by Levon Helm
So if Ronnie wasn’t coming that night, it was up to the three of us to sing and pass it around. Richard carried the main load, so we were home free. (A lot of people who saw us in those days thought it was Richard’s band.) Then Rick and I would throw in the extra tunes of the set. I’d sing a Little Richard tune, and I loved doing those Larry Williams numbers: “Boney Moronie,” “Short Fat Fannie.” So we were all singing and playing instruments, and to our minds that was the basis for a new kind of band—one without a front man.
Around this time Ronnie hired a young singer we’d met in New York to front the band until the Hawk showed up for the last set of the night. Bruce Bruno, from New Rochelle, New York, was a very talented triple threat, because he was a good singer, a good dancer, and a funny comedian who’d do comic bits with the band and keep everyone laughing until the Hawk arrived.
“I met the guys through Morris Levy,” Bruce recalls, “because my brother, Buddy Bruno, and I had both cut records for Roulette while we were still in high school. One night I was at Morris’s restaurant, the Round Table, working with a nine-piece band called the Orchids. We were all blown away by the Hawks, even though they were only a five-piece group. Morris Levy leans over and growls to me, ‘That’s the best fuckin’ band in America.’
“I stayed with the Hawks for maybe two years, from the end of ’63 to early ’65, and it was a wild time. I was drunk or stoned every day, trying to keep up with how they lived. We’d smoke a bone like we’d have a cup of coffee. I got to be good friends with Richard, who was gentle and intelligent, always fun to be around. A couple of times he got so drunk he barfed on the piano, but that was all part of this life they were living. They were already legends among musicians when I met them. The only problem I had was that the Hawks were so good, you couldn’t sing with anyone else! They were that good. When my time with them was over, I decided I had to get out of that side of the business.”
All this time we were leaning ever further away from rockabilly. Richard liked to sing that Bobby “Blue” Bland material and those Ray Charles songs, and we all liked Sonny Boy Williamson’s songs and anything by Jimmy Reed or Willie Dixon. This was what we wanted to play, but the Hawk continued to be adamant. “Boys, I know what the customers want,” he’d say. “We just can’t play that blues stuff all the time. We got to wake that crowd up!”
Another thing that came between us was that the Hawk didn’t like to smoke pot. He wasn’t a prude, because he liked to drink. But Ronnie was foremost an entertainer, a diplomat, a defender of his rights. He didn’t drink onstage and didn’t want anyone else to, either. He wanted a good, solid, sober show.
When we first discovered the weed, it was a new world. Chicago Green. You’d run into someone just come from a good day at the track, or maybe they’d just gotten out of jail and had a little money. They might have a little extra to share. Chicago Green was the best pot you could get. Or there was Mexican Brown. Wherever it came from, the band loved it. You could find a whole world in a bowl of cornflakes. We laughed like fools and generally had a great time. It didn’t hurt us, we figured. In fact, it helped get us through our lives of constant work. But it was also another point of disagreement with the Hawk, who’d fine us twenty-five dollars if he caught us. It wasn’t too severe a lashing, and Ronnie was still our comrade in arms, but he thought it was his duty as bandleader. “I have a certain responsibility to your families,” he would say.
In the end it came down to Hawk’s feeling that more discipline was the best thing for the situation. He didn’t want anyone to smoke pot, drink, or smoke cigarettes in the car. How long could we live with that?
Rick wanted out first, because Ronnie had fined him for having a girlfriend at the show. “Levon,” Rick said, “maybe we’re reaching the breaking point here; the sheer ridiculousness of this shit. I mean, we oughta get out and see the world. Or at least go to New Jersey and play anyway.”
“So what do you wanna do?” I asked him.
“Let’s go see the Colonel about working on our own, man. I mean, what the hell, you’re our official leader anyway, if you think about the union.”
This was true. I had seniority in the band, and the Hawk had never joined the musicians union, so for all those years the contracts were always in my name. I was beginning to see it now. We divided up the band’s money, and it didn’t take a whole lot of bookeeping in those days. Maybe I could actually do it; run the band myself. Young Rick was insistent. “Why can’t we have a band,” he asked, “where everybody plays an instrument, everybody sings, everybody does it without some guy out in front of the thing running the show and deciding the way things are gonna go?” This was a radical notion, like communism. But maybe, I thought, for the first time in our or anyone’s imagination, the rhythm section could run the band! If we could run the actual show, why couldn’t we run the rest of the operation? If we could stack up those verses and choruses, we might also be able to stack up a tour and some records. That was our attitude.
So Rick and I drove over to Hamilton to see Colonel Harold Kudlets, who explained that Ronnie had just fired him, so why didn’t we continue playing the same rooms on the same circuit that we’d been playing successfully for years? The Colonel would book us, be our agent, and try to get us a record deal. We told him that sounded OK to us, and we’d talk to the other boys about it, and when it came time to draw up the contracts we never wanted to see the word “sideman” again. That attitude held for the rest of our career, and over the years we’ve had managers and lawyers tear up a whole lot of paperwork because it had that word in it.
Rick Danko remembers how it went down:
“Ronnie had let the Colonel go because he felt he’d reached his peak with the organization, and he was going down to New York to talk to Morris Levy to see what he could do next. We were playing in Toronto, it was after the weekend, and I had a girlfriend visiting from out of town. The Hawk had a rule that girlfriends were a distraction. We were expected to play for thirty minutes and then go out and mingle for thirty. He thought this was crucial to our success, and that it wouldn’t look right if we were romancing our sweethearts. Young guys attract young girls, who attract other young guys. That’s how Ronnie thought life was: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He told me, ‘Son, when your dick gets hard, your brain goes soft.’
“I thought this rule was valid, and so I didn’t bring the girl that night. But she knew Ronnie was going to New York and thought it was all right to show up. But Ronnie missed his plane. So he came into the club, and there was my girlfriend. He looked at me and said, ‘Aw, that’s gonna cost ya fifty dollars, son.’
“‘That’s bullshit,’ I told him. ‘You’re not fining me for this one.’ Because I was already paying off a fine for gambling on the job. I’d won twelve hundred dollars in a card game, and so I had to pay Ronnie fifty dollars a week. He was funny like that. Then a few nights later Conway Twitty came to town, and we were all socializing in Ronnie’s studio over the Le Coq D’Or. Ronnie was drunk and mentioned that I hadn’t paid my fine, but a little disrespectfully. ‘Fuck you,’ I said, drunk myself. ‘I’m not paying no fine. You missed your plane, it’s not my fault, I didn’t bring her, she showed up!’ Then he got really pissed off.
“I didn’t say anything else, but he was on my case now. Next night we were onstage, and the Hawk kept looking at me funny. Between sets he takes me into the stairwell. He was high on pills, and he says, ‘Rick, someday Levon’s gonna be governor of Arkansas. Robbie’s gonna be the fucking road commissioner, and Richard’s gonna be secretary of state. And you, son, are gonna be back in Simcoe cutting some goddamn meat because that’s all you’re good for.’ It looked like Ronnie was getting ready to fire me.
“Next break, I grabbed Levon and told him this story. I e said, ‘Let me handle it, Rick. We’ll have a meeting.’ He talked to everyone on the next break, and at the end of the night we all gathered downstairs. Ronnie had a smirk on his face, which faded when Levon said, ‘You know, Ronnie, no
body’s very happy, especially young Rick over there. He’s very unhappy. So we want to tell you, with all due respect, that we’re givin’ you two weeks’ notice.’
“The Hawk didn’t say much. He hadn’t planned on this, but we could tell he wasn’t that sorry it happened.
“So Ronnie didn’t show up the next night or the night after that. I said, ‘Levon, let’s call up Ronnie and see if he’ll give us an extra $100 a week each’—$1,200 as a unit for the two-week gig we were playing at $2,400 a week.
“So Levon went to the pay phone. Me and Richard are listening to him telling Ronnie that since he’s not showing up, we needed an extra $100 each. And Ronnie’s saying, ‘Shit, son, I got a payroll higher than General Motors. I can’t afford this. Maybe I oughta go to Arkansas and put another band together …’
“Well, Levon told Ronnie he was free to do whatever he thought best. We took hold of the $4,800 the club owed us for the booking and went home that night to the two-bedroom suite we were sharing at the Frontenac Arms. We sat down and did a little budgeting. We could get a couple of Pontiac station wagons, a couple of sets of electricblue suits each (plus an extra set that Levon insisted we buy for our devoted fan Freddie McNulty because he was one of us), and go out on our own. There might even have been enough left over for a few weeks’ worth of dry cleaning and barbers.”
We spent the early days of 1964 in Toronto going over our game plan.
First we got Bill Avis back. He’d stopped being our roadie a year or so earlier when he stayed behind to manage the Hawk’s Arkansas operation: the clubs and the farms. He’d met Richard when he came down to play with the Revols. Then he went to work for Don Tyson’s chicken operation for a while before coming back to Toronto, where he met five girls who called themselves the Female Beatles. He toured them across the country that year, from Vegas to New York, and was working at Tony Mart’s on the Jersey Shore when I finally reached him.
“Levon called me,” Bill recalls, “and he said, ‘We quit Ronnie. We had to part company. Come back and help us out.’ I said, ‘Levon, I’ll be there as soon as I can, because I’m with the Female Beatles, and I can’t leave ’em stranded.’
“A couple of weeks later I got back to Toronto. I had a white Pontiac station wagon I’d been using for the Female Beatles, and Levon had a black one, leased from the same company. Salt and pepper, OK? So we pooled our station wagons, and that’s when they first played the Friar’s Tavern as Levon and the Hawks.”
Actually, we started out as the Levon Helm Sextet. I had to endure some teasing over this, but my name went on the band as a seniority thing. The Colonel thought I knew as many people as Ronnie did, since I’d gotten there at the same time. We thought those people who liked Ronnie would come to see us too. It just made business better for everybody. The group was me, Robbie, Rick, Richard, Garth, and Ish—Jerry Penfound. If Jerry was away, Bruce Bruno would come play with us. Soon we turned into Levon and the Hawks, which sounded better to me. Sometimes it was the Hawks. We also got booked into places we’d recently played by calling ourselves the Canadian Squires.
We had a funny beginning because we gave Ish about a grand toward building a new PA system for us. Jerry could do or build anything, from blowing glass to flying an airplane. He had a fantastic imagination. “We were in London,” Rick remembers, “and we got to the club early. Me and Levon are sitting at the bar, and these two guys come in, and they’re laughing about a pool game they’d just had where they won $800 from Jerry Penfound. Levon looked at me and said, ‘Well, there goes the PA system!’ Ish Kabibble; he was funny.”
Bill Avis recalls: “We did good business from the minute we started playing, because there was no better band in the world; take my word for it. The money was my responsibility. I’d collect from the clubs on Friday and split the money into envelopes. I’d send $150 to Levon’s mom and dad, or whatever he could afford that week. I’d send the Colonel ten percent of whatever we earned. I got $100 a week, Ish got $150 (Ish’s paycheck was sometimes garnisheed by the family court in London because he had a child and got behind on his support payments); all the others but Robbie got $162.50, and Robbie got a little more because he was making half the payments on our company car, which gave him the right to ‘carry the keys,’ as Levon put it.”
It was a great time to launch a band in Toronto, because the place was jumping. On a weekend night on that Yonge Street strip you could catch Oscar Peterson, Carl Perkins, Ray Charles and his band, Cannonball Adderly, Charles Mingus. You could see a local band like us or one of our competitors, the Paupers. There was a folk-music scene with young singers like Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young in the Yorkville coffeehouses. And it wasn’t just music. Toronto was also the publishing, fashion, and style capital of Canada. The city was swinging at least a year before so-called Swinging London. (Ronnie swore it was like a replay of the Roaring Twenties.) Over at the University of Toronto, Professor Marshall McLuhan was formulating his theories on media that would change the way we received information, the way we lived. The medium became the message in Toronto, and out of that came CNN, MTV, and the whole Global Village in which we all live today.
We loved the city in part because we felt very protected. We had some pretty tough people looking out for us. There was one damn guy—he worked at the Pump Room in London—who bit the caps off beer bottles and then chewed them for us.
As Rick Danko remembers: “We were pretty young guys in a tough part of town, and we learned there was a pecking order in people’s lives, and if you respected that, you might earn a certain level of protection. If somebody got in trouble, especially over seeing someone’s girlfriend (this happened a lot), you took your problem to someone a little older, a little wiser, with a little more clout, whether it be fists, guns, or political—depending on the situation.
“We were lucky because the rounders liked us. They’d want to come to our parties on the weekend because we attracted unattached young women who were appealing to the eye. The rounders didn’t have dates; they’d sit in the corner near the ladies’ room at the Concord Tavern out on Bloor Street West. Each chick would use the bathroom once or twice a night and have to pass through the gauntlet of rounders checking them out. Some of the ladies really liked this attention, and that’s how a good party would start. We’d have a bar full of tough guys—a guy selling nickel bags of pot would be rubbing elbows with an off-duty narcotics officer—and they’d be sending up notes requesting songs. Or, ‘Can we come to the party afterward?’ They loved music, loved us, so it was like a Spy vs. Spy kind of logic.
“We had people like ‘Teddy the Hungarian.’ He’d run from the Russians in ‘56 and was so immensely strong he liked to tear phone books in quarters when he was happy. Levon would have to clear a place for him in a restaurant, Teddy was so big. If someone was giving, say, Richard a big problem over a young woman he was dating, Teddy the Hungarian would be called in to settle out of court. Or ‘Tony From Toronto,’ who had a bigger gun than anyone.
“I had a situation where I was seeing an eighteen-year-old girl who was making me very hard. Her old boyfriend was just out of jail, got a machine gun, and shot out another guy’s truck windows for fucking his girlfriend. I thought, Aw, man! What’s he gonna do to me? So I called Tony from Toronto, and logic eventually prevailed. Nothing criminal happened, but we never wanted to leave anyone with the wrong impression. If someone around us had gotten a little too drunk the night before, he would be straightened out by our people the next day. It took us years to build this protection up; there was an unbelievably long list of people we could call.”
The Cannonball Adderly Sextet came through town in early 1964. They had a hit record, “This Here,” and a profound influence on the Hawks. We all went to see them and were impressed by how cool and collected they were, with expensively tailored clothes and a mellow outlook on life. The band was Cannonball, his brother Nat on trumpet, Joe Zawinul on keys, Sam Jones on bass, and flutist Charles Lloyd from West
Memphis, with whom we became good friends. The drummer, Louis Hayes, was a great musician. I watched him float those rhythms and realized the idea was not to get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it. Don’t be frantic. Don’t be out of control. We loved Cannonball’s band for its restraint; soon after we saw them we changed to what we called the “jazzster” style. Matching shiny suits became a thing of the past as we began to dress with a little more flair. Rick Danko still refers to 1964 as our Cannonball period.
All the Toronto clubs had Saturday matinees for the kids, who could buy chips and gravy, Cokes and lemonade. Since we worked on Saturday nights, we’d go to these afternoon shows if there was someone we’d heard good things about and whose act we wanted to catch.
That’s where we met John Hammond, Jr. He was the son of the legendary Columbia Records producer who had discovered Bessie Smith, Count Basie, and a young folksinger named Bob Dylan. John, Jr., was a solid blues singer and player on the college and coffeehouse circuit, keeping the country blues of Robert Johnson and Son House alive, and we really liked what he was doing. Through him we met Mike Bloomfield when we were living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York (R&B singer Jackie Wilson was also in residence at the time). Mike was playing guitar in a young Chicago blues band, and they were said to be very hot. Mike told us to come visit the next time we were passing through.
A little later Robbie and I were driving from Toronto to Tulsa. The big hit song on the black Pontiac’s radio was Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It.” We were all huge Motown fans. I remember that ride because Robbie talked about his childhood. He’d worked at a carnival at one point, and he went on about the mystique of the carny life: the hustlers, the freaks, the ride boys. If we were riding along and he saw a ferris wheel and some colored lights, he’d want to stop and check it out. It was a fascination of his.
We detoured through Chicago, and Mike Bloomfield put us up at his place for a couple of days. He was a wonderful human being! We hung out and met Paul Butterfield, the harmonica virtuoso whose interracial Chicago blues band was on the cutting edge of contemporary music. It was Paul, Mike, Sam Lay on drums, and Jerome Arnold on bass. We loved what they were doing because we were leaning in the same direction: Muddy, Sonny Boy, Slim, “Blue” Bland. The idea became to take this music—electric R&B—and build something new with it.
