by Levon Helm
Our Arkansas friends, meanwhile, weren’t used to marijuana, weren’t used to New York, and had stumbled into a real downer. They froze at a hard knock on my door. It was John Hammond, Jr., in his fringed buckskin jacket. He had a guy with him—might have been John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful—with real long hair, boots, and a leather bandolier for his harmonicas. These boys helped us commiserate. We were all having a good time when a couple of police cars pulled up to the hotel, flashing red lights and all. It didn’t having anything to do with us, but it was the last straw for my buddy Charlie from Arkansas, who was stoned and paranoid and figured this was a big-city pot bust. He took off out the door, down the hall, and through the fire exit, setting off the alarm, and headed down the stairwell. I chased after him, yelling, “Stop, Charlie! Ain’t nothin’ wrong, buddy!” but he was gone.
Richard Manuel asked, “What’s he gonna do when he hits bottom?” I didn’t know, so I got in the elevator, and by the time I reached Charlie he was in a doorway in an alley behind the hotel, with two uniformed New York cops asking why he was breathing so heavy. I stepped in to do the talking. “Look, officer, everything’s A-OK. The bills are paid, no problem with the hotel; you can check the front desk. They know us here. This friend of mine just drove up from Arkansas and got some really disturbing news from home, and he just ain’t himself …”
One cop said, “Well, you better get him back upstairs or back to Arkansas, but get him the hell out of here.” There’s the spirit of 1965 for you. So we put those boys back on the road to Arkansas, headed north to Canada, and hoped Eric Schuster was going to hell.
Bill Avis had left our other station wagon at the Toronto airport, so that’s where we drove after we crossed the border at Buffalo. There was a seventy-mile-per-hour speed limit on the Queen E, and I was doing at least ninety, smoking my old briar pipe as we cruised along. At the airport, as I pulled up to the parking garage, someone suddenly yanked open my door. An arm reached across me and turned the key off, then people were grabbing me. Someone pulled the pipe out of my mouth and barked, “Metropolitan police! Outside!”
Yes sir!
We were surrounded by Toronto cops and Mounties. Dozens of ’em, with guns drawn and pointed at us. Robbie looked at me in total disbelief. Garth was in shock. Rick was yelling at the cops, wanting to know what was going on. They told us to shut up and marched us down to a basement room you never want to go in, believe me. They brought in our luggage and searched it. They might’ve found an old pack of papers and a couple of seeds. Then they took the two cars apart. Dismantled ’em. Found maybe half an ounce of pot stuffed between the backseat cushions. So they arrested the six of us for marijuana smuggling.
The cops were real proud of themselves. They told us how they had picked us up at the border and followed us all the way into Toronto. They had eight cars on our tail. “You drove so fast we even lost you a couple times,” one of ’em told me. But they were ahead of us too and found us again on the highway that cuts between the lake shore and Route 401. Damn!
We had Bill Avis call the Colonel and tell him what happened. The Colonel called Jack Fischer, God love him, who owned the Commodore Hotel, where we played a lot. Bail was set at ten grand apiece. Jack and the Colonel put up the sixty grand and bailed us out. This was on a Friday, and it hit the Toronto Star that weekend: TORONTO POP GROUP SEIZED!!
Our families were devastated. Rick’s picture was on the front page of the Simcoe Recorder. Garth’s parents … Mama Kosh... Ed and Gladys Manuel. Thank God Diamond and Nell didn’t find out right away. Funny thing was, next week in Toronto we had the biggest crowds we’d seen in years. They were lined up around the block to hear us.
After we got out of jail, and after we could all calm down and get settled enough to talk, we figured out what had happened. It looked as though Rick’s girlfriend Christine, the same one that the Hawk had caught him with, had this boyfriend, or at least some guy, who was jealous.
“We got set up,” Rick agrees in retrospect. “This guy was trying to impress my girlfriend. None of us would have known him, but he knew what time we were coming through the border that day, and he told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that we were bringing in a trunkful of pot. Major pot dealers, right? And in those days you could go to jail for five years for smoking three joints from a nickel bag. So at the airport this one tough fucker hauls me out of the car with one hand, my feet off the ground, while frisking me with the other hand, saying, ‘What have we got here?’
“The high point was that this one RCMP found an ounce of Panama Red in the topcoat I was wearing. He says, ‘Mr. Danko, I’m going to see that you go to jail for thirty years for importing narcotics.’ The Mountie always gets his man, right? So then he asked where I got the stuff.
“I said, ‘Well, sir, this black guy named King gave it to me outside of Birdland. I never even tried it. You know the way God works, this arrest may have been for the best because I haven’t even had a chance to try any of this marijuana yet. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here.’”
We had to go to court, off and on, for what seemed like years. The Colonel found us an attorney who postponed everything. Then we started to see the cops who arrested us coming to the Le Coq D’Or or Friar’s Tavern, but now they were cheering us. A couple of them brought along their wives. We even made friends with a few. Soon the story started to die down, but there was this one tough cop who just wanted to see us all in jail.
Rick: “So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy, and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto. Richard used to say that Kathy made Brooke Shields look like a dog. We knew her through our friend ‘No Knees Joyce,’ a telephone operator who liked us and let us make our long-distance calls for free. Kathy was sixteen years old when we met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful, and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was fourteen years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, and we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.”
In August 1965 we were back in Somers Point on the Jersey Shore, playing Tony Mart’s Nite Spot. The marquee read:
THREE GREAT BANDS THREE—OVER 110,000 HAVE PROCLAIMED THEM CANADA’S GREATEST—LEVON AND THE HAWKS—PLUS—DIRECT FROM ENGLAND—THE FUNATICS—GO-GO, COMEDY AND SHOW—PLUS—THE PAWNS, AND THE GO-GO GIRLS—GAIL AND CHRISTINE.
This was the middle of summer, and we were hearing this long record on the radio. “How does it feel... to be on your own … like a rolling stone.”
Robbie Robertson said, “That’s a long record. It’s gotta be six, seven minutes long.”
“Sure has got a lotta words in it,” Richard remarked. Garth liked the organ part.
We knew who it was.
Halfway through August someone handed me the phone backstage at Tony Mart’s.
“This is Bob Dylan calling,” said a voice on the other end.
“Yes sir,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
Long pause. “Well, um … uh, howja like to play the Hollywood Bowl?”
I think I swallowed before asking, “Who else is on the bill?”
“Just us,” said Bob.
Chapter Five
DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC
Lo and behold!
Bob needed a group. We needed a break.
The two needs coincided.
If my memory serves me well, Bob also mentioned that we’d be playing a show at Forest Hills, Queens, late in August, before the Hollywood Bowl date in early September. The shows would be half acoustic and half electric, with the band coming in on the second part of the show. I asked how he’d heard about us, and I think he mentioned some people who’d told him about us when they heard he was looking for a rock and roll band; people like Mary Martin and John Hammond, whose father,
John Hammond, Sr., had discovered and signed Bob in the first place. Truth was, the Hawks were the band to know about back then. It was an “underground” thing, if you know what I mean. We were like a state secret among hip musical people because nobody else was as tight as we were.
The phone call ended up with me telling Bob that we were real interested in his proposal, that I’d talk to the other boys and get back to him the next day. Then I called the Colonel to see if Bob Dylan could actually sell out these places he was talking about. We’d heard him on the radio, but we didn’t have his records, so we had no idea how big Bob Dylan was. Colonel Kudlets assured us that Bob Dylan was indeed big time.
“Mary Martin would fly home on weekends and come down to our matinees,” Rick Danko recalls. “She was a good friend of a local group called the Dirty Shames. They did jug-band music and comedy, like the Smothers Brothers, really good. We got to know Mary, and she turned us on to some of the people in Albert Grossman’s stable: Gordon Lightfoot, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and this guy called Bob Dylan. We were going through our jazz period: handmade suits in different styles, very cool. One day she and her girlfriend came to our hotel to wake me up for our matinee, and she brought me Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited. It was about to come out. It was the first time any of us had ever heard him. Next thing I knew, Mary was calling me up to tell me that Bob was looking for a group, and she was telling him about the band.”
There was initial skepticism among the band when I told them about the call, because Bob was looking only for a guitar player and a drummer for these shows. He wanted Robbie and me, and I think I was actually his second call after the first guy couldn’t make it. And Bob Dylan was unknown to us. I knew he was a folksinger and songwriter whose hero was Woody Guthrie. And that’s it. I’d not heard him, aside from Highway 61 Revisited. I was into Muddy, B. B. King, and I thought Ray Charles had the best band. I had a Newcombe portable turntable that folded onto its own speaker—monaural, of course—that I’d bought at Manny’s music store during that Peppermint Lounge job in 1964. It had three gears and a little dial so you could vary the turntable speed. That way, if you wanted to study the drum lick on “Sticks and Stones” by Ray Charles you could switch it to 33 rpm and then gear down and really listen to how he did it. I was into dance music, something that I could sit around and really dig: Junior Parker, with everybody cracking, everything laying in the pocket—then I’m home. I’d carry this thing on the road so we’d be able to have a party if we needed to. Junior Parker, Sonny Boy, especially Jimmy Reed—you had to have his songs.
To me Bob Dylan was a songwriter, a troubadour kind of guy; just him and a guitar. “He’s a strummer,” Richard said derisively when he heard about the deal. That was a word we had for folksters back then, when we were snobby. We knew he was involved with Joan Baez and the civil-rights movement, and that Bob had written “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Some of his records sounded like country music to me, but the songs were just a little bit longer. But that was all right by me. Bob had said this would be an experiment, and we were foolish enough to take him up on it.
We heard from Mary Martin that Bob had sent some of his people down to see us at Tony Mart’s. Then Robbie went up to New York to see Bob. They met in a studio somewhere, and Bob was looking at a bunch of electric guitars, trying to figure out which ones to buy. This was Robbie’s thing. Back in Toronto he’d get a new guitar, use it a couple of weeks, then sell it to some kid who’d tell all his friends that he was playing Robbie Robertson’s guitar. There were hundreds of these floating around, so I’m told. Anyway, Robbie could tell Bob about electric guitars: “Get this one, get that one, this one’s a joke.” Then they sat on a couch in a room with a couple of guitars. It was the first time Robbie had heard Bob, and he was playing a little rough, and Dylan seemed to want it that way.
Because Bob was going electric. That spring he had done an acoustic tour of Britain, immortalized in the D. A. Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back, and after hanging with some of the Beatles and seeing what the Rolling Stones were doing, I guess he felt he had to change clothes and get himself a band. Mary Martin let us know that a month earlier, in July, Bob had played the Newport Folk Festival with Al Kooper and members of Paul Butterfield’s band, including our friend Mike Bloomfield. When Bob brought out the band halfway through the show, the audience booed. The folksters hated the band. There was almost a riot, and they made him stop. Bob was forced to come back with an acoustic guitar and sing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It had shaken him up. Now Bob had to go electric, had to get this loud, passionate, explosive sound into his music. Thinking back on it, after they’d booed him at Newport, Bob Dylan probably didn’t have any choice.
I met Bob for the first time in a New York rehearsal studio. Robbie and I had driven up from New Jersey, where we were in the third month of our stand at Tony Mart’s. Robbie hadn’t been impressed with the drummer Bob was using and suggested he hire me instead, so I had come to sit in on a rehearsal. Bob was wearing some mod-style clothes he’d bought in England: a red and blue op-art shirt, a narrowwaisted jacket, black pegged pants, pointy black Beatle boots.
I stuck out my hand when Robbie introduced me. “Nice to see you,” Bob Dylan said. “Thanks for coming up.”
We talked while Al Kooper and bassist Harvey Brooks set up to play. Robbie said we’d heard about the problems at Newport. “That’s right,” Bob said. “I got booed. You heard about that? I went on as usual, did a few songs, and they seemed to like it. Then Butterfield’s band came out, and we were gonna do five numbers from the new album, and people seemed to like it until we started having sound problems. The people down front tried to tell us about it, because we couldn’t hear ourselves, and the people behind them thought that the ones up front were booing, and they started to boo. They were yelling, ‘Get rid of the band and that electric guitar!’ We had to leave the stage. It was bullshit. You shoulda heard it, man. Pretty soon they were all booing.”
“Well,” Robbie observed, “they’re the folk scene. They want their folk music and nothing else.”
Bob laughed. “Yeah... but I don’t know about that. We’re gonna change all that now anyway.”
Then Bob’s manager, Albert Grossman, came in. We shook hands. He was a big guy with long gray hair and rumpled clothes. He reminded you of Benjamin Franklin, but gruff and unfriendly. He’d been a nightclub owner in Greenwich Village and now managed Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and many others. Albert explained that they were going to tour for a year, all over the world: America that fall, Australia and Europe in the spring of 1966, and back through the United States the following summer. The show was split in half, acoustic and electric, and they were looking for a regular group to support the second half of the show. So the boys strapped on their guitars, and I got behind the drums—a black-pearl set like jazz great Elvin Jones had—and we began, ragged at first. Real ragged. We worked out parts for eight or nine songs, from “Tombstone Blues” to “Like a Rolling Stone,” and I couldn’t believe how many words this guy had in his music, or how he managed to remember them all. Afterward Bob said to me, “You play as well as this other guy, maybe a little better.” And so we kind of made a deal to work together.
We had only a couple rehearsals by the time we played Bob’s famous show at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium on August 28, 1965.
Everyone who showed up for the soundcheck that late-summer afternoon knew that this was going to be one of those historic, make-or-break gigs. The times they were a-changin’, and the prophet of that change was transforming himself under the highly critical gaze of what Bob sarcastically called “the hootenanny crowd.” There’d been an interview with Bob in The New York Times that morning, headlined POP SINGERS AND SONG WRITERS RACING DOWN BOB DYLAN’S ROAD. Bob was quoted as saying, “If anyone has any imagination, he’ll know what I’m doing. If they don’t understand my songs, they’re missing something.”
We did the soundcheck in front of fifteen thousan
d empty seats. It was Robbie on guitar, me on drums, Al Kooper on organ, and Harvey Brooks, whose bass really rocked the big, empty bowl. Bob stood alone at the mike, his hair ruffled by the breeze. He seemed very thin and fragile, and didn’t say much to people he didn’t know that well, but I knew this guy was like a volcano. He was hot. The press was starting to call his music folk rock, although that really applied more to people who were covering his songs on the radio, like the Byrds and Sonny and Cher. I had the idea that soon the whole scheme of American music was going to change. Songs were going to be about ideas beyond the simple solace of the blues or the old let’s-ball-tonight attitude of rock and roll.
Forest Hills Tennis Stadium was packed that night. The whole band had come up from New Jersey. I wanted everyone to feel part of the show because I had an inkling of the way things would work out. In the dressing room Albert Grossman told us that only Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand had sold out the place that summer. The atmosphere outside was like a big, reverent party. A stiff wind blew low clouds through the darkness overhead. There was an inhuman roar when Bob went out. This was before big concerts were common, and I’d only heard a sound like that—fifteen thousand fans—at a football game. I was sitting backstage with Rick, Garth, and Richard when Bob strapped on his harmonica and guitar and went out. Meanwhile Albert Grossman was going nuts because deejay Murray the K had taken the stage and was chanting, “It ain’t rock... and it ain’t folk... It’s a new thing called Dylan, and its what’s happening, baybeeeee!!!”
“Who the fuck let Murray the K out there?” Albert roared. “Get that asshole out of here!” Albert was threatening to sue as Bob acknowledged the standing ovation.
The crowd had been noisy, but when Bob started to sing, “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back,” they got quiet enough. Bob did “She Belongs to Me,” “To Romana,” and “Gates of Eden” before giving the audience three new songs: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Desolation Row,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He finished the acoustic part of the show with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
