Levon could sing the hell out of that one, I thought. I knew his instrument, his talents so well, and I wanted to write a song that he could sing better than anybody. Then I put food, milk, and kitty litter out for our growing herd of seventeen cats and went to bed.
The following day I played the tune for the guys to see if it might be a contender. They reacted very strongly to the song’s possibilities, but I mostly thought of it as a fallback tune in case one of the other songs didn’t work out. I’d been thinking we should have something to showcase Garth’s brilliant keyboard work, so I suggested he do an intro to “Chest Fever.” We tried the song with Levon singing a harmony on the chorus and interjecting his laid-back drum feel during the riff section.
Halloween 1967. We heard it was Howard Alk’s birthday, so we all grabbed Salvation Army band–type instruments, threw on some masks, and headed in his direction. He was finishing up work on Peter Yarrow’s film You Are What You Eat—for which we had collaborated on the soundtrack with Tiny Tim—at his editing facility when we showed up hooting and honking outside. He and his wife, Jonesy, clapped and cheered and introduced us to a fellow named John Simon who was there helping with the film music. I had met John before, when I was recording with Charles Lloyd in 1965—he was the producer on the session. John was a staff producer with Columbia Records and had done an album featuring the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, called The Medium Is the Message, based on his mind-opening book. I thought the record was very unusual and wonderful in a crazy way. Some of it was along the lines of what we were doing in the basement with “Even If It’s a Pig, Part 2.”
Around the same time, Albert called me from Los Angeles saying he’d made a deal for us at Capitol Records, the same company that had the Beach Boys and the Beatles. He’d hoped to sign us to Warner Bros., but Mo Ostin was out of town and Albert wanted to get the deal done while he was in LA. I passed the news along to the guys, who thought, Hallelujah! This is real, this is serious, and now we have to get down to it.
In our pursuit of finding the right producer, I connected with John Simon. We hung out for a couple days before he finally said, “Are you guys going to play some music for me, or what?” He probably thought we were stalling, but we were still trying to get a bead on whether he was the man for the job. We played him some tunes from our basement tapes and then got behind our instruments and did “We Can Talk.” The way we passed around vocals in the performance blew John’s mind. He was nearly speechless. His face turned red. He stood up and paced.
“That was absolutely incredible,” he said. We ran through a couple more songs, and he just shook his head. “Please, let me work on this with you. I think this is really special.” John was the first and only producer we had met with, and his enthusiasm meant a lot. Most important, we felt comfortable with him and liked him.
—
Albert and Sally Grossman had taken a trip to India, and upon their return to Woodstock, they claimed to have discovered an incredible group there. Allen Ginsberg had turned them on to some street musicians in Calcutta called the Bauls of Bengal. “If Ravi Shankar is the classical music guy of India,” Albert told us, “then the Bauls are the Muddy Waters. They all sing and play instruments you’ve never seen before.” Sally said Albert was making arrangements to bring them to Woodstock, where they would stay at the Grossmans’ until Albert got them some gigs.
“This is going to be interesting,” Sally smiled. “It’s already getting cold here and I don’t know if they’ve ever worn shoes.”
When the Bauls arrived, Albert invited Dominique and me over to meet them. Really sweet, gentle people with a strong devotion to their spiritual calling, they seemed to be a family band, led by Purna Das and his younger brother Luxman. They were making breakfast when we arrived, and Albert said, “Check this out.” The Bauls prepared some yogurt concoction and mixed marijuana and honey into it. Then, after they ate, they took out a large chillum and packed it with tobacco and hash. They wrapped a small, wet cloth at the bottom of the chillum, fired it up, and passed it among themselves. This was part of their cultural ritual. They picked up their instruments and sat in a circle around the living room in the guest quarters. Each member sang one song, and each performance raised the bar higher until they finished with Purna’s almost operatic intensity. The rhythm coming from their instrument, called a khrmack, was intoxicating. It sounded like a combination of a gut-string guitar with only two strings and a tabla drum, melodic and percussive. This was chilling music, like funky East Indian opera raga.
I suggested the Bauls come out for a visit to Big Pink and meet the boys. And so the next day here they came, with coats and boots over their robes. A couple of them spoke some English, and we made a nice connection. They stood for long periods in front of the corny little picture on our fireplace mantel, transfixed by the revolving light on the back of the picture device that made it look like the river was flowing. They got a big kick out of that, and we got a big kick out of them watching it.
Charles Lloyd came up to visit with me in Woodstock while the Bauls were around, and I took him out to see our setup in the basement. He brought his sax, just in case we decided to jam a little. Some of the Bauls sat down at the checkerboards in the living room. They didn’t know how to play and were making up crazy rules as they went along, jumping over one another’s men in random directions and then calling out one another for cheating. At one of these tournaments, a couple of them got upset over the outcome of a game, and things grew heated. They stood abruptly and strutted downstairs to the basement in silent single file. Each of them took their instrument and tightened or tuned it in some fashion. Then—bam—they started playing their asses off, like they were letting off steam. “Wait a minute,” we said, “let’s record this,” and we put some mics in front of them while Garth began to get a balance. While they played, they displayed a large picture of their father, an amazing-looking man, holding one of their original instruments, a kartaijulie, against the sky. The father was the high priest of the family and a founder of the Baul movement.
When we got the microphones all set up, Charles got out his horns, like maybe we could have an interesting world-music, East-meets-West connection any moment now. He was into a lot of Asian mysticisms and musicalities, so he was at the ready. When the Bauls started playing, however, it became clear this was not a jam band; you might as well do yourself a favor and stay out of the way. I put my guitar back in its case, and Charles smiled and laid down his horn. They soared for close to an hour, and Garth recorded it all. No wonder we were always running out of tape. (The recording came out on Buddha Records a while later as The Bengali Bauls at Big Pink.)
—
One day when Dominique was using our station wagon, Bob picked me up and we headed to Big Pink. He drove cautiously through the center of Woodstock and onto the highway that led to West Saugerties. We were only going about twenty-five miles per hour. Cars were passing us, some honking their horns. I noticed Bob was wearing glasses I hadn’t seen before.
“How’s your eyesight?” I asked, with images of Mr. Magoo, the shortsighted cartoon character, floating through my mind.
He answered, “Pretty good. I just got some new specs.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, but why are you driving so slow? You’re driving like an old lady,” I joked.
He replied seriously, “You can’t be too careful these days. Do you know how many people make a living by jumping out in front of cars and then suing you for everything you’ve got?”
I looked at him, a bit taken aback. “What? Who told you that?”
“Just look in the newspapers. Every day, there’s somebody all bandaged up, suing a guy who was just driving along. But they pick their targets well. They’re out there just waiting for you.”
“If some fool is waiting to jump out in front of a car, wouldn’t they be better off finding somebody not going too fast, so they wouldn’t get terribly banged up?” I offered.
Bob pushed down on
the accelerator a little. “Yeah, you see, they got you coming and going.”
When we arrived in the basement, the boys were running over one of Richard’s songs, called “Lonesome Suzie.” It sounded quite lovely, and I was already thinking about a subtle guitar part that might blend right in. Bob went upstairs to get behind the typewriter, and Richard played through the tune again while I learned the changes. “This could be a contender,” I said to the guys. Everybody agreed, so we decided to play it that evening for John Simon.
After a smoke break, Bob pulled a new lyric sheet out of the typewriter and we kicked into “Santa Fe,” the beginning of a pretty good song possibility. Bob did some of his vibing vocables on words, and we played through it with Levon on drums. He was a bit rusty and tentative from just getting back, and still a little unfamiliar with the clubhouse groove. We had recorded a ton of songs with Bob already, and by the time Levon joined us we were winding down a little.
At the end of the afternoon it was already getting dark out, and Bob said, “Shall we head back?” When we got in the car, he looked concerned about something and drove a little more hastily than on the way out.
“I’ve had some weird shit happening at my house and I need to make sure everything’s okay,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“People. Strange people just show up at my door anytime—night or day. It’s really upsetting for Sara, and I don’t know who these people are or what they want. It makes me angry dealing with this shit all the time. You move up to the country for some quiet peace of mind, and they come like invaders on my doorstep.”
This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. “When you’re famous this comes with the dinner,” I reminded him, “especially the kind of fame you’ve created. People think you’ve got some miraculous insight, and they want to be close to that magic.”
“I don’t have any fucking magic!” he blurted.
“Well obviously they think you do,” I said. “Why don’t you try what other ‘famous’ people do? Hire some security or build a gate. Or have your guy, Bernard, deal with them. He can send them away.”
“He’s tried, but they keep coming. He doesn’t know how to deal with that. He’s French. They don’t have this kind of behavior in France. Ask Dominique, she knows. French people don’t act like that. Over here they don’t even know what privacy means.” He slapped the steering wheel. “I don’t want to have to build a gate. I don’t want to live like that.”
—
The next day Garth and I put together a selection of Bob’s basement songs for Albert to pass on to the music-publishing people, fourteen or so tracks that sounded like they could be covered by a variety of recording artists. The rest of these recordings would live underground and be for our ears only, especially a cut like “See You Later Allen Ginsberg,” a takeoff on “See You Later, Alligator.” Bob didn’t want any of these humorous tunes to be taken the wrong way.
Timing was falling into place for the Hawks to work exclusively on our own music. Bob mentioned to me that he had made arrangements to go to Nashville again and cut some new songs, different kinds of songs, for his next release. Quite extraordinary, I thought, that Bob already had another batch of material in the works. Just showed what a clear mind and healthy body can do for you creatively. We all knew the stories about artists doing their best work while being addicted, insane, or drunk, but this period was pretty much on the “natch.” We smoked a little weed here and there, but no more uppers or downers or hallucinogens, and nobody hardly ever drank. Once in a while Richard would have a few beers, but never enough to interfere with our work schedule. We had a clean dream machine, and it felt good for us all to work without any unnecessary baggage.
The boys and I sat down to review our own basement tapes and decide which tracks were real contenders for our album. We had a tape from Barry Feinstein’s photo studio of Richard trying out the beginning of a song idea called “Beautiful Thing,” just him playing a Wurlitzer electric piano and singing the words he had so far. It had a nice feel, but Richard couldn’t figure what to do with it from there. During the earlier days of our basement tunes, Richard and Rick had recorded “Orange Juice Blues” (also called “Blues for Breakfast”), and I liked some of the lyrics Richard came up with, like “I’m tired of everything being ‘beautiful, beautiful,’ ” a touch of antihippie humor slipping in there. His piano playing impressed me most of all, but I didn’t know if the song was a must.
“Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released” were strong contenders, and we were working on a version of “Wheels on Fire.” Rick felt quite strongly about “Caledonia Mission” and wanted to give that a go. We all agreed. I definitely thought “Yazoo Street Scandal” was right up Levon’s alley, but I still wasn’t sure about the flavor of it for our album. Even with Rick’s unique bass playing on this track, the song sounded a bit like some of our older music, and this was a brand-new day.
One of the songs from the tapes that stood out was “Ain’t No More Cane.” We had learned it from Bob, but Levon had grown up with it and said his daddy used to sing it around the house. We each sang a verse, with a blend of harmonies, accompanied by Garth’s soulful accordion—I might have had it somewhere in the back of my mind when I wrote “The Weight,” which was also becoming a contender. “Chest Fever” too, with its crazy “basement” words, and Garth’s new “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” intro, borrowed from Bach. We had to choose between “Lonesome Suzie” and “Katie’s Been Gone.” Both had Richard’s sympathetic sentiments. I liked that “Katie’s Been Gone” had no intro and that Rick’s harmony in the ending had a touch of “Pet Sounds” influence, but “Lonesome Suzie” was so moving. I suggested we let John Simon decide.
Levon and I pulled “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” from the ashes of the tracks with Bob. We’d never gotten around to doing a refined version of it with him, but Levon gravitated toward the trippy, funny lyrics. I had a bit of an arrangement stirring, so Levon grabbed his mandolin, and we went to town. Richard sang a version of a prebasement song of Bob’s called “Long Distance Operator,” which we dug playing, but I thought it might be reverting back to our older, bluesier-rock style.
By the time John Simon came back up to Woodstock to finish working on the film You Are What You Eat, the Hawks were convinced: his taste, musicianship, and producing skills all felt like a strong fit. When he came over to Big Pink to hear what we had stored up in our arsenal, his choices matched ours to a T. His arrangement ideas also sounded inspired and worth trying. John had produced Leonard Cohen and Blood, Sweat & Tears. He had worked with Marshall McLuhan! How wrong could he be?
What we didn’t have on tape we played through live for John. I loved seeing him shaking his head in admiration after we ran through Richard’s beautiful lament “In a Station.” “That’s incredible,” he rejoiced. “That’s going to be truly great.” I sang an acoustic version of “The Weight” for him that I was in the process of teaching to the guys. John started imagining drum parts with Levon and loved where we were going with the vocals. I thought Garth should play piano on this one, and Richard could sing harmony and play organ. I was in the midst of writing “To Kingdom Come,” which I had started banging out on the typewriter a while back, and sang some of it for John and the boys. That seemed to push the needle over the mark; we were ready to head into the studio.
The idea of having a clubhouse recording facility was indeed extremely rare at this time, and we loved Big Pink for the creative freedom it afforded us. But we had never seen it as more than a writing workshop. John agreed that we’d have to take our sound to town and suggested A&R Studios in New York. Phil Ramone, the highly regarded engineer, had taken over the studio and turned the rooms into the best in the city. “I want to tell Albert we need to book A&R,” John said. “We should get the room on top of the roof. It’s the best.”
—
The next afternoon, we were hanging out in the living room of Big Pink w
hen Rick glanced out the window and made an announcement: “Boys, we got company. Look who just pulled up. It’s Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend, Peter.” He ducked back from the window. “Oh dear! He’s got his harmonium with him.” We absolutely enjoyed Allen and had great respect for his poetic brilliance, but when he started chanting and squeezing that harmonium, it could make you dizzy.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. When they came through the door I gave a warm greeting. “Hi, Allen. Hey, Peter. How’s it going?” They shook hands with everybody.
“I brought my harmonium,” said Allen, “in case we feel like getting into some music.”
“Great. Oh! I nearly forgot. The Bauls of Bengal are looking for you. They kept asking, ‘Where is Allen Ginsberg?’ They looked a bit lonely.”
“They did? That’s what they’re saying?” Allen asked, surprised. “I’m responsible for them being here, far away from their home. Where are they?”
“They’re staying in the guest apartment at Albert and Sally’s,” I told him with a worried look in my eye.
Allen turned to Peter. “We better get over there. I’m sorry, fellas, but we need to go and check on the Bauls. They’re such a long way from their culture and their people.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we completely understand,” said Rick. “Tell them hello for us.”
They scurried back to their car and took off. I looked around at the guys. “Well, it’s true. I heard Purna Das say, ‘Where’s Allen Ginsberg?’ ”
Richard grinned. “No, you didn’t.”
Rick started singing “See You Later Allen Ginsberg.”
Garth chuckled to himself and went “shhhh” with his finger in front of his lips.
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