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 thousand 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.”
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 Your 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 called 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:
“Where ya from?”
“Arkansas.”
“Sign here.”
“Hey, hand! Come on he’p me widdem leads heah. We gonna put a ring around this sucka. Hold this.”
Three of us deckhands had to hump this heavy pipe. The master welder would step up, tip his visor so as not to be blinded by the arc light, and zap those leads shut like a surgeon. Zzzt. Zzzt. Zzzzzzzt. He’d step back again, cool as the other side of the pillow. We’d be sweating like hogs.
We were on a lay barge, which sat next to an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico. It had sleeping quarters, a galley, and a big damn spool with a mile and a half of six-inch pipe coiled around it. We were laying pipe. They had a machine that dug a trench, the pipe would go in, and divers would go down and weld the pipe together. These guys mostly sat around and drank coffee, but when they had to go down one hundred fifty, two hundred feet, they’d get all pumped up preparing for the mission. We laid a quarter mile of pipe while I was on board. I think I went out twice, because they were pretty good to us. I had a couple of harmonicas, and Kirby was a good guitar player, so we played music for ’em, and they’d let us hide. Some of the guys on that crew: heavy. There were people who were hiding out. The foreman was a tough and funny fifty-year-old called Hobo. He’d been in the carnival business, working for some abusive drunk. One night in Texas he’d had enough, and drove the truck with the ferris wheel into Mexico and sold it to a scrap dealer. After that he got into the oil-rig business.
At night we played cards and listened to the radio. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” was a big hit, with Bob Dylan singing, “Everybody must get stoned!” It was real funny to hear it and wonder who was playing the drums and how was everyone getting along.
We went to town one time, and I kinda appointed myself foreman. I was the official driver. We went to a Supremes concert, then down to the French Quarter and got seriously drunk. I think we ended up at the St. Louis Hotel for two or three days. Then we were broke again and back on the rig.
It was a dangerous job. You could easily get killed out there. One time the night crew hadn’t tied down the boom of the crane, and the morning crane operator got up and said, “Hand! Get me a cup of coffee and some cake.”
“Sir!” I was in the kitchen, getting three pieces of cake, and I turned around and saw the hook of the crane swing around—the sea was rough that day—and catch that poor son of a bitch in the cab, without a safety helmet. It was awful. Then I started noticing the body bags hanging up on the wall. A helicopter came in and took him away. Someone said they’d have to put a steel plate in his head. I don’t know whether he made it or not.
One afternoon, maybe it was in September, the sea started to really pitch. Foreman said, “Helm! Pennick! Get in the crewboat and go out to Number Three”—he pointed to a distant oil rig you could barely see on the horizon—“and bring back them come-alongs and chains and all the bullshit they left out there.” We were not too thrilled about this, since it was a long-ass way, and it was starting to blow pretty good, with only about three hours to darkness.
Dolphins are just like dogs. They were in the water and on the water and having the best time of their lives swimming along with us. Over in the west the sky was black, and it was hurricane season; Kirby and I were exchanging nervous glances and smoking lots of Winstons. We got put on that rig, scambled around for those short pieces of chain and some adjustable wrenches, and it started to rain. The sea was raging. We saw the boat coming back, and we threw whatever tools we had on the deck and jumped in after it. “Is that it?” the crew chief yelled. “That’s it!”
Then we were in the thick of it. The sea was so bad we couldn’t reboard our barge. The pilot wanted us to jump between two heaving decks, and we passed on the opportunity. Instead we rode into the shipyard. That’s when I took my paycheck, a good paycheck, and decided that the Cotton Carnival was coming up, and if I left now and got home in time, the Cavette sisters might allow me to escort them to the festivities.
First I went up to Springdale to touch base and see my folks. I checked in with good friends like Paul Berry in Fayetteville, who told me that Bob Dylan had called a couple of times, trying to find out where I was. I borrowed some money from Paul—whom I’d known for years and whom all of us in the Hawks knew we could count on any time—and hopped another drive-away car to California and hung out with saxophonist Bobby Keyes for a while. I knew Leon Russell out there, and Johnnie Cale, Roger Tillotson, Jesse Ed Davis, and Jimmy Markham—all musicians from the Tulsa area.
Back in Arkansas I played some dances with the Cate Brothers, Earl and Ernie (identical twins) on guitar and keyboard. They had a good little band and were like family, we were so close. In fact, my sister Modena’s son, Terry Cagle, became their drummer after I went back to Memphis in the spring of 1967.
I’d heard vague stories that Bob Dylan’s world tour had been canceled because of a serious motorcycle accident the previous summer. The boys were in New York, trying to get something going. That was about all I knew. So I borrowed a room from Mary Cavette in Memphis, and studied the Memphis style—Booker T. and the MGs—and watched television for six months while I waited for Lady Luck to deal out her next hand of cards.
In my absence, the collaboration between Bob and Robbie Robertson got more intense. Dylan loved Robbie’s playing. “I call it the mathematical sound,” he told a journalist around that time. To another: “Robbie Robertson is the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound.”
They hired Bobby Gregg, the New York studio drummer who played on Highway 61 Revisited, to take my place and took it back on the road. They played California for most of December 1965, and everyone came to see them. In San Francisco the city’s poets turned out in force: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (in a Moroccan djellaba) Michael McClure. The music got pretty wild. Bob was running across the stage, playing toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose with Robbie, acting out those lyrics. As much as Robbie played, Garth’s organ added that orchestral atmosphere that took it to another level. Rick’s craftsmanship and dancing was a counterfoil to Bob on the other side of the stage. (“Rick Danko on bass looked like he could swing Coit Tower,” wrote Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day.) They were playing really loud, really on the edge. Garth has tapes from that era that make your hair stand up.
The band was put on retainer around then. In January 1966 they recorded three tracks with Bob in Nashville. The drummer was Sandy Konikoff, whom we knew from Stan Szelest’s band the Ravens. (The tracks included a version of “Visions of Johanna” and “She’s Your Lover Now.”) Three days later in New York they cut again without Garth. These were the early sessions for Bob’s new album, Blonde on Blonde. The band went on the road in February and March 1966 with Konikoff on drums. Audience reaction remained mixed. They were a hit in Memphis (the Arkansawyers who’d come up for the show knew damn well who was playing the guitar) and got booed in Philadelphia.
Bob and Robbie recorded further in Nashville that March. In April Albert Grossman took the whole thing to Australia with new drummer Mickey Jones, from a New York band called the First Edition. More booing. When they landed in Sydney on April 12, there was a riot at the airport, as hundreds of fans turned out to welcome Bob.
Robbie was very close to Bob in those days, and when he wasn’t with Bob he hung out with Albert Grossman. People noticed that Robbie began to change. Bill Avis remembers: “One night in Australia I saw Robbie looking at me funny. He said to me, ‘You never liked me as much as you liked Levon.’ I didn’t know what to say, because I always did like Robbie. It hurt me, him saying that, and I left the group after that tour was over in May. It looked like things were changing in a way I couldn’t get next to.”
After a twenty-seven-hour flight to Sweden, the tour picked up a film crew run by Don Pennebaker, who would film the European part of the tour for ABC television. At the end of April they played Stockholm, where they visited Hamlet’s castle and Richard Manuel tried to trade his leather jacket to a Swedish kid in exchange for his beautiful blond girlfriend.
The famous British leg of the tour began in Sheffield on April 30. Bob’s acoustic set now consisted of “She Belongs to Me,” “4th Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Standing ovations. Adulation. After an intermission, the curtain parted to reveal the band set up and waiting in front of a giant American flag, which Bob was carrying as a backdrop. This was also a provocation, because the Vietnam War was really heating up, and Bob’s Euro audiences expected the Prince of Protest to comment. Instead Bob played in front of the biggest American flag he could find.
The catcalls and booing began before the band roared into “Tell Me, Momma.” The set kept building: “I Don’t Believe You,” “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” the new “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The audience would erupt after each song, some shouting approval, others yelling “Traitor!” and “Bloody disgrace!” This could go on for minutes, during which Bob and Robbie would tune their guitars while waiting for the din to die down so they could play. (In Paris on May 24 Bob tuned for ninety minutes between songs trying to get his guitar and harmonica to sound right together before the band was allowed to resume the show.)
There were surreal press conferences in the major cities—Bob had pretty well joined our accelerated way of living by then—and newspapers in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool splashed pictures of Bob all over their front pages before the shows. Afterward the reviews wrote, “A pop group could produce better rubbish than that” and “He should have left the group in America.” In Edinburgh one disgruntled customer told the film crew that “Dylan wants shootin’.” In Leicester some hoodlums stormed the stage, attacked Bob, and pinned him down before the show could be stopped.
But there were also people who loved the mathematical sound. Local musicians turned out in force to greet the boys backstage. The Spencer Davis Group came by in Birmingham. The Beatles were in the audience during the final show of the tour, at London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 27, 1966. This was the show—taped by Columbia Records for a live album, never released, subsequently bootlegged—in which the audience frequently erupts in jeers and rhythmic clapping to show its displeasure with the band, the volume, and the electric Dylan in general. While Bob tuned up for the last song, some idiot in the top balcony yelled “Judas!” at the top of his lungs. Bob kept tuning. “I don’t believe you,” he said into the mike, as some people cheered. Robbie turned to the band to start the song. “You’re a liar,” Bob sneered. And as Garth raised the roof with that organ, Bob said, “You’re a fuckin’ liar,” to his tormentor as they blasted into “Like a Rolling Stone.” According to Rick, hundreds of people walked out.
The Beatles came backstage after the show to commiserate with the boys. John Lennon had been hanging out with Bob at the hotel, and George Harrison was earnestly telling Richard Manuel about meditation. The Beatles were upset by the walkouts and booing, and assured the boys they had been telling people to shut up during the raucous parts of the show. The Hawks were impressed by the contrast between themselves—street kids from the wrong side of the tracks—and the polished Beatles, who wore jackets and ties. Richard told me later that everyone appreciated the respect they received from being Bob’s band. It just took everyone to a different level.
Later that night, Bob told Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones that the Hawks were the greatest band in the world. What about us? Keith wanted to know. Bob told him that the Stones were the best philosophers, but that the Hawks were the best band.
Rick Danko explains what happened next:
“We came back from that English tour with Bob pretty fried, man. We were living in New York City, where we’d moved to after playing with Bob. Right after the tour Robbie and I split a two-bedroom suite at the Gramercy Arms Hotel. Then I met this chick named Robin, who was going to summer school, and we shared an apartment in a rent-controlled building on Gramercy Park. We had a great setup.
“The original plan was to rest for a couple of months and spend the rest of the year on the road. Then late in July Albert Grossman’s office called and said that Bobby had a motorcycle accident in Woodstock and hurt his neck, so the tour was canceled. So there we were. We didn’t know what to do. Bob broke some bones in his neck and was in total recuperation mode. We didn’t know where Levon was. We were road musicians without a road to go on. We still wanted to record, so we started looking for a place to rehearse some music.
“While I was still living in New York, I started working on a film being produced by Peter Yarrow [of Peter, Paul, and Mary] called You Are What You Eat. Bob was in Woodstock and let us know that one of his first projects when he recovered would be to resume filming the movie we’d been shooting in Europe. But that’s not how I got to Woodstock. I came up the first time with Richard Manuel as part of Tiny Tim’s band for Peter Yarrow’s film. It was February 1967. I remember we left the city at about three in the morning so we could film at sunrise. It’s about a hundred miles north of Manhattan, so it took us a couple of hours. We were outdoors filming from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, playing songs in different locations around Woodstock. Richard and I had never been to the Catskills before, and we couldn’t believe how beautiful it was, but we were frozen. We went over to Albert Grossman’s house and sat in front of a roaring fireplace with his wife, Sally. That day was my introduction to Woodstock. As things happened, Sally Grossman would play a key role in our career, and Woodstock would become our home.”
When the early English colonists arrived in New York in 1628, they found the Dutch already there, in New Amsterdam. So they sailed up the North River, as they called the Hudson (the Delaware was the South River), and built a stockade and called it Kingston. The resident Dutch settlers retreated up the valley of Esopus Creek and began to farm the Woodstock valley and the Bearsville flats. According to legend, the Esopus Indians didn’t camp in the area but used it for burying their chiefs, and even today the land has a charmed feel about it, protected by great Overlook Mountain and a long chain of only slightly less majestic hills: Indian Head, Ohayo, Mount Guardian, Tobias, Plattekill.
I’ve heard our local historians suggest that Woodstock’s tolerance of artists and show people dates at least to the 1870s, when theater and circus folk began to visit in the summer. Several important artists’ colonies were established after 1900 by wealthy New Yorkers seeking a rural alternative to the organized bohemianism of Greenwich Village. The rustic cabins of the Byrdcliffe Colony came first, built over seven old farmsteads under Mead’s Mountain and rented out to socially acceptable artists, followed by the Art Students League Summer School in 1906, which moved into the old livery stable. I’m told the young students, with their flowing hair, French berets, and prehippie lifestyle, really shook up the old Dutch Reformed town fathers back then. Painters, sculptors, writers, and composers bought old farmhouses and built cabins on Ohayo Mountain, in Bearsville and Wittenburg, in Hurley and Glenford. Mill Hill Road and Tinker Street in Woodstock sprouted art galleries and academies, which led to a group of artists known as the Woodstock School. By the twenties and thirties, theater people were coming for the summer and putting on plays, and Woodstock had become a full-blown summertime arts colony with a reputation for welcoming talented people who needed a quiet place to work or rest.
Peter Yarrow had spent summers in Woodstock since he was a boy. His mother had some land with a cabin on it, and Peter started bringing up his friends in the early sixties. He was and is a very generous guy. He took Bob Dylan up to Woodstock as early as 1962, and Bobby spent a lot of time up there in that house with his girlfriend, writing songs and playing chess down at the Woodstock Bakery. Milton Glaser, an artist and art director, took Albert Grossman to Woodstock, and Albert fell in love with the place. He bought an old stone house in Bearsville and gave Bob Dylan a private room in back with its own entrance. Immediately, Albert and Sally’s became the headquarters of an ever-expanding scene. Albert built a studio complex and a little empire that lasts to this day. This is where Bob met his wife Sara. They got married and moved to an old house in Byrdcliffe in 1965. Their neighbors included composer Aaron Copland and Mason Hoffenberg, best known as the coauthor of the comic-porn novel Candy.
After Dylan’s motorcycle accident, he teamed up with two filmmakers, Jones and Howard Alk, and began to edit the movie they’d shot in England. Albert Grossman suggested to the band that since they were on retainer, they might as well move up to the country to be closer to Bob, who was getting ready to cut another album. That’s how they came to rent the house off Pine Lane in West Saugerties known as ... Big Pink. “Before we left New York,” says Rick Danko, “we went into the studio with John Court, who was Albert Grossman’s business partner. The company was called Groscourt Productions. They had this singer, Carly Simon, who they wanted to make into the female Bob Dylan. We cut a couple of things with Carly, like ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,’ but nothing came of it.
“Next thing you know, we trickle up to the country and land at the Woodstock Motel right in the middle of this quiet little rural town. The owner, Bill, was a great guy. He and Garth became friends, and he went out and found Garth a pipe organ. Garth was interested in Scriabin around then, music and color and all that. Soon people around town started to get to know us. If I was trying to cash a check in the Colonial Pharmacy, someone there might vouch for me by saying, ‘Yeah, he’s with the band.’ Meaning Bob Dylan’s band. Everyone knew everyone else back then.
“Then we got tired of the motel, and I went house hunting and found Big Pink. It was a pink suburban-looking split-level with three bedrooms and a long view of Overlook Mountain. It came with a hundred acres of woods and fields and had a pond. So Richard, Garth, and I moved in. Robbie rented a house on the Glasco Turnpike in Woodstock with his beautiful French girlfriend, Dominique. She was a journalist whom Robbie had met during Bob’s tour. I think they got married right after that.
“Big Pink was our clubhouse. Richard did all the cooking, Garth washed all the dishes (he didn’t trust anyone else to do them because he wanted them clean), and I took the garbage to the dump, personally, and kept the fireplace going with split logs. That’s how we settled in. We were paid a weekly retainer by Bob, and it was the first time in our lives where we had a chance to relax. We’d been on the road nonstop for six years at that point, and for the first time we didn’t have to play joints to stay alive anymore. Then I got Hamlet the dog from Bob Dylan. Hamlet was as big as a bear—a big dog. Albert and Bob had paid about a grand apiece for these pedigreed German dogs that had come from the most illustrious bloodlines in the world, but something went wrong. Hamlet was more like a standard poodle mixed with a German shepherd and a giant shorthaired terrier.
“Bob was having a hard time with the dog one day when I was over at his house. The dog was bigger than Bob, and Bob already had a Saint Bernard pulling him around. I stayed out of that one, but Hamlet and Bob were having some trouble. Bob said, ‘Please, Rick, take this dog back to the house with you. No, man, I insist...’ I didn’t want anything bad to happen, and Bob had kicked Hamlet out of the house, so he was living outside. So I took him back to Big Pink. We went to the vet—he didn’t care—and I had him groomed. He looked so great that the next time Sara Dylan saw Hamlet, she wanted him back! But he was our dog by then. He slept on the carpet by the stove through most of the basement tapes music and most of the Big Pink rehearsals as well. That dog heard a lot of music.
“When we’d gotten comfortable, we cleaned out the basement of Big Pink, and Garth put together a couple of microphones and connected them to a little two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and that was our studio. For ten months, from March to December 1967, we all met down in the basement and played for two or three hours a day, six days a week. That was it, man. We wrote a lot of songs in that basement. It was incredible!”
While the boys were recording, Rick was busy expending the kind of restless energy it took to convince Albert Grossman that it was time for us to go out on our own. It helped a lot that Sally Grossman loved the band and was really on our side. Toward the end of 1967, when Bob Dylan made it clear to Albert that he wouldn’t be touring anytime soon, Albert took it upon himself to get the boys a record deal. They cut a demo, which I’ve never even heard. Robbie said it was terrible anyway. Warner Bros. was interested: Label chief Mo Ostin had sold a lot of records with Peter, Paul, and Mary, and now Albert was telling him we were going to be even bigger. But Capitol Records jumped at the deal while Mo was out of town or something, and Albert said OK. That’s when Rick called me at Mary Cavette’s in Memphis, where I was still watching TV and waiting.
Rick remembers: “I call Levon and tell him we signed the deal with Capitol. ‘They wanna give us a couple hundred thou, Lee. Better come and get your share!’
“He says, ‘What’s the deal?’ So I tell him it’s for ten albums over so many years.
“Levon says, ‘I think it’s a dirty goddamn deal. I don’t like it, but I’ll be there anyway on the next plane. Maybe we can fix it.’
“‘Do you need an airplane ticket?’
“He says, ‘No, but I’ll call and let you know what time my plane lands. Tell the boys I’m coming up.’
“And that’s how Levon came back into the fold.”