Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South, Chapter 4 of 4
In the final chapter of my, and Robbie's, account of his apprenticeship years, an encounter with two of Helena's finest threatens to turn nasty, and a summons comes down from on high
According to Robbie, Ronnie Hawkins’s rules and regulations were not the only reason the Hawks abandoned their boss. Hawkins “built us up to the point where we outgrew his music and had to leave,” Robbie later said. “He shot himself in the foot, bless his heart, by sharpening us into such a crackerjack band that we had to go out into the world. We knew what his vision was for himself, but we were younger and more ambitious.”
Following their muse and sharpening their sound, Levon and the Hawks were, before long, “probably the most widely imitated white band in the mid-South, ” as the music historian Robert Palmer writes in his authoritative Deep Blues. The Hawks’ excellence, especially the guitarist’s, is palpable in Robbie’s composition “Leave Me Alone,” (though, as is apparent, they hadn’t yet shed their Bo Diddley influence). Robbie considered “Leave Me Alone” and its flip side, “Uh Uh Uh” the Hawks’ first skillfully produced songs. “In the past,” he writes in Testimony, “we’d mostly just played the songs and the producer had pressed ‘record.’” This time, they were working with what Robbie considered “a real producer,” the veteran R&B entrepreneur Henry Glover, for Glover’s Ware label. While the band was on the road, Glover saw fit to release the 45 as the work of “The Canadian Squires,” a moniker more appropriate to a doo-wop group than a hard-riding rockabilly band. When Robbie saw the record, his response was, “Oh, dear.” He shrugged it off; just another bump in the road.
. The Canadian Squires? “Oh, dear,” thought Robbie.
Although the Hawks gigged virtually nationwide, their favorite roost was Charlie Halbert’s Delta Supper Club in Helena, Levon’s home turf, where they never failed to pack the house.
One afternoon the guys were sitting around in Halbert’s Rainbow Court Motel when Robbie wondered out loud if Sonny Boy Williamson, one of the greatest-ever blues harmonica players and a product of Helena’s rich blues tradition, was in town. (1)
“Probably so,” said Levon, who idolized Sonny Boy; Levon had grown up listening to “King Biscuit Time,” broadcast every day at noon over Helena’s KFFA. The show, which featured the less than completely dependable Williamson when he saw fit to show up, was jointly sponsored by King Biscuit Flour and Sonny Boy Corn Meal.
“Let’s drive down to the holler,” Levon proposed—Helena’s Black section, known to local whites by a more derogatory name. And off they drove in search of the great man.
Whether the Hawks knew it or not, Sonny Boy Williamson had not been a Helena resident for years. His King Biscuit days long behind him, he had gone from local to global celebrity. Nonetheless, when the Hawks went looking for him, “there he was,” says Robbie, “coming up the street, in his famous suit and a bowler hat. He had a briefcase with his harps in it. He was old, but he looked….fine.” Something had brought the old man back to Helena.
The redoubtable Rice Miller, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson (b: numerous unconfirmed dates between 1897 and 1912; d: 1965). After several early- and mid-1960s European tours, during which he was lionized by such aspiring blues artists as Eric Clapton, Sonny Boy affected the manner, or his idea of it, of an English dandy, fitted out in a custom-tailored, two-toned suit and bowler hat, the picture of threadbare elegance.
Sonny Boy and his King Biscuit Time drummer, James “Peck” Curtis, performing Sonny Boy’s first-ever single, cut in 1951 for Trumpet Records. A close look at the photograph reveals Sonny Boy’s famous two-tone suit. Williamson had a genuine verbal gift, as is evident in his witty song titles and lyrics, such as this song’s “Every time she starts to lovin’/She brings eyesight to the blind,” or, from his first Checker Records single, “Don’t Start Me to Talking”: “Don’t start me to talking/Because I might tell everything I know.”
Thrilled to meet his childhood hero, Levon introduced himself and, Robbie says, “invited Sonny Boy back to our place, where we had our instruments set up. We played, and Sonny Boy was like, ‘Whoa! You boys can play!’ And he played his ass off.” Robbie happened to notice that Sonny Boy kept a metal can near him, into which he spat at intervals. Tobacco, Robbie surmised, until he glanced into the can and saw that Sonny Boy was spitting blood.
The Hawks decided on the spot to contact their booking agent and arrange a tour: “Levon and the Hawks, featuring Sonny Boy Williamson”; Sonny Boy, for his part, told the guys that it would be his pleasure to bring them to Chicago’s legendary Chess Records studio, the recording home of Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and many others. In high spirits, the Hawks and Sonny Boy repaired to Levon’s favorite barbecue spot. “We were having the time of our lives,” says Robbie, “when all of a sudden these two patrol cars come zooming up, lights flashing.” I’ll let Robbie take the memorable audio narrative from here, at 2:30, to its conclusion.
Sadly, no Sonny Boy/Hawks tour was to take place. Hardly had they left Helena for their next gig than they got word that Sonny Boy had died. Not long afterwards, “we got this call,” recalls Robbie, “from [the high-profile music manager] Albert Grossman for me to come and meet with this guy Bob Dylan.” Neither Robbie, who barely knew who Bob Dylan was, nor Levon nor the others could have remotely imagined how radically life was about to change.
Except for two footnotes below, this ends “Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South” as Robbie and his bandmates, whipped into shape by one egomaniac, begin their long relationship with another. If you recall, these four chapters are based on the long interview, “all blood, sweat, and booze,” as Greil Marcus characterized it, that I conducted with one of rock’s greatest-ever musicians, a songwriter/guitarist nonpareil, for Musician magazine in 1991. It’s been an odd experience, spending several weeks listening to the voice—funny, smart, observant, and very much alive—of a man who is no longer in the world. But who, as I wrote in the very first sentence of Chapter 1, left his mark, and then some, on our culture.
(Note: The audio of the final segment of Robbie’s and my 1991 conversation is below, beneath the footnotes.)
From the program for Bob Dylan’s October 1, 1965 Carnegie Hall concert, the “accompanists” Levon and the Hawks. (2)
Notes:
1. Rice Miller was one of a kind, both musically and in his eccentric, if not outrageous, behavior. He borrowed—“filched” is the more accurate term—his nome d’arte from the popular Chicago-based bluesman John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, although, typically disregardful of the facts, Miller always claimed that it was his given name. After the actual Sonny Boy died in 1947, Miller felt no compunctions, if he ever had, about advertising himself as “the one and only Sonny Boy Williamson,” which is how I’ll refer to him—he grew to be much more famous than his namesake.
Williamson had his own, “uniquely orchestral harmonica style,” according to Palmer. He alternated quavering, vocally inflected melodies and rich chords, sometimes thickened with his humming, and he alternated them so skillfully the music took on an almost hypnotic ebb and flow…. He was also an extraordinary showman. He would play without his hands, snapping his fingers just in front of the microphone to provide percussive cross-rhythms, or he would play with the harmonica in his mouth sideways,,, like a cigar. Sometimes he played a harmonica that was entirely hidden inside his mouth….”
Sonny Boy more or less left Helena in the 1950s, buying a home in Milwaukee. He began recording for Chess Records’ subsidiary, Checker, hitting Billboard’s R&B Top Ten right away with “Don’t Start Me to Talking,” his first Checker single. Now nationally known, Sonny Boy widened his celebrity still further in the 1960s, when, in the wake of Muddy Waters’ trailblazing 1958 tour of England, Williamson toured all of Europe, as far east as Poland, in 1963 and ‘64, pausing to record albums with the Yardbirds (who then included an 18-year-old Eric Clapton) and the Animals.
Given his celebrity status, Sonny Boy’s Helena friends were surprised to see him back in town in 1964, taking over his old slot on King Biscuit Time.
“Sonny Boy,” said King Biscuit Time’s white announcer, Sonny Payne, “I thought you were having a ball over there in Europe.”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“I just come home to die. I know I’m sick.”
“How do you know you’re going to die?”
Sonny Boy looked Payne in the eye and said, “We’re just like elephants. We knows.” Perhaps, among his other gifts, Sonny Boy was clairvoyant, because his premonition was correct.
2) I was perhaps the only 10-year-old present at the Carnegie concert, Dylan’s fifth electric show (not including his appearance the previous July 25th at the Newport Folk Festival when, backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he plugged in a Fender Stratocaster and dropped an A-bomb on the folk-music world. A distraught Pete Seeger reportedly wept backstage.) He’d since found a permanent backup band, as one can see on the program, above.
As I wrote in my Stereophile column of December 2022, “The first half of the show featured Dylan alone, strumming his acoustic guitar, which the crowd lapped up. During the intermission, their unease was palpable”—they would have to have spent the summer in Antarctica not to have heard Dylan’s electric “Like A Rolling Stone,” which had been released that July 20th and risen to #2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 despite its unprecedented six-minute length.
When Dylan came back out, strapped into his Strat, he was accompanied by the tight-as-a-tick rockabilly unit he’d plucked from obscurity. As Dylan and the Hawks played nine songs, loud, Robbie wondered how many people had ever been booed at Carnegie Hall The hallowed venue itself was traumatized: Carnegie Hall’s audio setup was not built to handle decibel levels of this order, and when Robbie launched into his screaming solo on Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues,” Carnegie’s PA system screamed back, emitting shrieks and howls, acute sonic distress that almost shut things down.
As Dylan and his villains struck the final chords to “Like a Rolling Stone” and exited, the booing rose a notch. Surprisingly, it subsided after a few minutes, yielding to applause that lasted until Dylan re-emerged, alone. “Surveying the crowd,” I wrote, “he said in that sardonic drawl, ‘Weelll, I didn’t know you liked me so much.’ He played a one-song acoustic encore and split, the world busted open.
“The booing did not subside as Dylan and the Hawks traversed the USA; just the opposite. The abuse further increased as they circled the globe in 1966, reaching its height that May in Manchester, England, when a furious folknik famously stood up and shouted ‘Judas!’ Dylan turned to the band and yelled “Play fuckin’ LOUD!” One has to admire his spine, his conviction in the face of universal outrage that he was doing the right thing even if it meant shoving it down the world’s throat. [Dylan’s off-mike exhortation is audible at 0:35 of the Manchester performance of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the final song on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home. The soundtrack was released in 2005 as Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Volume 7.]
The Carnegie gig was not the Hawks’ first appearance with Dylan; they had come aboard a week earlier, for two shows in Texas. When Dylan hired them, they were Levon and the Hawks, but the name didn’t last long. Unnerved by the boos, Levon quit the tour in November and went home. By the time he rejoined his buddies, in 1967, they were the Band.
I had never seen or for that matter heard of the Carnegie Hall program of ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘Levon and the Hawks. But I can say that by the time they hit Berkeley in early December of that year, there wasn’t boo or a hiss or even a sigh to be heard. On the West Coast the feeling was, ‘Well, what took you so long?’ People figeted during the acoustic first half and gaped and all but levitated when he came back with this five piece band—Levon gone by then, Bobby Gregg, who’d played on ‘Like Rolling Stone,’ in his place. Allen Ginsberg ushered a bunch of Hells Angels into the front row but even that didn’t take the bloom off. I couldn’t take my eyes off Rick Danko. The long break in ‘It ain’t Me Babe’ was so hallucinatory—I thought I saw the roof of the hall lift off to show the sky, and that was just the music—that after it was over any memory of the song was completely erased, except for the sensation that something once in a lifetime had happened. Decades later I heard bootleg of the show but was afraid to listen to that song I was worried it wouldn’t live up to my shadow memory. But when I heard it I said, ‘Oh, now that makes sense. Sure.’