One evening, while I was sitting with two of the officers and their wives between sets, one of the wives looked directly at her husband and said, “You better not do anything harmful to Robbie and the boys. These are some good kids and we don’t want to see anything bad happen to them.”
The other wife joined in. “Absolutely. They play wonderful music and look so handsome doing it. I believe they are going to be very successful in the near future. We don’t want to see anything get in the way of their careers, do we?” she asked, looking at her husband. “Or things could get very lonely at home, if you know what I mean.” They all broke into laughter as I took the stage for our next set.
A few nights into our run, the lead arresting narcotics detective came to the club. We did our “palsy-walsy” routine with him, even inviting him to back to the hotel for a little party after the show. There I pulled him aside, poured him a Crown Royal, and lowered my voice to ask him a question. “Just outta pure curiosity, how did you guys know we were going to pick up our other car at the airport parking lot, and that we had some pot?”
He took a sip of the whiskey, looked around the room, and leaned in toward me. “We got a call from Rick Danko’s girlfriend—or ex-girlfriend. She told us when you were coming back and that you had marijuana.”
I gasped. “Rick has been trying to get her off his back for months. He broke it off but she keeps hanging on.” Ironically, this was the girl who had prompted Ronnie Hawkins to fire Rick.
Now the pieces started to fit together. Just then, Levon came over and put his hand on the detective’s shoulder. “I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” he said, and introduced him to Katy, a pretty, shapely sometime girlfriend of Levon’s and a pal of ours. She shook hands with the detective and didn’t let go. Katy looked very beautiful and sexy in her white skirt and sheer top. After a few minutes Levon said to Katy and the detective, “Why don’t you guys go into the next room so you can talk privately?”
Levon had explained to Katy that we needed to beat the charges against us, or we could end up going to prison for years, and she had offered—if it would help us—to let the detective “get his rocks off.”
After Katy and the detective got it on, she said, “Oh, God, I forgot to tell you something….I’m sixteen years old.” The detective’s eyes bulged out of his head. “I don’t want to have to tell anybody about what we’ve done,” she continued, “but I need to know that the boys aren’t going to have any problems with these awful charges against them.”
The next day the Hawks and Business Bill Avis gathered to size up the situation. “How about our dear Katy,” Levon said. “Did she come through or what? I had no idea she was gonna play that underage stuff. She’s seventeen but she told him she was sixteen.” I told everyone what the detective had said about how Rick’s ex had set us up. Rick looked upset but didn’t seem that shocked by the news. He rattled it around in his head a few seconds and said, “I’m gonna take responsibility for this. I’m going to say the Panama Red was in my overcoat pocket. It was mine, and it was me who brought it across the border. I don’t want anybody else going down.”
Rick was being a stand-up guy. It was a big, bold move for him to offer to take the rap, whatever it might be, for the charges.
—
On September 15, Bob Dylan came up to Toronto with his girlfriend, Sara Lownds, to hear the Hawks play live. I set them up in a discreet corner of the Friar’s to check us out. We played pretty good that night, and when we finished our last set at 1:00 a.m., Bob put Sara in a taxi to go back to the hotel. As she was leaving, she told me that she really liked our music and hoped that everything would work out. Sara was kind of a quiet type, with a mystical side. She had dark hair, fair skin, and sad eyes. I thought it was very sweet what she said, and I knew she didn’t have to do that.
After the club had emptied out, we got a mic for Bob and plugged in his guitar. Some of the songs on his records had particular arrangements we tried to follow, though that wasn’t necessarily our strong suit. Never playing something exactly the same way twice was more up our alley. We played a few tunes through—“I Don’t Believe You,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” then “It Ain’t Me Babe”—which he had played acoustic in the past.
As we ran through the material, it sounded a bit messy; we didn’t know the songs that well. I tried to help lead the arrangements by giving signals, waving my guitar neck and playing a little louder on the chord progressions. We played the songs with no concrete beginnings or endings. Bob would usually start strumming away to set the tempo, and we would stagger in when we got a feel for the rhythm. I suggested that when we neared the end of the song, Bob could give me a nod and I would signal the boys that we were coming in for a landing. We ran through about ten tunes before Bob put his guitar down and called it a night.
He returned to the Friar’s the next day for another session, and as we kept running through the songs, I could tell we were drawing somewhat closer as a unit. I was enjoying Bob’s singing and the level of intensity this collaboration brought to the songs. He wasn’t too fixated on details or fussy about how tight we were. Finally Bob appeared to have heard enough.
“Yeah, that sounds pretty good. So why don’t we do this first tour and see how it goes. What do you think?”
Truth be known, we didn’t know exactly what to think. But we all agreed to give it a shot.
When I sat down with the guys to talk about how this music felt to them and their take on working with Bob, Richard offered, “He seems like an okay guy to me, but that run-through wasn’t very good on our end. We have to start by really learning these songs.”
Bob had asked Garth to play some of the organ parts from his record, but these didn’t necessarily fit Garth’s style or aesthetic.
Levon shrugged. “So far it’s sounding rough as a cob to me.”
Rick chimed in with the voice of reality. “We gotta give it some time and see how it goes. Besides, we’ve still got our trial to face—we may have to phone in our parts from Kingston Penitentiary.” The possibility of doing time for our drug charges still loomed large.
The next day we got together for lunch with Bob and Sara and a special guest, Bob’s mom. She had come to visit him from Minnesota, which surprised me a bit. When Bob mentioned his background to us in conversation, he made it sound almost as if he’d had an orphanlike upbringing. But his mother was warm and outgoing—a regular, proud, loving mother. She liked Rick, chatting him up and asking where we got our suits made, and that’s when I insisted Bob come to check out our tailor, Lou Myles. Bob didn’t seem like much of a suit guy, but Lou was on top of his game. He pushed to make Bob a brown and black houndstooth wool suit, and a salt-and-pepper tweed with black leather piping around the jacket. As Bob concluded his visit in Toronto there was a very positive feeling about us doing this tour together, but the outcome of our trial still remained very much up in the air.
—
Now we had to turn our attention exclusively to our legal problems. The prosecution would be calling us individually to the stand. “The less said the better. Don’t let them trick you into saying things,” our lawyer advised. We shared with him some of the stories about different officers coming to the clubs to see us over the last few months. Other stories, of course, we held back, especially the one about the detective and Katy.
On the morning of the trial, the six of us dressed respectfully and drove in our two Monarch station wagons to the Mississauga courthouse, nervous as hell. The Colonel and Jack Fisher came out in full support—and to get their bail money refunded. I had a sick feeling in my throat, but this was our high noon, and we had to see it through.
“The court will now come to order.” The judge entered the courtroom, poker-faced. I put my hand on Rick’s knee and gave him a reassuring pat. He nodded, looking straight ahead, and patted me back.
The judge asked our attorney and the prosecution a question about procedure, but our attorney didn’t respond. Dead silence. C
onfused, I looked over and saw that if our lawyer wasn’t asleep, he was having a moment of deep thought.
Oh no. I cringed.
The judge addressed him again, and as he wobbled to his feet with a document in his hand, he passed gas. Everybody acted like it didn’t happen. I wondered if it could be a clever sympathy maneuver on his part—I sure hoped so.
Our attorney called the arresting officers to the stand one by one to sketch out the details of the arrest. First came one of the policemen who had come to the club with his wife. He answered the questions very professionally, describing how the arrest went down and what they found on us. His testimony wasn’t particularly harsh, but it didn’t do us any favors either. A cold chill ran through me.
Don Docker, Garth’s old schoolmate, looked right at us as he testified. No patsy here. He described the arrest and the importing of marijuana, and said that although he didn’t think we were a threat to society, we had committed a crime. I looked at Garth, who had a weariness in his eyes.
Next they called the narcotics detective, whom we’d introduced to Katy, to testify. He claimed there were questionable circumstances leading up to the arrest and that it was possible the marijuana was part of a setup to get us in trouble. When the prosecution started to drill him, he declared that, in his professional opinion, we were not drug dealers in any way, we had never been in trouble before, we were on the cusp of becoming successful, and there was nothing whatsoever to be gained from treating us as a threat or as criminals. Levon gave me a little nod. You could hear a slight gasp in the court: he was doing a better job of defending us than our lawyer.
Then it was our turn to take the stand. The court called Bill Avis and asked about the rolling papers found on him. He said he used them on his face when he cut himself shaving.
“You use cigarette rolling papers that are commonly used to roll marijuana joints? You use them for shaving?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, sir, in case I nick myself,” Bill answered.
They called a couple more of us to see if someone would make a false or incriminating statement, but we held our ground. The only one to cause a stir was me. All along our lawyer had told us that he wanted to plant in the judge’s mind the idea that there was something fishy about this whole setup. I took a chance when he asked where the pot in the little film canister under the car seat had come from. Did I put it there?
“No, sir,” I answered truthfully, not knowing where it came from.
“Did one of your bandmates put it there?”
“No, sir.”
“Did perhaps the police put it there?”
“I don’t know…possibly,” I answered. Another gasp in the courtroom. A few of the cops’ eyes widened at the suggestion.
Finally they called Rick to take the stand. He confessed that the grass we had brought from New York was his. It was found in his overcoat and a friend in New York had given it to him. He assumed full responsibility for bringing it across the border into Canada but said he’d had no intention of selling it. “I made a terrible mistake, and I apologize to my family and my bandmates for being so foolish, and I will never do anything like this again.” I thought, Man alive, Rick couldn’t have played it better.
Our moment of truth had arrived. The judge picked up his notes and said, “Here’s my ruling: for Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Jaime Robertson, and William Avis…no charges. You are free to go. For Rick Danko, I’m giving you a one-year suspended sentence, probation, and, I hope, a lesson well learned.”
The Hawks exhaled collectively. We shook hands and thanked our elderly lawyer over and over. Rick looked more relieved than anybody. No jail time! He was bouncing around, hugging and laughing with everybody he could find. He’d have to get a work visa and a waiver to travel, which were already in the works with the lawyer. We notified Albert Grossman that we were free to do the tour with Bob.
We drove back to Mama Kosh’s house to tell her the great news, and she made us a fantastic meal to celebrate. Now all that was left was to wait for our first trip on a private plane—they were sending a twin-engine thirteen-seat Lodestar to pick us up and fly us to our first gig of the Bob Dylan tour in Austin, Texas.
Going out on tour with Bob Dylan was like heading into the great unknown, and I couldn’t think of a better place to kick things off than in the heart of Texas. One thing you knew down there was they loved their barbecue and they loved their music. The morning after we flew in on the Lodestar, Bob, the Hawks, Albert Grossman, and Bobby Neuwirth all gathered at the hotel before we headed over to the Austin Municipal Auditorium. This was a true state-of-the-art concert hall that had over four thousand seats. This was the first time all five of the Hawks would be playing together in such a big space.
For this first show of the tour, we didn’t know what to expect. Everybody’s nerves were on edge, waiting to see if the Hawks were going to be a good fit. Of course we felt like we could have been more rehearsed, but Bob only had so much patience for any of that.
Still, it felt good to have our little army together on the front lines. Bob ran through a couple of acoustic songs at the sound check, and I went out in the house to listen. Then we played part of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” getting a balance onstage while the soundman checked settings for the whole band. Bob stopped about three quarters of the way into the song and said over the PA, “How’s it sound?”
“More, please,” the soundman asked. We ran through two more songs, but the soundman still wasn’t satisfied. “Almost there.”
We moved Bob’s amp so they could get more isolation among the instruments. It was hard to hear ourselves and get a balance onstage while they worked on the sound in the house. What they usually say at this point is, “You can’t tell how it’s going to sound until the place fills up with people.”
“You want me to tune that guitar up for you?” I asked Bob. “They put light-gauge strings on it, like mine, but for rhythm you should probably have a heavier gauge. They’ll stay in tune better.”
“I like these strings,” Bob answered.
“That’s because they’re easier on the fingers for bending, but the trade-off is they go out of tune quicker. Let me stretch them out real well, see if that helps.”
That night, when we made our way back into the auditorium, the Hawks felt a bit like outsiders in this tried and true world of folk music. How odd to be invited to the party but not sure if your name is on the list. We couldn’t even know for certain if some of Bob’s gang wanted this to work.
Could have been beginner’s luck, but we got through the set reasonably well that first night. We might have played some tunes a little too fast or too slow, but nothing fell apart, and the audience put up with our noise pretty good. There were some hoots and hollers, but we didn’t get the feeling they hated it. The auditorium acoustics were more forgiving than at Forest Hills or the Bowl, and though it’s possible I was reading too much into it, Texas just felt like a musical place; this crowd seemed more open to the whole experience.
We got some feedback from the crew after the show, and it was such a bizarre scale on which we were measuring our performance. “Well, they didn’t charge the stage.” “Didn’t hear too many boos.”
I mentioned to Bob that maybe I was taking too many solos. “Nah, the more the better,” he responded.
Truth be told, we were all learning how to make this music come together in front of an audience. Bob had limited experience playing with a band, so coming from our background as a tight unit, this felt pretty loose. “We keep breakin’ meter,” Levon complained. “I don’t know where we are half the time. Can’t tell when Bob’s gonna come in singing, so I don’t know when to lead in or lay out.”
“We can’t count on specific arrangements yet,” I said. “Wherever Bob goes with the tempo or timing, we just gotta be on top of it and go with the flow.”
“We’ll get it,” Rick insisted. “It’s just a bit of a free-for-all right now.”
—
The next night, September 25, we played Dallas, which rattled our nerves even more than Austin, being such a major American crossroads. You couldn’t help but recall that only two years earlier President Kennedy had been assassinated here.
The Moody Coliseum was a big hall, probably seating around seven thousand people, and the roar of the crowd was overwhelming. Bob sounded very strong in the first half. I watched most of it from the back of the hall, wondering, How in the world does this man remember all the words to his songs? Lots of singers can memorize many song lyrics, but with Bob this was a feat above and beyond, not only because of the complexity of his lyrics but because some of his songs seemed to contain more verses than the Bible.
After a short intermission the Hawks and Dylan hit the stage, ready or not. As in Austin, either the Dallas audience was more accepting of our electric bombardment or the news had yet to reach Texas that booing the second half of Dylan concerts was de rigueur. We chose to believe the first option.
After the show a couple of interesting characters Levon had met joined us back at the hotel with an assortment of pills and weed. One of the guys was real good at knife throwing and boasted serious expertise in fighting with a straight razor. He gave me a lesson, showing me how to whip the razor out of my back pocket, flip it over my fist, attack with it, and make the razor disappear, all within a split second—very flashy and dangerous. Both guys were cool and seemed friendly enough, but you definitely wouldn’t want to cross them.
There was a knock on the door.
“Hey, it’s Neuwirth. Open up.” I let him in. He took one look at our guests and started joking. “Who are these guys, local pimps or drug dealers? Come on, I nailed that one, right?”
The vibe in the room instantly went sideways. My straight-razor friend stood up and looked at Neuwirth with a deadly smile. I pulled him back down to the couch.
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