“You better go,” Levon told Neuwirth. “You know what your problem is? You don’t know what’s fuckin’ funny and what’s not. Go on, before someone whips your ass.” As he walked out the door, Neuwirth shrugged. “Sorry, man, I was just kidding around.”
When he left, I added, “Don’t worry about him, that’s just Neuwirth being Neuwirth. He’s a good guy, he’s just got that New York attitude.”
Levon snarled. “That crazy son of a bitch is gonna get his ass whooped talking that big-city shit down here.”
—
We had a few days off until our next job back in New York, a performance at world-renowned Carnegie Hall. The venues we had played so far with Bob were much bigger than any the Hawks had played before, but Carnegie Hall was on another level: this was one of the most prestigious concert halls anywhere. I was excited and concerned at the same time. Of course we wanted to do our very best under these circumstances; given that, more rehearsing seemed the obvious move. But the one thing this organization wasn’t was obvious.
Running over a few tunes at the Carnegie sound check, I could tell the acoustics were more delicate than in the other places we’d played. Rick and Levon said we needed to turn Bob’s amp down. We figured that if all Bob could really hear was his guitar, we’d have no way of finding a balance or the pocket.
“Hell, that’s what’s wrong,” Levon said. “There ain’t no pocket. We’re all just clamoring along until we get to the end of a song.”
“We should play quieter here,” I told the guys, “try for a more subtle blend.”
Sometimes, however, the excitement of playing live and rocking out can send subtleties right out the window, and that’s precisely what happened at Carnegie Hall. Finding the pocket got sacrificed in the name of reaching for the sky. Bob turned up, I turned up, and, consequently, so did everybody. Loud ruled.
The Carnegie Hall audience didn’t take it lying down. The crowd may have been lying in wait to see if anything rubbed them the wrong way, and apparently we provided them with plenty to hiss about. I wondered how many people had ever been booed at Carnegie Hall. Levon and I had been through this at Forest Hills Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl, but Rick, Richard, and Garth had an otherworldly look on their faces. Bob appeared unbothered by it. It seemed to me that he realized that in a folk-music center like New York, we were bound to get a strong backlash for playing electric. But toward the end of the show, the crowd enthusiastically rushed the stage. To experience two such extreme reactions at one concert was really odd. The evening was like a roller-coaster ride.
After the show, back in our dressing room, I could hear a conversation coming through the wall. Some friends and music-business people were telling Bob and Albert quite bluntly, “You’ve got to get rid of this band. They’re ruining the music. The audience loves you, loves your songs, but when those guys come out, they hate it. You heard how the crowd reacts. It’s plain to see they gotta go, and the sooner the better.”
I couldn’t hear how Bob or Albert reacted, but when I looked around the room at the other guys, I could see hurt and confusion on their faces. The comments knocked the wind out of me too, but they also left me feeling intent on vengeance. Somehow we had to win this battle.
—
A few days after the Carnegie show, Albert, who also managed Richie Havens, hooked it up for us to catch his show at the Café Au Go Go in the Village. The set was really good; Richie’s voice stoned me, and afterward Levon and I went to a bar across the street just to come back down. We hadn’t been there long when a voice behind me said, “Hey, guitar man, what’s happening?” I turned and was so glad to see the smiling face of Mike Bloomfield. He was in town for some shows with the Butterfield band, and I thanked him again for arranging our fantastic time in Chicago.
When I told Mike that we were doing a tour with Bob Dylan, he looked puzzled. “Really?”
“We’re feeling it out,” Levon responded. “We’ll see.”
“Why didn’t you hang in there longer with Bob?” I asked Mike. “You played good on his record. But when I saw you in the studio cutting ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ you mentioned something about it being kind of weird.”
“Well, first of all, the song ‘Rolling Stone’ is by Muddy Waters,” said Mike, sticking his hand out for me to give him some skin. “That’s where that English group got their name. And Bob’s song is ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ right?”
“Hail, Muddy Waters, right?”
Levon answered, “Hail, hail, Muddy Waters.”
Mike was a hardcore blues guy, beyond a devotee. He talked about the blues like a religion, and I could see how playing with Bob, who loved the blues but incorporated so many other influences into his music, might not totally jibe with a purist like Mike.
“Bob’s a cool guy, but he doesn’t know that much about playing with other musicians,” Mike added.
“Well, that’s gonna come with time,” I said. “And he’s done so incredibly well on his own, the majority of people think he should carry on that way. The Hawks are like the uninvited guests who won’t stop ruining his music.”
Mike laughed. “Exactly—that’s why I didn’t want to stick around.” He paused for a second. “Look, I gotta tell you something. It’s what I couldn’t talk about at the recording session with Dylan. I gotta make a confession.” His face turned red. He closed his eyes for a moment. “You know that grass you took from Butterfield’s apartment? Well, I had to tell him it was you guys that stole it.”
“What? You told on us? You finked on us?”
“I had to,” he pleaded. “He thought I took it, and he was literally gonna kill me. He went crazy. And we play in a band together….I’m sorry, man. But the thing is, he’s on his way here now to meet Albert, and if he sees you…”
“Well, let’s get the hell outta here and we’ll figure it out later,” Levon said. Across the bar I caught a glimpse of a musician I knew who also sold pot. I went over and said, “Hey, you got any weed? I need to score some.”
He reached into his pocket and quietly pulled out a whole ounce. “It’s expensive. It’s the best. It’s Acapulco Gold.”
“Let me see,” I said. It did look special, with hardly any sticks or seeds. “How much?”
“Sixty dollars.”
“Holy shit.”
I went to Levon and said, “We need sixty bucks. We’ll pay Butterfield back ten times over.” We had eighty between us, and I bought the grass.
We stepped outside to wait for Paul, and sure enough, we soon spotted him coming across the street.
“You motherfuckers!” cried Butterfield the moment he saw us. He started reaching into his pocket and racing toward us.
I didn’t wait to find out what he was reaching for. “Paul,” I yelled back, “I told you we were gonna pay you back, and baby, we are paying you better than anybody’s ever paid you back. Check this shit out—Acapulco Gold, man.” I held up the big bag of weed.
Butter put on the brakes when he caught sight of the bag. Levon smiled. “That’s the best damn weed known to man. Look at that shit.”
Paul grabbed the bag, opened it, looked inside, and smelled it.
“I think we can call this deal even,” Levon said. “Okay?”
Paul stuffed the bag in his pocket, scowling. “All right, man, all right.”
As he and Mike walked into the restaurant to meet Albert, I let out an enormous sigh of relief. I heard Bloomfield saying to him, “See, I told you they were good guys. I told you they’d come through, right?”
—
We had a couple of days off, and I think Bob did some writing, because a few days into October we were asked to go into the studio to record some new tunes. Bob and I might have run through one of them in a hotel room, but for the most part we did these songs cold.
After we had run through the first, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” I asked Bob if we could take a few minutes and let the engineer get a sound on everything, so that the boys and I c
ould put together a more solid arrangement. But Bob just wanted to move forward. “I think we got it, let’s record it. I got another song I’d like to get to.” So we laid it down, playing too much and pushing too hard. Bob sounded good, and Levon and I had a pretty good little break section, but Richard and Garth were wailing when they should have been sailing. Still, we had a good time doing it. Next we launched into “I Don’t Want to Be Your Partner” with a funky little vibe. (Later this would evolve into “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”) The song was over before we could get a handle on it, but it had some cool words. Another tune that had terrific possibilities was one called “Freeze Out.” I completely zoned out and played too many blues sevenths, which did not belong in the song. Bob recorded it later as “Visions of Johanna,” and it turned out brilliant. There was one song idea, or at least a chord progression Bob had started with no vocals yet. I think Bob called it “#1.” Garth played some beautiful little melodies and background on that, but we never came back to it.
Compared to session musicians, our studio inexperience showed that day in spades. Don’t remember who the producer was for the session, and maybe there’s a reason for that. Bob and his people mostly seemed to like “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and wanted to release it as the next single. Bobby Neuwirth didn’t dig the song or our recording. When he said so, Bob lashed back at him, and things got heated. Some people were afraid to go against Bob’s instincts, but if honesty was the bottom line, Neuwirth could play that card. I respected him for speaking his mind, even if I hoped he was wrong about the single. We were all too close to it to have a real perspective on the record, but deep down I sure didn’t think it was the best the Hawks could do.
—
We toured with Bob for the next two months, getting better all the time. Some of the shows were recorded, and back at the hotel we listened and learned. I heard things we could improve on, but we were definitely starting to find some amazing dynamics. Still, the audiences didn’t seem to notice or care how much better we were getting. They came to these shows with their minds already made up. They booed, chanted, and hissed; sometimes they even charged the stage or threw things at us. I joked at the time that I learned how to play guitar without looking at my fingers because I was so busy dodging flying objects. It was harsh. We were in the midst of a rock ’n’ roll revolution; either the audience was right, or we were right.
In the middle of November, we were booked for two nights at the beautiful Massey Hall in Toronto, built in 1894. What a way to return home—playing the classiest concert hall in town. All the guys were jazzed about seeing old friends and showing off a little. I took Bob over to my mother’s house for one of her specialty meals but ended up eating both my portion and Bob’s. He wasn’t doing too much eating in those days. Could it be that those little truck-driver pills had found their way into Bobby’s medicine chest? Or perhaps he was keeping a watchful eye on his figure. Bob said Mama Kosh was exactly how we’d described her: like a young Ma Barker, loving, loyal, and street savvy, taking no guff from anybody.
For our first night at Massey Hall, friends and family came out in droves to witness their native sons play the big time. We had gangsters and thieves, hustlers, tailors, cooks and contortionists, carnies and gamblers, you name it. Levon invited Freddy McNulty, our mentally challenged little friend, backstage before the show. We introduced him to blues giant John Lee Hooker, who was playing a club in town; Bob had invited him to stop by and say hello.
I said, “Freddy, you know John Lee’s song, ‘Boom boom boom boom, I’m gonna shoot you right down, right offa your feet, boom boom boom boom.’ ”
Freddy twirled around, did a few little dance steps, and murmured, “I’ll knock you right down, I’ll show the chicks some boom boom boom.”
Levon and Bob cracked up. “John Lee, what do you think about taking Freddy here on the road?” I asked.
“I don’t know what this cat’s on,” said John Lee, “but I knows he’s far out.”
The lights went down, and we took the stage in darkness and slammed into “Tombstone Blues.” The most extreme booing and yelling erupted. Our friends and families were astonished at this reception and looked like they wanted to punch somebody. We had thought that in Toronto, our old hood, things would be different. We had bragged to Bob and Albert about Toronto, sure that it would be spectacular when we made our triumphant return. So we couldn’t believe it when the crowd proved us wrong. It was hard to hide our disappointment.
The second night’s show was just as bad, if not worse. We had our small rock-and-R&B contingent on our side, but the bulk of the crowd came from the dedicated folk scene in Toronto. A local music critic wrote a review scolding Bob for playing with a “third-rate Yonge Street band.” Not second-rate: third-rate! You could hardly come up with a lower blow than that. At least we got to stop by Lou Myles’s store while we were in town, and Bob picked up his two suits, which he wore for the rest of the tour. I had never seen Lou design anything like these before, and I have to say that both suits turned out fantastic and unique.
A dark wave passed over the Hawks on the trip to Toronto. Typically thick-skinned, we all felt hard hit from this particular rejection. Rick looked let down, as if an old friend had betrayed him. Richard wanted to put it all behind him and move on. Levon was completely pissed off. Only Garth seemed to understand why this was happening and chalked it up as a sign of the times.
But Toronto was my hometown, and I took it personally. The city felt small and insecure, like it would never be important enough. When we left town after those shows, I really didn’t know if I would be coming back.
Anyway, New York City was the headquarters for what we were doing these days, and it felt like the center of the world. After staying at a few different Gotham hotels—the Albert, the Gramercy Park, the Chelsea—I secured a suite on the top floor of the Irving Hotel overlooking Gramercy Park, a small, lovely square of trees and flowers that required a key to enter.
For a while, whenever Bob was going to hear someone play, or even just hanging out, he called me to join him. His world revolved around art, poetry, and music, and the scene swirled with an almost atomic energy. Whether uptown or downtown, the streets were alive with music. I felt like I had a front-row seat for the cultural explosion that was changing the world.
My job in life at age twenty-two was to learn, to absorb the magic, and to have a real good time along the way. Bob brought me into his world with a generosity that made Albert Grossman and Bobby Neuwirth accept me—both of them were tough nuts but amazing people. We would go out to clubs, bars, meet up with people. We’d be at the Kettle of Fish regularly, and when we weren’t downtown, we’d go to a place called Ondine, or the Scene, uptown. Bob was becoming a phenomenon, but he didn’t live large. It was interior, all coming from within. And his girlfriend, Sara, had a daughter—she wasn’t some silly rock ’n’ roll girl. There was something completely outrageous about Bob and at the same time something quite grounded as well. We traded stories about our pasts, and though it had been a fairly short time that we’d really known each other, we already shared a unique experience on a musical battlefield; in the process we’d become like war buddies.
Every day it seemed that Bob’s fame was growing exponentially. A lot more people were trying to get a piece of him. I’d never seen this kind of idolization—no one had, unless you’d been around someone like Elvis Presley in the fifties, or the Beatles. Even still, this was on a scale that felt unprecedented, and for some reason Bob insisted I have a front-row seat for it.
Levon didn’t want to join me in these new experiences with Bob, which put me in a hard place. I knew he felt somewhat alienated. He was becoming uncomfortable with the “show biz” aspects of rock ’n’ roll; he didn’t even like people taking his photograph. The music, the people, the lifestyle, even the private Lodestar plane we traveled in bothered him. “I ain’t that interested in touring in a Buddy Holly special,” he’d tell me. “Sometime, if the weath
er’s bad, that sucker could get blown right outta the sky.”
Levon was like an older brother to me. He’d taught me a great deal about music and about life in our years together. But in New York that was a role he couldn’t quite play anymore, and he withdrew. Bob was pushing forward and Levon was pulling back. I couldn’t help being drawn to the positive energy.
Richard, Garth, and Rick were also caught up in this magical storm. They thought we had a job to do and were rolling with the punches. It was an extraordinary experience, overwhelming to the point of numbness. We had a plan: to ride this storm, see if it would take us to a higher place, do a smooth landing, and take it from there. Well, maybe that’s not a plan. Maybe that’s blindman’s bluff.
—
One morning in November, Bob called me with a quiet tone in his voice.
“Hey, are you by yourself? Anybody with you?”
“No, why?”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure, what’s happening?” I said.
“Sara and I are going to get married,” he said, “and we need a witness. You know, a witness when you sign the papers for when you get married.”
“You mean a best man at your wedding?”
Bob laughed. “Well, I don’t know about ‘best man.’ That’s quite a commitment. Maybe ‘good man’ or ‘very good man.’ How would that be?”
I laughed. “Well, when’s the big day?”
“Today, like in two hours. We’re going to the courthouse. Can you make it?”
“Well, I’ll have to take my best suit out of mothballs and get it pressed, but I’ll meet you outside in two hours.”
“Okay, but you don’t need to tell anybody,” he said. “Let’s keep it quiet, you know what I mean?”
We drove over to Long Island, nobody saying much, like we were a little embarrassed. Sara looked beautiful, and Bob and I looked like immigrants trying to dress up for Labor Day. They said their vows, and it was kind of touching. There was a small reception afterward in a banquet room at the Algonquin Hotel, hosted by Albert and Sally Grossman. This day was important for Sara, who was with child and understandably wanted a grounded setting for raising a family. Neuwirth and the journalist Al Aronowitz came, and several friends drifted through as well. The whole thing was low-key but lovely and it felt right.
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