By this time folk music had developed an enormous swell of popularity in Toronto: Gordon Lightfoot was causing a stir around town, and Ian and Sylvia Tyson were on their way to wide recognition. And just as Yonge Street had hosted the rock ’n’ roll explosion, a street in town called Yorkville became a focal point for the folk scene, drawing talent from all across the land. For the Hawks, folk came from the other side of the tracks. It was a kinder, gentler music, sung in coffeehouses where university students sipped cappuccinos. There was nobody drinking cappuccinos where we played, and we had only ever played electric, loud and hard. Ronnie had a special admiration for folk music, but the rest of us Hawks were definitely cut from a different cloth. “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning” had a certain toughness to it, but it still was no “Smoke Stack Lightning.” We wanted a sound that cut through you, music with a sense of danger and sex that reflected our world.
You could see it in the characters we hung around with. During our tenure at the Concord, our crew included a fellow named Teddy “the Hungarian,” a strong, grizzly chap who would accompany us to the hotel after the gig and park himself in a corner, reading comic books and giggling to himself. If we asked nicely, sometimes Teddy would rip phonebooks in half for our entertainment.
“What exactly do you do for a living, Teddy?” I asked him one day.
“I’m a strong arm for certain businessmen,” he explained modestly.
“What do you do when you go up against a mob guy?” I asked. “Or another money collector who thinks he’s more of a badass than you?”
Teddy looked around the suite and grinned at me through his stubby little teeth. “A while back I was hired by a major bookie organization in Windsor. There was a territory dispute, and I ran up against a very dangerous guy who was working for some heavies out of Detroit. They sent him to threaten me and chase my people away. He told me he was going to break my legs with a baseball bat unless I took a walk.”
I lit a smoke and sat back in my chair as Teddy looked right through me with his beady eyes. “I grabbed this big monster so fast and so hard around the throat, his head nearly exploded. Robbie, you’ve seen my teeth, right? They’re very thick and sharp. I told him if I ever saw him again I would bite his lips off. Ever seen somebody with no lips? It’s not a pretty sight.”
I couldn’t even look Teddy in the face at this point. Downtown Dougie, a professional “booster” thief, was in the room and overheard us. He just shook his head, let out a little laugh. “That’s a real fucking pipper.”
Sometimes Levon invited a small, mentally challenged dancing dynamo who talked in riddles over to the hotel after the show. Freddy McNulty delighted Levon. He brought him to our Sunday-night gigs and let him get up and sing and dance with us; he gave him money, fed him, protected him from bullies, bought him clothes, and made everybody around appreciate Freddy’s unusual ways.
Freddy knew that one of Levon’s secret ambitions was to get him laid. One evening a band came to town that had a dwarf in their group, and Levon invited him to join our party. A couple of girls were hanging out, and Levon began working on them, convincing one to take care of Freddy and the other to take care of our small new buddy. “You might never have the opportunity to bring this much joy to someone’s life ever again,” Levon told them. They finally agreed and led their boys toward a pair of private bedrooms. Some minutes later the dwarf and Freddy reemerged, flushed. The girls appeared next, like sexual Mother Teresas who had done a pious deed. “Well, how was that?” Levon called out. “How did you boys do?” Freddy and the dwarf looked at each other, mumbling awkwardly. Finally one of the girls popped her bubblegum and said, “That was pretty fucking weird.” Levon fell apart laughing.
Experimenting with different drugs in those days seemed like it came with the job. One friend of ours, George—or “Dr. M.,” as we called him—had every kind of pill one could imagine. But drugs could be like a roll of the dice, and every so often we rolled snake eyes. One night Ronnie invited a pretty young lady who looked to be about twenty-one back to the hotel, where we were hanging around with our dates and friends. Before long one of the road managers brought out a selection of pills, and we passed them around like they were jelly beans, everyone choosing their favorite color. The girl with Ron picked out a Tuinal. He laughed and warned her that she could get very stoned on those babies, but she took it anyway and ended up completely wasted. We were all young, thought we knew everything, courted danger without thinking about the consequences.
A few nights later this young lady’s brother showed up outside the Concord at closing time with a crew of street thugs, yelling and threatening that they were going to kill the guys who had abused the sister. They had guns and knives. This felt serious. We ducked back into the club, where the owner, Jack Fisher, a savvy guy who rarely lost his cool, reached in a drawer behind the bar and pulled out a .38 pistol. He told someone to call the cops. Then he walked outside. “The police are on their way,” he called out to the mob. “So if it’s a gun battle you want, then that’s what you’ll get.”
The angry gang turned on their heels, scowling and swearing they’d be back. Revenge became the name of the game. In the days that followed they called the hotel over and over again with threats: We’re watching you. We’re going to meet again. They showed up in parking lots or stood across from the hotel and put everybody on edge wondering when the next showdown would be. They were serious and we were on guard. Luckily, life on the road meant never staying in one place for too long. Much to our relief, Ronnie got a call to do some recording in Nashville for a Hank Williams tribute album, and we were able to leave the death threats behind. We were packed up and on the road before you could blink an eye.
—
The danger was behind us but still in everyone’s thoughts. After we’d officially passed into the South, we pulled off the highway to visit a gun shop. The plain-fronted stone building seemed nondescript enough, but inside we found a candy store for weapons, endless racks of guns and knives, and cases filled with ammo of every shape and size. We bought small derringer pistols, switchblades, an assortment of blackjacks, brass knuckles, even tear-gas pens—whatever could be easily concealed and quickly accessed. By the time we pulled back onto the highway, we’d spent nearly our last dime, and the Caddies were like two mobile arsenals.
We were headed to Fort Worth, Texas, for a job at a club called the Skyline Lounge, where we had never played before. When we arrived, our jaws dropped open. The club was burned out, blown up. It was hard to imagine it was habitable, never mind the kind of place that would actually attract paying customers.
“Looks like we finally hit the big time, son,” Ronnie said to Levon. “Man, I hope you boys saved up your paychecks, because if we can’t draw nobody here, we’re up shit creek without a paddle.”
But inside we learned why the place was called the Skyline Lounge: there was no roof. A fire had burned it up, and the owner either had decided to go with it or couldn’t afford to fix it. You could still smell the singed wood. Dubiously we set up our gear and checked out the PA system. Our voices sounded like barkers at an amusement park. Ronnie turned to us on the bandstand and said, “Well, boys, you live and you learn. If we can get through this alive, we can do anything.”
We checked into a motel and returned to the club that night, ready to go on at 9:00 p.m. sharp. All told, the audience numbered less than ten. The place was so empty you could make out individual conversations in the crowd.
About halfway through our first song, a girl started dancing her way toward the stage from the back of the joint. As she came closer, I gradually realized that the club employed a one-armed go-go dancer to entice people to get up and dance. She spun over to one table, sprightly swinging her lone arm in the direction of the people seated there. We were spellbound, watching the patrons trying to avoid her gaze, but the wind from her swinging arm eventually brought on nods of approval from the people brave enough to witness her gyrations. She cruis
ed to the front of the stage doing the Twist and gave us a few twirls and spins, like we were all part of the same attraction. Then bam! She hit the floor and did the splits. I nearly peed myself. Then she broke into the Stroll, another popular dance of the time, and strolled her way over to the other table of people, who toasted her with whoops and hollers. At last, a few songs later, a lone couple got up and joined her on the dance floor. Things were picking up. The owner of the place looked on approvingly. Still, I wondered, How is the guy going to pay us? A song or two later a couple from the other side of the dance floor joined in. Gyrating back and forth to our music, these four people all looked so lost in this huge venue, meandering about a dance floor that could have easily accommodated eighty couples. We played, and they danced and drank, while the stars shone down on us.
Suddenly, a tussle broke out in the middle of the dance floor. It seemed to me that there weren’t nearly enough people here to cause a ruckus, but the next thing I knew, one of the guys had pulled out some kind of weapon. With no warning he shot tear gas at the other guy from very close range. The man clutched his face and crumpled immediately. Everyone shrieked and ran from the dance floor. As the cloud of gas drifted on the wind in our direction, we were left teary-eyed on the stage, playing for no one.
When we wrapped up—which wasn’t much later, as no one could breathe for the gas—the club owner approached us with more great news. “Boys, this building ain’t exactly secure enough for you to leave your musical equipment unattended.”
“You’ve got people stealing drum sets and guitars?” Ronnie asked.
The owner nodded. “We sure are sorry about that.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do?”
He folded his arms. “If I were you, I’d stay here and guard ’em.”
Our booking ran for a week, so we decided to take overnight shifts in pairs, guarding our instruments with our new handguns. Rick and I agreed to take the first shift. We played cards and tried to push off our tiredness and boredom in any way we could. Rick devised a scheme to jimmy open the cigarette machine, so we had no shortage of smokes. There was a soda-pop machine too, the bottles hung between metal slats. We discovered if you had a bottle opener and a straw, you could drink all you wanted, right out of the machine.
Rick helped make our guard duty less grim. He was upbeat and funny, telling me about his former band with his schoolteacher and his older brother Junior, and the crazy gigs they’d played. He booked the gigs, sang and played lead guitar, taught them the songs, and was the youngest pipsqueak in the group. They had played some jobs around his local area opening for Frankie Yankovic, King of the Polkas. “That was my whole reality,” he told me. “Thank the stars above that you guys came along, or I might have ended up leading the second-best polka band in the country.”
Around 4:00 a.m., Rick and I were deep into a game of crazy eights, when suddenly we heard a terrifying sound that seemed to be coming right toward us—a loud clawing on the floor and fast, hard breathing. Rick grabbed the gun from the table, and we both inched back from the doorway, pressing our bodies up against the wall. Rick leveled his pistol and pointed it into the blackness.
Around the corner came two German shepherds, growling threateningly, bound on tight leashes. Two policemen stood behind them. “Damn, boys, what the hell are you doing here this late at night?”
We sank back against the wall. I told them we were the house band for the week, and we were here to guard our musical equipment from burglars.
One of the cops grinned. “Man! If I’d let these dogs go, they woulda eat y’all up and spit you out.”
“It’s more likely you would have had two dead dogs,” Rick muttered, still gripping the pistol in his hand. There was a pause, and then both cops cracked up, like that was the funniest thing they’d heard all day.
“We usually stop by here during the night to see if everything’s all right. It’s kind of a strange place, you know.”
“Well, thanks for coming by,” I said, relieved.
“Sure thing,” said the cop. “Try not to shoot anybody with that gun, y’hear?” They snickered as they left, the dogs scratching and pulling them forward on the wood floor.
The next night it was Richard and Levon’s turn to play watchmen. Garth had narcolepsy and could be asleep at any given moment, so he was off the hook. I never knew if he was more exhausted or more rested than any of us. Ron, on the other hand, pulled rank, claiming that he had to figure out how to get us our money, so it was important for him to be rested and sharp. So Richard and Levon took their positions, and we bade them good night.
In the morning Ron met Rick and me with a big grin. “Turns out Richard and Levon had a similar experience to you fellas, only when the police came in, Richard panicked and sprayed the dogs with mace!”
Levon and Richard trudged into the room, looking dead tired.
“You guys maced the dogs?” I asked.
“The cops should have announced themselves first,” grumbled Levon.
The Skyline was tethered to reality by the flimsiest of strings. Throughout the week the owner, whose name was Jack, would pop in on us in the middle of the night. Maybe he realized we were ready to maim any man, monster, or beast, because he always called out, “It’s me!”
“Does that guy ever sleep?” Rick groaned, shifting his pistol to his other hand.
You could tell by Jack’s grinding jaw that he was into uppers. He had another club over in Dallas that seemed to be doing well, and he was trying to get the Skyline off the ground too with some help from groups like us.
The crowds were picking up night by night, but Jack didn’t want to pay us until the weekend. We were hungry. Desperation set in. Being from Canada, we had brought big overcoats with us, so we threw them on and headed to the nearest Piggly Wiggly grocery mart. One of us picked up a loaf of bread and some mustard, while the other filled his overcoat with bologna, cheese, cold cuts, and a few cupcakes for good measure. The guy with the bread and mustard headed to the checkout counter to pay and I called out, “Oh, good, you got some bread and mustard. Go ahead and pay and we’ll meet you in the car, thanks.” We stuffed our bellies like long-lost refugees and headed back to the Skyline for another trip to the Twilight Zone.
By the time we finished up our gig, the tear-gas fumes had cleared up, and we no longer played with watery eyes. We got paid—not as much as we’d hoped—and hit the highway, thinking that the strangeness was over.
Only it wasn’t. A few months later, on Friday, November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas, and two days later his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was in turn shot by a mysterious nightclub operator with ties to the mob. As the assailant’s face was splashed repeatedly across television and newspapers for days on end, a bizarre realization settled in for all of us Hawks: Jack, the owner of the Skyline Lounge who always seemed to be tweaked on pep pills, was none other than Jack Rubenstein—otherwise known as Jack Ruby. The man who had hired us only a few months before to play his weird, burned-out Skyline Lounge in Fort Worth, Texas, had shot and killed the assassin of President Kennedy.
When we got back to Arkansas from Texas, Levon pulled me aside. “We got to make a connection down here,” he said. “We got to find us some Mary Jane.” He and Ron knew a guy named Jim Fred who could get his hands on a variety of pills. Levon and I tracked him down and picked him up in our new white ’63 Cadillac, which Ron had helped us buy. As we pulled up to a stoplight where three young kids were playing, Jim Fred rolled down the window and said, “Hey, kids, you want to see something funny?” He stuck his right hand out the window. The kids stared, then let out a horrified scream as they realized he was missing some fingers. Jim Fred laughed as we pulled away. “Kids these days have no sense of humor.”
“Hey, do you know anybody who sells grass around here?” I asked him.
“Well, of course I do,” he said. “There’s a couple of old guys out here a ways that got sacks of it in their barn. They grow it t
hemselves. You want to go see ’em?”
Levon and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. We cruised out into the sticks, following Jim Fred’s directions. Soon we pulled up to a funky farmhouse with a weather-beaten barn. A grizzly-looking geezer came out of the house yelling, “Who’s that? Who the hell are you boys?”
Jim Fred jumped out of the car. “Hey, Clo, it’s me, Jim Fred. I would have called, but I don’t think you even got a goddamned phone yet.”
Just then, another old fellow came out of the barn, carrying a rifle under his arm. Levon spoke up. “I’m from down Helena way, and this here is the Duke. Jim Fred said we might be able to purchase a little reefer from you gentlemen.”
“This here’s Bertram,” said Jim Fred, gesturing to the guy with the rifle, “and that’s Clo.” He smiled at them. “I told Levon and the Duke, you boys grow some pot that will set them on their ass!”
Bertram looked at me, looked at Levon, then looked at the Caddy. Finally he said, “Well, you sure as hell ain’t the po-lice, with a ride like that.”
“Go on, sit in it,” offered Levon. “It still has that new-car smell.”
“No, if I sit in it, I’m gonna want to keep it,” said Bertram. “And then I’d have to kill you.”
Bertram invited us into the house while Clo went to get the pot. “Clo and I don’t smoke that stuff no more. We prefer something a little harder.”
A minute later, Clo came into the house carrying a small black doctor’s case and a paper bag full of pot. “Here, smell this,” he ordered, pushing the paper bag in front of Levon and me. Then he reached into the doctor’s case and pulled out a syringe and a spoon. He cooked up some heroin, looked into a small mirror, and shot it into a vein in his neck.
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