This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  From the beginning, I was the Hawk’s right-hand man. To this day he’s a good friend and a great leader, with an uncanny ability to pick the best musicians and build them into first-rate bands. He was immediately likable, trustworthy, and just naturally an entertainer; one of the funniest guys I ever met. The Hawk had been to college and could quote Shakespeare when he was in the mood. He was also the most vulgar and outrageous rockabilly character I’ve ever met in my life. He’d say and do anything to shock you. Meeting a woman for the first time, he might drop to his knees and pretend to eat her. She had to either laugh or run away. I’d grown up on crude country jokes, but Hawk’s sense of humor was unbelievable.

  “See here, son,” he said deadpan as we headed out of Illinois. “You ever fuck a goat?”

  “Uh, no, Hawk—not yet.”

  “Well, I have—good pussy, too. Only problem is you have to stop and walk around to the front when you want to kiss ’em.”

  Rockabilly humor. Luke winked at me. Later we were talking about going down on girls, and Hawk told us he kissed ’em down to the belly button and then developed amnesia.

  None of knew what to expect from Canada. My dad had told me the Eskimos were violent and would kill us if they had the chance. We thought we were going to igloos and dogsleds. We were just country boys, but the Hawk had gone through the university and even he didn’t know what to expect. “Canada,” Ronnie assured us, “is as cold as an accountant’s heart.” Instead we found ourselves driving through southern Ontario in the summertime, a lush, green landscape of farms and lakes, prosperous towns, and above all else Toronto, the cultural capital of Canada and our future home base.

  Our Canada connection was Harold Kudlets, a booking agent in Hamilton, Ontario. Soon we started to call him “Colonel” Kudlets; the Hawk insisted that if Elvis could have a colonel, he could damn well have a colonel too! Harold was a colorful guy who’d started in the big-band era, but now he had a system going: He booked bands from the South through Conway Twitty to play a circuit in Ontario, Quebec, and U.S.-Ontario border towns like Buffalo, Detroit, and Cleveland. He also turned it around: If he found a good band from Toronto or Buffalo, he’d book them into our Missouri-Arkansas-Louisiana-Oklahoma circuit. The Colonel basically ran a transnational rockabilly interchange. The same type of music was popular in both areas in the late fifties, and we were the beneficiaries.

  We went over to the Colonel’s office. He took one look at me and blanched. “Tell me, sir,” he asked. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen, sir.”

  “Well, you look about twelve years old to me. Don’t you boys know you have to be twenty-one just to be in the places we’re booking you into?”

  The Hawk explained that in Arkansas I’d gotten by wearing dark glasses to make me look older. The Colonel looked dubious. We survived our initial jobs by sneaking me into the taverns, hiding me in the kitchen between sets in case the police came by (as they often did), then sneaking me out when the band was finished for the night.

  The first place we played was the Golden Rail Tavern in Hamilton. We rehearsed all afternoon, speeding through our material, with the Hawk as wild as an ape. When the bartenders saw what Ronnie was up to and heard our music—Bo Diddley in overdrive—they all threatened to quit. Opening night looked like a disaster: People were lining up to get out. But eventually word got out that rock and roll had really hit town and that this band was hopped up! We played “Ooby Dooby,” “Hey! Bo Diddley,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” and some Chuck Berry as loud and fast as we could. The Hawk really worked that crowd, dancing and doing that camel walk. They loved our speed and power, and our red suits with the black satin lapels. The Ron Hawkins Quartet was an immediate hit. The bartenders stopped complaining when they saw how much business we brought in. We were even held over for a week. The next gig was at the Brass Rail in London, Ontario, where we were held over for three weeks.

  Finally we played the Le Coq D’Or on Yonge Street in Toronto’s honky-tonk downtown entertainment district. This was the big time in Canada, and they loved it. The Le Coq D’Or was soon jammed with every “rounder” in Toronto. From the beginning, the Hawk attracted a rough crowd: racket guys, pool hustlers, off-duty cops, tobacco farmers, gamblers, hookers, and their pimps. Ronnie used to yell, “It’s racket time!” to start the show. It was our good luck that our music attracted these people, since they befriended and helped us in many ways, many times over the years.

  Our recording career also began during that first visit to Toronto. An A&R (artists and repertory) guy named Dan Bass from Quality Records came to the Le Coq D’Or and liked our version of “Hey! Bo Diddley,” which Mr. Diddley himself had recorded in Chicago for Chess Records the year before. Soon we found ourselves in a little studio on Kingston Road. There we cut a primitive “Hey! Bo Diddley,” which later in 1958 was released as a single (both 45 and 78 rpm discs) in a pressing of maybe five hundred copies. It didn’t go anywhere because we didn’t have a record deal yet.

  We said good-bye to Canada after maybe three months. We were all homesick, and anyway Hawk’s friend Dayton Stratton had booked us into the southern circuit of taverns, dance halls, roadhouses, and frat parties. This would help sustain us as we shed layers of skin, eventually emerging as Romping Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, then as Levon and the Hawks, then just the Hawks.

  But when we got back down south, we almost immediately got homesick for Canada again. A lot of the honky-tonks we played at home were run by gangsters. They weren’t supposed to have liquor licenses, so these places were under someone else’s name. It was often hard to get paid after a night’s work. Times were rough, and money was so scarce we had to carry what the Hawk called an Arkansas credit card: a siphon, a length of rubber hose, and a five-gallon can. The only way we could get from one date to the next was by siphoning off our customers’ gasoline while they were still inside drinking. The Hawk told people he was the only rock and roll singer to perform every night with chafed lips from sucking gas.

  The Hawk also liked to carry “the difference” in the glove compartment. We almost never took it out. But it was a rough circuit, as I said. Some of those places we had to play our way in and fight our way out. There were a number of times things got out of hand. The Hawk had to tag a couple of people. Ronnie was fearless and didn’t mind tempting fate, and there were nights we were amazed to be alive. One time some guy in Alabama got too close down front, and he and the Hawk made a negative connection. The Hawk always felt it was his microphone and his stage. The next thing we knew, he’d dived into the crowd after this guy. We all jumped in after him. Well, there was a brawl, but it didn’t last long because Willard grabbed this one guy and smashed him against the wall. Then we jumped back onstage and started to play “Who Do You Love” again. This kind of thing went on until we became familiar on the circuit. It was like leaving County Line School for Marvell. We were uptight for a couple of months until we fought our way into the system.

  After a few weeks, we were happy to go back to Canada. There the circuit was tough but less violent. The places we played in Ontario were mixed-drink clubs. The hours were better, we played fewer sets a night, and last call was at midnight rather than whenever they shut down for the night like at home. The best part was that a Canadian tavern booking might last as long as a month. You could make friends and have some fun instead of living on the highway.

  So as soon as he could, the Hawk put a down payment on a pink and white ’57 Cadillac four-door Sedan deVille and bought some new equipment and a teardrop-shaped trailer to haul it. We painted a hawk on the side of the trailer and lit out for Canada again with Jimmy “Lefty” Evans to play electric bass. Lefty was a real pro; he’d played with all the Memphis boys, including Conway and Billy Riley, and was doing sessions when he decided to come on the road with us. Ronnie gave me a couple of greenies to stay awake, and we made it from West Helena to Toronto in under twenty-four hours. It was a fast life, and we had a policy of going with speed. When we h
ad a destination, we didn’t just idle around. We drove fast. We were a blur.

  We were thrilled to be back in Toronto. I remember thinking it was the best place for live music I’d ever seen, outside of Memphis. We realized that down south we were just one of several good bands playing a rockabilly style that was already becoming dated. But in Canada we were unique and exotic, playing the most uninhibited, wildest rock and roll that hip Torontonians had ever heard. They loved the band and did everything they could to make us feel at home. We joined the shady clientele at the very down-market Warwick Hotel, not far from the Le Coq D’Or.

  On a typical Friday night in late 1958 the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets became Canada’s equivalent of Times Square. Leather-jacketed hoods in greasy ducktail hairdos drag-raced down Yonge in their tail-finned Pontiacs. Garish neon signs advertised the bars and taverns, little boys with dirty faces charged a dime to shine your boots, and the local hookers, most of whom became our friends, waited for customers on street corners when the tough Toronto cops weren’t looking.

  Ronnie Hawkins became the king of this scene almost immediately. He turned the upstairs room of the Le Coq D’Or into his private studio and “gymnasium.” He told people, “I got the only gym in the world where you come in feeling OK and leave a total physical wreck.” After the Le Coq D’Or closed at midnight, he’d move the band upstairs to rehearse all night. Soon invitations to these after-hours affairs were eagerly sought, since a few of them turned into legendary parties.

  “Let’s not call them orgies,” the Hawk would say. “Let’s just say it was seven or eight people in love.”

  Ronnie liked to tell people we had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend. I’d wink and tell them not to believe everything that came out of Ronnie’s mouth, but most people realized that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Anyway, the Hawk assiduously cultivated the worst reputation he could for us. He felt it was part of the promotion of the show.

  We usually played from Thursday through Saturday nights. To pick up a little extra money, on Sundays we played out-of-town clubs like Pop Ivy’s down in Port Dover. One night at Krang’s Plaza, in the west end of Toronto, a little kid named Freddie McNulty came in and started to dance by himself. He was short, with curly red hair and a loony smile, and he loved the Hawks beyond all reason. He was a show all by himself, right down in front; one of the wildest rockabilly dancers you ever saw. Freddie could shake it down! He was a character, the first person who ever gave me five. He came across the stage, and I stuck out my hand. He said, “I dig ya style, man,” and whack! He didn’t play anything, but he had a genius for music, so we’d let him sit in on gigs and sneak him in with us when we went down to Port Dover on Sunday. Hell, they were still sneaking me in because I was underage. Freddie became our mascot. He followed us back to the hotel, got us coffee, went to the movies with us, whatever.

  We’d brought our red band jackets with us up from Arkansas, but soon they began to disintegrate. We worked up a terrible sweat when we played, so our suits had to be dry-cleaned almost every day. Across from the Le Coq D’Or was a tailor, Lou Myles, who became the Hawks’ wardrobe coordinator. He made us a new set of black suits—pinched waists, skinny lapels, and pegged pants worn over pointy black boots—that we wore with fresh white shirts and narrow black ties. That was our look: cool, lean, and mean.

  One night our agent, Harold Kudlets, came over to see our show at the Brass Rail. The Hawk was out for blood that night: We had popped some pills, and Ronnie was doing somersaults on the edge of the stage. The customers almost went berserk when he unchained Willard on Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and he started hitting those damn piano keys so hard the hammers started popping out of the old piano. When the Colonel saw the pandemonium we were generating, he called a New York agent who booked a circuit of nightclubs on the Jersey Shore. That’s how we got to Wildwood, New Jersey, in the spring of 1959.

  The clubs on the Shore drew rock and roll fans from New York and Philadelphia. Soon we were doing turn-away business, drawing almost as well as some of the biggest acts in those days, including Sammy Davis, Jr., Teresa Brewer, and Frankie Laine. That got the talent agents all stirred up, and soon we were being courted by New York record companies who saw Ronnie as the Next Big Thing. After all, that year there was a huge void in rock and roll: Elvis was in the army, Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee was in disgrace for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, Little Richard had joined the ministry, Conway had gone country, and Buddy Holly was dead. Some people were saying that rock and roll was dying, but that Ronnie Hawkins might be able to save the patient.

  Mitch (Sing Along With Mitch) Miller over at Columbia Records wanted to sign us real bad, but Ronnie was more interested in an agent that had been sent to see us by Morris Levy, the head of Roulette Records. We went into Manhattan to see Mr. Levy at Roulette’s office on West Fiftieth Street. As we were going up the elevator the Hawk leaned over and whispered to me, “Be polite to Mr. Levy, son. He’s Mafia up to his eyeballs.”

  Morris was one tough cat, and he practically owned Broadway back then. He knew all the big boys, and nobody messed with him. He’d come up owning famous New York jazz clubs like the Royal Roost and Birdland, and started Roulette in 1956 in partnership with deejay Alan Freed, who had moved his famous Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll Party show from Cleveland to New York’s WINS two years earlier and changed its name to Alan Freed’s Rock & Roll Party. The Hawk explained that Freed was no longer part of Roulette, but that Morris owned the disc jockey, who liked to gamble and accepted cash—hundred-dollar bills in a brown bag—in exchange for playing songs on his show. In 1957 Variety, the show-business paper, called Morris the “octopus” of the music industry, so far-reaching were his tentacles. His acts on Roulette and about five other labels eventually included Count Basie, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Harptones, the Crows, and Buddy Knox, whose “Party Doll” had been Roulette’s first single. With Alan Freed’s help it went to No. 1 in five weeks.

  “We can’t miss with these cats behind us,” the Hawk said.

  In addition to his labels, clubs, and restaurants, Morris was also a major song publisher and a partner with Freed in his successful rock and roll stage shows at the Brooklyn Paramount and Fox theaters. (Many years later, after Morris was said to be worth $75 million, he would be referred to as the “Godfather” of the American music business.)

  Whatever his reputation, Morris treated us like royalty. He took us to his new restaurant, the Round Table, a classy steakhouse on Fiftieth Street, where he introduced us to Frankie Carbo, the so-called underworld commissioner of boxing in New York. That was the first time I ever ate one of those big New York-cut steaks, bacon wrapped around it, twice-baked potatoes, all the trimmings. Morris told us he wanted us for Roulette, spent a lot of money wining and dining us, and convinced the Hawk. We signed to Roulette in April 1959 and began to record almost immediately.

  On April 13 we cut a version of “Ruby Baby” and “Forty Days” at Bell Sound, produced by veteran A&R man Joe Reisman on a two-track tape recorder. What a feeling of joy that was! I’d seen KFFA’s studio back in Helena with Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys, but this was Bell Sound! All of a sudden there we were. “Forty Days” was Ronnie’s rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and boy, we took it fast. You can pick up a smidgen of what that band was all about when Willard speeds through the piano solo and lifts the song right off the ground. Roulette released this as a single in May, Morris Levy put his big guns behind it, and it spent eight weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, eventually reaching No. 45. At the end of April we were back in New York recording eight tracks, including “Red Hot,” “Wild Little Willie,” and “Odessa,” Hawk’s tribute to a famous black madam whose house on Yazoo Street in Helena was well known to us. The first time he took me to visit her he said, “Son, I’ve been coming to see Odessa since the Dead Sea was merely sick!” Ronnie liked to maintain that he knew every hooker betwee
n Helena and Toronto.

  We also cut our next single, “Mary Lou,” which had been written and cut by Young Jessie Obie in 1955. Hawk learned the song from Roy Orbison, and our version was a hit, reaching No. 26 during the wonderful, hot summer of 1959.

  We just about lived in the Cadillac that summer. During one of our breaks we went back to Arkansas, and Ronnie picked up a new white ’59 Sedan deVille and got a trailer to match. While we were checking on the Hawk’s business interests in Fayetteville (he owned the Rockwood Club with Dayton Stratton), we went to the local car dealer. Ronnie signed for me—I was barely nineteen—and I drove a new Cadillac of my own out of there. Now we had a little fleet.

  We started pushing our records right after we recorded “Forty Days.” The hottest TV program on the air back then was The Steve Allen Show, and of course Morris Levy got us an audition. By then all the rockers had been on TV, so it wasn’t any big deal, but for us this was the big time, and we were all a little nervous as we rode up in the elevator to audition for Steve. It was the Hawk, me, Lefty, Luke, and Willard. Luke and Lefty had their amps, I lugged the bass drum and the tom-tom, and Colonel Kudlets carried my sock cymbal. We got off the elevator, clattering and banging, and found ourselves in the rehearsal hall. Everyone turned and looked at us like we’d just come from Mars. Dayton Allen and Tom Poston were up on the podium, reading from a script, and everybody was laughing. Steve Allen and his wife, Jayne Meadows, sat on folding chairs, talking to the producer and director, and I don’t think they noticed us at first.

  We waited in the hallway until the cast finished rehearsal, then suddenly we got a green light. Everyone watched as the Hawk announced, “Folks, this is the one that took us from the hills and the stills and put us on the pills!” We started playing “Forty Days,” but a little too fast. Actually, it might’ve been a lot too fast. I guess we were scared, because we came out of that gate like fuel dragsters. There was no turning back, so we kicked it into high gear: the Hawk doing backflips; Willard playing flat on his back, his clothes popping open; Luke on his knees; and Lefty running straight at him with his bass. Shit! I thought everyone had gone crazy. All activity in the studio stopped. They stared at us in shock, like they’d never even seen monkeys act like this. We’d put a fiddle pickup in the studio piano, which made it sound ten times louder than an ordinary piano. It didn’t sound electric, just loud. Steve Allen was a musician, a big-time composer and piano player. He watched aghast as Willard banged those keys and the hammers started flying out of the piano like it was a popcorn machine.