by Levon Helm
In January 1960 Morris Levy flew Ronnie and me to London. Rockabilly hadn’t died in England like it did back home, and Ronnie had a following, especially, we heard, up in Liverpool. Before we left, the Hawk gave Robbie a hundred dollars to live on, and he and the rest of the band moved into Charlie Halbert’s motel. Fred Carter, Jr., was supposed to teach Robbie a few things while we were away; instead Fred took him up to Memphis, to the famous Home of the Blues record store on Beale Street, and Robbie spent his allowance on blues and R&B records. Fred also took Robbie to Sun Records, where Jerry Lee Lewis was recording. I’m here, Robbie said to himself. I made it.
In England we appeared on an early BBC pop-music show called Boy Meets Girl and got to hang out and jam a little with Eddie “Summertime Blues” Cochran, who was also big in England and touring at the time with the Shadows, a good British band. I was astonished by Eddie’s ability to chord a guitar using his little finger as a bar. It was something else! Eddie Cochran was a hell of a rocker; we were saddened a short time later when we heard he’d been killed in a car accident over there. (I almost got killed myself in London when I stepped off the curb after looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic. I’d forgotten the British drive on the left!)
Meanwhile, back in Helena Robbie was picking apart Howlin’ Wolf records for their bass and guitar parts. He practiced twelve hours a day until his fingers were hard as nails. Robbie remembered the Hawk pumping him up, telling him how good he was. He thought about Ronnie’s mercenary, out-for-blood attitude toward the music business, and realized that Fred Carter wasn’t exactly killing himself as a guitar teacher. Robbie realized he was fighting for his life. “There was no way,” he remembered, “that Ronnie was gonna come back and say, ‘This ain’t working out.’”
The Hawk and I returned home and couldn’t believe the progress Robbie had made in two weeks. We started rehearsing and would sit up all night deciding what to do with the band.
Charlie Halbert had a big mansion up on a hill, and he let us rehearse in his living room, which had a good piano. Robbie watched Fred work his Fender Telecaster. He had replaced the two bottom strings with steel banjo strings, a trick that gave his sound a real bluesy twang. Robbie picked up all this stuff and absorbed techniques from everyone, even transposing some of Ray Charles’s piano licks for electric guitar. One night we sat down and played Ronnie’s big ‘numbers—“Mary Lou,” “Hey! Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love”—and Robbie was pumping the bass lines. Hell, I wanted to get up and dance, it sounded so good.
When we finished rehearsing that first night, the Hawk looked at me and said, “This cat’s a genius.” He turned to Robbie. “Son, you got the job. Stick with us, and you’ll get more nookie than you can eat.”
In the winter and spring of 1959-60 Ronnie Hawkins reached a turning point. Morris Levy wanted him to stay in New York and take over rock and roll, maybe go to Hollywood. “You can’t go back to Canada!” Morris shouted at us in his office. “You’ve got it all to yourself. Elvis is in the fuckin’ army, and you’re better than him anyway now. Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran—dead. There’s a vacuum here, and you’re the only one around who can take advantage of it. You’re on the goddamn verge! You can’t just vanish on me.”
But the Hawk wasn’t as sure as Morris was. If you watched American Bandstand that year you saw who was taking over: Dick Clark’s new teen idols, like Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell. Italian kids from Philadelphia with big hair. When the big payola scandal hit the front pages a few months later, Alan Freed’s career was over, and with it the rock and roll business we’d come up in. Hell, the fifties were over. Meanwhile, the Hawk had been investing. He owned a couple of clubs in Fayetteville and had bought two farms in the area. These required cash flow. We’d worked for almost two years building a lucrative circuit in southern Ontario and Quebec. Hawk knew that in Canada he could work seven nights a week all year and be guaranteed a living that the changing American music business might no longer provide.
I felt the way the Hawk did. By then my dad had quit farming, and Momma was working in a department store. I’d been sending money home every week since I went with Ronnie, so my own family was dependent on the Hawk’s working steadily. There were so many bars between Windsor, Ontario, and Montreal that I knew we could work every night of the year. Unlike Luke, Lefty, or Willard, I didn’t have a girl back home. In fact, I was getting extremely infatuated with the Canadian girls. By all means, I agreed with the Hawk, let’s get back to Toronto and be the big fishes in the littler pond.
Morris Levy couldn’t believe it. “Hawkins moves better than Elvis,” he told me. “He looks better than Elvis and sings better than him too, if you ask me. Why don’t you talk to him?”
I had tried. So had Henry Glover. Even the Colonel. Morris was mystified. “He keeps saying how much he loves Canada,” he told me. “It’s breaking my heart.”
We went back to Canada with Robbie in the band, playing bass. He told me later his whole outlook had changed in Arkansas. “I’d hear something at night and not know whether it was an animal, a harmonica, or a train,” he remembered, “but it sounded like music to me. And every day the radios would go, ‘Pass the biscuits! It’s King Biscuit Time!’ and you’d hear this harmonica—‘waa, waaaah’—and it was Sonny Boy Williamson. The jukeboxes were like being in heaven, but what blew my mind was that in the places we played, the audiences weren’t just a bunch of kids, it was everybody. Old people too, from the richest to the poorest, checking it out and getting crazy. I’d never even seen a beer flow like this.”
Back at the Warwick Hotel in the hooker district, we were happy to be home. That’s when the great Stan Szelest from Buffalo came into the band. Ronnie thought we sounded thin when Luke left, so he hired seventeen-year-old Stan to play piano. (The Canadian bar owners didn’t like hiring Canadian musicians. Rock and roll came from the States, and that was all a tavern owner in Simcoe, Ontario, or Quebec City wanted to know.)
Stan was a Memphis-style musician with that full muscle in his playing. His group, Stan and the Ravens, were rock and roll in Buffalo, and Stan had made his bones on the road playing behind Lonnie Mack in Pennsylvania’s mining and steel towns. Stan was young, but he was already a star-quality musician. He was big and good-looking, and I was happy because Stan and Robbie were closer to my age than Luke and Lefty, who were closer to the Hawk’s advanced age of twenty-five. We took Robertson and Stan over to Lou Myles and bought ’em a couple of black mohair stage suits. Once Lou made your suit, you were officially a Hawk.
With rockabilly a dying form, Ronnie tried to stay even with the changing times, which led to some funny things happening. Rock and roll was still good business in Canada (we were making five hundred dollars a week, top money for a band in those days), but the younger kids were being converted to the folk-music revival sweeping North America in the wake of the Kingston Trio. Canadian folkies like Ian and Sylvia and Gordon Lightfoot were drawing to the coffeehouses in Toronto’s Yorkville district crowds as big as the ones we were bringing to Yonge Street.
So in March 1960 we were back in Manhattan recording folk songs for Morris Levy. Ronnie sang “John Henry,” “Motherless Child,” and “I Gave My Love a Cherry.” He even cut a protest song, “The Ballad of Caryl Chessman,” about the condemned killer whose rehabilitation in prison stirred up those against capital punishment. Henry Glover brought in jazz bassist George Duvivier to back Ronnie, and Roulette released Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins in May 1960.
Spring and fall were the times we went back to Arkansas. Working out of Fayetteville, we made our rounds. At the Club 70 near Little Rock they did a heavy trade in amphetamines in the parking lot. The place, torched and repeatedly rebuilt like so many Arkansas honkytonks, was between the city line and the Air Force base at Jacksonville. Inside you’d get a volatile mix of northern kids from the base and locals from Little Rock, and soon chairs would be flying over our heads. After the show we’d head into the Ozarks to play a college dance
in Fayetteville or a frat party in Norman, Oklahoma, where we’d have to wade through a knee-high river of beer cans to get to where we were set up.
We had a friend there named Dayton Stratton, who co-owned the Rockwood Club with the Hawk. Dayton was also a manager and a booking agent, and he helped us with security. If we were putting on a dance in Norman, he’d hire some wrestlers from the University of Oklahoma to keep things relatively peaceful.
Dayton was the ultimate southern gentleman—until you riled him. I’d see him beg people to stop fighting and just sit down and enjoy the music, but sometimes they wouldn’t listen. If they took a poke at Dayton, oh my God. He’d hit ’em with both fists and kick at a well-defined area between the head and the groin. I’ve seen people try to fall when Dayton was working on them, and they couldn’t because the rain of blows was that intense. They’d eventually go down, and Dayton would keep it up until they hit the floor. He would clean house! One night I had to stand between Dayton and a friend of mine. That was scary.
During this period we played a week at the Canadian Club in Tulsa, after which the owner gave us a check that bounced as soon as we tried to cash it. Well, that made us angry. We’d heard this guy had stiffed a lot of other musicians, including Ray Charles just a month earlier. I hated that particular place because it had a low, spackled plaster ceiling. Whenever I got up from the drums, I’d always hurt my head on the little “stalactites.” Jimmy “Pork Chop” Markham, who played drums with Conway Twitty, told me he had the same problem. All drummers hated the joint.
The Canadian Club’s owner had gotten away with ripping off musicians because he figured no one had enough money to hire a lawyer and go after him. So Ronnie, Dayton, Donny Stone, and I decided to take matters into our own hands. We went back to the club that night after closing. Leon Russell had the house band, and we tenderly moved his equipment out to the parking lot, because Leon’s gear wasn’t paid for yet. Then Hawk and Dayton went in, broke the beer machine, and generally wrecked the place. Then Ronnie poured fifteen gallons of gas on the floor, running a line of gas out the back door to the parking lot. That’s the way they did it in the movies.
Well, I lit the match, touched the line of gas, and it all blew at once! The force of the explosion knocked us all down. The Hawk was blown through the back door of the club, and his eyebrows got burned off. There was nothing left of the Canadian Club except smoking rubble. We were too dazed to leave the scene and were still there when the cops arrived.
They let us go! Told us the owner was a lowlife who was always causing trouble. “Hell, boys,” they told us, “you done us a favor. We’ll just say we couldn’t find the arsonists. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”
Later, Dayton and Donny returned, found out where the club owner lived, wrecked the Cadillac parked in front of his house, then went in and got the money he owed us. We heard this guy took out a contract on us, but we never heard from the hired killers and are still laughing about torching the Canadian Club to this day.
Instead of going straight back to Canada, we stopped in Nashville to record Ronnie’s next record, Ronnie Hawkins Sings the Songs of Hank Williams.
The two worst things a musician can say to his producer in Nashville are “I’ve been thinking” and “I’d like my band to play on the record.” Country records were all cut by a clique of studio musicians, and the artist’s wishes never entered into it. Well, we arrived at Bradley Studio, an old Quonset hut, ready to cut “Jambalaya,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and Hank’s other songs, and the Hawk floored ’em by demanding that we all play on the record. The producer said no, and Hawk read ’em the riot act. The Nashville session people were sitting around and didn’t like this. They looked at us, we looked at them, the Hawk was shouting, and it looked like our Nashville debut was going to end in a fistfight. Meanwhile, downstairs in studio B, Bobby “Blue” Bland and his orchestra were recording “Turn on Your Love Light.” I could hear the music leaking out of the studio; Blue Bland was a hero to me, and I was itching to go downstairs and listen.
The Hawk won eventually, and his Hank Williams LP was released in November 1960. I didn’t enjoy Nashville and got out as soon as I could, but Fred Carter, Jr., saw the light when he realized a studio guitarist could earn twenty times what a musician could earn on the road. Fred kept talking about it, and we could see his days in the band were numbered.
Sure enough, he soon carried out his plan to move to Nashville. There Fred quickly became one of the elite studio guitarists and then a record executive with his own studio.
There’s a period in here where the Hawks’ guitar players were all jumbled up. For a short time Fred was replaced by Roy Buchanan, a brilliant and moody player who definitely had his own mystique. He had a beatnik look, complete with goatee, which both Ronnie and I adopted for a while. Roy had strange eyes, didn’t talk to anyone, and looked real fierce. Ronnie always reminded us to smile, move, and dance when we played. We had to look like we were having a better time than anyone. It was show business, those little leg kicks that fellas in bands had to do back then.
Not Roy. He didn’t believe in putting on a show. He just stood there and played the shit out of that guitar. Roy played a Louisiana Hayride style like Fred and James Burton, who was playing with Ricky Nelson then. We loved how good Roy was, but he was too weird for the Hawk. One night Roy tried to convince us that he was a werewolf and destined to marry a nun. Not long after that, Robbie took over the lead guitar.
The Hawk was thinking about me playing second guitar. I wasn’t a lead guitarist, but I did play a decent rhythm guitar. “Do you know,” he asked, “how powerful two guitars could be?” I remembered Luke and Fred together just a couple of months earlier: It was a hell of a sound. Pork Chop Markham came up from Arkansas for a look but decided he was better off with Conway. We also thought about Sandy Konikoff, the drummer in Stan Szelest’s former band, but then the Hawk decided to stay with one guitar.
So we hired Rebel Paine from Buffalo to play bass. He must have come in with, or just after, Stan. Rebel was a Seminole, originally from the Florida Everglades, and a hellacious character and a great bass player. Willard was back in the group, and Stan was playing keyboards, with Robbie on guitar and me on drums.
To me, Stan was the demon in the Hawks. I was in awe of him, not only for his musical ability (which bordered on magic) but because he actually kicked the shit out of me a couple times when I got on his nerves. Stan was a big, strong rocker, and he didn’t take any shit from anyone—especially me, who liked to give it out. One time he said to me, “Levon [by then the boys had changed my name from Lavon because it was easier to say], for two cents I’d kick your ass.”
I said, “Hell, Stan, I’ll give you a goddamn dollar bill.”
The Hawk says, “OK, best man spits over my finger” (an old Arkansas way of starting a fight), and Stan and I started swinging at each other in the hotel room, knocking over lamps and breaking things. The Hawk made us finish it in the parking lot. I kneed Stan in the gut; then he punched me in the forehead. I felt stunned, like a hog staring at a wristwatch. Stan was throwing up. For the next month it was like sitting next to a rattlesnake in the Cadillac.
Robbie Robertson had a Steve Cropper rhythm-section style of playing. He was an ensemble player, like we all had to be. He had a serious side, but he was just a kid like the rest of us, so he was a good laugher and fit in pretty well. Eventually, after Stan and Rebel went back to Buffalo, Robbie and I got to be close friends.
“The one who really saved my ass was Levon,” he once recalled. “He was my best friend, my big brother. He taught me the tricks of the trade. Ronnie taught me the sexual tricks; with Levon it was the angle, the inside scoop on style and southern musical things.”
This is true, if you don’t mind my saying so. I took Robbie under my wing, and we roomed together on the road for some time afterward. It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history.
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Realigned, the Hawks took to the road.
The Hawk’s trailer was made to match his car. We had the Cadillac of trailers. It was like a little teardrop-shaped ice-cream wagon back there, but wasn’t a lot higher than the Cadillac itself, so you had to give it a little extra room, coming around people. The trailer was white, and had a hawk painted on the side. I mean, you couldn’t miss us. Years later Dr. John told me he’d seen us go by in Louisiana in the early sixties. He said we were going at a pretty good clip.
I was at the wheel. Always. The Hawk knew I’d push it up and we’d get there faster. My tractor-driving experience came in handy one night when we lost the trailer on the northeast side of Mount Gaylor, where the Ozarks peak. Late at night, I’m doing maybe eighty, eighty-five, and that damn thing hits a rock and comes loose. The safety chains had enough slack in ’em to hold the turn, about three inches off the road. “Son,” the Hawk says, while the boys are hollering in the back, “if that son of a bitch is goin’ off the cliff, we’re goin’ with it.”
To stop the thing I had to pop the brake and stab maybe twelve inches of ’59 Cadillac tail fin through the window of the trailer. It looked awful. I lived through that twice, and it scared the hell out of us.
Our first roadie was a skinny, very funny guy from Scotland who managed one of the all-day movie theaters on Yonge Street. He let us in anytime in the afternoon. His name was Colin McQueen, but the Hawk called him Bony.
He unloaded the trailer and set up our gear until he ran afoul of the Cadillac. The Hawk was strict about that car and could spot a dent from a hundred yards. One day he saw a little nick about the size of a quarter in the bumper, inches from the steel post the car was parked against. Bony had the keys because the Hawk had told him to get the car washed. So Bony had a short career with the Hawk, who was always a stern taskmaster.
For a while we had to cart our own stuff, set it up, try to clean up a little bit. Then we met Bill Avis, from Lake Simcoe, Ontario, and the Hawk hired him to be our road manager.
