Every day we awaited the arrival of money from Billy’s management, which would give us something to live on and let us fly to England. But between our room rate and Billy’s business calls across the Atlantic, our hotel bill started adding up. The front desk at the hotel started getting antsy. “Patience,” Billy advised, promising the cash would be arriving any day now. As our discomfort grew, we took to slinking past the front desk, hoping to go unnoticed.
Nothing takes the sting out of an awkward situation like a couple of pretty girls. One night Billy invited me to come meet two English girls he knew who were sharing an apartment. They were both very attractive and fun. We had a bite to eat, shared a few laughs, and began necking for hours. In 1959 I’d call this a near-perfect night.
But when we got back to the hotel, the hammer came down. The hotel manager wanted payment for the room “NOW!” Cornered without a backup plan, I said the only thing I could think of to buy us time: I told him we were guests of Ronnie Hawkins.
“He’ll be here in a few days,” I stammered. “He’ll be taking care of the bill.”
Ronnie and the Hawks were good customers at the Westover, so this took the heat off a little, but now we were ready to strangle Billy Kent. A couple more days of long-distance calls and finally our doom was confirmed: even though Billy had every intention to make this work, he realized he would have to go back to England in order to get everything straightened out in person.
We were screwed, and since Ron wouldn’t arrive for a few more days, we couldn’t leave. At this point Ron had already offered Scott the piano job, but Scott was holding out, hoping Ronnie would also hire Pete and me. So we had no idea if Ronnie would be feeling charitable toward us when he finally turned up. All I knew was that he would probably have a nervous breakdown when he heard I’d said he would cover the bill.
Sure enough, when the Hawk arrived at the Westover and the hotel manager told him the story, he flew off the handle. “If it wasn’t for me,” he yelled, “you’d be doing time somewhere, without a pot to piss in!”
I had no choice but to agree, as he proceeded to take care of the hotel bill.
“This Billy Kent guy’s a phony,” he added. “You were suckers to be fooled by him in the first place.” I liked Billy and didn’t want to think the worst of him—though it might have been the English girl he introduced me to that had made me a believer.
Now, at the beginning of our fourth week playing at Le Coq d’Or, that same pretty English girl showed up. Now that I’m playing in the Hawks, I thought, I’ll be able to impress her properly. Hoping to expand upon our necking session, without hesitation I asked if she’d like to come back to the hotel afterward and meet everybody.
“Yes, that would be nice,” she agreed.
When we got to my room, I couldn’t help but start kissing her and making my move, but she pulled away. “No…I can’t. I’m not ready for that.”
Maybe I’m being a little impatient, I told myself. But I’m a professional rock ’n’ roll musician now. This should be working.
Discouraged, I told her I’d be back in a few minutes and went over to Levon’s room to see what he was up to. A couple friends were visiting, and we sat and chatted for a bit. When I went back to my room, she was emerging from the bathroom, straightening herself.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, “but I need to get going. I’ve got work early in the morning.”
At a loss, I hugged her good-bye and she disappeared into the night.
The next day Ron kept looking at me with a grin on his face like a cat that had just eaten a mouse. Finally he pulled me aside.
“Son, I got a little confession to make. When you went over to Levon’s room last night, I happened to stop by your room.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, that girl of yours opened the door. I slipped in, locked the door, laid her down on the bed, and bogged her.”
The news hit me like a gut punch. I didn’t know who to be mad at.
“She told me she wasn’t ready for that,” I stammered.
“Well, she might not have been ready for you,” Ron explained, the grin never leaving his face, “but she was ready for me. Sweet young thing just wanted somebody a little more grown up, that’s all.”
I could hear Fred and Levon snickering in the background. I began to understand a bit more about the rules of the game in the Hawks. There were none.
Two years earlier, in 1958, Morris Levy’s Roulette Records had contacted Ronnie in a frenzy to record a song about Caryl Chessman, the “Red Light Bandit,” who was on death row and scheduled to be executed. It was a controversial idea, possibly a highly commercial one, but there was a catch: Roulette envisioned a folk ballad as opposed to a rock ’n’ roll tune. Not every rockabilly star would’ve been up for it, but Ronnie had expressed a deep but somewhat obscure appreciation for folk music that came from a part of his Arkansas background. Unfortunately, Ron’s “Ballad of Caryl Chessman,” with its plea to “Let him live, let him live, let him live,” wasn’t that memorable, nor was its plea very effective—Chessman was eventually put to death. Now Ronnie decided he wanted to make an entire album of his favorite folk songs. The Hawk was ahead of the curve on this one: the peak of the folk-music movement, when finger-picking protest singers would swarm coffeehouses across North America, hadn’t yet arrived. Still, it was in the wind, and Ronnie had picked up the scent. Of course, none of the rest of us had any idea what to do on a folk album, so we just tried to be respectfully supportive. After all, if something was good for Ron, it was probably good for us.
The folk album didn’t garner much attention, so we headed back south to play some honky-tonks and keep sharpening our blades. Moving around all the time, doing one-nighters, the Hawks were like a blur going by. The more time we spent in Fayetteville, the better chance we all had to get a little settled. Fayetteville was Ron’s Ozark stomping grounds, and he felt comfortable and appreciated there, though my being from Canada was like being from just this side of Mars. Ron’s friends were welcoming and hospitable but mostly older. I just tried to blend in with them.
By this time, Fred Carter was finally making plans to leave the Hawks, though Ronnie and Levon and I were encouraging him to stick around as long as he could. “We’re going to put you on rhythm, behind Fred,” Ron decided, pointing at me.
“Rhythm guitar?” I had just mastered that damn bass. But my passion truly was playing guitar, lead guitar, and this was a stepping-stone.
Ron nodded. “I’ll go looking for a new bass player. Time to find out what’s really going to work here.”
Soon he found what worked: a smooth young operator originally from Alabama named Rebel Payne who had played Fender Precision bass in a band up in Buffalo, New York. Rebel’s bronze Indian skin glowed against his near-perfect white smile. He played in a gliding, steady style that went down easy, just like his personality. Rebel melted effortlessly into the Hawks.
Unfortunately things weren’t going smoothly, personally or musically, between Ronnie and Magoo. When you’re spending hours at a time together rehearsing, or packed into a car hustling from town to town, bad vibes amplify quickly. Magoo and Ron always seemed to be working each other’s nerves. They had almost completely opposite senses of humor: Magoo couldn’t roll with playing the joker on piano like Will “Pop” Jones had, and most of his humor Ron didn’t really get or want to get. The atmosphere they created when they were together became increasingly uncomfortable.
I could see it happening, but there was nothing I could do. It was sad to watch. Magoo and I had chased this dream together. Hell, he had initially turned Ronnie down because there was no place in the band then for me. But the reality of being in the Hawks just didn’t feel right for him. “This isn’t my scene,” he confided. Eventually he tendered his resignation and headed back to Toronto. It was strange and depressing to see him go. But he acted lighthearted and in some ways seemed relieved to be moving on, which helped take the sting out of it for me. We’
d shared a goal and it was hard right then to think we wouldn’t be on the same team.
—
It was only four years earlier, at the end of the summer of 1956, that—wham!—the world had changed overnight. Rock ’n’ roll had fully arrived. On Tuesday we were listening to Patti Page’s “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” Perry Como, Teresa Brewer, maybe a little “Sh-Boom.” Come Wednesday, we had the Big Bang of rock ’n’ roll with Chuck Berry, Elvis, and Little Richard. It struck me as a miracle. Where were all these rock ’n’ rollers last week? Were they just waiting in the wings for their moment to arrive? Of course, I would go on to learn that this new music had been seeping under the door for years with artists like Fats Domino, but to me it felt like it happened in the blink of an eye.
Wherever it came from, I was thirteen and ecstatic. I’d just reached puberty; suddenly, girls were a revelation. I already had a guitar in my hand. So there I was, standing at the crossroads as rock ’n’ roll exploded. Everything changed: my clothes, my hair, my focus. Music became my calling.
Now I just needed the proper equipment. I loved my acoustic guitar, but becoming the rock ’n’ roll hero of my dreams would require something more. Sure, Elvis played acoustic to accompany his singing, but I wanted to play lead and tear off explosive guitar solos. So I saved my money and begged my parents for a copper-colored Harmony electric guitar I’d seen in the Simpsons department store catalog. I had to have it. Each day I willed Christmas to come so I could finally wrap my hands around that guitar.
Then, finally, on Christmas Eve 1956, we opened presents just after midnight; there would be no waiting until morning. I ripped open the big box with my bare hands, pulling out that beautiful guitar. To my eyes it glowed in the dark. I tuned it, turning the knobs and marveling at its size, at how lightweight it seemed. Then, as I strummed away, I suddenly realized a major flaw in my plans—I had no amplifier. Wailing a solo was out of the question. I had been so caught up with just getting the guitar that I’d never stopped to consider how to make it scream. So one afternoon I took the guts out of my parents’ combination record player/radio console in the living room and managed to turn it into a makeshift guitar amp without electrocuting myself. When my mom got home, she saw the speaker and tube chassis in the middle of the living room floor with a wire running up into my guitar. I was beaming.
“Jaime…”
Before she had a chance to get upset, I hit the strings, and a hot rush of noise came blasting out of the speaker. Mom laughed, somewhere between amused and impressed, but thankfully not mad. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll see if we can afford to get you a little amp. But first you’ve got to put that thing back together.”
Around the same time, the rebel rock ’n’ roll spirit that had taken over music was bleeding into movies too, in pictures like Crime in the Streets and Rebel Without a Cause. Soon our teenage lives began to imitate art. Gangs formed in different neighborhoods. Hot rods and souped-up cars became the thing. Kids wore brotherhood denim jackets with the name of their club or gang sewn onto the back. Gang rumbles broke out up by the railroad tracks over territorial disputes. I joined a Scarborough outfit called the Black Orchids—one half Bowery Boys, one half Devil’s Disciples—and wore the name proudly. Boots were a big deal. You could tell the most serious members of the Black Orchids by the size, cut, and toughness of their boots. “I’m going to feed him the boots!” was a promise we often heard. Although some groups had weapons, the Black Orchids mostly stuck to well-timed kicks in the crotch. A boot that found its target would send the crowd into hysterics and also had the added benefit of ending a fight immediately.
I soon discovered I wasn’t much for the physical end of things. When rumbles first became popular I felt brash, ready for anything. Then I got smacked around a couple of times, kicked in the gut, and I thought, I have to find another way to rebel.
—
When Scott left, Ron invited Will “Pop” Jones to come back on piano. Willard already knew most of the songs and Rebel was an experienced bassist, so it came down to my finding just the right place in the mix for a rhythm guitar. Levon came to my aid, showing me some twin-string parts that supported Fred’s lead in a funky, feel-good way. I played the red Gibson ES-330 semi-hollow-body guitar, which matched Levon’s red sparkle drums. Its fullness balanced out tonally with Fred’s Fender Telecaster, which had a thinner and more piercing sound. I went back to “school” with my record collection from the Home of the Blues and more, and ravaged the style of Eddie Cochran and James Burton. I thought back to how Jimmy Ray “Luke” Paulman used to play for Ronnie in the driving, explosive fashion of the white Mississippi Delta rhythm guitar—that bone-dry, percussive sound, the way he muffled the strings with the palm of his right hand and slid into all the chords with his left.
While playing a date in Conway, Arkansas, we ran into Conway Twitty and his band, the Twitty Birds. Made me relieved to be in a group called the Hawks. Still, the name didn’t let on how wicked his band was: Big Joe Louis on guitar, Tommy “Porkchop” Markham on drums, and Blackie Preston on bass. They were a crackerjack outfit, tight as a drum, and I noticed that Ronnie felt a bit competitive with them—on a friendly level, of course. Right then Conway and his boys were all in an uproar. They told us that Big Joe and Blackie had been out driving with a couple of girls, Big Joe behind the wheel and Blackie in the backseat making out with one of them. He’d undone her top and was “tasting her milkshake” when Big Joe went flying over a hill at a railroad crossing. The car came crashing down, and Blackie accidentally bit the girl’s nipple off. It was horrible. They took her straight to the hospital but weren’t sure whether Blackie would end up in any legal trouble.
“Blackie’s kind of crazy anyway,” Ron observed later. “Something eventually was bound to happen.”
“Well, hell, you can’t blame him,” Will responded. “It was Big Joe that went over the bump.” It sounded like a joke, but he was stone serious. Getting used to Willard’s deep country ways was still a work in progress for me. Sometimes he made Ronnie and Levon seem like Harvard graduates.
The young southern belles from the University of Arkansas made me feel much more at home. Every time we played clubs or a school dance around town, I would try to meet someone a little closer to my age. Levon and I would double-date sometimes with girls from the university. We often took them to drive-in movies, mainly for the purpose of making out.
“I hope it’s not a good movie,” I said to Levon as we got ready one night.
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, “I think this one’s even in black and white.”
He wasn’t wrong. But the movie was John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, so powerful, so beautiful, that it tore your heart out. Making out in the backseat couldn’t compete with Henry Fonda’s acting and John Steinbeck’s epic story.
The next night, Levon and I pulled into the local Tastee-Freez for a corn dog and thick shake. We had just picked up our order when some guy started pointing his finger at me, claiming that I had been hanging around with his girl. I had no idea who the guy was or what he was talking about.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly who I’m talking about, you son of a bitch!” he yelled, jabbing his finger in my face.
Levon put his corn dog down and got right in between us. “Don’t you be pointing your goddamn finger over this way,” he growled, “or I’ll gnaw your fucking ear off. Get out of here, you sorry-ass bastard.”
The guy threw his cup of soda on the ground and walked away.
“I’ll kick his ass all over this town,” Levon declared, picking up our box of food. I followed him into the car, catching my breath.
“Who do you think he was talking about?” I said, bewildered.
“Come around here pointing his goddamn finger…” Levon mumbled as he sucked on the straw of his thick milkshake.
It was the first time I’d experienced the protection of an older brother. And it felt pretty good.
—
Ronnie’s agent, Harold “the Colonel” Kudlets, had us booked into Hamilton, Ontario, then back to London and Toronto. We packed up the trailer once again, and naturally Levon took the first driving shift. With six of us in the DeVille, I was stuck riding the hump in the front seat. Soon Levon and I were the only ones still awake. The radio station WLAC out of Nashville was pumping out the gospel sound of the Harmonizing Four’s “We’re Crossing Over.” I turned it up as Levon kicked the Caddy into passing gear and we cruised by a big rig.
“Listen to that bass singer,” I said. “Man, is he good.”
Levon blinked his lights at a truck, and the truck driver blinked back. “You know, I became friendly with Herb, the bass singer in the Platters.”
“Really?” I replied. “I wasn’t sure I even liked that kind of music, but their lead singer, Tony Williams, has to have one of the finest voices in all of rock ’n’ roll. Hey, did you ever listen to the Hound?”
“Who?”
“George ‘Hound Dog’ Lorenz. He was an R&B disc jockey with a real smooth rap. Sometimes he broadcast out of the Zanzibar club in Buffalo.” Lavern “Jim Dandy” Baker or Bill “Honky Tonk” Doggett could be onstage while the Hound was doing his show in the back of the club. “Every night while I was doing my homework I would listen to him. He had this theme song to open his show, ‘The Big Heavy.’ The horn line would come in, and he’d say in this cool, deep voice, ‘Dig, man, the Hound’s around.’ ”
Levon laughed. “That’s beautiful.”
“He was amazing,” I said. “In the next open space between horn lines, he’d say, ‘Movin’ and groovin’. Layin’ the sound down.’ Then he’d play ‘Blue Monday,’ yelling out, ‘Comin’ at you from New Orleans, none other than the great Antoine Fats Domino.’ ”
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