This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  The best part of this trip was that Butter and Michael took us to these obscure blues clubs on the south side and introduced us to people like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy, who didn’t yet have a big audience beyond Chicago. We went to see Howlin’ Wolf with Butter’s band, a great experience. Wolf ignored the drunks who pestered him and gave his full attention to the young ladies who came up to him with song requests.

  April 1964. The Colonel booked us into the Grange Tavern in Hamilton for two weeks at thirteen hundred dollars a week. Bruce Bruno was with us, singing and telling jokes. Then we did three weeks at the Embassy Club on Bellair Street in Toronto, through early May. I think I was renting rooms from Robbie’s mom. She was like my own mother, and you could really nest in there. We called her Mama Kosh because we’d come out of Switzer’s Deli off Bathurst Street with those big sandwiches, and everything was kosher.

  We never rested. Three weeks at the Brass Rail in London, a couple of gigs at the Circle M Ranch in Dundas, and two weeks at the Concord Tavern in Toronto got us into June. Then we worked two weeks at Cafe De L’Est in Montreal. Our Ontario license plates occasionally turned us into closing-time targets when we played in Quebec. A couple of times we had to fight off the locals on our way out of the parking lot.

  On June 15 Levon and the Hawks began a two-week engagement at the famous Peppermint Lounge, 128 West Forty-fifth Street in New York. We worked from 9:00 P.M. to 3:00 A.M. for $1,250 a week. The Peppermint had spawned the Twist craze four years earlier and was still a big nightspot for international tourists. The waitresses were excited because the Beatles had been in a couple of weeks earlier, and their long-haired drummer, Ringo Starr, had danced with some of the regulars while the house band played “Money.”

  While in New York, we reconnected with our friend John Hammond, Jr., who was recording his third album for Vanguard. He asked if we wanted to help, and naturally we did because it was our first time in a recording studio without Ronnie. John, a scholar of the music we’d grown up on, realized the electric blues was the medium of the moment. When we showed up at the studio we found Charlie Musselwhite ready to play harmonica and Jimmy Lewis on bass. Michael Bloomfield was there with his guitar, but he was too intimidated to play in front of Robbie, who was considered the best in the land. So on John Hammond’s So Many Roads album the piano credit is listed as Michael Bloomfield. (Jaime R. Robertson is listed on guitar, Eric Hudson [Garth is his middle name] on Hammond organ, and Mark Levon Helm on drums.) We did a new version of “Who Do You Love” and songs by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Robert Johnson, and logged some needed studio time in the bargain.

  John was a good friend, and I think he was one of the first to see the possibilities of having an electric band. He helped us get kicked out early by the Peppermint Lounge when he sat in and played the blues with us on Friday night. Backstage the shady owner grabbed me and yelled, “Forget that blues shit. What are you, nuts? This is a twist joint!” We left that night, and lost our front man, Bruce Bruno, who wanted to stay in New Rochelle and marry his sweetheart, B.J. (They’re still together.) The day after the Peppermint Lounge gig ended, we headed back to Canada for two weeks at the Grange. On Sunday nights we played Pop Ivy’s ballroom in Port Dover for $250. Someone taped our show one night, and the tape still exists.

  We rev up to speed immediately with “Not Fade Away.” I’m calling the tunes, and announce that the next one’s for the dancers. This was Richard doing “A Sweeter Girl” with two honking tenor saxes: Jerry and Garth. Then “Lucille”; that’s me bawling out the vocal. Then an instrumental, “Peter Gunn,” with more horns and a Charles Lloyd-inspired flute solo by Ish.

  Next we take Barrett Strong’s “Money” at the speed of sound, and Richard does a slow, soulful “You Don’t Know Me” that gave customers a chance to rest and find the bar.

  Now it’s time for our Hawk section. We make a wild racket on “Bo Diddley,” with Robbie stretching that guitar five years ahead of its time, then blast off into “Forty Days,” an old war-horse that always got ’em on their feet. “This next one,” I announce, “is left over from our days with the hootchy-kootchy show. You’ve heard this kind of music down at the Lux Theater [a Toronto strip joint], and Rick is gonna do his female impersonator bit for you, ladies and gentlemen. And by the way, there’s lots of corn left, and it’s free. And Pop Ivy’s got a few free beers for you if you ask nice. Haw haw haw … We call it the ‘Hootchy John Blues,’ with Garth and Jerry on the tenor saxophones.”

  After that comes a blues section, “dedicated especially to Dave that we call ‘Robbie’s Blues.’” This showcased several different blues styles and let us show the direction we wanted to head in.

  After the break Richard tears up “Kansas City,” next I yell out “Memphis,” then Richard does his best James Brown imitation on “Please, Please, Please.” That’s me whistling the intro to “Short Fat Fannie” (still a favorite) and Garth playing the crazed sax solo. More Chuck Berry with “No Particular Place to Go” (Robbie is unbelievable) leads into “You Can’t Sit Down” (we all solo on the verses) and “Turn on Your Love Light”—classic, old-fashioned horn-band R&B.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I say, “we’d just like to take a short minute, and we’ll be right back … OK, we call this one ‘Put on Your Red Dress, Baby, Because You and Me Is Gonna Do It Up Tonight,’ heh heh heh heh heh.” This is followed by “Woman Love and a Man,” on which I basically shout my lungs out.

  Garth has the next spot, a little blues and Bach number that anticipated the intro to The Band’s “Chest Fever” by four years. The evening builds to its climax with “Honky Tonk” and finishes with an explosive “Twist and Shout.”

  Then the lights go low. Midnight was closing time on Sunday, and Richard ends the show with a beautiful version of “Georgia on My Mind” that defuses the night’s energy and the raw power of the sound we were putting out. Everybody loved Richard’s voice, especially on that song.

  We finished in Hamilton on July 11. The next day we drove to Quebec City for a week at La Baril D’Huitres (the Oyster Barrel) at fourteen hundred dollars a week. Then back to the Embassy Club for two weeks. The first week of August we played the Grand Hotel in Bridgeport, Ontario; the second week was at the Brass Rail in London; and then an eight-week residency at the Concord Tavern at thirteen hundred dollars a week for the band. We basically worked every night of the year after that, finishing at the Friar’s Tavern, 303 Yonge Street. Our contract specified that we played Monday through Friday from 8:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. There was a Saturday matinee from three to five, which usually sold out because all the young musicians in Ontario wanted to jam with us, and the evening show ran from eight to eleven-thirty.

  I write this to emphasize that our work was our whole life. We were playing music five hours a day and rehearsing new material as well. This made us sharp. I mean, we were honed! Also frustrated, because we knew that for all our talent and energy, we were still just one step ahead of “Land of 1000 Dances,” the most requested song of the day. (We refused to play it.) It was a scene we wanted out of. “I’m tired of being a rankster,” Richard would say. “I wanna move on up out of this rankdom we’re in.” We were all ready for something to happen by the end of 1964.

  Richard met a new girl around this time. Jane Kristianson was a young model, born in Denmark, educated in Toronto. When Playboy magazine did a spread called “The Girls of Toronto,” Jane was the only girl photographed with all her clothes on. Full page, too. We wondered who she was.

  “I was nineteen when I met the Hawks,” Jane says. “I’d already had the misfortune to encounter Ronnie Hawkins at parties. He was so gross you wanted to hand him a napkin whenever you saw him. He called me his ‘little hors d’oeuvre’ and once pinned me under him on a bed before someone else pulled him off.

  “Anyway, one night late in 1964 another model called me and said to meet her at Friar’s Tavern because a great group was playing and she was interested in one of the boys. We were un
derage, but we somehow got in. A group was playing, all of them tall and clean-cut. I was talking to my friend when the group stopped playing. All of a sudden I noticed they were sitting around us. Richard Manuel was saying funny things, trying to get our attention. He was always doing little routines, teasing people, and in fact had tried to pick me up the night before at another place.

  “Someone said that Muddy Waters was playing up the street, and we all left to see him during the band’s next break. But my picture had been in the papers as a teen model, and the doorman recognized me and said, ‘No way you’re twenty-one.’ So I couldn’t get in. Everyone else went into the club except Richard. ‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘let’s go get a cup of coffee.’

  “Well, I went with him, and he was very sweet and gentle. That’s what drew me to him. Plus his sense of humor. He told me about his family, about his mom, Gladys, and his father, Ed, who had been quite violent when he was young. Then I got to know the rest of the band. Robbie was aloof, quiet, ambitious. Levon was rambunctious and very country. Rick was very handsome, hyper, and funny. Garth spoke slowly and was more sensitive then the others.

  “When I was with Richard awhile, they took me down south to Arkansas and Oklahoma in two big station wagons. We’d go to these clubs late at night, and we’d be the only white people. Junior Parker would be up onstage, and everyone would be carrying on. It was wonderful, just being with them.”

  I remember another incident from this era: the night Robbie almost had his ass whipped at the Tastee-Freez in Fayetteville. I pulled up to the place one night, just in time to see Robbie being muscled in back of the building by a drunken paratrooper who’d learned that young Robertson had been dating his girl while this guy was away in jump school. Now, Robbie never fought, didn’t like to fight, so I jumped out of the Pontiac and grabbed Mr. Airborne, who was about foaming at the mouth.

  “’Scuse me, sir,” I said. “But you’re making a mistake. You got the wrong people.”

  “No sir,” he rumbled, “this is the son of a bitch, and we’re just going right behind here and talk it over.”

  “No you’re not,” I told him. “In fact, you’re going to have to disengage right now, because you’re outnumbered, and I’ll bite your goddamn nose off if you look at me funny!” My eyes were pinned. That stopped it—thank God.

  Robertson was more careful after that.

  As the year turned into 1965, we began to get restless. The Hawk had taught us to sweat up a roadhouse with hard-core rock and roll, and we knew the satisfaction of wringing a crowd of Saturday night dancers dry until they were begging for more. We were the undisputed champions of Canadian rock and roll.

  Were we happy? Guess the answer. “There’s got to be more to it than this,” Rick grumbled one dark and frigid morning, heading back to Toronto after a long job at some bloodletting type of place.

  We’d listen to the radio and laugh because, with the exception of Motown, the groups were all so bad. We studied hit records like anatomy students, trying to figure how they were put together and what worked. The big acts of the day—the Beatles and the Beach Boys—came across to us as a blend of pale, homogenized voices. We’d been working for years on a vocal mix that accentuated three distinct voices: me on the bottom, Rick in the middle, and Richard riding on top. We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We were jealous and considered them our rivals, even though they’d never heard of us.

  We talked to the Colonel all the time about breaking out of Canada. Robbie and I spoke about it incessantly. I’d say we were making an OK living and doing all right, and he’d say, “Yeah, but we’re living week to week, and we’re not getting anywhere.” Rick was hot to go to New York so we could get discovered, but as titular leader I wasn’t that sure what we should do. Jerry Penfound had already left us, so Levon and the Hawks settled into the quintet format that sustained us for years to come.

  The Colonel told us that our first step was to make some records. We had cut a single in 1964 with Henry Glover as the Canadian Squires, which Henry released on his Ware Records label. “Uh Uh Uh”/“Leave Me Alone” were written by Robbie and recorded in New York. I sang “Leave Me Alone,” and the lyrics were about our lives: “Trouble, fight, almost every night. Bad men, don’t come around, or I’m gonna lay your body down.” Both were harmonica-driven R&B songs that sounded and felt a little like the Rolling Stones, who were interested in the same kind of blues music that we were (and who were about to release their breakthrough single, “Satisfaction”).

  “That sounds awful,” Garth Hudson said the first time we heard our record. Garth frowned with displeasure, as only he can. We were sitting in a diner somewhere. “Uh Uh Uh” came on the jukebox, and it was twice as low as anything else. “Too bottom heavy,” Garth said. We’d been concerned about getting that presence we liked around the bass pattern, an important part of our sound, but it just didn’t translate onto record.

  We were friends with Ronnie Hawkins again; he’d gotten another band together as soon as we left his employ. One day we were chewing the fat, and our record came on. The Hawk said, “Son, you’re gonna have to forget this Canadian Squires thing because American record companies won’t touch a Canadian group. Take my word for it. They know the Canadian market is so small they won’t get their money back.”

  We knew then that things had to change.

  We cut again in New York in early 1965 under our own name, Levon and the Hawks. Henry Glover was producing, and an engineer named Phil Ramone was at the board, if I remember correctly. Robbie came up with “The Stones That I Throw” and “He Don’t Love You,” and Richard sang lead on both. They were released on Atlantic’s Atco subsidiary in 1965, but we never heard them on a jukebox anywhere. (We also cut a sped-up version of “Little Liza Jane” that we called “Go Go Liza Jane,” but this remained unreleased.)

  In April 1965 we were back in Helena, staying at Charlie Halbert’s motel. We’d been hired by the Marvell High class of ’65 to play the combined junior-senior prom. It was planting time in cotton country, and the air was thick with the familiar scent of spring soil and the humid atmosphere of the delta; a wonderful time to be home. My family had relocated, but we still had a lot of friends and kin in the area, so we stayed on a few days after the prom. I think we might have played the Catholic Club in Helena a couple of nights as well.

  We woke up late one day and went out to breakfast. Bill Avis turned on the radio:

  Clang! “It’s King Biscuit Time! Pass the biscuits!”

  And we hear Sonny Boy Williamson, Peck Curtis, Pinetop Perkins, and Houston Stackhouse wailing the blues on KFFA at twelve-fifteen in the afternoon.

  “Holy shit!” Richard said. “I can’t believe these guys are still doing this!”

  “That’s right, folks,” announcer “Sunshine” Sonny Payne is saying, “Sonny Boy has just returned from a tour overseas where he has played for the armed services and nightspots in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, and many other cities in Europe. So to get the show on the road, here he is: the man in the spike-toed shoes … your favorite radio entertainer... the king of the harmonica … Sonny Boy Williamson in person playing ‘V-8 Ford Blues’!”

  But Sonny Boy doesn’t go right into it. “Just before we do this number, ladies and gentlemen: Tonight’s the big night in Greenwood, Mississippi. Don’t forget that—yassir!—in Greenwood, Mississippi, tonight. Don’t try to meet me there, beat me there! Yah!” And the band crashes into the show’s first song.

  “Hey, Levon,” Garth says. “You know where everything is around here. Let’s go look for Sonny Boy. Maybe we could hang with him a little.”

  What followed was the most magical day of our lives.

  We stopped in at Mr. Gist’s music store, where we were told that Sonny Boy Williamson had indeed just come back from Europe. “He’s hot as a firecracker,” Mr. Gist said. “Never sounded better. You can probably find him down at the building he’s renting from me.” We found Sonny Boy walkin
g down the street. Not that it was possible to miss him, at six feet three inches, with a white goatee and a three-piece suit of alternating gray and charcoal-gray flannel he’d had made in England. Plus a derby hat and a brown attaché case for his harps. There was no one else even remotely like Sonny Boy Williamson walking around Helena that day.

  We pulled up slowly, and I got out of the car. Sonny Boy didn’t even look that surprised to see a white boy accosting him on the street. I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Williamson, but my name is Lavon Helm from Marvell, and I grew up listening to you, and we have a pretty good band here”—I gestured over to the Mercury, where the boys were waiting—“and we wanted to know if you might be interested in going somewhere and playing a little music with us.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment; just looked at us. Sonny Boy had an intimidating reputation—it was well known that he carried a big knife and would cut anyone who fucked with him—but we weren’t intimidated because we had nothing but respect and good intentions toward him. Finally he said OK and got in the car. He didn’t say much at first, but we’d caught him on the right day and managed to get him back to the Rainbow Inn Motel in West Helena. There we had a set of drums and a couple of amps set up for rehearsal. We ended up jamming for the rest of the afternoon. Whatever Sonny Boy wanted to do, we just followed him and made sure he had plenty of ice in his cup.

  After a while, Sonny Boy put down his harmonica and spat into a tin can. I assumed he was chewing tobacco. “You boys sure can play,” he rasped. “Where you been playin’? You know, I’m seventy years old, and you got one of the best bands I’ve heard.” He spat into the can and coughed. We started to play again, and I noticed he was watching us carefully. He was used to showing off for the young English bands he’d been playing with, but now he knew something was happening. He was looking at Robbie like, Where the hell did this kid learn that? Then he’d pass the ball to Garth or over to Richard, and Sonny Boy would get a big smile on his face. We could tell that he liked us, liked our readiness to break the rules. Right then and there we began thinking, Why can’t we be Sonny Boy’s band?