Albert kept us on a modest retainer to live on while he worked out plans for our next tour with Bob. Once a week I’d go up to his office to pick up our money. They would always make me wait like I had nowhere to go, and each time when Albert finally wrote out the check, he would look pained at having to pay us.
“I’ve got an idea for you guys,” he said one day. “Why don’t you do a record of Bob Dylan’s songs as instrumentals? All the songs with recognizable melodies, you know, like ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Believe I could get you a record deal for that.” He handed me the check, smiling at his brain wave. “Think about it.”
I acted like I could see the idea lightbulb over his head and said I would talk to the boys. I realized in that moment that Albert knew the Hawks only through our playing behind Bob. He had never heard Richard sing or Garth’s multi-instrumental brilliant musicianship or Rick’s fantastic harmonies and killer voice. Albert knew I could play, but he didn’t know I could write.
—
At the end of July, Albert called me at the hotel with a tremor in his voice. He said Bob had been in a bad accident on his motorcycle. Bob had flipped over on the bike and fractured his neck. I was shocked. “What hospital did they take him to?”
Albert explained that Bob had gone for treatment to a particular doctor in Middletown, New York, from whom he could receive private and intensive care. I asked the key question: “Is he going to be able to recover from this without permanent damage?”
“It’s too early to say,” Albert replied.
I tried calling Sara, but she was with Bob at the doctor’s. Then I told Garth, Rick, and Richard. We were all really worried, not knowing how badly Bob was hurt. When someone says “broken neck,” you can’t help but think the worst. When Sara got back to me, she said they thought Bob would heal in time, but it could be a slow process. He would need some traction and then he would have to wear a neck brace as long as necessary. She said, “I’m sure he’ll check in when he’s recovered a bit more.” In the meantime, Albert said, all touring would be canceled indefinitely. We would remain on standby until we knew how well and when Bob would recover.
—
On the night Dominique was arriving from Paris, Richard, Rick, and I borrowed a car and headed for JFK. Perhaps we shouldn’t have smoked a joint on the way, because I got completely lost. I felt so terrible that Dominique would be waiting at the airport, not knowing what was going on. When we finally arrived at the Air France terminal, I could see the exasperated look on her beautiful face. I jumped out and hugged her, apologizing for my awful taxiing skills. She was a bit freaked out, not knowing if I’d forgotten her or if she was stranded there. Rick pulled out the rest of the joint and said, “Here, this will settle your nerves.” Dominique laughed, and even with a bit of a language barrier, we were back in a comfort zone almost immediately.
At the Chelsea, Dominique and Edie became fast friends. They would go on Edie’s daily run to the pharmacy to cash her check and buy more makeup, over to Warhol’s studio or Factory, as it was called, and maybe a little stop at Dr. Feelgood’s. Business as usual for the summer of 1966. Sometimes Dominique and I would go down to musician Buzzy Linhart’s loft, which he shared with his bandmate Serge. It was way downtown in no-man’s-land, where the streets were deserted and we could play music all night without bothering a soul. Serge and Buzzy’s pad was a musical sanctuary. You’d run into all kinds of characters there, from Richie Havens to members of the Lovin’ Spoonful. When the sun started rising, it was our cue to wrap things up. At dawn fruit and vegetable markets opened all along the block, and stores and restaurants from all over would come to buy their fresh produce. Once, as we were leaving, one of the vendors yelled, “Hey, come on, don’t stop the music now! I’ll give you a dollar. Keep playing.”
“Make it two, and you got a deal,” I yelled back.
If we got to sleep by 6:30 a.m., it was a good night; later than that, the day could start to evaporate. Dominique fell right into the groove and took this all in like it was meant to be. Everybody liked her, but no one as much as me: ever since I’d met this girl in Paris she had been stuck in my heart.
Dominique had planned to stay in New York for just a week, but she ended up staying a lot longer. Eventually, she had to go to Montreal to see her parents and check in with the newspaper she wrote for, Le Photo Journal. The boys and I were also going to Canada to see the folks, and I asked if she and Chantal, who was already back there, might enjoy coming to Toronto for a visit. I was eager to make plans for our next rendezvous.
I called Bob from Toronto. We hadn’t been able to speak since the accident, and while he sounded a bit restrained, he still had electricity running through his veins. It was so great to hear his voice. He’d been staying with Dr. Ed Thaler in Middletown, New York, for the first part of his recovery. Dr. Ed was a miracle worker, he said, getting him back to normal as fast as possible. “This doctor’s a genius. He’s built these speakers based on the human ear that sound as good underwater as they do in your living room.” Dr. Ed had ordered him a special neck brace that he said would enable him to get back to the grind in no time. As we kept talking, he sounded more and more like his salty old self. “I can’t turn my head,” he said. “If anybody came up behind me, I might not know they were there for hours.” It was nice to hear him joke about it. “Come up to Woodstock when you get back. That’ll be good timing.”
I told the boys that Bob sounded pretty damn good, and he really wanted to get back to work. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
On a hot Canadian summer day, I dropped Rick off with his family in Simcoe and drove over to the Six Nations Indian Reserve. I just wanted to feel this place under my skin again. On the banks of the Grand River I found a quiet spot and sat for a while, musical memories swirling around in my head. This was where it had all begun for me. Here I had learned my first G chord on a beginner’s guitar with a picture of a cowboy on it, but an Indian showed me where to put my fingers.
The drive from Ohsweken to Hagersville felt shorter than I remembered. I also saw the place through another lens, not just in its personal resonance but from stories my mother had told me of her upbringing here. I saw the shack houses that had to endure tremendously harsh winters, many of them with no indoor plumbing. I knew my mother was one of the luckier ones, who’d had a chance to see what was on the other side of the mountain. Slowly I rode along Second Line trying to recognize all the little destinations from my childhood: where the wild strawberries grew, the railroad tracks, where we would wave at the train engineer going backward and tooting his lonesome whistle, the water pump that gushed out the coldest, best-tasting water into a tin cup. I pulled up to the little gray house where my aunt and uncle had lived with their twelve children. I sat in the car outside, wondering if some of the family still lived there. For some reason I couldn’t muster up the courage to go knock on the door and say, “Hi, it’s me, Jaime. I’m back.” I wasn’t back. I was just feeling my way through. I’ll come back here when I’m hopefully more successful or famous, I thought, and they can be proud of one of their native sons.
While staying at my mother’s, I wrote a note to my uncle Natie in prison. I couldn’t imagine him behind bars, but I told him that my musical journey was full of extraordinary experiences and that pretty soon I was going to make a “real move.” He would know what I meant. I missed his kids, David and Vicki, and my lovely aunt Fran, but I was like a moving target, never in one place too long.
—
Dominique had left me the phone number of her parents’ house in Montreal. I called and asked for her. “Bonjour? Allo?” was repeated. I said slowly, “Hello, could I please speak with Dominique?” A woman’s voice told me to hold on a moment, then, “Louise, telephone.” (I soon found out that “Louise” was Dominique’s given name. She had changed it, another thing we had in common.) Dominique sounded jubilant, as if happy to be back on her home tu
rf with family and friends. She said she had spoken to Chantal, and they could come visit us in Toronto after the weekend. She asked me where they would stay. I said we could all stay at my mother’s.
“At your mother’s?”
It was no problem, I assured her. Ma was like one of the gang. All the guys were camping out there right now.
Dominique laughed. “Well, they sure couldn’t stay at my mother’s, that’s for sure.”
Bill Avis came by for a visit and told me that the Beatles were going to be playing Maple Leaf Gardens in a few days. Though we’d met a couple months earlier in London, I didn’t know them that well, but I said to Rick and Richard, “Let’s get in touch with their road manager, Mal Evans, and see if we can say hello at the hotel after the show.”
Rick and I went to pick up Dominique and Chantal at the train station. They looked beautiful, but I could see that they felt a little out of place—they were, after all, smack-dab in the middle of “English” Canada. They had grown up with English-speaking Canadians trying to dismiss their culture, and the good cheer of our welcoming committee wasn’t going to erase that overnight. We told the girls that the Beatles were playing that night in town and we thought we could all try to meet up with them afterward.
I didn’t want to arrive at the Beatles’ hotel with too many people, so Rick, Richard, and I went ahead to see if the guys wanted to have some people over. We found Mal Evans and he ushered us past the big crowd gathered out front. In a huge suite upstairs we found a pretty mellow scene. Paul, John, and George were all engaged in different conversations, while Ringo read a magazine on the far side of the room. George stood up and glanced at Mal, as if to say, Who the hell are these guys?
“It’s Bobby Dylan’s band,” Mal announced. “The guys we saw him with in London.”
“Hello, guys.” George waved as a look of recognition came across his face. “Visiting with some family here.” John got up, came over, and shook our hands, laughing. “So you survived the tour with Bobby Dylan after all?”
“Oh yeah, we got through,” I said, “but we’ve got the scars to show for it.”
John talked a bit about their tour but didn’t really seem to be loving the experience. Could have been too much screaming and not enough about the music. Suddenly he looked around the room with a sly smile and asked, “Would you like to join me in my office?” We got up and followed him into an adjoining bedroom and through to the bathroom.
“Let me show you a little trick,” he said. He pulled the door to the bathroom closed behind him and reached into his pocket, retrieving a pack of Lark cigarettes. He took hold of the little plastic wrapper end and pulled it with a flick of the wrist. The three of us watched as if he were Merlin the magician. He peeled back the aluminum paper, ripped it off, and pounded the cigarette pack against his other hand, the way anybody would to remove the first cigarette. Why the big ritual? I wondered. Sure, we’re in show business, but is this really necessary?
John flipped the Lark cigarette with its charcoal filter into his mouth and lit it. Immediately the smell of marijuana filled the room. He took a big puff and said, “Beatles have to take precautions.” We all started giggling with delight and smoked the whole joint together. I could only conclude that John had someone make the cigarettes and package them exactly as they would in a factory. Must be good to be a Beatle.
When we got back to the house, we told the girls they weren’t having a big after party. “We just said hello—and it got too late.” You could see they were a little disappointed, but we knew that when you’re on tour you have to catch your breath when you can, or it will take you down.
—
I enjoyed being with Dominique more every day, but soon she and Chantal had to get back to Montreal, and the guys and I headed to New York. I had made a commitment to play on John Hammond’s new record, which would be produced by Leiber and Stoller. And Barry was giving up his New York studio, so Rick, Richard, and Garth were looking to find us another place where we could rehearse.
Once we’d settled back into the city, I went up to the country to check in with Bob and see how his recovery was coming along. Albert Grossman’s wife, Sally, was heading up too, so I hitched a ride with her. She asked what the Hawks were up to, and I told her that we were working at Barry’s temporarily but it was tricky finding a stable place in the city where we could make music. She said Albert thought we could easily find a place in Woodstock where we could do whatever we needed without any bother. Sally made things sound natural and flowing, and the idea stuck with me.
After Bob saw the cut Pennebaker had done on the documentary from our European tour, he decided that he and Howard Alk would edit the footage themselves at his house in Woodstock. Bob said he wanted something more unexpected and experimental. Filmmakers like Federico Fellini had drawn a new line in the sand, and breaking the old mold was very inviting. The film, which Albert had already arranged for TV distribution with ABC, had become Bob’s project as he recovered.
When I got to his house, I was hardly inside the front door when Bob, with his very stiff-looking upper body and hard-core neck brace, waved me into a side room where he and Howard Alk were working on the TV special. “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said. Smiling at each other, they sat me down in front of the little Moviola editing screen. Howard, still grinning, said, “Are you ready?”
I smiled back. “I think so.”
They showed me the first eight minutes of the film, breaking into laughter every thirty seconds or so. I started laughing along with them without realizing it. What I saw was bold and incomprehensible, with surreal, disconnected editing that was kind of hilarious. Things were cut together to give a completely different meaning to what was actually going on: Bob and Albert having a phone conversation when they were really talking to other people. There would be a cut to one of our shows and we would play a big intro to a song; Bob would step up to the mic to start singing, and they would cut to some guy in Copenhagen talking about Hamlet. I liked that it wasn’t taking itself too seriously. The editing was abstract and fun, once you took the ride.
Bob and Howard couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh man,” said Bob, reaching for the back of his neck brace, “this hurts, but it’s getting better. So what did you think about the film so far?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I said. “Let me see it again.”
I liked this experiment; I liked them reaching outside the box. This was a stretch, and Bob Dylan—who was a master of stretching—was delivering. Albert thought this was a splendid rebuke to everything that the dumbness of TV represented. He had no problem sticking this in ABC’s face.
A friend of Bob’s and Howard’s, someone I knew through them, was also staying at the house, and later that evening he asked me to come over to his room.
He said, “You wanna do some drugs? What are you into?”
“I’ve had some good and bad experiences on hallucinogenics. But mostly pot and hash.”
He laughed like I was still a juvenile delinquent. He reached into a black bag and pulled out a “works”—a needle and syringe, a bag of heroin. “You never did H? You never got high?”
I said, “Yeah, I snorted it once by accident, and it made me throw up. I don’t like shit that makes me puke.”
He tied up on his arm, cooked up the scag on a spoon, shot up, and said, “You get over that real soon. This is getting high.” I felt like a lightweight, but I thought Howard and Bob probably wouldn’t even blink at this.
—
Back in the city, the guys had struck out looking for a rehearsal space; everything they found was too expensive. And when I tried to get a room for Dominique and myself at the Chelsea, the manager said they were almost completely booked up: the only room left was on the main floor and looked out onto a dark alley. It would just be temporary, but I felt embarrassed in front of Dominique, who had come back to New York to stay with me. She thought the room was strange, but so what? We were together, an
d tomorrow was another day.
Right around this time, it became perfectly clear that Dominique and I were not in a casual relationship; we were a couple. I had never been involved with a girlfriend on this level before. She was different from anybody I had ever known: her sharp intellect and humor, her extensive knowledge of literature and international cinema, the sound of her accent, her blazing smile and fiery eyes. When I held her in my arms it was a perfect fit. She was stunningly beautiful inside and out. I couldn’t imagine life without her.
Albert and Sally Grossman invited us over to their Gramercy Park house one afternoon. We had some gourmet delights, of which Albert was a champion.
“Oh, I almost forgot, “Sally said. She went into another room and came back with a tiny calico kitten to show Dominique, who melted immediately.
“We just had a couple of litters from our cats in Bearsville,” said Albert.
“You can have this little girl if you want,” said Sally.
Dominique couldn’t resist. “Yes, please, can we take her?” she asked me. “She’s so adorable.” I gave in, wanting to make her happy. Sally then went back into the other room and returned with another kitten, fuzzy with black fur and cute as anything you’ve ever seen. “This one’s a boy, and he’s very funny. You know, sometimes animals aren’t so lonely when they’ve got a friend to play with.”
“That’s a great idea,” Dominique said. “Let’s take them both! Come on, can we?” I should have known better, but I didn’t.
We took the kittens back to our dungeon room at the Chelsea. You could step out of our window into an enclosed space where the hotel wrapped around itself, a black pit about twenty feet square that went all the way up to an opening at the roof. I watched the kittens go in and out of the window and play in the dirty pit.
“We gotta get out of here,” I told Dominique. “This is too grim.”
I thought if we found a little two-bedroom apartment in the Village, we could split the rent with Richard. We ended up getting a spot on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Bedford in the Village for eighty-nine bucks a month. So we moved with Richard and our two kittens, which we’d named Maybelle, after Mother Maybelle of the Carter Family, and Matt the Cat. It was on the first floor, and Dominique, Richard, and I instantly turned it into a cool pad. The location was brilliant—two blocks down from the Village Vanguard, great record stores, fantastic burger joint across the street. We were happening.
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