I must have been fifteen when I started going up to Memphis to see the musicians who were inventing rock and roll. It wasn’t long after that I became one of those kids that had to stay out all night, who just couldn’t go home. One night I managed to sneak into the Delta Supper Club in West Helena, which was the local watering hole where everyone played. You could see Conway there, or Sonny Burgess and the Pacers. The ceiling was a little low, but it wasn’t too bad a place to play. It had a stage like a little band shell, and Mutt Cagle always insisted it had the best dance floor in the South. Air conditioning was a No. 3 tub and a block of ice set in front of a big window fan. They’d set up a couple of those on a hot Saturday night, and people’d stand the sweltering heat for the high quality of the music and the good time that came with it.
The Delta Supper Club was one tough place. It had a big seam running down the middle of the bar where it had been glued back together after an ejected customer stormed back in with a chain saw and cut the bar in half. As rowdy as the place was, I’ve seen rowdier times playing fraternity parties in Oklahoma. You could still go in and out of the club without a fistfight, although if you wanted that kind of action someone would certainly accommodate you. It had a good jukebox and was just a regular dance-hall kind of bar, a bottle bar like all the bars in the South. You bring your bottle, and they provide the ice, glasses, and food.
One night I’m in there listening to Conway Twitty and the Rock Housers, who were the best band around. Oh boy, were they good. Conway was from Friars Point, Mississippi, but moved to Helena when he was about ten so his daddy could pilot Charlie Halbert’s ferryboat. His first band was the Phillips County Ramblers, a country-style group, but that changed when Elvis’s “Mystery Train” inspired young Mr. Jenkins to begin writing rockabilly songs. He went up to Memphis and worked with some of the Sun musicians, like Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee, and often came through our area with a series of good bands.
So I’m in the Delta Supper Club, and Conway’s doing “Jenny, Jenny,” and the place is just going nuts. He had all the rockabilly moves—the stutter, the twitches, the strut—and the band, led by Jimmy Ray Paulman on guitar, provided a raw rockabilly jolt. The girls loved Conway’s big, heavy-lidded good looks and long hair that reminded ’em a little of Elvis. The dancers are jitterbugging and working up a sweat, and I take a swig of my beer and work up the courage to ask to sit in for a song, since Conway was known for giving the young ones a shot.
“Sure, son,” he said between sets, after I’d reminded him of the time my sister and I had opened for him on the porch of our little store in Midway. “Last song of the next set. Just come up and do whatever you want.” So I got up and probably did one of Sonny Boy Williamson’s things, and that might have been my debut as a singer in front of a band. I can’t tell you what a feeling it gave me to be up on that stage. I was in high cotton! After the show, I said, “Mr. Jenkins, thanks so much for the experience. Do you think I could come by and try another one some time?”
“Sure thing,” he said, “but we’re headed up to Canada tonight, and it’ll be a little while before we’re back.”
Canada?
“Ontario. They love rockbilly up there. Got a whole circuit; good bread to be made. You oughta come on up and see for yourself.”
I thought this was a great idea, but J.D. and Nell had already told me in no uncertain terms that I had to finish high school before they’d cut me loose to play music. After that I sat in with the Rock Housers whenever they’d let me, although I was happy just to be there, observe, and be amazed by the pure power they were putting out.
In September 1957 Governor Orval Faubus tried to stop the integration of Central High in Little Rock. This caused a big scene, as President Dwight Eisenhower sent in federal troops and Faubus was branded an arch-segregationist. We knew it wasn’t true. He’d been a progressive governor, but it would have destroyed his career in Arkansas politics if he’d been branded pro-integration. The way it happened, the Arkansas schools integrated pretty quietly after my senior year in high school, and Governor Faubus won four more terms, which was just fine with us. Orval dragged Arkansas into the twentieth century by the scruff of its rough red neck.
One night that fall I was in a bottle club in Forrest City, Arkansas, with a half-pint of Ancient Age bourbon in my back pocket. Guitarist Jimmy Ray Paulman’s brother George was playing bass with a bunch of ol’ boys from West Memphis. I don’t remember how it happened—I think the drummer was either drunk or didn’t show up—and I volunteered to play the drums. It didn’t matter that I was a guitar player. I hit that Bo Diddley beat and watched it just jungle-up that dance. We had a lot of fun that night, and I thought that maybe I ought to start playing drums.
Meanwhile, Conway Twitty was about to lose Jimmy Ray Paulman to a young rocker from Fayetteville in northwest Arkansas: Ronnie Hawkins.
The Hawk was born in 1935. His dad was a barber and his mother taught school, and by the time he was twenty-two Ronnie had already enjoyed a checkered career. As a teenager he had run bootleg whiskey from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma in a souped-up Model A Ford. Sometimes he’d make three hundred dollars a day. By the time he was eighteen he’d invested some of his profits in part-ownerships of various bars and clubs in Fayetteville. There he attended the University of Arkansas, which generated turn-away crowds every weekend.
Ronnie never learned to play an instrument, but soon he was entertaining in his clubs by opening for the bands that came through, like Sonny Burgess’s band or Harold Jenkins’s Rock Housers. The Hawk was famous for his camel walk, a funny dance step he’d learned from a black musician named Half Pint, who shined shoes in his dad’s barbershop. It was like Chuck Berry’s duck walk; you looked like you were standing still, but you were moving. Older people who had seen vaudeville shows knew it as the camel walk. Soon Ronnie was forming his own bands, usually known as the Hawks. While in the army, he had an all-black backup band called the Blackhawks. Things being the way they were in the South then, Ronnie soon discovered that an integrated band was more trouble than it was worth.
When he got out of the service, the rock and roll craze was exploding. Chuck Berry was the king of R&B, and Bill Doggett’s 1956 hit “Honky Tonk” was just the kind of music that interested the Hawk. Ronnie packed a pair of jeans and his record-hop suit into his army duffel, checked his spit-curl hairdo in the mirror, and lit out for Memphis to become a rock and roll star.
I was still in high school at this point. I had the Jungle Bush Beaters with Thurlow to keep me busy on weekends when we weren’t farming. I also played drums with the twenty-five-piece Marvell High Band (until summarily relieved of duty for continually playing in double time). I also helped stage a senior-class musical that people enjoyed so much we took it around to other high schools, split the money with ’em, and put our share in the senior class trip fund. I was dreaming of being a rock and roll star too, making it my business to check out every good band that came our way, like Roy Orbison’s Teen Kings from Texas, who played the Malco Theater on Cherry Street in Helena one night to promote Roy’s first big hit, “Ooby Dooby.” I loved that band because it was a country-R&R hybrid: electric mandolin, drums, doghouse bass, Roy playing electric guitar and another Martin flatpicker. They made a country sound, with a lot of good bottom to it. I saw that band and wanted to be up there with it.
In 1957 some musicians in Memphis offered Ronnie a hundred dollars a week to front their band. The guitar player was Jimmy Ray “Luke” Paulman, who had met Ronnie when Conway’s band played up in Fayetteville, and Luke had sat in with the Hawk’s band. Ronnie told everyone in Fayetteville that he was leaving to be a rock and roll star, and next time they saw him it would be on prime-time TV. When he arrived in Memphis the group had already broken up over who would run the band for ten dollars extra per night! Ronnie Hawkins found himself stuck; his pride dictated he couldn’t return to Fayetteville until he had a band that could outdraw every other group around.
So Luke invited the Hawk down to Phillips County to try something else. Hawk and his friend Donny Stone came down to West Helena with Luke and moved into Charlie Halbert’s Rainbow Inn Motel. Charlie owned the local ferry and was one of our most important music promoters. He loved musicians and enjoyed helping them out, including Elvis, Conway, and me.
Anyway, Ronnie Hawkins began to put together a band with Luke on guitar, George Paulman on bass, and their cousin Willard “Pop” Jones from Marianna on kamikaze rockabilly piano. Charlie called a friend at KFFA, who let Ronnie and the boys rehearse in the station’s basement, where Sonny Boy Williamson kept his amps and gear.
Now they needed a drummer, but all the drummers around our area were already working. George Paulman told them about a seventeen-year-old high-school kid from Marvell who’d sat in with him and a bunch up in Forrest City. That evening I was just coming in from doing some chores when I noticed a Model A Ford moving fast up our road, leaving a tornado of yellow dust in its wake. The car backfired once or twice as it pulled into our yard. Out stepped Luke and a big ol’ boy in tight pants, sharp shoes, and a pompadour hanging down his forehead.
“I like that hairdo,” I told him.
“Why, thanks, son,” the Hawk rasped in his nasal Ozark twang. “I call it the Big Dick Look.”
I took the boys up into the house to meet the family. Hawk got right to the point. “Lavon, we’re startin’ a band, and there aren’t any drummers around. They tell me you’re a good guitar player and you play a little drums too. Do you wanna join the band?”
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. “Yes sir!” I said. “I am ready. Let’s go. Just say when. Where do we start?”
Then reality hit me. “Do you know where we can get a set of drums?” I asked the two musicians.
At the kitchen table, my dad cleared his throat. Momma didn’t look too thrilled. The Hawk sought to reassure them. “Mr. Helm, sir, we got it all planned out. We can play clubs around here and then go up to Canada. Conway—uh, Harold Jenkins—knows a guy up there that can keep us working half the year. Luke here goes up there with Conway all the time, ain’t that right, Luke?”
Jimmy Ray nodded. He was kind of quiet.
“Mr. Helm,” the Hawk continued, “Conway’s making good bread in Canada. Real good bread, and he says there ain’t no reason not to go. He says they’re starving for a good band up there.”
Diamond hemmed and hawed a little. “Canadia,” he said. That’s what he called it. “You ever been up to Canadia, Mr. Hawkins? It’s cold all the time. They’ve got ten months of winter up there, and two months of bad sledding. Canadia—I don’t know …”
The three of us and my brother, Wheeler, worked on my folks for a couple of hours. I think we had my daddy convinced at one point, but Momma wore us all down in the end. We reached an agreement that while I was still in school I could play with the band locally on weekends. Then when I graduated in May, they’d give me their blessing, and I was free to go up to Canada.
Well, we got some drums—I think I borrowed a set from Bubba Stewart in Marvell—and rehearsed for months until I got out of high school. We booked our first gig on a Friday night at the Rebel Club in Osceola. “It’s a rough place, son,” the older and wiser Hawk advised me on the way over. “In fact, you have to puke twice and show your razor just to get in.” I must have gulped. The Hawk spat out the car window and reminded me that if anyone asked, I was twenty-one, not seventeen. “Better grow some whiskers if you wanna go to Canada,” he’d say. “I don’t know how the hell I’m gonna get you into those clubs up there if you keep looking like a damn choirboy.”
That first gig was great. Ronnie Hawkins could really work a crowd on a Friday night. I mean, he had ’em where he wanted ’em. He was big, good-looking, funny, and had a good voice. He was an entertainer rather than a musician. He had an instinct for crowd psychology and could start a rumble across the room if he wanted to just by flicking his wrist. It was this power he had over people. We’d hit that Bo Diddley beat, Hawk would come to the front of the stage and do his kick, that camel walk, and the thing would just take off. Ronnie had been a professional diver as a teenager, so he could execute a front flip into a split that would astonish you. Then he’d dance over and pretend to wind up Will Pop Jones, a big, strong kid who hit those piano keys so hard they’d break. God, that rhythm was awesome! I didn’t really know what I was doing on the drums, so I just kept time. People danced, so I figured everything was on target. After the show Ronnie gave me fifteen bucks, and I was in heaven.
“Stick with me, son,” he advised, “’cause this is just hamburger money. Soon we’ll be fartin’ through silk!”
Things continued like this during my senior year. I went to school during the week and ran off with Ronnie for the weekends. Toward spring, when our house was surrounded by high water and we had to come out by boat, Hawk would drive over Thursday night if it looked rainy. I’d pack some clothes and a suit and stay at Charlie Halbert’s so I wouldn’t miss the show. Sometimes we opened for established musicians like Narvel Felts or Carl Perkins, who was the king of our circuit. Carl had a left-handed, right-footed drummer, W. S. Holland, who I watched and learned from whenever I got the chance.
Our band got better every time we played, and soon I got up the nerve to do a couple of songs myself. Ronnie’d hold the mike up to my mouth while I kept time and shouted out the words to “Short Fat Fannie” or “Caledonia.” I’d been teaching myself to drum by playing along to old Sonny Boy Williamson records and soon realized my primitive gear was holding me back. The old snare I was using had calfskin on it and was a bit ragged; after each set I put it in the oven to tighten it up again. What I needed were new drums.
We also needed to join the musicians union, Charlie Halbert told us, if we wanted to play the Delta Supper Club, the Silver Moon, or Pop Warner’s club up in the Missouri bootheel. So one day in early 1958 Charlie, Hawk, and I drove up to Memphis in Charlie’s Lincoln. I was at the wheel, as usual. We pulled up to the union hall, Memphis Local 71, and I got out. Ronnie stayed in the car.
“Ain’t you coming?” I asked him.
“Naw,” Hawk said. “I can’t play anything. What do I want to join the union for?”
I didn’t argue with him. I went in, signed up (Charlie loaned me the first year’s dues), and for the next six years all the Hawk’s professional gigs were booked under my name.
Charlie Halbert, bless him, then took us over to the Hauch Music Company and put a down payment on a brand-new set of red-sparkle Gretsch drums for me. We may have also ordered our red lamé band suits on this trip. Charlie was our guardian angel. As we sped out of Memphis that evening, he fell asleep in the seat beside me. To reward his kindness, I pretended to stall out his Lincoln on the train tracks at a crossing in West Memphis and woke Charlie just as a freight rounded the bend, heading straight for us.
Meanwhile, my academic career was winding down fast. Fireball and I disgraced ourselves on the senior class trip to Washington in the spring of 1958. First we all went up to Memphis and boarded our own train car, which we rode all night to DC. We got into a nasty poker game with some Oklahoma kids, harassed any poor soul that tried to get some sleep, teased the homesick little farm girls until they cried, then snuck off and got lost in Washington and raised some more hell on the way home—enough so that ours was the last senior class to make that trip. There are still people in Marvell who blame me and Fireball for ending that tradition.
Yet when we finally graduated, I had somehow fooled enough of my classmates to be voted Most Talented, Friendliest, Best Dancer, and Wittiest in our class. At our senior prom, the song we played over and over would soon be the No. 1 record in the country: Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe.” Harold Jenkins had been biding his time for years, and it finally paid off for him.
We left for Canada when school let out in May. My dad was all for it—he was impressed by the good money we were making on the weekends—and Momma gave me her blessing as well. I was a fairly independent kid, and I was lucky she let me just be that way. I remember watching her waving good-bye in the rearview mirror as I drove the Hawk’s car down our country road, away from the life I’d known in Turkey Scratch, toward a whole new world a thousand miles north.
There were only four of us going to Canada: Hawk, me, Luke, and Will Pop Jones. Hawk thought that George Paulman was too “rural” to be in the band, meaning that George would just as soon fight the customers as play for ’em. We hadn’t hired his replacement yet, so we drove away as the Ron Hawkins Quartet in a ’55 Chevy sedan that the Hawk borrowed from his sister Winifred for the trip north.
The Hawk always let me drive, but he was funny about his cars. Ronnie wanted those Cadillacs driven a certain way and parked right, with the brake locked so the weight of the car was off the transmission. I’d been driving a tractor for nine years, so it was the most natural thing in the world for me to pull in with the tractor, stop, lock the brake, drop the plow to the ground, kill the engine, and gas it up before any condensation had a chance to form in the tank. Those simple tractor-driving rules suited the Hawk just right. He didn’t even like the other boys to drive. “Dammit, son!” he’d swear at Luke. “You gotta lock that brake, give the tranny a little rest!”
From the beginning, I was the Hawk’s right-hand man. To this day he’s a good friend and a great leader, with an uncanny ability to pick the best musicians and build them into first-rate bands. He was immediately likable, trustworthy, and just naturally an entertainer; one of the funniest guys I ever met. The Hawk had been to college and could quote Shakespeare when he was in the mood. He was also the most vulgar and outrageous rockabilly character I’ve ever met in my life. He’d say and do anything to shock you. Meeting a woman for the first time, he might drop to his knees and pretend to eat her. She had to either laugh or run away. I’d grown up on crude country jokes, but Hawk’s sense of humor was unbelievable.
“See here, son,” he said deadpan as we headed out of Illinois. “You ever fuck a goat?”
“Uh, no, Hawk—not yet.”
“Well, I have—good pussy, too. Only problem is you have to stop and walk around to the front when you want to kiss ’em.”
Rockabilly humor. Luke winked at me. Later we were talking about going down on girls, and Hawk told us he kissed ’em down to the belly button and then developed amnesia.
None of knew what to expect from Canada. My dad had told me the Eskimos were violent and would kill us if they had the chance. We thought we were going to igloos and dogsleds. We were just country boys, but the Hawk had gone through the university and even he didn’t know what to expect. “Canada,” Ronnie assured us, “is as cold as an accountant’s heart.” Instead we found ourselves driving through southern Ontario in the summertime, a lush, green landscape of farms and lakes, prosperous towns, and above all else Toronto, the cultural capital of Canada and our future home base.
Our Canada connection was Harold Kudlets, a booking agent in Hamilton, Ontario. Soon we started to call him “Colonel” Kudlets; the Hawk insisted that if Elvis could have a colonel, he could damn well have a colonel too! Harold was a colorful guy who’d started in the big-band era, but now he had a system going: He booked bands from the South through Conway Twitty to play a circuit in Ontario, Quebec, and U.S.-Ontario border towns like Buffalo, Detroit, and Cleveland. He also turned it around: If he found a good band from Toronto or Buffalo, he’d book them into our Missouri-Arkansas-Louisiana-Oklahoma circuit. The Colonel basically ran a transnational rockabilly interchange. The same type of music was popular in both areas in the late fifties, and we were the beneficiaries.
We went over to the Colonel’s office. He took one look at me and blanched. “Tell me, sir,” he asked. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen, sir.”
“Well, you look about twelve years old to me. Don’t you boys know you have to be twenty-one just to be in the places we’re booking you into?”
The Hawk explained that in Arkansas I’d gotten by wearing dark glasses to make me look older. The Colonel looked dubious. We survived our initial jobs by sneaking me into the taverns, hiding me in the kitchen between sets in case the police came by (as they often did), then sneaking me out when the band was finished for the night.
The first place we played was the Golden Rail Tavern in Hamilton. We rehearsed all afternoon, speeding through our material, with the Hawk as wild as an ape. When the bartenders saw what Ronnie was up to and heard our music—Bo Diddley in overdrive—they all threatened to quit. Opening night looked like a disaster: People were lining up to get out. But eventually word got out that rock and roll had really hit town and that this band was hopped up! We played “Ooby Dooby,” “Hey! Bo Diddley,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” and some Chuck Berry as loud and fast as we could. The Hawk really worked that crowd, dancing and doing that camel walk. They loved our speed and power, and our red suits with the black satin lapels. The Ron Hawkins Quartet was an immediate hit. The bartenders stopped complaining when they saw how much business we brought in. We were even held over for a week. The next gig was at the Brass Rail in London, Ontario, where we were held over for three weeks.
Finally we played the Le Coq D’Or on Yonge Street in Toronto’s honky-tonk downtown entertainment district. This was the big time in Canada, and they loved it. The Le Coq D’Or was soon jammed with every “rounder” in Toronto. From the beginning, the Hawk attracted a rough crowd: racket guys, pool hustlers, off-duty cops, tobacco farmers, gamblers, hookers, and their pimps. Ronnie used to yell, “It’s racket time!” to start the show. It was our good luck that our music attracted these people, since they befriended and helped us in many ways, many times over the years.
Our recording career also began during that first visit to Toronto. An A&R (artists and repertory) guy named Dan Bass from Quality Records came to the Le Coq D’Or and liked our version of “Hey! Bo Diddley,” which Mr. Diddley himself had recorded in Chicago for Chess Records the year before. Soon we found ourselves in a little studio on Kingston Road. There we cut a primitive “Hey! Bo Diddley,” which later in 1958 was released as a single (both 45 and 78 rpm discs) in a pressing of maybe five hundred copies. It didn’t go anywhere because we didn’t have a record deal yet.
We said good-bye to Canada after maybe three months. We were all homesick, and anyway Hawk’s friend Dayton Stratton had booked us into the southern circuit of taverns, dance halls, roadhouses, and frat parties. This would help sustain us as we shed layers of skin, eventually emerging as Romping Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, then as Levon and the Hawks, then just the Hawks.
But when we got back down south, we almost immediately got homesick for Canada again. A lot of the honky-tonks we played at home were run by gangsters. They weren’t supposed to have liquor licenses, so these places were under someone else’s name. It was often hard to get paid after a night’s work. Times were rough, and money was so scarce we had to carry what the Hawk called an Arkansas credit card: a siphon, a length of rubber hose, and a five-gallon can. The only way we could get from one date to the next was by siphoning off our customers’ gasoline while they were still inside drinking. The Hawk told people he was the only rock and roll singer to perform every night with chafed lips from sucking gas.
The Hawk also liked to carry “the difference” in the glove compartment. We almost never took it out. But it was a rough circuit, as I said. Some of those places we had to play our way in and fight our way out. There were a number of times things got out of hand. The Hawk had to tag a couple of people. Ronnie was fearless and didn’t mind tempting fate, and there were nights we were amazed to be alive. One time some guy in Alabama got too close down front, and he and the Hawk made a negative connection. The Hawk always felt it was his microphone and his stage. The next thing we knew, he’d dived into the crowd after this guy. We all jumped in after him. Well, there was a brawl, but it didn’t last long because Willard grabbed this one guy and smashed him against the wall. Then we jumped back onstage and started to play “Who Do You Love” again. This kind of thing went on until we became familiar on the circuit. It was like leaving County Line School for Marvell. We were uptight for a couple of months until we fought our way into the system.
After a few weeks, we were happy to go back to Canada. There the circuit was tough but less violent. The places we played in Ontario were mixed-drink clubs. The hours were better, we played fewer sets a night, and last call was at midnight rather than whenever they shut down for the night like at home. The best part was that a Canadian tavern booking might last as long as a month. You could make friends and have some fun instead of living on the highway.
So as soon as he could, the Hawk put a down payment on a pink and white ’57 Cadillac four-door Sedan deVille and bought some new equipment and a teardrop-shaped trailer to haul it. We painted a hawk on the side of the trailer and lit out for Canada again with Jimmy “Lefty” Evans to play electric bass. Lefty was a real pro; he’d played with all the Memphis boys, including Conway and Billy Riley, and was doing sessions when he decided to come on the road with us. Ronnie gave me a couple of greenies to stay awake, and we made it from West Helena to Toronto in under twenty-four hours. It was a fast life, and we had a policy of going with speed. When we had a destination, we didn’t just idle around. We drove fast. We were a blur.
We were thrilled to be back in Toronto. I remember thinking it was the best place for live music I’d ever seen, outside of Memphis. We realized that down south we were just one of several good bands playing a rockabilly style that was already becoming dated. But in Canada we were unique and exotic, playing the most uninhibited, wildest rock and roll that hip Torontonians had ever heard. They loved the band and did everything they could to make us feel at home. We joined the shady clientele at the very down-market Warwick Hotel, not far from the Le Coq D’Or.
On a typical Friday night in late 1958 the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets became Canada’s equivalent of Times Square. Leather-jacketed hoods in greasy ducktail hairdos drag-raced down Yonge in their tail-finned Pontiacs. Garish neon signs advertised the bars and taverns, little boys with dirty faces charged a dime to shine your boots, and the local hookers, most of whom became our friends, waited for customers on street corners when the tough Toronto cops weren’t looking.
Ronnie Hawkins became the king of this scene almost immediately. He turned the upstairs room of the Le Coq D’Or into his private studio and “gymnasium.” He told people, “I got the only gym in the world where you come in feeling OK and leave a total physical wreck.” After the Le Coq D’Or closed at midnight, he’d move the band upstairs to rehearse all night. Soon invitations to these after-hours affairs were eagerly sought, since a few of them turned into legendary parties.
“Let’s not call them orgies,” the Hawk would say. “Let’s just say it was seven or eight people in love.”
Ronnie liked to tell people we had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend. I’d wink and tell them not to believe everything that came out of Ronnie’s mouth, but most people realized that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Anyway, the Hawk assiduously cultivated the worst reputation he could for us. He felt it was part of the promotion of the show.
We usually played from Thursday through Saturday nights. To pick up a little extra money, on Sundays we played out-of-town clubs like Pop Ivy’s down in Port Dover. One night at Krang’s Plaza, in the west end of Toronto, a little kid named Freddie McNulty came in and started to dance by himself. He was short, with curly red hair and a loony smile, and he loved the Hawks beyond all reason. He was a show all by himself, right down in front; one of the wildest rockabilly dancers you ever saw. Freddie could shake it down! He was a character, the first person who ever gave me five. He came across the stage, and I stuck out my hand. He said, “I dig ya style, man,” and whack! He didn’t play anything, but he had a genius for music, so we’d let him sit in on gigs and sneak him in with us when we went down to Port Dover on Sunday. Hell, they were still sneaking me in because I was underage. Freddie became our mascot. He followed us back to the hotel, got us coffee, went to the movies with us, whatever.
We’d brought our red band jackets with us up from Arkansas, but soon they began to disintegrate. We worked up a terrible sweat when we played, so our suits had to be dry-cleaned almost every day. Across from the Le Coq D’Or was a tailor, Lou Myles, who became the Hawks’ wardrobe coordinator. He made us a new set of black suits—pinched waists, skinny lapels, and pegged pants worn over pointy black boots—that we wore with fresh white shirts and narrow black ties. That was our look: cool, lean, and mean.
One night our agent, Harold Kudlets, came over to see our show at the Brass Rail. The Hawk was out for blood that night: We had popped some pills, and Ronnie was doing somersaults on the edge of the stage. The customers almost went berserk when he unchained Willard on Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and he started hitting those damn piano keys so hard the hammers started popping out of the old piano. When the Colonel saw the pandemonium we were generating, he called a New York agent who booked a circuit of nightclubs on the Jersey Shore. That’s how we got to Wildwood, New Jersey, in the spring of 1959.
The clubs on the Shore drew rock and roll fans from New York and Philadelphia. Soon we were doing turn-away business, drawing almost as well as some of the biggest acts in those days, including Sammy Davis, Jr., Teresa Brewer, and Frankie Laine. That got the talent agents all stirred up, and soon we were being courted by New York record companies who saw Ronnie as the Next Big Thing. After all, that year there was a huge void in rock and roll: Elvis was in the army, Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee was in disgrace for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, Little Richard had joined the ministry, Conway had gone country, and Buddy Holly was dead. Some people were saying that rock and roll was dying, but that Ronnie Hawkins might be able to save the patient.
Mitch (Sing Along With Mitch) Miller over at Columbia Records wanted to sign us real bad, but Ronnie was more interested in an agent that had been sent to see us by Morris Levy, the head of Roulette Records. We went into Manhattan to see Mr. Levy at Roulette’s office on West Fiftieth Street. As we were going up the elevator the Hawk leaned over and whispered to me, “Be polite to Mr. Levy, son. He’s Mafia up to his eyeballs.”
Morris was one tough cat, and he practically owned Broadway back then. He knew all the big boys, and nobody messed with him. He’d come up owning famous New York jazz clubs like the Royal Roost and Birdland, and started Roulette in 1956 in partnership with deejay Alan Freed, who had moved his famous Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll Party show from Cleveland to New York’s WINS two years earlier and changed its name to Alan Freed’s Rock & Roll Party. The Hawk explained that Freed was no longer part of Roulette, but that Morris owned the disc jockey, who liked to gamble and accepted cash—hundred-dollar bills in a brown bag—in exchange for playing songs on his show. In 1957 Variety, the show-business paper, called Morris the “octopus” of the music industry, so far-reaching were his tentacles. His acts on Roulette and about five other labels eventually included Count Basie, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Harptones, the Crows, and Buddy Knox, whose “Party Doll” had been Roulette’s first single. With Alan Freed’s help it went to No. 1 in five weeks.
“We can’t miss with these cats behind us,” the Hawk said.
In addition to his labels, clubs, and restaurants, Morris was also a major song publisher and a partner with Freed in his successful rock and roll stage shows at the Brooklyn Paramount and Fox theaters. (Many years later, after Morris was said to be worth $75 million, he would be referred to as the “Godfather” of the American music business.)
Whatever his reputation, Morris treated us like royalty. He took us to his new restaurant, the Round Table, a classy steakhouse on Fiftieth Street, where he introduced us to Frankie Carbo, the so-called underworld commissioner of boxing in New York. That was the first time I ever ate one of those big New York-cut steaks, bacon wrapped around it, twice-baked potatoes, all the trimmings. Morris told us he wanted us for Roulette, spent a lot of money wining and dining us, and convinced the Hawk. We signed to Roulette in April 1959 and began to record almost immediately.
On April 13 we cut a version of “Ruby Baby” and “Forty Days” at Bell Sound, produced by veteran A&R man Joe Reisman on a two-track tape recorder. What a feeling of joy that was! I’d seen KFFA’s studio back in Helena with Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys, but this was Bell Sound! All of a sudden there we were. “Forty Days” was Ronnie’s rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and boy, we took it fast. You can pick up a smidgen of what that band was all about when Willard speeds through the piano solo and lifts the song right off the ground. Roulette released this as a single in May, Morris Levy put his big guns behind it, and it spent eight weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, eventually reaching No. 45. At the end of April we were back in New York recording eight tracks, including “Red Hot,” “Wild Little Willie,” and “Odessa,” Hawk’s tribute to a famous black madam whose house on Yazoo Street in Helena was well known to us. The first time he took me to visit her he said, “Son, I’ve been coming to see Odessa since the Dead Sea was merely sick!” Ronnie liked to maintain that he knew every hooker between Helena and Toronto.
We also cut our next single, “Mary Lou,” which had been written and cut by Young Jessie Obie in 1955. Hawk learned the song from Roy Orbison, and our version was a hit, reaching No. 26 during the wonderful, hot summer of 1959.
We just about lived in the Cadillac that summer. During one of our breaks we went back to Arkansas, and Ronnie picked up a new white ’59 Sedan deVille and got a trailer to match. While we were checking on the Hawk’s business interests in Fayetteville (he owned the Rockwood Club with Dayton Stratton), we went to the local car dealer. Ronnie signed for me—I was barely nineteen—and I drove a new Cadillac of my own out of there. Now we had a little fleet.
We started pushing our records right after we recorded “Forty Days.” The hottest TV program on the air back then was The Steve Allen Show, and of course Morris Levy got us an audition. By then all the rockers had been on TV, so it wasn’t any big deal, but for us this was the big time, and we were all a little nervous as we rode up in the elevator to audition for Steve. It was the Hawk, me, Lefty, Luke, and Willard. Luke and Lefty had their amps, I lugged the bass drum and the tom-tom, and Colonel Kudlets carried my sock cymbal. We got off the elevator, clattering and banging, and found ourselves in the rehearsal hall. Everyone turned and looked at us like we’d just come from Mars. Dayton Allen and Tom Poston were up on the podium, reading from a script, and everybody was laughing. Steve Allen and his wife, Jayne Meadows, sat on folding chairs, talking to the producer and director, and I don’t think they noticed us at first.
We waited in the hallway until the cast finished rehearsal, then suddenly we got a green light. Everyone watched as the Hawk announced, “Folks, this is the one that took us from the hills and the stills and put us on the pills!” We started playing “Forty Days,” but a little too fast. Actually, it might’ve been a lot too fast. I guess we were scared, because we came out of that gate like fuel dragsters. There was no turning back, so we kicked it into high gear: the Hawk doing backflips; Willard playing flat on his back, his clothes popping open; Luke on his knees; and Lefty running straight at him with his bass. Shit! I thought everyone had gone crazy. All activity in the studio stopped. They stared at us in shock, like they’d never even seen monkeys act like this. We’d put a fiddle pickup in the studio piano, which made it sound ten times louder than an ordinary piano. It didn’t sound electric, just loud. Steve Allen was a musician, a big-time composer and piano player. He watched aghast as Willard banged those keys and the hammers started flying out of the piano like it was a popcorn machine.
Somehow we crashed to a finish. An assistant murmured they’d call us, but of course they never did.
Next we went down to Philadelphia to do American Bandstand, which Dick Clark broadcast over the ABC network. This was the MTV of the fifties: Every weekday across the country millions of kids tuned in to watch Dick’s teenage dancers do the latest steps and to catch the newest acts. Since they figured we were from the country, the set was dressed like a western saloon. They also put garters on our sleeves, gave us cowboy hats, and plastered us with makeup. What the hell, we were gonna be on TV, that’s all we knew. (The other act on the show besides us was actor Chuck Connors, star of TV’s The Rifleman. Dick and his kids thought they’d seen it all by then—Jackie Wilson, James Brown—but they appeared stunned when Ronnie began to do double backflips as we lip-synched our way through “Mary Lou” and “Forty Days.” Lip-synching had tamed a lot of acts on Bandstand, but it didn’t stop the Hawk. He went wild anyway, and “Mary Lou” went on to sell 750,000 records.
We were back in New York in September 1959 to appear on Alan Freed’s huge Labor Day show at the Brooklyn Fox. We did two or three shows a day, and there were so many stars I hung out in the wings watching between sets. Jackie Wilson headlined with his latest release, “You Better Know It.” Jimmy Clanton did “My Own True Love.” Several up-and-coming acts were on the bill: Dion and the Belmonts, the Skyliners, the Crests, the Mystics. Fifteen-year-old Johnny Restivo did his hit, “The Shape I’m In.” The Tempos, from Pittsburgh, did their huge hit of that summer, “See You in September,” after which Bo Diddley, a Freed road-show regular since 1955, came out and killed everyone with “Crackin’ Up” and “Say Man.”
Bo Diddley’s band had only three pieces: Clifton James on drums, Jerome on maracas (“Bring it on home, bring it to Jerome”), and Bo on guitar. Without a piano, Bo tuned his guitar by ear, which always gave problems to bandleader Sam “The Man” Taylor. (Mr. Taylor took Lloyd Price’s band and augmented it with his own, going up to thirty instruments sometimes. This was the first time I ever saw two drummers on a stage, sitting side by side. Lloyd’s man played his snare drum turned on a sharp angle between his legs and swung his sticks like hammers, mallet style. Sam’s drummer played in standard cross-sticking style. Spider, the bass player, played a stand-up bass right at the drummers’ shoulders. When the three of them bore down, it didn’t swing, it swung.) While Bo Diddley and the band were working the house, Sam searched for the key they were in. When he found it, he’d adjust the mouthpiece of his saxophone to sharp or flat to allow for Bo’s “by ear” tuning. Then he signaled the band, holding up two fingers and one across in the shape of an A, then gave a thumbs-up to tell them it was on the sharp side. Now they were ready for the big final chord. On Bo’s last chop t’chop chop, the whole outfit meshed with Bo’s band, and the drummers roughed it up and crashed out on Clifton’s downstroke. It was a lot of power, a big chord blasted out by everybody, and it made my hair stand up. (One night I overheard one of the horn players tell his buddy, “You never know what key lurks in the heart of Bo Diddley.”)
That show was an education. We did our songs and watched the kids go nuts as Ronnie camel-walked and did his backflips. Afterward, on the way back to Canada, we realized we were the only rockabilly-style act in the show. Dion had drawn the biggest response. The writing was on the wall, and we read it. The music we were playing was on its way out.
That September our third single, “Wild Little Willie,” was released, and Morris Levy sent the band off to do promotional tours, playing record hops. We’d go to Detroit or Cleveland and pile into a station wagon with an electric piano, a set of drums, and a couple of amps. There’d be five hundred kids dancing in a high-school gym, where we’d set up and play three or four quick songs. Then we’d throw all the stuff back into the car, and dash off to another record hop on the other side of town. Sometimes we did several of these a day. This was how you promoted yourself back then, but after a while it stopped being exciting to the Hawk or any of us, especially since we weren’t paid for these dates. (After one of these shows, the local promo man suggested we go out for a pizza pie. “Hey, Levon,” whispered Willard in the backseat, “what the fuck is a pizza pie?”
“Shut up, Willard,” I hissed. “D’you want him to think we’re a bunch of hicks?” But that was indeed when we Arkansas boys had our first pizza.)
Right there was when things began to change. Luke, our guitar player, had a wife in Arkansas who wanted him home, and he started to talk about leaving the band. But we kept pushing all that autumn. We ran back to Toronto to play the Friar’s Tavern, then down home for a swing through Fayetteville, a couple of frat parties at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, then over to Little Rock to play the Club 70 and a dance at the National Guard Armory, where things could (and often did) get out of hand. In mid-September we were back on the Jersey Shore around the time Roulette released our first album, Ronnie Hawkins. On September 16 the Hawks, without Ronnie, were booked into Bell Sound in Manhattan to record a couple of instrumentals under our new producer, Mr. Henry Glover.
Henry was an old-time record man and an Arkansawyer to boot. He had helped Syd Nathan build Cincinnati’s King Records into America’s first major independent label, becoming the first black record executive while producing early sessions by James Brown, Little Willie John, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Lulu Reed, and the Delmore Brothers. Henry wrote songs as well: “Honky Tonk,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and later “California Sun” and “Peppermint Twist,” after he’d cut Hank Ballard’s original Twist dance records.
Something clicked between Henry and me. I tried to put myself under the wing of this A&R genius (he’d talked Little Willie John into cutting “Fever”), and for the next twenty-five years we would depend on his counsel and advice.
So we were at this session alone, working on tracks without vocals. After we’d cut a couple of instrumentals on his new four-track machine, Henry came into the studio and said, “Lavon, you know you’ve got a hell of a band here. If you boys ever decide you want to do something by yourselves, I hope you’ll come talk to me about it first.”
This meant the world to me at the time, because Henry wasn’t just a rock and roll maven. Since coming to New York to work with Morris Levy at Roulette, he’d been involved with jazz artists like Sonny Stitt, Lockjaw Davis, Sarah Vaughan, and especially Dinah Washington. Henry knew good music when he heard it, and if a veteran music man like him thought we could cut it on our own, well, maybe we could someday—if the need arose.
We were back in Wildwood, New Jersey, that weekend when something funny happened. Playing nearby was Ronnie’s cousin Dale Hawkins, best known for the 1957 hit “Suzie-Q.” Dale’s band had an incredible guitar player from Louisiana, Fred Carter, Jr., who played as well as Luke and maybe even a little better. Well, Ronnie and Dale had a little reunion—“Shor good to see ya agin, cousin; how many years has it been anyway?”—but as soon as Dale left the room, Ronnie tried to hire Fred Carter, Jr.! “How much ya makin’ with Dale, son?” he asked. Ronnie knew Luke’s days in the Hawks were numbered, so he offered Fred more money, and besides, Ronnie had a couple of hit records. Dale wasn’t too pleased, but Fred showed up in Canada shortly afterward. For a while, before Luke went home for good, we had a two-guitar attack that I thought was incredible. Where Luke played classic rockabilly style, Fred had developed a plectrum/finger-picking technique that became known as the Louisiana funk sound. Check out “Suzie-Q” to see what I mean. It wasn’t easy to hire Fred, though. We might have had to pay him $150 a week.
We spent most of October 1959 in Toronto, playing the Le Coq D’Or and the Concord Tavern and working out songs for Ronnie’s next album, which we would cut later in the month back in New York.
This was when we began to notice a local kid hanging around our bandstand. He was young, maybe fifteen at the most. He’d do anything to make himself useful—haul amps, help set up, run for coffee—and after several weeks of seeing him every day, I noticed he usually had a guitar case with him. He didn’t cause any problems, so it was OK by me, I guess. His name?