This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  Willard calmly picked up his sack and disappeared into the Warwick to eat by himself.

  So Willard was a terrific, funny character, and I was sad to see him leave the Hawk when we went back to Arkansas in the fall of 1961.

  The Hawk kept talking about getting Garth Hudson to replace Willard. Garth played the organ and some horns for a band in Detroit, and everyone kept saying he was the best musician on our circuit. Others said that Garth would rather play Bach than rock.

  Hawk had tried to hire him as early as 1959, but Garth Hudson wasn’t interested in joining us. He was a little older than us, a trained classical musician who was only playing rock and roll to make a little money in his spare time. His family was very conservative, and Garth didn’t think they would approve of him joining any rockabilly band on a permanent basis. Somehow Ronnie had talked him into coming to the Le Coq D’Or to see us. It must have been December 1960.

  “Aw, I finally told Ronnie I’d look at his band,” Garth remembers. “There was Willard with his pounding left-hand technique. I’d never heard anyone amplify a piano that loud before. He was a big guy with tremendous thrust, played those wild glissandos like Jerry Lee Lewis, with incredible stamina. Stan Szelest was a close second in terms of sheer power. I thought, I can’t play this music. I don’t have the left hand these guys do.”

  “Then I looked a little closer. Stan Szelest’s fingers were bleeding from pounding the keys. I looked at Willard and saw hammers actually flying out of the piano. The whole thing was too loud, too fast, too violent for me.” Six months later he came to see us a second time, and again left without joining.

  We all knew that if Garth Hudson joined the band, it would put us up a notch, and we’d be unstoppable. But he said no again. So Ronnie reached down into a little Stratford, Ontario, band that he was managing (he’d sent them down to Fayetteville to play the Rockwood Club) and pulled out Willard’s replacement.

  Richard Manuel was a whole show unto himself. He was hot. He was about the best singer I’d ever heard; most people said he reminded them of Ray Charles. He’d do those ballads, and the ladies would swoon. To me that became the highlight of our show.

  Richard already had a small following when we met him. He was born in Stratford, Ontario, in 1944. His father, Ed, was a Chrysler mechanic, and his mom taught school. Richard sang in his church choir with his three brothers and started piano lessons when he was about nine. They ended when Richard played a note that wasn’t on the sheet music. It wasn’t a wrong note, he insisted. (Later he realized it was a different voicing of the same chord.) The piano teacher slammed the lid on his fingers because she thought he wasn’t paying attention.

  But the Manuel family piano soon became a hangout where Richard and his friends would get together and rehearse. “The Beak,” as he was nicknamed because of his prominent nose, was into the blues real early—Ray Charles, Bobby Bland—which he’d pick up on WLAC’s The John R. Rhythm & Blues Show after midnight. He ordered records from Memphis and Nashville by mail, and friends remember him arriving at junior high school with fresh Jimmy Reed and Otis Rush albums under his arm.

  In 1960, when he was fifteen, Richard, John Till, and Jimmy Winkler started a band called the Rebels, which soon changed to the Revols in deference to Duane Eddy and the Rebels. Soon the Rockin’ Revols were the best teenage band in Stratford. Hell, even we heard about ’em. Richard, of course, was the singer. He did teen-idol songs like “Eternal Love” and “Promise Yourself” and played a mean rhythm piano on a boogie-woogie version of Franz Liszt’s “Liebestraum” that was broadcast over CKSL in London, Ontario.

  We first ran into the Revols when they were opening for the Hawks at Pop Ivy’s place in Port Dover. “See that kid playing piano?” Hawk said. “He’s got more talent than Van Cliburn.” After their show, Ronnie told the Revols they were so good they were making us nervous. Richard blushed. “Thanks, but you don’t have to worry. You guys are the kings,” he told us in reply.

  Next time we saw them was at a battle of the bands in the Stratford Coliseum in 1961. The Stratatones opened, we were next as headliners, followed by the Rockin’ Revols. I remember them watching us from the wings as the Hawk went wild at the edge of the stage, working the crowd. Robbie was rumbling on guitar. Nobody else was playing that good that I knew of. The Hawk was a hell of an act to have to follow; he didn’t leave you much to work with after he had exhausted an audience.

  But when the Revols came on, Richard sang Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind” and brought down the house. That did it, as far as the Hawk was concerned. Rather than compete with the Revols, he hired ’em. He sent them to Dayton Stratton, who booked them into the Rockwood Club and other stops on our southern circuit. The Revols lived in a house trailer in Fayetteville, which they nearly demolished, they were so wild. One time they took the Hawk’s Cadillac to Memphis to clear up an immigration problem—none of the band’s six members was much over sixteen—and got themselves arrested at three in the morning and spent the next day in the Memphis city jail until they could prove the Cadillac wasn’t stolen.

  While we were in Arkansas, Stan Szelest left the band to marry his high school sweetheart, Caroline. Ronnie had a policy of discouraging us from having steady girls. Our life-style, he insisted, was not to fall in love. Ronnie only hired good-looking guys to draw girls to the places we worked. The boys were sure to follow the girls, and we’d all have a party. But if you had a girlfriend, you’d sit with her between sets instead of mingling at the bar. Ronnie figured that if you weren’t prowling around, you weren’t doing your job.

  When Stan went back to Buffalo, the Hawk called Richard and told him to come on down to Arkansas. Richard turned him down because he had a pact with Jimmy Winkler: One couldn’t leave the Revols without the other. At a band meeting, Jimmy told him, “Beak, this is your chance. You better take it.”

  So Richard called back, and he was in the band. His younger brother took his place in the Revols, who drove Richard to the airport for the flight to Tulsa, where we would pick him up. They bade the Beak farewell, but not before taking out a flight-insurance policy on him—just in case.

  Rick Danko remembers: “Richard’s first night was a baptism because Ronnie was real drunk, and he just pulled the curtain back, showed Richard the crowd, and told him, ‘Let it ride, son!’ Richard had never played lead piano, only rhythm piano, but he could really sing. He reminded me of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Lee Marvin! That’s what he sounded like. I knew at once that Richard and I sounded great singing together. He brought a lot of powers and strengths to the group. He brought in gospel music from his church upbringing. Plus, he loved to play and just come up with new things. It was like having a force of nature in the band.”

  The piano was a rhythm instrument in the Hawks, like the drums and the bass. Solos, when they happened, were played by the guitar and the horns, and later the organ. The piano was there so the rhythm didn’t drop out. Richard fit into that slot right away. Energy piano, we call it. At the same time, he gave the Hawk a rest when it came to singing, because Richard could scream a rocker or croon a ballad and make you believe it. I’d been singing only because someone had to sing when Ronnie didn’t. Having Richard’s voice put us on a higher level musically.

  Richard settled in quick. He was instantly likable and extremely funny. He liked to drink a little with the rest of us; he was seventeen when we met him, and he told us with a sheepish grin that he’d been drinking for ten years. He really missed his parents when we went out on the road. In fact, we all missed our folks. We were young and away from home, and we would spend hours sitting around hotels talking about our parents, and families, and the funny things they said and did. That loneliness was a fact of our lives, and in retrospect we know it took a toll on Richard.

  We spent a good part of that fall of 1961 working in the South, breaking in Rick and Richard, who’d been hired within just a few months of each other.

  Usually that time of year we’d live
at the Iris Motel in Fayetteville and do the frat parties, college dances, and roadhouses in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It was a helluva circuit back then. We played places on Oklahoma Indian reservations where we felt we wouldn’t get out alive if they didn’t like us. Other places people didn’t come to hear the band; they came to steal our gear, throw coins and lit cigarettes at us, test us a little. If we got past that, then they’d listen to us. (There was a little Indian boy who used to come see us in Tulsa back then. He’d watch Robbie very carefully from down in front of the stage. You couldn’t miss him. This was Jesse Ed Davis.)

  One week we played a gangster club in Fort Worth that had been robbed and firebombed so often they didn’t bother locking it at night. We had to take turns strapping on guns and guarding our equipment when the joint closed. One morning at dawn the cops burst in with dogs, and there was almost a showdown before we got it sorted out. The next night the club was teargassed by a bounced customer. These kinds of places often didn’t pay us at the end of the week, and we’d find ourselves stealing steaks from supermarkets to survive.

  Just being a professional musician in that part of the country was like being a gunfighter. The younger ones wanted your reputation, and if we were a new band in town we made our last set an open session, or else. People down there all knew music, and the local guitars would come up with a smile, plug into your amp, and try to run you off the stage. They’d happily make you look like a chump, if they could.

  But eventually we got that respect we were after. Despite our unsavory rep throughout the Midwest and Canada as pill-poppin’, whorevisitin’, gas-siphonin’, girlfriend-stealin’ reprobate musicians, we’d hear our competition—good bands, too—and they’d be playing our arrangements, our turnarounds, stuff we invented. That’s how we knew we were so good.

  I had been bothering Ronnie for months about trying to hire Garth Hudson again. We’d seen him play with his band and in little jazz clubs, and he was a phenomenon to us because of the scope of his musical knowledge. He was as interested in good polka music as he was in J. S. Bach. He could play with Miles Davis or the Chicago Symphony or the Grand Ole Opry. We felt we had to have Garth.

  When we got back to Canada the Hawk agreed we needed Garth in the band at any cost. “This guy’s a damn genius or I’m Jack Kennedy,” Hawk fumed. “I don’t even understand what he’s doing musically, but I know it works. You don’t have a great band unless you have him or someone like him, someone who’s been to school, knows how to arrange. You need him to teach the other guys.”

  “Why don’t you just pay him what he’s asking,” I suggested. “How much could it be?”

  “Son, Garth doesn’t just wanna get paid to play. He wants me to buy his time when he ain’t playing,” Ronnie explained. “I told him he could have anything he wanted. I told him he could give you guys music lessons when we ain’t onstage.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He thought it was funny. He said he would think about it if we’d throw in a new Lowrey organ as part of the bargain.”

  Garth grew up in London, Ontario. “My dad, Fred James Hudson, and my two uncles were farm people from around London,” he recalls. “Not tobacco farmers. They told jokes about tobacco farmers and complained about their methods—no crop rotation, and they bleached their soil with chemical fertilizers. But Dad left the farm and went to work for the Canadian Department of Agriculture as an inspector. My mother, Olive Louella Pentland Hudson, had me in 1937, and I was her only child. I was raised in the Anglican Church, Diocese of Huron. There was a strong English tradition in the farming community, and London had some magnificent stone mansions, built with English money. I dated a girl who lived in the gardener’s house attached to one of these estates. I took her to a dance and hit a stop sign at a T intersection with a ’49 Pontiac Tierback Straight Eight. That was a dark day. I couldn’t sleep that night. In the morning I heard my folks in the kitchen. My father hadn’t seen the bumper yet. That’s when my heart problems started. I was probably sixteen.

  “My mother played the accordion. She had a good ear and played the piano too. We had a player piano in the house when I was little. I guess I learned something from watching it, because I could play ‘Yankee Doodle’ by ear before taking lessons from Miss Milligan on Richmond Street. I think I was five years old. Her brother played first violin with the Hart House Symphony, an old Toronto institution. My first record—I still have it—was a 78 with a chip in it: ‘Wild Old Horsey’ with ‘Gee It’s Great to Be Living Again’ on the other side. It was kind of country swing put out by a political-religious movement of the late 1940s called MRA: Moral Rearmament of America.

  “My dad played flute, drums, cornet, saxophone, and triangle. Dad had a C-melody silver saxophone. He’d get it out every year or so, put a handkerchief in it, and play sweet band music like the Lombardos, Guy and Carmen, who were from nearby London. They had the Royal Canadians. All my uncles played too, and they were good musicians. My uncle Austin played trombone. He had great tone and worked at the London Arena four or five nights a week with various bands. Sometimes they played the Stork Club in Port Stanley, thirty miles south of London on the shore of Lake Erie. It had the largest ballroom floor in Canada. Later I played there myself with dance bands.

  “I sort of grew up with country music because my father would find all the hoedown stations on the radio, and then I played accordion with a little country group when I was twelve. My parents sent me to study piano at the Toronto Conservatory. I had a good teacher who used older methods and older pieces. That’s how I learned to play the Bach preludes and fugues, material like that. I loved Chopin, and Mozart amazed me. But I found I had problems memorizing classical annotated music. I could do it, but not to the extent that is necessary. So I developed my own method of ear training and realized I could improvise.

  “Another uncle of mine owned a funeral home. That was where I started playing in public. They had a good organ, and I played hymns from the Anglican Church, but usually it was Baptist hymns: ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross.’ When we played ‘Abide With Me,’ that was the signal for the minister to come in.

  “I had a high-school guidance counselor who laughed when I told him I might like to be a professional musician. He told me music was a hobby, and I ought to think about going into agricultural research, which is what I thought I was going to do. But I also had a teacher who played in a big band, who saw I was interested in transcribing music. He asked me to do something for him, and I used a record player and wrote down what I heard. Then he played the transcriptions with his band.

  “My first group was the Three Blisters, and we backed up the highschool variety shows and the choirs. Then we had the Four Quarters. I played the accordion, still one of my favorite instruments. Then—either 1952 or 1953—I started to tune into Alan Freed’s Moondog Matinee from Cleveland, from 5:05 to 5:55 every day. He played great rhythm and blues, and I remember him talking about the first Moondog Coronation Ball, where they had thousands of people who couldn’t get in. It was almost a riot. That’s when I realized there were people over there having more fun than I was.

  “There was a little rockabilly band in London called the Melodines. They did Bill Haley stuff, pretty well too. So some friends and I formed a group called the Silhouettes. We played around town and then went to the Windsor-Detroit area, where there was more opportunity to work. We hooked up with a young singer and called ourselves Paul London and the Kapers. I guess my professional career began at Aybar’s Island View Tavern in Windsor, Ontario, with Paul London.

  “We played teen hops and similar things. I originally wanted to play piano in the band, but it turned out to be more fun to play the saxophone. Our repertoire was Little Richard and Larry Williams. We did ‘Long Tall Sally,’ ‘Hoochie Koo,’ and ‘Ready Teddy.’ I think I moved to piano when we played an afternoon dance party on CFPL-TV. To learn what to play, I listened real close to Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry’s
piano player. I wanted to play organ, but I couldn’t afford the one I wanted. Other bands in Detroit used organ, but one group had a Lowrey, and it sounded great. I went to a music store and tried one out, and the Lowrey had certain things a Hammond couldn’t do.

  “One night we all went to the Brass Rail in London to see the Hawk at a dinner show. Everyone I knew thought that Ronnie was the best rockabilly performer with by far the best band. Nobody could follow the Hawks, including Elvis, as far as being an organic unit that could get up there and shake it up! He was great and funny. To begin the set Ronnie’d yell, ‘It’s orgy time!’ and that would get everyone laughing and in the spirit of the thing. I remember we were nervous because we were mostly underage, but we got in. Boy, the Kapers were impressed by the power and speed of the thing. The Hawk was billed as ‘Mr. Dynamo’ and more than lived up to the label. They had Willard Pop Jones, with that left hand going all the time. He was breaking the keys! That’s where I met Levon and Robbie for the first time.

  “Then we saw the Hawks again, at the Legion Hall in Ingersoll, Ontario. They played ‘Mary Lou’ and Ronnie’s other hits, and I recall a Marty Robbins-style song called ‘Hayride’ that would rear its ugly head. I think that was when they invited me into the band, after Hawk sent Levon and Robbie over to check me out. I met with Robbie in Grand Bend, and we talked about it, but I told them no. I wasn’t interested in that kind of music at the time. I liked chord changes and music that was a little more ‘uptown.’ Our band was playing rockabilly, but I didn’t have the left hand for that pounding technique that Willard and Stan Szelest used. My family also thought ‘rock and roll musician’ was a déclassé occupation, especially after my conservatory background, and they were already upset with me for dropping out of college after only a year. So I decided to stay local with Paul London and the Kapers.

  “Later in 1961, Willard left the band because he couldn’t stand the pace. He went home and got married. Then Rebel Paine and Stan Szelest left, and Ronnie kept trying to get me into the band. The Kapers had made a couple of records in Detroit—‘Sugar Baby’ and ‘Big Bad Twist’—and we were promoting them (one went to No. 8 on the local chart), but we couldn’t get it on American Bandstand, we were told, because of two negative words. That was the way it worked.