by Levon Helm
Before we went on, Bob gathered the four of us into a huddle. He said, “We don’t know what’s gonna happen. It may be a real freak show out there. I want you guys to know this up front. Just keep playing, no matter how weird it gets.”
The booing began during the intermission when people saw me and Bill Avis setting up the drums. There was some rhythmic clapping while they waited for Bob, and some conspicuous groaning when Robbie walked onstage in wraparound shades and strapped on the electric guitar. But when Bob came out we blasted into “Tombstone Blues,” and I swear to God they didn’t know what hit ’em. Robbie fired off a solo like tracer bullets into the crowd, and it was a whole new world. Suddenly Bob was bending and writhing and howling away, and it was real, real, real gone.
The booing started when we finished the number.
“Booooooooooooooooooo!”
“Traitor!”
But some people were clapping, and so we played “I Don’t Believe You” and “From a Buick 6.”
People booed and yelled between songs. “Yay yay! Shake it up, baby!” “Rock and roll sucks!” “Where’s Ringo?!” “Play folk music!” “Where’s Dylan?!” Then we did “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm,” which sure sounded incredible from where I was sitting, but sure enough, after the song someone yelled out, “Scumbag!” and all hell broke loose. We started the intro to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” better known as “Mister Jones,” and Bob said, “Aw, man, come on, now,” as a fight broke out between some mods and rockers. People were being thrown out. People were cursing, but not at Bob. They were mad at us, the band. People were throwing fruit at us! Then some clown crawled up onstage and knocked Al Kooper off his stool. I mean, it was looking ugly.
Bob turned around and looked at me. He laughed and said something to Robbie. To me he yelled, “Looks like the attack of the beatniks around here!” So, storming the bastions of folkster purity, we kept playing “Thin Man” until things cooled down. By the time we rolled into “Like a Rolling Stone” the crowd was singing along. This was, after all, a hit single. I looked out and saw the younger kids—not the old folksters—knew all the words and were singing along. After ninety minutes we left the stage, somewhat shaken, wondering if some of the message had broken through.
Bob huddled with his manager in the wings. We were supposed to go out and play some rock and roll for the encore, but Albert told us there would be none. Bob was pissed off. “Damn beatniks,” he muttered.
Six days later we flew out to Los Angeles and played pretty much the same show at the Hollywood Bowl. Afterwards I told Bob I was glad the audience had been more friendly.
“I wish they had booed,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s good publicity. Sells tickets. Let ’em boo all they want.”
The band had a long talk on the way back to New Jersey to wind up our residency at Tony Mart’s. Robbie and I had an offer to go on the road with Bob, but we didn’t want to break up the band. I even had reservations about going with Bob. Ever since we’d left Ronnie, we’d pledged to one another that we were gonna do it by ourselves. Between us we could command seventeen different instruments, and we had Richard, so we never felt we needed a singer to stand up in front. That was always our idea: We were gonna be a band!
“They played Forest Hills and the Hollywood Bowl,” Rick Danko remembers, “and Bob wanted Robbie and Levon to join him. And I’m sure Robbie said, ‘We’ve got this band that we play with, and we’ve been playing together pretty good for some years now, and we’d like to continue to play.’ And Bob said, ‘When can I hear the band?’
“After that we had a week off, our first in five or six years. We went back to Toronto, played a few nights at Friar’s Tavern, and kept a court date resulting from our big bust. That’s where I met Bob for the first time.”
Bill Avis adds: “Back in New Jersey we all had a meeting about what was going to happen. Robbie was quiet. Levon was insisting that no one was going to get left behind on this one. There was a pact among these men, who’d already been through so much together. The end result was that Levon and I drove into Manhattan after they’d played the Hollywood Bowl. We parked in front of 75 East Fifty-fifth Street and went in to see Albert Grossman. And Levon told Albert, and this is a quote:
“‘Take us all, or don’t take anybody.’
“To our surprise—we weren’t exactly used to having things go our way—they bought the package, including me as road manager. The Colonel even kept taking his ten percent, like always. Other than that, everything changed. Things got a hell of a lot better.”
We said good-bye and thank you to Tony Mart just before Labor Day 1965. We’d been there since the Fourth of July, and they were sad to see us go, but we were headed back to Toronto. Bob Dylan showed up a few days later to hear the band for the first time. We played at the Friar’s Tavern. Our voices were blown from two months in New Jersey and a few days off, so we were mostly playing instrumentals by then, jamming on “Honky Tonk” and “Work Song” (we were still in our Cannonball Adderly period), letting Garth do what he did best. Like everyone else who encounters Garth for the first time, Bob was blown away. He loved the group.
We rehearsed with Bob after they had locked up the place for the night. I have to give him all the credit, because he worked hard with us. He was turning around from being a solo performer and teaching himself how to lead a band. We went through his songs once, trying to strobe those guitars together, and Bob gave us some tapes to listen to.
Bob stayed with us for maybe a week, just hanging out, working on music. He told me he’d wanted to have his own band since he’d left Minnesota in 1961, so this wasn’t a big revelation. He was approaching it as an experiment, and I just remember that the atmosphere was real friendly and exciting.
Rick: “We went to court while we were in Toronto and fessed up. Bob gave a very strong deposition saying we were indispensable to his artistic well-being and couldn’t be replaced. Then the witnesses didn’t show up, and the judge told us we didn’t have to go to jail, so we had to spend a couple of days celebrating and partying. While this was going on, Bob had his mother come up to visit him. I thought that was a nice thing. Mrs. Zimmerman wanted to know where we had our suits tailored, and eventually we took Bob over to see Lou Myles, who made him that brown houndstooth check suit with the pegged waist that he wore all over the world and sang ‘One Too Many Mornings’ in. It was photographed a lot.”
A couple of weeks later, on September 23, they sent a plane to Toronto to pick us up, and we met Bob at the Municipal Auditorium in Austin, Texas. We had one more rehearsal during the afternoon soundcheck and just started in playing that night.
I was damn sure that no southern audiencė would possibly boo what Bob was doing, and I was right. The Texas crowd loved Dylan’s stuff, and so our first show as Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks was a smash. Weeks later, after a lot of booing had gone down elsewhere, Bob told me the Texas audience was the only one who’d understood what we were doing.
The next night we were in Dallas, and they didn’t boo us there either. After that we sort of moved to New York, living in hotels. Bob had a place in New York and another hideaway near Albert Grossman’s country house in a little upstate New York town called Woodstock.
On October 1 we played Carnegie Hall. The bill read BOB DYLAN W/ LEVON & THE HAWKS. There was some noise when the band came out, but Bob won them over in the end—a pattern that would be repeated for the rest of my time on that tour. The last number of the show was always “Rolling Stone,” and at Carnegie Hall a couple of hundred people rushed the stage at the end, shouting for more. I could see Bob standing at the microphone. He was exhausted, spaced out, but really beaming. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “I didn’t think you’d feel that way.”
After Carnegie Hall we went into Columbia Studios in Manhattan and cut our first sides with Bob. “Can You Please Crawl out Your Window” was released as a single in December. We also did another song called “I Wanna Be Yo
ur Lover,” which was supposed to be a takeoff on “I Wanna Be Your Man,” the only song ever recorded by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but it wasn’t released contemporaneously.
For the next month we played east of the Mississippi, becoming Bob Dylan’s band. We were booed everywhere; by then it had become a ritual. People had heard they were “supposed” to boo when those electric guitars came out. But at the same time we found a way of performing with Bob. It was a hell of a challenge, because he was still learning about a band. He would suddenly stop and break the beat, and we’d get confused and not know where we were. We’d look at one another and try to figure out if we were playing great music or total bullshit. The audiences kept booing. We made tapes of the shows and listened to them afterward in the hotel, because we couldn’t believe it was that bad that people felt they had to protest, but the tapes sounded good to us. It was just new. Meanwhile, people out front were yelling, “Get rid of the band!” and backstage, people were coming up to Bob and saying—right in front of us sometimes—“Look, Bobby, these bums are killing you. They’re destroying your career. You’re gettin’ murdered out there. Why do you wanna pollute the purity of your thing with this dirty, vulgar rock and roll?”
The more Bob heard this stuff, the more he wanted to drill these songs into the audience. I mean, he was on fire. We didn’t mean to play that loud, but Bob told the sound people to turn it up full force. We were the first rock band that played in some of these old arenas and coliseums, and Robbie’s guitar used to reverberate around the big concrete buildings like a giant steel bullwhip. It was intense. Bob was hot-wired into it. He usually started as soon as we played a note, really howling at the moon. He’d bend and grind, stage front, miming Robbie’s solos while Robbie stood stock-still next to me, out of the spotlight, concentrating on these fireball licks. We could tell a lot of the kids out front thought Bob was soloing, but we didn’t care. Sometimes Rick would go out front and dance and sing with Bob a little, but mostly we were in the shadows, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
I began to think it was a ridiculous way to make a living: flying to concerts in Bob’s thirteen-seat Lodestar, jumping in and out of limousines, and then getting booed. At the same time, we’d have a few days off between shows. We could actually get a breath, a new experience for us. It was getting real strange. We’d never been booed in our lives. As soon as they saw the drums set up during the intermission, it was like, “Light the kerosene!” Sometimes the booing would get to me, especially when they’d throw tomatoes or whatever, and my drums would get stuff on them. A couple of times, when I thought Bob wasn’t looking, I’d give ’em the finger. I kept waiting for Bob or Albert Grossman to take us aside and say, “Now, boys, we told you it was only an experiment. Sorry it didn’t work out.” Because I couldn’t have taken what Bob endured. We seemed to be the only ones who believed in what we were doing. But the guy absolutely refused to cave in. It was amazing, but Bob insisted on keeping this thing together.
We were seriously booed during a two-night stand at the Back Bay Theater in Boston. That’s when it started to get to me. I’d been raised to believe that music was supposed to make people smile and want to party. And here was all this hostility coming back at us. One night Richard said, “How are we going to take this thing to England next year?”
I said, “Richard, it seems a long way around—England—to get where I wanna go. I can take getting booed here; this is my country. But I can’t see taking it to Europe and hearing this shit. And anyway, I don’t really wanna be anybody’s band anymore.”
He looked at me and said, “You’re gonna leave.”
“How did you know?”
“I can just tell,” he said. “There isn’t a lot for a drummer to do in this music.”
I still wanted to see us make some records. I wanted to hear Richard Manuel sing. I wanted to hear Garth Hudson set up those chords. We had an ensemble, and we needed to go in and record.
During November 1965 we went to Minnesota, Ohio, and western New York. Then we did two nights at Massey Hall in Toronto. It was a homecoming for us, but not what the locals were used to, and as usual the response was a mixture of cheers and boos. We were not too thrilled when a local music journalist wrote that Torontonians were surprised to see that a great like Bob Dylan had teamed up with a “third-rate Yonge Street band” like the Hawks. Bob got married on November 25, and the next day we flew out to play two nights in Chicago. More booing.
Our last show that month was in Washington, DC. There’d been a lot of booing and a couple of fights. The vibes were pretty weird. After the show we were coming through the tunnel to the dressing room. A girl reached down from her seat and lunged at Bob’s head with a pair of scissors, trying either to get a lock of hair or kill him. In the dressing room, Bob had a scared look in his eyes after that one.
We flew back to New York. We were living in the Irving Hotel, down near Gramercy Park, where Albert Grossman lived. Very late that night, I knocked on Robbie Robertson’s door and told him I was pulling out. I said, “You know I’ve always had the same ambition: to be our own band. You had that same ambition too; that was the plan.”
He said, “I know that, but Bobby’s opening a lot doors for us, man. We’re meeting important people, learning how to travel, making contacts that we’d never make otherwise. We’re playing three nights a week against six. Jesus, all these years, and we’ve never had time to think before. Some good’s gotta come from this.”
I said, “Well, I’m not sure that we’re gonna maintain that same policy and ambition for ourselves.”
“Yeah, OK,” Robbie said, “but what about the music? Some of this stuff is incredible. Sometimes I think it’s gonna explode.”
“Well, I can’t always hear it,” I told him. “Sometimes I’m afraid of it. Do you remember when we left Tony Mart’s?” People had hugged and kissed us and were crying to see us go. My own eyes got a little moist there. “To go from that to being point band for this style of music that Bob can hear, and the rest of us hear as much as we know how, and I myself can’t even really hear yet—I want to draw a line for myself. To me, music’s always been some good chords and a tight rhythm section. This stuff is too damn powerful for me.”
“Lee,” he said intently, “we’re gonna find this music. We’re gonna find a way to make it work so that we can get something out of it.”
“Not with me, Bubba,” I said. “It just ain’t my ambition to be anybody’s drummer. I’ve decided to just let this show go on without me for now. Tell the boys that I wish ’em well, and I’ll see ’em when it’s time to put the thing back together again.”
Robbie asked where I was going, and I told him I didn’t exactly know, but that they could always find me by calling J.D., my dad down in Springdale, Arkansas.
And that was it.
* * *
Boy, I had mixed feelings as I headed south that morning. On one hand, I’d been proud that I was one of the first drummers that made it easier for Bob to hear himself. I actually enjoyed our times in the studio, rehearsals, the soundchecks. It was great to help him when he had a certain feel that went a certain way. It was great to help him find that common pulse. It was great to meet people like John Lee Hooker, Marlon Brando, beatnik poets from San Francisco, all coming to greet Bob when he came to town.
On the other hand, I wasn’t made to be booed. I could look at it and find it kind of funny, at least the part that was directed at me as the drummer. I mean, the Grand Ole Opry used to be the same way; they didn’t want any drummers either. But the whole booing thing became heartbreaking, considering the effort Bob was putting out and how easy it would have been for him to play it safe. I was starting to get real pissed off. It was better for me not to be part of that.
Bill Avis recalls: “That was the way it happened. Levon didn’t say nothing to no one except Robbie. We got up in the morning, and Levon was gone. Rick said, ‘Where’s Levon?’ and Richard Manuel said, ‘He done ca
lled it a day.’ It shook us up for a minute, but it was also understood. No one liked the booing. No one liked having stuff thrown at them.
“If you ask me, Levon left because of Albert Grossman. Albert was as abrasive as Levon was polite, and so it was just a total personality clash between the two of them. Levon also probably remembered that the Hawks had been his band, and he just didn’t feel comfortable not being the leader anymore.”
At the time, it wasn’t hard to imagine that my days with the band were over. I knew that everyone wanted that recording contract of our own, but maybe it wouldn’t work out that way for me.
In my heart, though, I felt this was going to be a temporary thing. In the meantime I’d play with some other people. I intended to go back to Arkansas and play some dances and return to my standard policy, which was to whistle while I worked. When I left Bob’s tour, it felt like an immense weight had been lifted from my shoulders. But I also missed my brothers in the Hawks terribly, and the way things worked out, it would be many moons before I saw any of them again.
First I went to Mexico and lived on the beach until I’d spent all my money. Then I met up with Kirby Pennick, a musician friend from Arkansas, and together we discovered that Florida was a bad place to be broke. We were just bumming around. We got the paper, and there was a drive-away Lincoln going from Florida to New Orleans. We just said, “Let’s go.”
So while the band went off to Australia and Europe, I found myself in New Orleans, a much friendlier town. Canal Street. St. Louis Hotel, between the levee and Jackson Square Park. French Quarter clubs, where Kirby and I played a couple of amateur nights for the prize money. Lots of rounders, comers and go-ers, musicians, gamblers, dealers, Dixie Mafia. Some of those people probably killed Jack Kennedy. There were a lot of characters, and we were always running into people who’d created missions for themselves: Spy vs. Spy. I fooled around there for a while until we were so broke we actually needed to work. I was a busboy in a restaurant until they fired me for eating the entrées. The newspaper was advertising high-paying jobs out in the Gulf. That’s when we signed on as deckhands with the Aquatic Engineering and Construction Company in Houma, Louisiana:
