a jewelry-plating factory while Robbie was growing up.

  The boy spent his summers on his mother’s reservation, surrounded by cousins and uncles who played fiddles, mandolins, and guitars and laughed a lot. His great-grandfather would grab the boy with the crook of his cane as he ran by, tell him stories and lore, trying to make a Mohawk out of him. His mother took Robbie for guitar lessons when he was ten; the Hawaiian instructor laid a guitar on his lap and taught him to play it flat, Waikiki style. It was the only training the boy ever had. Meanwhile he stayed up all night listening to WLAC out of Nashville, a fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station with a thousand-mile range. Deejay John R. played blues all night in the 1950s. It was the underground radio of the day. There was also George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, a rock and roll disc jockey in Buffalo whose show was influential for a lot of young Canadians.

  Robbie liked school until he caught the rock and roll bug. At thirteen he was in a band called Little Caesar and the Consoles, playing New Orleans songs like “Blue Monday.” Then he formed Robbie Robertson and the Rhythm Chords around the time the now-classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet came out, featuring Robbie the Robot. So Pete Traynor, one of the Rhythm Chords, drilled some holes in Robbie’s Harmony guitar, installed some antennae and wires, and they renamed the group Robbie and the Robots. Then there was Thumper and the Trambones. At fifteen Robbie Robertson was a tall, dark street-smart punk living with his mom in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighborhood and hanging out on Yonge Street, catching the bands that came through town: Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins, Ronnie Hawkins. That’s when we met him.

  Robbie, Pete Traynor, and a piano player named Scott Cushnie had this little band, and they opened for the Hawk one night at Dixie Arena. The Hawks, Robbie told an interviewer, “played the fastest, most violent rock and roll I’d ever heard. It was exciting and exploding with dynamics. The solos would get really loud, Ronnie would come in and growl, then it would get quiet, then fast and loud again. It was these cool-looking guys doing this primitive music faster and more violent than anybody, with overwhelming power.

  “It was also the way they looked, how young they were. They weren’t as young as me, but they were still pretty young. There was this little kid playing drums. You couldn’t believe this guy was the drummer, but he was terrific. Terrific to look at and terrific to hear….

  “I knew the majority of the music I liked and felt connected to was from the South,” Robbie continued, “and they kind of represented that to me. And Levon didn’t let down my fantasy of what this thing was. He was real, authentic, and had such a love for music. To me it seemed he came right from Mecca.”

  The Hawk took a liking to this kid. One afternoon I came into the club, and Robbie was auditioning for the Hawk, playing him a couple of songs he’d written. That night Ronnie said to me, “Son, y’know that kid who’s been hanging out? He’s got so much talent it makes me sick! Maybe we should take him on.”

  I pointed out that we already had a couple of guitar players.

  “Yeah,” the Hawk said, “but Luke’s going home soon, and this kid can write a little. Besides, I know his mom. She’s worried about him, and maybe if we take him on, it’ll keep him out of jail. Let’s think about it.”

  We didn’t hire Robbie right away, but the Hawk took him along to New York when we cut our next tracks at Bell Sound. He sat next to me in the Cadillac and talked my ear off as I drove down the “Queen E.” Jesus, this kid really wanted to be in the band. I got the impression he’d kill for a permanent seat in the Cadillac. Of course, I would’ve too.

  One reason the Hawk took Robbie to New York was that he trusted Robbie’s ears. Robbie was opinionated about hit records, and Ronnie figured since the kid was still a teenager, what Robbie liked would also appeal to the teenager rock and roll market. We were looking for that big hit, right? So while I went over to the Metropole Cafe on Seventh Avenue to check out Cozy Cole or Gene Krupa, Hawk and Robbie went over to the Brill Building on Broadway and met some of rock and roll’s biggest songwriters—Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Otis Black-well—and auditioned a hell of a lot of songs. “That wasn’t bad,” the kid told Mort “Save the Last Dance for Me” Shuman. “You got anything else?”

  The Hawk cut two of fifteen-year-old Robbie Robertson’s tunes with Henry Glover on October 26: “Hey Boba Lou” and “Someone Like You,” as well as “Baby Jean” (cowritten by me) and nine other tracks. These came out on the Hawk’s second album, Mr. Dynamo, which Roulette released in January 1960.

  The Hawk told anyone he could that this kid Robbie was going to be one of the biggest stars in the business some day. Ronnie had us all convinced. Nevertheless, he told Robbie he was too young to be in the band.

  Late in 1959 Willard wanted to go back to Arkansas for a while; not quit the band, just take a leave. The Hawk replaced him with Scott Cushnie from Robbie’s band, who finished a gig we had at the Brass Rail in London, Ontario. Luke went home, deeply mourned by the Hawk, who maintains to this day that Jimmy Ray Paulman was the best rhythm guitar player in the history of rock and roll, bar none. Then Lefty Evans quit while we were working down in Arkansas. As a going-away present for him, I picked up two cherry bombs for a dollar. While Lefty was asleep in the Cadillac, I lit the fuse of one of the big firecrackers, tossed it in the backseat, and shut the door. The hissing fuse woke him up, and Lefty tried to stomp it out, but the fuse kept burning. I could see Lefty’s fingertips just reaching the door handle when it went off. Then he tumbled out of the car amid thick smoke and flying bits of paper.

  We were cruel to one another in the band.

  Fred Carter, Jr., took over lead guitar, and Robbie Robertson was called down to Arkansas to play bass. It might have been Scott who suggested Robbie.

  The Hawk called Robbie at his mother’s house from his nightclub in Fayetteville. “Son, can you play any bass?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” Robbie lied.

  “Start practicing. I’ll call you next week.”

  The Hawk didn’t call. A few weeks later Robbie reached him at the Rockwood Club. “OK, come on down,” Ronnie told him. “I’m gonna put you in training. Maybe we can break you in.”

  Robbie begged, pleaded, and lied until his mom let him go. There was no money for bus fare, so he pawned his ’57 Fender Stratocaster. He took one bus from Toronto to Buffalo, than another to Chicago, then a train to Springfield, Missouri, and another bus up winding Ozark roads to Fayetteville. When Robbie got off the bus, Ronnie and his friends simply laughed at this city kid wearing a long overcoat. It was hot in Arkansas in December. “You look like an immigrant from Albania,” the Hawk told him. Ronnie took the kid to the barber, got him cleaned up, bought him some new clothes, and explained that he and I were going to England to be on TV, and if Robbie practiced real hard while we were gone, he might have a spot in the band when we came back. “Nobody knows if you’ll be good enough,” he told the kid. “We’ll see how it works.”

  Then he put Robbie on a bus to Helena.

  Up in Fayetteville, the Ozark mountain air was clear and fresh. As Robbie’s bus came out of the mountains, down through Little Rock, he saw the landscape flatten. The light changed as it filtered through the delta dust. Everything was l
ow and wet, with rice growing in fields of water. “People walked in rhythm and talked this singsong talk,” he remembered. “When I’d go down by the river in Helena, the river seemed to be in rhythm, and I thought, No wonder this music comes from here: The rhythm is already there.”

  I picked Robbie Robertson up at the bus station and drove him out to Turkey Scratch. “How come your house is up on stilts?” he wanted to know. Diamond was still farming cotton on some land he owned and some he leased. Linda was still at home, and my brother Wheeler was only about ten. Momma made Robbie supper, and he told her it was the best meal he’d ever had. I bet it tasted good, after ten hours on that bus. Diamond told some funny stories, and Robbie about split his sides. Then Diamond got out his mandolin, and we all might have sung a little, with Robbie playing my guitar. Later that night we drove back into Helena, and Robbie looked around with his mouth open.

  “It’s like being in another world,” he said. “I never saw so many black people in my life. It’s like Africa.” I explained that down here in the delta there were eight black people to every white. Robbie didn’t say anything. He sat in the passenger seat and stared into the darkness of the night.