by Ray Connolly
As he talks his head, tilted backwards, moves from side to side, and his eyes, behind his Batman dark glasses become fixed in the top righthand corner of their sockets.
He is not particularly politically active, although he once did some charity work for an organisation headed by the late Martin Luther King.
He was brought up a Baptist, and still goes to church whenever he’s at home. ‘I’m a strong believer in God,’ he says, ‘and I always have God on my mind, even if I don’t always go to church. Some people who go to church don’t have God on their minds when they’re in church.’
He is engaged to a girl he met at Tamla Motown called Syretta Wright (’everybody calls her Reeta’). She is a song-lyricist and singer, and following his less than successful first night at the Talk of the Town she’ll be joining P.P. Arnold and Madeline Bell to form an accompanying vocal trio.
What would you have, I ask, if you could have anything in the world? ‘I think,’ he says, ‘I would want something that seems impossible …
‘I would want peace for all people. Sometimes I wish that I could have been all the soldiers that were killed in Vietnam. Yeah, I guess you could call it a sacrificial wish.’
It sounds good, too.
POSTSCRIPT The thing one forgets about Stevie Wonder is that after twenty years of making hit records he is still only in his early thirties. Perhaps it was then churlish to raise an eyebrow at his professed desires for world peace. In those days lots of more mature people were making equally passionate, and empty sounding protestations of love for mankind. Like Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder is a great songwriter who doesn’t always write great songs, and it was not too surprising to see him turn up on two tracks of McCartney’s ‘Tug Of War’ album last year:
February 1970
Ronnie Hawkins
They’d told me that Ronnie Hawkins used to hold parties Nero would have been ashamed to attend, so when the invitation came I didn’t need any arm-twisting.
‘We’re in the Penthouse at the Playboy. Come right up,’ were the instructions, and that seemed to be just about Ronnie’s lifestyle all right.
And yes, it was quite a party. They never had them like that in Ormskirk. God knows who all the people were: record company employees, girlfriends and pick-ups, I imagine.
There was a lot of drink around, too, some really dirty picture books from Sweden (and I mean dirty) for those who had no one to talk to, and a lot of low behind-the-barn Deep South humour.
And sitting there right in the middle of it all was Ronnie Hawkins, the host, alternating the shapes of his lips to take sips of brandy, puffs of his cigar and drags on a weedy little home-made cigarette that had a funny smell.
‘I never did get much from marijuana,’ he says. ‘Some cats can take a puff and wow! they’re high, gone, faster than a July snow. But it never did nothing much for me, just made me sleepy.
‘I remember one time I went up to this woman’s farm I knew. And she was breeding all kinds of animals there — every kind you ever saw. And I was sitting there having me a smoke and patting this dog’s back and, you know, I began lolling off. And while I was dozing one of my friends replaced this dog for the tiniest little horse you ever saw. Its body was like that of an ordinary horse, but the legs wasn’t longer than eighteen inches. Special bred little thing it was. And when I woke up, there I was looking at this horse when it should have been a dog, and thinking, “Jesus that hash sure is something.” And I turned to a guy who was alongside me and said “For God’s sake tell me that that goddamned horse is standing in a two-foot hole.”’
This is Ronnie Hawkins in his element: boasting, bragging, telling stories, the centre of the party, the man with nothing but friends. Get him going and neither he nor you want him to stop.
‘For eighteen years I’ve been paying my dues playing the skid row bar circuits, and boy I can tell you we’ve played in some pretty tough places. One time I remember particularly. We were playing in one of Jack Ruby’s clubs, the Skyliner in Dallas I think it was, and they had a revue with girls stripping and all that. And we were just sitting watching when we noticed that one of the stripper girls only had but one arm. Can you imagine that?’ And Ronnie Hawkins guffaws till it looks as though he’s going to come bursting out of his Levis.
Unless you’re absolutely besotted with nostalgia about the rock music of the fifties, you might be forgiven for having forgotten (if indeed you ever knew) who Ronnie Hawkins is.
Ronnie was one of the very first rock and roll singers to come out of the South. He’s now a very big man, with a neatly clipped beard, military style haircut, straw cowboy hat, and a taste for cigars about the size of Giant Redwoods. He is also generous to the point of absurdity, grateful to an equal degree, and more outspoken than almost any man you’re likely to meet.
This week he has been staying in London on the last stop on a month’s round the world tour.
‘It’s the first vacation I’ve ever had in all my life. When we left home in Canada there were seven of us, but one by one all the others dropped out along the way. They couldn’t stand the pace. Now there’s just Ritchie and me.’
Ritchie is Australian freelance journalist, Ritchie Yorke, who put Hawkins back into the big time when he wrote an article about him in the American rock newspaper Rolling Stone. The article brought all kinds of offers from big recording companies and now the two are firm friends.
It was Ritchie, indeed, who arranged for Ronnie to play at being host to the Lennons when they made Hawkins’s home in Streets-ville, Ontario, the base for their Christmas peace mission to Canada last Christmas.
That was Ronnie’s second stroke of luck. The resulting publicity was, he figures, the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. When he gets back from his holiday this weekend he’ll be done with the low-class bars for good. He’ll be done with paying his dues.
‘I was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I started out playing with the bands when I was sixteen. I always had a lot of good little bands right through. They may not have been good in comparison with the musicians of today, but they were good for then. I started off by hopping up country and hillbilly songs, and I was the first in that area to add drums and start playing with electrical instruments in my band. And from that day to this I just been a rockieroller.
‘One time I had an all negro group, but in them days there just wasn’t any integration, and the only places we could play were army bases and negro clubs, so eventually we split up. All the guys I played with were much older than me, so I guess they must all be about fifty by now.
‘We played all over the South. Those places were so tough you had to show your razor and puke twice before they’d let you in. Times were so bad we always carried an Arkansas credit card — that was a siphon, a hose and a five-gallon can. You see we didn’t have much money and the only way we could get from one place to the next was by siphoning off somebody else’s petrol from out of their cars while they were inside drinking.
‘I tell you I was the only rock and roll singer in the South who had chapped lips for three years. I was belching up ethyl and regular and even a bit of diesel now and again.
‘We were poor because rock and roll music used to be the lowest form of music in the world, and only the people who couldn’t afford anybody else would hire a rock and roll band. The young people always dug it, but the older ones never could stand it. One cat once called me the abortion of music. If I’d known what abortion meant I would have hit him.’
His anecdotes and stories come rolling out with the ease of a man who has spent the last eighteen years re-telling them.
I met him first when I stayed at his home with the Lennons a couple of months ago. For the full three days I was there he just stood back from the hustling and hassling that was going on at a frenetic pitch all around, and grinned and laughed, and spoke to his famous guests only when he was spoken to.
He has been married for eight years to a Canadian girl called Wanda, and they ha
ve three children. But that doesn’t deter him from telling just about every interviewer he meets of the wild times he has had.
He says: ‘We were just like any band you care to name. They all have these orgies and parties, with pretty little girls and drink and raising hell. Wanda? Well, she knows how I am. I’ve always been this way. I suspect maybe she thinks it’s just me bragging and showing off, and not really meaning none of it. She’s a good woman.
‘But to tell the truth I’m getting so old that I can’t go chasing the girls like I used to. And if I do chase ‘em, when I catch ‘em I’m fit for nothing. You know them oysters that are supposed to make you passionate. Well, I’m so old that if I take half a dozen, only five of them work.’
Sitting with us, cherishing every moment, are a couple of antiques from a prehistoric age, a couple of London rockers, Wild Willie and friend, they tell me, all done up in their fingertip-length jackets, with velvet collars, drainies tighter than a bark around a tree, and hair greased back and pompadoured like sticky plumes. They’ve been fans for years, and although Ronnie himself didn’t know exactly when he was to arrive in England, they found out and were faithfully there to meet him off the aeroplane.
Elated at having such a ready audience, Ronnie is in full swing about his recent holiday: ‘We had trouble everywhere we went. In Tahiti there was a typhoon out of season; in Hong Kong we crossed into No Man’s Land and were likely to get shot at by the Red Chinese; and in Tokyo I had me one of them baths I’ve always been reading about with them geisha girls and that. I must have been expecting too much, because nothing happened like I thought it would.
‘Bangkok’s the place though. I reckon a man could do just about anything in Bangkok — but I didn’t because we didn’t have no time. When we were there a man comes up to me in the street and says “For ten dollars I can take you to a place where you can see a man making it with a chick.” But I said “Well, looks to me as though for ten dollars I could get my own chick and do it myself.”’
All he wants now, he jokes, is to be a teenage idol all over again. ‘After that article in Rolling Stone about me all the big record companies came offering money like I’d never heard of. One even flew me out to Hollywood, California, and offered me a quarter of a million dollars front money to sign for them, and they’d never heard me sing a note. But I signed with Atlantic because the way I see it is — if anyone is going to make it at all, he’ll make it with Atlantic. Everything they do is just right.
‘I’ve got my little band practising now so that when I get back I’ll be able to go out again. They’re a great little band.’
And if there’s one thing Ronnie Hawkins knows about it’s bands. Wasn’t it he who hired, put together and trained individually all the members of Dylan’s backing group The Band? ‘We played together for about five years, but we were going nowhere and they got tired of the bars. I can understand that. And they also wanted to start playing more blues and try for the big time. But I couldn’t take the chance. The way I saw it was we had a good regular living in where we were, and I had a wife and kids and couldn’t take the chance. So they left me and joined up with Dylan and went to live in Woodstock, New York.’
What about that blue disfigurement under his beard and along his cheek, I ask. ‘How did I do that? Well let me tell you. I’ve been singing and hollering for so long that I went and burst a goddamned blood vessel.’
And that great big man laughs like a tickled bear, and sips from a large glass of brandy.
‘With a couple of glasses of brandy inside me I just become irresistible — least I figure so. That’s me, the housewives’ companion and the working girls’ friend.’
POSTSCRIPT Ronnie Hawkins is one of those guys who never quite made it. After being lumbered with many of the bills for telephones and house repairs after John and Yoko used his home for their Christmas peace assault in Canada in 1969, he had a few months of some notoriety before slipping back into the semi-obscurity of Toronto night-life. In autumn 1982 he played in London for the first time in many years. I based a character for a television play on Ronnie.
March 1970
Germaine Greer
The first time I met Germaine Greer we had a very dirty conversation. It was about eighteen months ago and I’d gone to her studio at the Pheasantry in the King’s Road to ask her about life as a groupie following her self-interview article on that subject in the magazine Oz. She was totally fascinating but it was all a bit rude really and after a couple of attempts at bowdlerisation I decided that there was just no hope of ever getting the article into the Evening Standard.
The second time I saw her she kissed me — a full frontal kiss cushioned by a spongy hug right there in front of half a million people who had turned up to see the Rolling Stones play some rock and roll music in Hyde Park last summer.
I think it must have been something to see. The band had just finished playing when Germaine, six foot tall and wearing a gigantic curly Post Office red wig that stood a good five inches out from her skull, strode across to me and renewed our acquaintance for the benefit of the crowds, the butterflies Mick Jagger had set loose and half a dozen Nikons.
I saw her again this week — down by the Serpentine where our bottoms got damp on the grass, a spider disappeared up her leg and a snooping great bull mastiff got an ear-full of Germaine Greer bull mastiff abuse when it took a wet-nosed fancy to us.
Germaine Greer is by any standards a strange and eccentric woman with a more varied diversification of roles to her belt than any other person I’ve ever met.
Mostly she’s a lecturer in English at Warwick University (she got her PhD at Cambridge in 1968 for a thesis on Shakespeare’s comedies), but she’s also been a groupie, a school-teacher, a waitress, and a television personality — she played a major part in the Kenny Everett series Nice Time. She’s now also the author of the book The Female Eunuch.
She’s nothing if not great, entertaining, very educating company. Lounging out there her conversation drifts through a dozen frames of mind — she’s depressed about the death of Jimi Hendrix (’the smell of death was strong in the air at the Isle of Wight and it’s not surprising it took the best thing we had’), nervous about the stir her book has been causing (‘I keep going to the lavatory all the time, and I’ve lost my purse twice in a week’), aggressively condemning in her scorn for a little fat boy eating ice cream (‘… and thus shortening his ugly little life even further’), and scatty in her appreciation of the people passing by.
‘Just look at that lady,’ she says suddenly as a brazen thing walks towards us. ‘I do believe she’s wearing a pair of totally transparent trousers. Oh look, red knickers underneath them … I think they’re red knickers.’
The Female Eunuch (the working title was The Clitoris Strikes Back) is an enormously readable, impressively researched attack upon the role which woman has come to play in society. To Germaine, women are castrated from being truly female into a travesty called feminine — a bondage role created as the antithesis for what she considers to be the other fiction, masculinity.
What Germaine advocates is that we should all get back to being human beings of sexual potency without being dominated by the cultural blancmange which has come to clog and obscure our real forms and roles. Demonstrating this she is withering in her attacks on what we’ve come to consider the archetypes of femininity and ‘conquistadorial’ masculinity.
She’s thirty-one and was brought up in a safe, Roman Catholic, Melbourne, middle-class family. Her father was a newspaper executive.
‘At fourteen I went through a mystical stage. I laid siege to heaven and was always fasting and going to church and I wanted to be a nun and a saint, but I always had the feeling that there was nobody there.
‘And then I began to question things and they decided at school that I was going to become a great sinner. I suppose if I were to make a full confession it would take a few years, but that’s only in terms of what they call sin — like acts of generosity
and acts of love, whereas other things like meanness, coldness and impotence they call virtues.’
After getting her MA at Sydney University, where she had already become involved in the embryo underground scene with the original Australian Oz magazine, she came to Britain to take her PhD in 1964.
Now living with the manager of a rock group, she was once married for all of three weeks. She hasn’t seen her husband for some time now. ‘It was just totally disastrous,’ she says. ‘You think that living with someone is the same as being married to them but it isn’t. Marriage involved all kinds of responsibilities like family.
‘The magazine Suck asked me to write an article saying what I’d do if I could be male for a day, and I just wrote one sentence saying “If I could be male for a day I’d make myself pregnant”. One of the troubles about having a baby is that there has to be a father, and no matter how careful I might be in avoiding pushing the child through all the recognised hoops, I’m sure the father might interfere all the time saying “my child is going to Roedean”, and that sort of thing.
‘I think I’d give my husband a divorce if he’d ask for one, but I don’t think he will. Marriage is so wrong. It’s so immoral. I’m sure the sum of two people when joined together in marriage is less than the two individuals they were to start with.’
She must live a strangely schizophrenic existence. During term time week-days she’s Dr Greer, Leamington Spa’s eccentric academic. Then during vacations and weekends she’s a standard bearer for the alternate society — working from her flat in Knightsbridge for magazines like Suck and Oz and carrying on her own peculiar brand of the female liberation movement.
‘Female liberation wasn’t even a big thing when I began to write this book. They were thinking about it in the States but it hadn’t got here. It seems to me that the terms of their discourse are quite inappropriate. All those organisations who want to put women on the boards of every company like obligatory negroes, and who want to change the tax laws are getting it entirely wrong.
