Leiber and Stoller were the hottest songwriters around. They had written “Hound Dog” and “Kansas City” before they even hit their stride. I sat in their writing room as they tried to remember something that might suit Ronnie. First they refreshed their memory on a couple of his hits, “Mary Lou” and “Southern Love.” They sang me one idea and I could barely breathe. It was amazing—not just the song, but the fact that Leiber and Stoller were sitting there playing it for me. “That was terrific, yeah,” I gushed when they’d finished. “You got any more?” At this they paused. Jerry looked at Mike, looked at me, and said, “Who are you again?”
After I’d listened to tunes from all these songwriters, the Hawk said we were going up to the Roulette Records offices to meet with Morris Levy. Good, I thought, I’ll be able to get to the bottom of this whole “Robertson, Magil” songwriting matter.
Levy’s office looked like a scene out of a Damon Runyon story. Outside the door, tough guys in dark suits with broken noses looked us over. As we entered, a blond receptionist resembling Veronica Lake or Joi Lansing, her hair falling smoothly over one eye, barely glanced at us. Count Basie poured out of the speaker in the background. Morris welcomed Ronnie with his gravelly gangster voice (what happens to mobsters in their childhood that makes their voices go all gruff and raspy?). “Come on in, come on in, you wild man. I get such a kick outta this guy,” he announced.
Ronnie started right in with his routine. “Hey, hoss, how you doing? I wanted to stop by and see if there was any papers you wanted me to sign so those boys outside don’t have to hang me out the window.”
Morris chuckled. “Don’t believe those stories. I’m a sweetheart, you know that.”
“Sure, I know that,” Ronnie parried, “but does Frankie Lymon know that?” They both bent over laughing.
After a few more jibes, Ron did a little camel walk across Morris’s Oriental rug and we all sat down. Ron gestured to me and said, “Morris, this is the kid I was telling you about. Think he might have a lot of PO-tential.”
Levy looked over at me, nodded his head, and growled, “Yeah, he’s a nice lookin’ kid. If you had to do time, it’d be good to bring him along. I bet you don’t know whether to hire him or fuck him.” At that moment I decided to forgo bringing up any dispute over the “Robertson, Magil” songwriting issue.
—
As my train made its way through the Midwest, the conductor’s song had a beautiful cadence to it, rhyming off the names of passing cities and towns. The farther south we got, the sweeter it sounded. When the conductor called out, “St. Louis, Missouri, gateway to the West,” all I could hear playing in my head was “Saint Louis Blues” and “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis.”
A bus carried me from Missouri into Arkansas, and in Fayetteville, Ronnie Hawkins’s home base, I asked the driver to let me off in front of the Starlite Motel. I saluted him, descended the steps with my old suitcase, and put my feet on solid ground. The air smelled like Ozark pines and fried food. I was here.
A voice called out from across the road as the bus pulled away, “Welcome to the South, boy!” I looked up and there was my old bandmate Scott “Magoo” Cushnie. I couldn’t have been happier to see anyone. Scott had joined Ronnie’s band a couple weeks earlier and helped persuade the Hawk that I was worth a tryout. He grabbed my arm and said, “Come on, Ronnie and some of his local-yokel friends are over in his room.” As we approached I could hear howling laughter. “Check it out,” said Scott. “These people are insane.”
When we pushed open the door, everybody went quiet. They stared at me as if I were a full-blown alien. Ronnie took one look at my clothes and said, “Well hell, son, people down here never seen a Canadian hobo before. What in the world is that coat you’re wearing?”
“It’s reversible,” I said, and everybody burst out laughing, Ronnie the loudest.
“Son, we’re going to have to get you some damn clothes, immediately if not sooner. I can’t be seen with anybody dressed like that ’round here. I’m much too good-looking and sophisticated myself.”
The next few days I quietly but quickly adjusted to the surroundings. The local Fayetteville characters were classic, a rogues’ gallery of wild southern types and small-time legends. Herman “Killer” Tuck, who had played drums for Jerry Lee Lewis, owned a furniture store in town. Chester, a mentally challenged fellow in a wheelchair, would yell bizarre phrases at girls walking by on the main drag—“Whoocha, baby, whoocha!”—prompting the store owners to threaten to push his wheelchair down the hill if he didn’t stop scaring away the customers. And Don Tyson, the owner of Tyson’s Chickens, loved four things: making money, rock ’n’ roll music, having a few laughs, and pretty girls—though not necessarily in that order.
My favorite, though, was Dayton Stratton, whom Ronnie called Blinky. Together they were partners in the local Shamrock Club. Dayton was one of the sweetest, most gentlemanly people you ever met, but saints preserve you if you caused trouble in his club. He would first ask you, extremely polite and kindly, to leave the premises. If the trouble continued, he would start blinking and stammering. Then, like lightning, his feet would leave the floor and he would pound you several times about the head, so fast, so hard, you didn’t know what had happened. Invariably, people who pushed too far with Dayton went down. Whether they were huge Razorback football players from the University of Arkansas or big, tough redneck farmboys, it didn’t matter. You did not make trouble in Dayton’s backyard.
Ronnie took me to his favorite Fayetteville clothing store and dressed me and groomed me. When it came to music, though, the expectation was that I’d quickly learn to measure up. The band rehearsed at the Shamrock in the afternoons and sometimes gigged there at night. I wasn’t sure where I fit into the mix just yet, but they let me sit on the side, near the front of the stage, and take it all in. Technically I wasn’t old enough to get into a club like this, but since I was with their coolest export at the time, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, the doorman never batted an eye.
I soaked up everything I could, fast as I could, especially when it came to the band’s personnel. The guitarist I was trying out to replace, Fred Carter Jr., was ten years older than me. He hailed from Winnsboro, Louisiana, and had played with Ron’s cousin, Dale Hawkins, of “Suzie Q” fame, and Roy Orbison. Fred was an experienced and accomplished musician, definitely the real thing. Levon Helm, who was probably twenty by then, already struck me as a veteran. He knew the ropes and had music in his bones. He was just born that way: the real real thing.
The presence of my old bandmate Scott gave me a boost of confidence and comfort in this strange new world. He seemed to roll smoothly with the routine. He wasn’t as thunderous on the keys as Will “Pop” Jones, the piano man he had come down to replace, but he played his heart out. I liked the swing he gave the groove, not at all choppy or hardheaded.
Lefty Evans, a right-handed bass player, had a more traditional sound. It bugged Levon, who wanted something more driving, more eighth notes, more exciting, but Lefty’s real calling was country music. Levon teased him about it. “How can you sing, play bass, and hold your nose at the same time to get that nasal twang in yer voice?”
Every day opened my eyes a bit wider to the Hawks’ world. It became pretty obvious to me early on that in Arkansas they had their own rules when it came to sexual activity. It was understood that there was going to be some hanky-panky, but with whom seemed shockingly circumstantial: it was par for the course to see someone’s sister or wife or neighbor slipping in or out of Ronnie’s or Levon’s motel room in the afternoons. Sometimes Ron would whisper under his breath, “Boys, I’ll tell you, I had a little encounter this afternoon with what’s-his-name’s sister-in-law and she nearly devoured me. Got scratches all over my back to show for it.” Later that night we would see the sister-in-law and her husband at the gig near the front of the stage, cheering Ron on. I was baffled—but also couldn’t wait to get acquainted with the local customs.
—
Soon we headed out for the Mississippi Delta, Levon’s home turf. The six of us rolled in Ronnie’s big Caddy, towing our instruments behind us in a trailer decorated on each side with a painting of a hawk holding drumsticks. Along Highway 540, Scott and I fell silent at the particular beauty of the Arkansas countryside, rolling hills of green on green as far as the eye could see. We turned onto Route 40, where we passed the town of Conway, namesake of Harold Jenkins, a singer with an incredible vocal range who found much greater success after changing his name to Conway Twitty.
We were headed to Charlie Halbert’s Rainbow Court Inn Motel in West Helena. Ron described Charlie as a good old boy who loved music and liked to help out musicians. He also owned the Delta Queen ferryboat, which went from Helena over to Clarksdale, Mississippi, home and breeding ground of a lot of great bluesmen. Memphis was seventy miles upriver and was the center of music in the universe, as far as I was concerned. This whole area was a great mystery to me: How could Johnny Cash, B. B. King, Jimmy Reed, Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson, and on and on, all come from this particular place? What magic potion was in the water around here?
Shortly after we settled in at the Rainbow, Ronnie went to England to do a TV show and promote his new record. He took Levon with him, leaving Fred behind to familiarize Scott and me with Ron’s repertoire. But I soon discovered Fred had little interest in showing me anything. He constantly avoided my efforts to learn from him, “Nobody ever showed me nothing,” he would say, “so why should I show you?”
What was his deal? Was I a threat to him? Or was I nothing at all? Scott had already sat in with the Hawks and was familiar with some of the tunes, but I had barely a clue. To make it worse, Lefty Evans had decided to leave the Hawks too. He’d spoken quite seriously about becoming a preacher. “Preachers make some damn good money down here,” he’d inform us with remarkable sincerity. His departure meant double trouble for me: now my challenge was to learn all the songs on bass and guitar. Which meant that I’d have to learn to play the bass—I had never really played it in my life. I wondered if Scott might have exaggerated my relationship with the Fender Precision Bass to Ron to help get me the tryout, but now wasn’t the time to get confessional.
I tried to hustle Fred a little. “You can’t blame me for wanting to learn from a master. Throw me a bone. I just don’t want to let Ronnie down.” Scott thought Fred was being a jerk and shrugged it off with a “who needs him” attitude, but I couldn’t afford to think like that. I needed to absorb everything I could while Ronnie was gone. This was rockabilly boot camp.
In the meantime I tried to soak up as much local flavor as possible. Before he left for England, Ronnie had taken us to the Delta Supper Club in West Helena, a local dance joint where everybody went to hear music. Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty, and Ronnie all played here on occasion. The Delta Club was very basic and unglamorous—some tables, a dance floor, a funny-looking shell-shaped bandstand, a few neon signs, and a bar of legend that had been chainsawed down the middle by an angry patron. All kinds of folks came here; I noticed that down south older people and young people all went to the same clubs. Age didn’t matter; it was all about the music, and who was playing it.
Scott and I ventured over there after dinner one night when we heard that Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men might be playing. He scored us some beer, though I hadn’t yet developed a taste for alcohol. We got to talking with a couple of young girls who were dancing in front of us—they simply could not fathom that we were from faraway Canada. Scott and the two girls got a little tipsy and we all ended up back at the Rainbow Inn.
The Rainbow had a number of well-furnished bungalows—ours, which we shared with Fred, had a living room where we could set up our instruments, a kitchen area with a bar, and two comfortable bedrooms. We were having a few laughs with the girls when Fred came back. He paused in the doorway for a moment, looked around, and liked what he saw. “Well, hello there. Where did you fine young things come from?” Suddenly he was all funny and charming, flashing his powerful dimples. He ended up embracing the girl I was with in a long, slow hug, speaking softly in her ear. Over her shoulder, he waved me good-bye. I’d been snookered. I stepped out for a bit, and when I came back both bedroom doors were locked. When I knocked, Fred called, “Go away, I’m busy.” The night ended for me on a chair in the living room among empty beer cans and full ashtrays.
A couple of nights later Scott and I were waiting for a table at Nick’s Café, the place everybody went for a late bite, when I noticed a striking girl grooving to the song playing on the jukebox. As I looked closer I could see that she might be an American Indian. I drew a breath, went over, and started gabbing about what a cool jukebox they had at Nick’s. She said her name was Emma, and she turned out to be from the Kiowa Nation. I told her my mother was Mohawk, from Six Nations. “Mohawk! You’re Mohawk? How come you don’t have one of those scary haircuts?” We had an easy connection, and while the boys were sampling the chicken-fried steak, Emma and I sat by the river talking. She had the sweetest laugh. Miss Emma and me, we both felt the shimmer.
At the end of the week, Fred said he was driving over to Sun Records in Memphis to let Sam Phillips know he’d be available for session work in the near future. He asked if I wanted to come. Sun Records? The label that discovered Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash? With the yellow label that was black in the beginning? The center of the universe? Yes, I wanted to go to Sun Records.
We hit the road and Fred pointed out pieces of music history along the way, like the Plantation Inn, Miss Annie’s Place, and the Cotton Club in West Memphis, and then we drove over the Memphis-Arkansas Memorial Bridge into Tennessee. He dropped me off on Beale Street at the Home of the Blues record store while he went to make an appointment at Sun. Home of the Blues was just up the street from the Lansky Brothers, where only eight years earlier a seventeen-year-old Elvis working at the Loew’s State Theatre had bought his first suit from Bernard Lansky, and where Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash got their sharp outfits. To me these were more than just shops: they were historic landmarks. I had heard of Home of the Blues only on fifty-thousand-watt southern radio stations that on cold, clear nights could beam all the way up to Canada.
The inside of the shop featured wall-to-wall record covers and rows and rows of records, ones you could never get up north and many I’d never heard of. I spent nearly my whole first week’s paycheck on Warren Smith, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Roy Orbison, Little Walter, Charlie Rich, Howlin’ Wolf, Don Gibson, T-Bone Walker, Little Junior Parker, Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson, and the Swan Silvertones. I was going to my music school, and to church. When Fred picked me up on Beale Street later and saw all my bags of records, his eyes went wide. “Boy, what did you do, buy out the store?”
“They’ve got everything you want and stuff you didn’t know you wanted,” I told him. I felt proud and equipped.
As we headed back to Sun Records for Fred’s appointment, I was flushed with excitement. Inside I took a seat in a little lobby area while Fred was escorted to an office. The pictures of legendary Sun recording artists hanging up and down the hallway made me feel I was stepping into a rock ’n’ roll cathedral. A man came out of the recording studio, and as the door swung open I thought I saw Jerry Lee Lewis sitting at the piano. Must be imagining it, I thought, but then the door to the control room opened and from the speakers I heard that voice and that piano—Jerry himself. So real I could barely stand it.
Back in West Helena, Scott pored over the jackets on my new LPs, commenting on the cool or corny artwork, and I cut my thumb on the plastic opening all the albums. I had found the holy grail. Those records played day and night on Ron’s record player, which was worth its weight in silver. I always listened with a guitar and bass within reach and many times fell asleep playing along.
The next night I brought Emma, the beautiful Kiowa girl I had met at Nick’s Café, back to the Rainbow Inn. We
fell into each other’s arms, went directly to Fred’s bedroom, and locked the door. Scott was already asleep in the other bedroom.
Emma and I were deep in the throes of enchantment when Fred returned. He knocked sharply on the bedroom door with a sense of authority. I said, “Go away, busy right now.”
He knocked again.
“Go away, thank you, I’m busy.” Emma put her hand over my mouth to stifle my laughter.
When we surfaced in the morning, Fred was stretched out on the living-room couch with a cushion over his head to shield his eyes from the daylight.
Not sure why, but after that Fred started sharing some of his guitar knowledge with me. That afternoon he was changing his guitar strings and decided to show me how he used one banjo string for the high E and moved all the regular guitar strings down one place, meaning the A string was now the low E. It made all the strings much more bendable. He said it was a trick he had learned when he was playing the Louisiana Hayride, a radio show out of Shreveport, where country music and the blues met and got hitched. I was taken with the way he used a flat pick and two National finger picks on his middle and third fingers. I started trying that too. You could grab hold of the strings in a more deliberate way, steel on steel, and I even tried them playing bass—which might’ve been a first.
Fred finally started going over all the tunes with us, showing us where the live arrangements were different from the records. I was lapping it up, grateful for his generous turn. I’d been using a spare guitar and bass, but he suggested we go over to the guitar store in Memphis and check out some new equipment. Ronnie was always open to getting new gear for members of his band. He let you pay it off, a little out of your paycheck every week.
And then news came over the wire that on Friday night it was going down: Howlin’ Wolf and his band were playing at the Cotton Club in West Memphis. I had just bought his record with the gray cover and a picture of a wolf howling, called Moanin’ in the Moonlight, the one with “I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline),” “Smoke Stack Lightning,” and of course “Evil,” a real heart-warmer. Yes, Chester Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf, was badass. I suggested we could piggyback a stop at the Cotton Club with our trip to the musical instrument store. But Fred wouldn’t commit, mainly because I was too young to get into the club.
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