by Levon Helm
“Where ya from?”
“Arkansas.”
“Sign here.”
“Hey, hand! Come on he’p me widdem leads heah. We gonna put a ring around this sucka. Hold this.”
Three of us deckhands had to hump this heavy pipe. The master welder would step up, tip his visor so as not to be blinded by the arc light, and zap those leads shut like a surgeon. Zzzt. Zzzt. Zzzzzzzt. He’d step back again, cool as the other side of the pillow. We’d be sweating like hogs.
We were on a lay barge, which sat next to an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico. It had sleeping quarters, a galley, and a big damn spool with a mile and a half of six-inch pipe coiled around it. We were laying pipe. They had a machine that dug a trench, the pipe would go in, and divers would go down and weld the pipe together. These guys mostly sat around and drank coffee, but when they had to go down one hundred fifty, two hundred feet, they’d get all pumped up preparing for the mission. We laid a quarter mile of pipe while I was on board. I think I went out twice, because they were pretty good to us. I had a couple of harmonicas, and Kirby was a good guitar player, so we played music for ’em, and they’d let us hide. Some of the guys on that crew: heavy. There were people who were hiding out. The foreman was a tough and funny fifty-year-old called Hobo. He’d been in the carnival business, working for some abusive drunk. One night in Texas he’d had enough, and drove the truck with the ferris wheel into Mexico and sold it to a scrap dealer. After that he got into the oil-rig business.
At night we played cards and listened to the radio. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” was a big hit, with Bob Dylan singing, “Everybody must get stoned!” It was real funny to hear it and wonder who was playing the drums and how was everyone getting along.
We went to town one time, and I kinda appointed myself foreman. I was the official driver. We went to a Supremes concert, then down to the French Quarter and got seriously drunk. I think we ended up at the St. Louis Hotel for two or three days. Then we were broke again and back on the rig.
It was a dangerous job. You could easily get killed out there. One time the night crew hadn’t tied down the boom of the crane, and the morning crane operator got up and said, “Hand! Get me a cup of coffee and some cake.”
“Sir!” I was in the kitchen, getting three pieces of cake, and I turned around and saw the hook of the crane swing around—the sea was rough that day—and catch that poor son of a bitch in the cab, without a safety helmet. It was awful. Then I started noticing the body bags hanging up on the wall. A helicopter came in and took him away. Someone said they’d have to put a steel plate in his head. I don’t know whether he made it or not.
One afternoon, maybe it was in September, the sea started to really pitch. Foreman said, “Helm! Pennick! Get in the crewboat and go out to Number Three”—he pointed to a distant oil rig you could barely see on the horizon—“and bring back them come-alongs and chains and all the bullshit they left out there.” We were not too thrilled about this, since it was a long-ass way, and it was starting to blow pretty good, with only about three hours to darkness.
Dolphins are just like dogs. They were in the water and on the water and having the best time of their lives swimming along with us. Over in the west the sky was black, and it was hurricane season; Kirby and I were exchanging nervous glances and smoking lots of Winstons. We got put on that rig, scambled around for those short pieces of chain and some adjustable wrenches, and it started to rain. The sea was raging. We saw the boat coming back, and we threw whatever tools we had on the deck and jumped in after it. “Is that it?” the crew chief yelled. “That’s it!”
Then we were in the thick of it. The sea was so bad we couldn’t reboard our barge. The pilot wanted us to jump between two heaving decks, and we passed on the opportunity. Instead we rode into the shipyard. That’s when I took my paycheck, a good paycheck, and decided that the Cotton Carnival was coming up, and if I left now and got home in time, the Cavette sisters might allow me to escort them to the festivities.
First I went up to Springdale to touch base and see my folks. I checked in with good friends like Paul Berry in Fayetteville, who told me that Bob Dylan had called a couple of times, trying to find out where I was. I borrowed some money from Paul—whom I’d known for years and whom all of us in the Hawks knew we could count on any time—and hopped another drive-away car to California and hung out with saxophonist Bobby Keyes for a while. I knew Leon Russell out there, and Johnnie Cale, Roger Tillotson, Jesse Ed Davis, and Jimmy Markham—all musicians from the Tulsa area.
Back in Arkansas I played some dances with the Cate Brothers, Earl and Ernie (identical twins) on guitar and keyboard. They had a good little band and were like family, we were so close. In fact, my sister Modena’s son, Terry Cagle, became their drummer after I went back to Memphis in the spring of 1967.
I’d heard vague stories that Bob Dylan’s world tour had been canceled because of a serious motorcycle accident the previous summer. The boys were in New York, trying to get something going. That was about all I knew. So I borrowed a room from Mary Cavette in Memphis, and studied the Memphis style—Booker T. and the MGs—and watched television for six months while I waited for Lady Luck to deal out her next hand of cards.
In my absence, the collaboration between Bob and Robbie Robertson got more intense. Dylan loved Robbie’s playing. “I call it the mathematical sound,” he told a journalist around that time. To another: “Robbie Robertson is the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound.”
They hired Bobby Gregg, the New York studio drummer who played on Highway 61 Revisited, to take my place and took it back on the road. They played California for most of December 1965, and everyone came to see them. In San Francisco the city’s poets turned out in force: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (in a Moroccan djellaba) Michael McClure. The music got pretty wild. Bob was running across the stage, playing toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose with Robbie, acting out those lyrics. As much as Robbie played, Garth’s organ added that orchestral atmosphere that took it to another level. Rick’s craftsmanship and dancing was a counterfoil to Bob on the other side of the stage. (“Rick Danko on bass looked like he could swing Coit Tower,” wrote Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day.) They were playing really loud, really on the edge. Garth has tapes from that era that make your hair stand up.
The band was put on retainer around then. In January 1966 they recorded three tracks with Bob in Nashville. The drummer was Sandy Konikoff, whom we knew from Stan Szelest’s band the Ravens. (The tracks included a version of “Visions of Johanna” and “She’s Your Lover Now.”) Three days later in New York they cut again without Garth. These were the early sessions for Bob’s new album, Blonde on Blonde. The band went on the road in February and March 1966 with Konikoff on drums. Audience reaction remained mixed. They were a hit in Memphis (the Arkansawyers who’d come up for the show knew damn well who was playing the guitar) and got booed in Philadelphia.
Bob and Robbie recorded further in Nashville that March. In April Albert Grossman took the whole thing to Australia with new drummer Mickey Jones, from a New York band called the First Edition. More booing. When they landed in Sydney on April 12, there was a riot at the airport, as hundreds of fans turned out to welcome Bob.
Robbie was very close to Bob in those days, and when he wasn’t with Bob he hung out with Albert Grossman. People noticed that Robbie began to change. Bill Avis remembers: “One night in Australia I saw Robbie looking at me funny. He said to me, ‘You never liked me as much as you liked Levon.’ I didn’t know what to say, because I always did like Robbie. It hurt me, him saying that, and I left the group after that tour was over in May. It looked like things were changing in a way I couldn’t get next to.”
After a twenty-seven-hour flight to Sweden, the tour picked up a film crew run by Don Pennebaker, who would film the European part of the tour for ABC television. At the end of April they play
ed Stockholm, where they visited Hamlet’s castle and Richard Manuel tried to trade his leather jacket to a Swedish kid in exchange for his beautiful blond girlfriend.
The famous British leg of the tour began in Sheffield on April 30. Bob’s acoustic set now consisted of “She Belongs to Me,” “4th Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Standing ovations. Adulation. After an intermission, the curtain parted to reveal the band set up and waiting in front of a giant American flag, which Bob was carrying as a backdrop. This was also a provocation, because the Vietnam War was really heating up, and Bob’s Euro audiences expected the Prince of Protest to comment. Instead Bob played in front of the biggest American flag he could find.
The catcalls and booing began before the band roared into “Tell Me, Momma.” The set kept building: “I Don’t Believe You,” “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” the new “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The audience would erupt after each song, some shouting approval, others yelling “Traitor!” and “Bloody disgrace!” This could go on for minutes, during which Bob and Robbie would tune their guitars while waiting for the din to die down so they could play. (In Paris on May 24 Bob tuned for ninety minutes between songs trying to get his guitar and harmonica to sound right together before the band was allowed to resume the show.)
There were surreal press conferences in the major cities—Bob had pretty well joined our accelerated way of living by then—and newspapers in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool splashed pictures of Bob all over their front pages before the shows. Afterward the reviews wrote, “A pop group could produce better rubbish than that” and “He should have left the group in America.” In Edinburgh one disgruntled customer told the film crew that “Dylan wants shootin’.” In Leicester some hoodlums stormed the stage, attacked Bob, and pinned him down before the show could be stopped.
But there were also people who loved the mathematical sound. Local musicians turned out in force to greet the boys backstage. The Spencer Davis Group came by in Birmingham. The Beatles were in the audience during the final show of the tour, at London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 27, 1966. This was the show—taped by Columbia Records for a live album, never released, subsequently bootlegged—in which the audience frequently erupts in jeers and rhythmic clapping to show its displeasure with the band, the volume, and the electric Dylan in general. While Bob tuned up for the last song, some idiot in the top balcony yelled “Judas!” at the top of his lungs. Bob kept tuning. “I don’t believe you,” he said into the mike, as some people cheered. Robbie turned to the band to start the song. “You’re a liar,” Bob sneered. And as Garth raised the roof with that organ, Bob said, “You’re a fuckin’ liar,” to his tormentor as they blasted into “Like a Rolling Stone.” According to Rick, hundreds of people walked out.
The Beatles came backstage after the show to commiserate with the boys. John Lennon had been hanging out with Bob at the hotel, and George Harrison was earnestly telling Richard Manuel about meditation. The Beatles were upset by the walkouts and booing, and assured the boys they had been telling people to shut up during the raucous parts of the show. The Hawks were impressed by the contrast between themselves—street kids from the wrong side of the tracks—and the polished Beatles, who wore jackets and ties. Richard told me later that everyone appreciated the respect they received from being Bob’s band. It just took everyone to a different level.
Later that night, Bob told Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones that the Hawks were the greatest band in the world. What about us? Keith wanted to know. Bob told him that the Stones were the best philosophers, but that the Hawks were the best band.
Rick Danko explains what happened next:
“We came back from that English tour with Bob pretty fried, man. We were living in New York City, where we’d moved to after playing with Bob. Right after the tour Robbie and I split a two-bedroom suite at the Gramercy Arms Hotel. Then I met this chick named Robin, who was going to summer school, and we shared an apartment in a rent-controlled building on Gramercy Park. We had a great setup.
“The original plan was to rest for a couple of months and spend the rest of the year on the road. Then late in July Albert Grossman’s office called and said that Bobby had a motorcycle accident in Woodstock and hurt his neck, so the tour was canceled. So there we were. We didn’t know what to do. Bob broke some bones in his neck and was in total recuperation mode. We didn’t know where Levon was. We were road musicians without a road to go on. We still wanted to record, so we started looking for a place to rehearse some music.
“While I was still living in New York, I started working on a film being produced by Peter Yarrow [of Peter, Paul, and Mary] called You Are What You Eat. Bob was in Woodstock and let us know that one of his first projects when he recovered would be to resume filming the movie we’d been shooting in Europe. But that’s not how I got to Woodstock. I came up the first time with Richard Manuel as part of Tiny Tim’s band for Peter Yarrow’s film. It was February 1967. I remember we left the city at about three in the morning so we could film at sunrise. It’s about a hundred miles north of Manhattan, so it took us a couple of hours. We were outdoors filming from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, playing songs in different locations around Woodstock. Richard and I had never been to the Catskills before, and we couldn’t believe how beautiful it was, but we were frozen. We went over to Albert Grossman’s house and sat in front of a roaring fireplace with his wife, Sally. That day was my introduction to Woodstock. As things happened, Sally Grossman would play a key role in our career, and Woodstock would become our home.”
When the early English colonists arrived in New York in 1628, they found the Dutch already there, in New Amsterdam. So they sailed up the North River, as they called the Hudson (the Delaware was the South River), and built a stockade and called it Kingston. The resident Dutch settlers retreated up the valley of Esopus Creek and began to farm the Woodstock valley and the Bearsville flats. According to legend, the Esopus Indians didn’t camp in the area but used it for burying their chiefs, and even today the land has a charmed feel about it, protected by great Overlook Mountain and a long chain of only slightly less majestic hills: Indian Head, Ohayo, Mount Guardian, Tobias, Plattekill.
I’ve heard our local historians suggest that Woodstock’s tolerance of artists and show people dates at least to the 1870s, when theater and circus folk began to visit in the summer. Several important artists’ colonies were established after 1900 by wealthy New Yorkers seeking a rural alternative to the organized bohemianism of Greenwich Village. The rustic cabins of the Byrdcliffe Colony came first, built over seven old farmsteads under Mead’s Mountain and rented out to socially acceptable artists, followed by the Art Students League Summer School in 1906, which moved into the old livery stable. I’m told the young students, with their flowing hair, French berets, and prehippie lifestyle, really shook up the old Dutch Reformed town fathers back then. Painters, sculptors, writers, and composers bought old farmhouses and built cabins on Ohayo Mountain, in Bearsville and Wittenburg, in Hurley and Glenford. Mill Hill Road and Tinker Street in Woodstock sprouted art galleries and academies, which led to a group of artists known as the Woodstock School. By the twenties and thirties, theater people were coming for the summer and putting on plays, and Woodstock had become a full-blown summertime arts colony with a reputation for welcoming talented people who needed a quiet place to work or rest.
Peter Yarrow had spent summers in Woodstock since he was a boy. His mother had some land with a cabin on it, and Peter started bringing up his friends in the early sixties. He was and is a very generous guy. He took Bob Dylan up to Woodstock as early as 1962, and Bobby spent a lot of time up there in that house with his girlfriend, writing songs and playing chess down at the Woodstock Bakery. Milton Glaser, an arti
st and art director, took Albert Grossman to Woodstock, and Albert fell in love with the place. He bought an old stone house in Bearsville and gave Bob Dylan a private room in back with its own entrance. Immediately, Albert and Sally’s became the headquarters of an ever-expanding scene. Albert built a studio complex and a little empire that lasts to this day. This is where Bob met his wife Sara. They got married and moved to an old house in Byrdcliffe in 1965. Their neighbors included composer Aaron Copland and Mason Hoffenberg, best known as the coauthor of the comic-porn novel Candy.
After Dylan’s motorcycle accident, he teamed up with two filmmakers, Jones and Howard Alk, and began to edit the movie they’d shot in England. Albert Grossman suggested to the band that since they were on retainer, they might as well move up to the country to be closer to Bob, who was getting ready to cut another album. That’s how they came to rent the house off Pine Lane in West Saugerties known as ... Big Pink. “Before we left New York,” says Rick Danko, “we went into the studio with John Court, who was Albert Grossman’s business partner. The company was called Groscourt Productions. They had this singer, Carly Simon, who they wanted to make into the female Bob Dylan. We cut a couple of things with Carly, like ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,’ but nothing came of it.
“Next thing you know, we trickle up to the country and land at the Woodstock Motel right in the middle of this quiet little rural town. The owner, Bill, was a great guy. He and Garth became friends, and he went out and found Garth a pipe organ. Garth was interested in Scriabin around then, music and color and all that. Soon people around town started to get to know us. If I was trying to cash a check in the Colonial Pharmacy, someone there might vouch for me by saying, ‘Yeah, he’s with the band.’ Meaning Bob Dylan’s band. Everyone knew everyone else back then.