by Levon Helm
“I met Ronnie and the band in early 1961,” Bill remembers, “when they were playing at the Le Coq D’Or in Toronto. I’d quit school due to hard times and was hanging out, looking for work. I tried to see Ronnie when he was in town because it was simply the best band anyone had ever heard—country rock and roll. Hawk did that camel walk and people went nuts. And there’d be Levon, dead center, stage rear, twirling his drumsticks and singing ‘Slippin’ and Slidin” and ‘Short Fat Fannie.’ Robbie was already in the band, with Will Pop Jones, Rebel Paine on bass, and Stan Szelest on keyboards.
“The first thing you noticed was how good-lookin’ this band was. Clean-cut, tall young men immaculately dressed in hip suits, cuff links, good haircuts. They just looked sharp. Stan Szelest looked incredible. Ronnie called Stan ‘Lon Chaney on helium.’
“The next thing you noticed was that everyone looked up to the band. All the rounders—hoods, hookers, night people—would do anything for them. These people weren’t that nice to other musicians, who noticed this. So other bands—local guys like Larry Lee and the Leisures—copied our music, our clothes, our style. There was no question about who were the kings of the hill.
“When I got the nerve to ask Ronnie for a job, he said, ‘Son, I’ll give you fifty dollars a week and all the nookie you can eat.’ That was all I needed to hear. So I was the roadie: set up the mikes, mix the sound, do a little PR on the side. They took me to Lou Myles the tailor and got me a black mohair suit like theirs. They had a big Cadillac, and later two of ’em, and we drove those suckers a million bloody miles over the next six years.
“Like most people, I got to be friends with Levon, and we roomed together quite a bit on the road. In Toronto we lived with Mama Kosh—that’s what the band called Robbie Robertson’s mom—in her house at 193 First Avenue. We rented rooms from her when we were in town playing the Le Coq D’Or, Concord Tavern, or Friar’s Tavern. She’s a lovely lady, and she genuinely loved the band.
“Her son, meanwhile, was just coming into his own as a guitar player. Robbie was too young to legally get into most of the places we played, but he could stretch those goddamn strings, man, until you’d think they’d pop. He was a player, a showman. He’d raise that right arm over a sustained note, and the place would go ape! He’d make those strings hum.
“I was so happy to be part of this gang. The Hawks were like a permanent stag party with an entourage of the most beautiful girls in Canada. We were a hot band, and we knew we were going places, even if we weren’t quite sure where we were going or even how to get there. To us back then, the sky was the damn limit!”
Nineteen sixty one was a big transitional year for us. We started it out playing a dance Dayton Stratton was putting on in Dallas the night of the Cotton Bowl. The University of Arkansas was playing Duke University, and unfortunately the Blue Devils beat us 7-6, and the Razorbacks in town for the game felt more like getting drunk than dancing. We were playing the show with Conway’s band, which had a real good drummer, Jack Nance, who I’d looked up to ever since he’d taught me how to twirl the sticks. Nobody was in a good mood that night, least of all the Hawk, who pointed to Jack and whispered to me, “You’re gonna cut Jack’s ass tonight, cut him so damn bad he’s gonna bleed. He’s gonna want to quit when you get through with him, OK?” Because it was war with the Hawk. That’s how it was. He was known for taking no prisoners.
Ronnie’s band was pretty much in flux. Willard had been going like fire for three years and wanted a change. Rebel’s wife wanted him home after a year on the road with us. One Sunday afternoon that spring we were in the Cadillac heading toward our weekly job at Pop Ivy’s in Port Dover. “If we don’t get some new blood in the group this year,” the Hawk said, “it’s gonna be all over. But it ain’t a big problem because there’s so much goddamn talent here in Ontario, I can’t even stand it.”
I was a little more skeptical.
“What about that big kid over in Simcoe?” Ronnie suggested. “What’s his name—Danko? Nice-looking boy. He’d bring in the girls, and he plays guitar in that little group of his.”
“Yeah,” piped up Robertson from the backseat, “but he only knows four chords.”
“That’s all right son,” the Hawk joked. “You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you.”
“My family lived in rural Ontario,” Rick recalls. “I’m from Greens Corner, near Simcoe, in the southern Ontario tobacco belt. My grandfather, Joseph Danko, came from the Ukraine and bought a huge farm in Manitoba to grow wheat, long before they had tractors. My dad, Maurice Danko, was born on the farm but came to Ontario when he married my mom, whose family was there. I was born at home in 1943, the third of four brothers.
“We were a musical family, all of us. My dad played mandolin and banjo. So did Uncle Spence, who married my mom’s sister. My earliest memory is pretending to play music so I could stay up to watch those people party. Dad played country music with some older people at barn dances. Those were the first times I saw people play music, people dancing—a hundred fifty dancing in a big old barn. To this day, it’s weird for me to look at people at a concert, and they’re not dancing.
“I’m like Levon. We didn’t have electricity till I was ten years old. We listened to the Grand Ole Opry on a windup Victrola and battery radios. I had a crystal set that brought in WSM and WLAC in Nashville. I could even get Wolfman Jack coming out of Nuevo Laredo. I was a bit of a showman as a kid because I was allergic to dust. I’d get these red blotches if I worked in the garden. I’d be gasping for air! So my mother got these songbooks that came out every couple of weeks, and I learned songs on the guitar. I’d get ’em from the radio too, country songs from Nashville: Kitty Wells, Red Foley, Ernest Tubb. Uncle Spence had been in Nashville and said he knew ’em all, and that really impressed me. He took me to Toronto one summer, and we got to meet [singer-banjoist] Grandpa Jones, then in his thirties!
“I was one of those kids who was basically out of the house by the time he was ten. I was playing publicly from age twelve on. The drummer was my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Titmouse. He had a set of drums, but no cymbals. I fired him the moment I got out of public school—the only person I ever fired in my life!”
“At fourteen I realized I could rent a hall in January, Uncle Rollie would put up posters, and two hundred people would show up because there was nothing else to do. We’d be Rick Danko and the Starliners on Friday night in St. Williams, and Rick and the Roxatones on Saturday in Walsh. In Delhi we had seventeen different ethnic clubs. This was where the tobacco farmers moved after they’d turned the farms over to their kids. We’d play the Slavic club, the Belgian club. At the fairgrounds in Delhi they had a famous guy who weighed six hundred pounds. He had a hot-dog stand. To this day Levon remembers him: Alfonso Cook. The Hawks used to stop in Delhi on the way to Port Dover. Levon’d buy a few dogs and stare at Alfonso for hours.
“I quit school at fifteen. I knew I’d be playing music, but I was a serious kid and didn’t want to be dependent if I could help it, so I apprenticed myself to a meat cutter and learned how to cut meat. Not butchering, where you go for the throat a thousand times a day, but dividing it into quarters, cuts, and so on. There was an art to it, like any craft.
“I was seventeen the first time I saw the Hawk. This was at Simcoe Arena in late 1960. Conway Twitty was headlining, with Fred Carter, Jr., on guitar, after Fred had left the Hawk. The Hawks were Levon, Rebel, Stan, and Willard. Robbie was just learning guitar. The Hawks were wearing these tight black suits, and the music was more than powerful. It was unbelievable. Ronnie was doing backflips. Will Pop was playing so hard when the Hawk danced over to the piano the buttons of his clothes were ripping open. Everyone was covered in sweat. They were irresistible. Levon would just laugh into the microphone and make the whole audience laugh. They had routines, comedic timing. Mostly, Ronnie tore the place up. I never saw anything like it. He was doing James Brown steps, only faster!
“Next spring, when the Hawk came back
to Simcoe, I arranged to have my band—maybe it was Ricky and the Rhythm Notes that night—open for him. That happened maybe five times. On a rainy Sunday night in May 1961, Ronnie comes up to me after the show at Pop Ivy’s in Port Dover—I couldn’t believe this—and he rasps, ‘Son, what do we have to do for you to get in that Cadillac over there and come with us tonight?’
“They had two Cadillacs. I got in with the Hawk. Bill Avis was driving. We made two stops. At the meat cutter’s I said good-bye to my boss. ‘Don’t make any rash decisions,’ he advised. When I told him I was going to Toronto with a famous rock and roll band, he shook his head and said, ‘You’ll be back.’ Then we went home to get some clothes. I told my mom I was leaving town for a couple of weeks and parked my ’49 MG convertible in the garage because it had a few holes in it. I kissed ’em good-bye and that was it. I was on the road. Hawk was telling me that I was gonna play a little rhythm guitar, but that Rebel was coming out of the band later that summer, and I’d be playing bass after that. I’d never played either in my life! Meanwhile I noticed that Bill Avis has us cruising down Highway 3 at maybe seventy-five, and all of a sudden I saw car lights coming on fast behind us. I thought it was the Mounties. But no.
“‘Pull over, son,’ Hawk said to Bill. ‘That’s Levon—give him plenty room!’ Sure enough, in ten seconds Levon blows by us at one hundred ten, windows rolled down with bare legs sticking out. Young girls’ legs. He had a beautiful ’54 two-door: dark green on top, light green on the bottom, first year of the rock-ground windshield. Filled with young women! This was Levon on his way to Grand Bend, where the Hawks were playing next. Yaa-hooooo!!!! Away we went!
“We got to Grand Bend, where the Hawk was playing a hotel on Lake Huron. They put us up in a loft over the beer storeroom, a place where they’d put in a hallway with Sheetrock, with three bedrooms on each side. I didn’t know what to expect because these guys had terrible reputations as sex perverts—orgies, gang bangs, everything. I was just a kid from Simcoe and didn’t know anything about this life they were living, this existence.”
We put young Rick Danko in one of these rooms. The Hawk gave him a couple of greenies and told him to practice while we were playing. Between sets we sent Bill Avis to peek at him through a hole in the wall.
“How’s he doing?” Hawk asked.
“Practicing like hell and chewing his teeth,” Bill replied.
“He’s too green,” Robbie said.
Hawk looked at me. I had to be honest. “I don’t think he can cut it,” I observed wisely.
“That boy’s a hell of a musician,” the Hawk said. “Take my word for it. He’s gonna play bass when Rebel goes home.”
Eventually we let Rick out of his room, and the Hawk told him to watch the band and learn that way.
“They were basically playing Ronnie’s records,” Rick says. “‘Mary Lou,’ ‘Odessa.’ Levon would get a big slot, and he’d yell out ‘Lucille’ or ‘Short Fat Fannie.’ It wasn’t hard, but I had a lot to learn. Levon and Robbie started to work with me, teaching me about the bass and the bass feeling. I rehearsed for maybe two months off the stage before they’d let me on. Rebel stayed around, but he was taking a lot of speed, and I couldn’t pick up much from him. So I used to copy Stan Szelest’s left hand.
“Every piano player who ever worked with Ronnie asked for as many tapes from Stan as they could, to study him. He was a living fountain of rock and roll piano, a one-of-a-kind player. His presence, the way he could pound a piano, was overwhelming.
“So I tried to play what Stan was doing with his left hand. I wasn’t stealing, I was learning. One night Stan gave me a look while I was copying him. He stared at me with a super-conscious look in his eye, and—magic!—all of a sudden I got better at doubling his left hand. He had transmitted some powerful force to me. Stan could just give it to you, if he wanted to.
“By midsummer 1961, Rebel was out, and I was in. Stan and I became roommates on the road, and he let me drive his ’59 Buick convertible, the ‘Ragtop.’ He wrote his rockabilly classic ‘Ragtop’ about that car, so I was honored.
“The other thing that I both recognized and respected was the bond of friendship between Levon and Robbie. It was very strong, a brotherhood, almost a family thing. It was one of the strongest relationships that I ever felt, and the energy was so good that it was fun to be around it.”
There were a couple of other developments while we were at Grand Bend. Ronnie liked to keep the pot boiling, and still hadn’t given up on the two-guitar idea. So Roy Buchanan came back for a few days, and he and Robbie had a kind of duel. Call it a showdown.
Robbie had been playing for eighteen months and was acquiring a hell of a reputation. There just weren’t many guitar players in Ontario who worked as hard as Robbie, bending strings, screaming like Jimi Hendrix would years later. The whole band was incredibly tight because Ronnie literally worked us all the time. If we played until midnight, the Hawk would let us break for “lunch” and then rehearse us till four in the morning. Whether we were in Canada or Arkansas, it didn’t matter.
Robbie had actually learned a lot from Roy, whose technical accomplishments as a blues guitarist were without peer back then. (Once I asked him where he learned to play so good and he explained in all seriousness that he was half wolf.) But Robbie was playing with total excitement and raw teenage disturbance. That’s what it boiled down to: Roy Buchanan’s tricks and technical skills versus Robbie’s ability to really rock a good dance party. I’m told there are a lot of people in that part of Ontario who remember those nights when Robbie and Roy went at it. When it was over, Robbie still held the guitar chair in the Hawks. Roy Buchanan, a true master of the electric guitar, went his own way.
Instead of a second guitar, Ronnie hired Jerry Penfound to play horns. Jerry was from London, Ontario, and played a mean baritone saxophone. It sounded low, powerful; really what you wanted to hear under what we were playing. That horn added another dimension; now we could play “Turn on Your Love Light” and soul-type songs, a direction that the band, if not the Hawk, wanted to pursue.
We called Jerry “Ish,” short for Ish Kabibble, an old radio character. He was a funny cat who was a really good cook. He’d inherited some money, could fly a plane, wore a big blue diamond ring he liked to flash at the girls. He fit in right away, and when Willard left the band at the end of the summer, Ish stayed in. People were always coming and going.
The Hawk called Will Pop Jones “Caveman.” Sometimes he called him “Bungawa.” It meant the same thing. He was a hellacious character, the living embodiment of rockabilly. He was a big, raw-boned Arkansan; maybe 185 pounds, with not an ounce of fat. His untutored country manners and habits were so crude they revolted even the Hawk, who was usually beyond embarrassment. Willard would pile white bread, mashed potatoes, and chicken gravy in ascending layers on a big plate until the food was nine inches high and dribbling over the side. He would then take this and a couple of Cokes up to his room to eat by himself, in exile. His table manners were so bad that Ronnie didn’t like to eat with him.
Willard would show up onstage very shiny, with everything in order, but he played with such ferocious energy that after one song he’d be rumpled, then totally disheveled: sweaty jacket, shirttail out, collar open, tie and hair askew, loafers half off, exposing one green sock and one purple sock. All this and hammers sailing out of the piano. Few who saw him perform ever witnessed anything like it.
Willard was unbelievably cheap. The Hawk used to say he could squeeze a nickel so hard the buffalo would shit. On the road he’d sleep in the Cadillac unless someone let him crash on the floor of his motel room. If we were all in the car, Ronnie would say, “Willard, please don’t go to sleep; you know how awful you look when you wake up.” This was because Willard had a lazy eye; one eye looked one way, the other eye went the other way. No one back home in Marianna ever thought about getting Willard the simple operation to straighten this out, and for years the Hawk ragged on him about it until we
were finally able to get him to the doctor in Toronto. Willard had the operation, came out of the hospital, and was so strong he did four or five sets with us that night, wearing a patch.
After he had his eye fixed, Willard started getting dates. We all remember one famous one that didn’t work out, when Willard met a working girl during a booking at the Concord Tavern. She took him home, and it was going along pretty smooth until the subject of money came up. The lady wanted to be paid, and Willard didn’t want to hear about it. They got to shouting at each other, and Willard noticed she had a couple of hamsters in a cage. He grabbed one hamster and said, “I’ll pinch his goddamn head off! I ain’t bullshittin’ ya, girl! I’ll pinch him right now in front of you!” Willard was about to sacrifice the hamster, when the lady relented.
We were living at the Warwick Hotel at the time. A sign outside said ENTERTAINERS WELCOME, so the clientele consisted of musicians, strippers, and hookers. That address ended a lot of dates for us before they even started; killed a lot of parties. “The Warwick? Are you crazy? Forget it!”
The day after his date, Willard went downstairs to get some breakfast over at the Wilton Restaurant: two bacon cheeseburgers and a couple of cartons of milk, please. As he was walking back to the hotel, the girl’s pimp and a buddy stepped out of an alley. Willard quickly sized up the situation. These weren’t the friendly, familiar pimps that came to hear us play, like “Russian Wally” or “Ralph the Frenchman.” These guys were there either to collect or to slap Willard around a little.
“Wait just a minute,” he said, and gently laid the paper bag containing his meal against the wall. Then he whirled around, grabbed the pimp by the arm, and smashed him face-first against the side of the brick building. Willard let go of the arm, and the pimp just… faded. He fell down the brick wall like water and lay unconscious in the street.
