History / The Hawks (1957–1964)

The Hawks (1957–1964)

Levon Helm was seventeen when a piano player at the Delta Supper Club in West Helena, Arkansas, mentioned to a touring rockabilly singer named Ronnie Hawkins that the kid at the bar could probably drum. Hawkins didn't have a drummer that night. He had one by the end of it.

Helm's mother wasn't about to let her son skip graduation for a rock and roll band, so he split time between Marvell High School and the road until 1958, then joined Hawkins full time the moment he had a diploma. The timing lined up with something bigger: Hawkins was moving his whole operation north, to Toronto, where rockabilly was still a novelty and audiences hadn't gotten tired of it yet. He built a following fast. By 1959 he'd signed to Roulette Records and cut two hit albums, Forty Days and Mary Lou, with Helm behind the kit on both.

Hawkins had a method for building a band, and it wasn't subtle. When a local group opened for him and had a player worth stealing, he stole them. Robbie Robertson was fifteen when his own band, the Suedes, opened for the Hawks at the Dixie Arena in Toronto. Hawkins put him on the road crew first, then discovered he could write, and had him co-writing songs for the 1959 album Mr. Dynamo before Robertson had played a single note onstage with the group. A year later, Robertson pawned his 1957 Fender Stratocaster to buy a bus ticket to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to audition properly. Helm picked him up at the Greyhound station. Robertson played bass for the Hawks through 1960, then took over lead guitar in 1961.

Rick Danko came in through the same door. At seventeen, already five years into playing music and working days as a butcher, he booked his own band, the Starlights, to open for Hawkins, who promptly hired him as a rhythm guitarist. When the Hawks' regular bassist got fired not long after, Hawkins simply ordered Danko to learn the instrument. By September 1960 he was the full-time bass player.

Richard Manuel's route ran through a band called the Rockin' Revols, which opened for the Hawks in Port Dover and again at the Stratford Coliseum, where Hawkins heard him sing a song made famous by Ray Charles and decided on the spot that he needed him. Manuel was eighteen.

Garth Hudson took the most convincing. He'd trained classically at the University of Western Ontario, and his parents had paid for it, so a rock and roll band wasn't the plan. Hawkins got him anyway, using a cover story that Hudson's parents could live with: he'd join as a paid "music consultant," not a band member, and the other Hawks would each kick in ten dollars a week for "lessons." Hawkins also bought him a Lowrey organ, an instrument worth something like sixteen thousand of today's dollars at the time. Hudson joined in late 1961. By December of that year, the lineup that would eventually become the Band was complete: Helm, Robertson, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson, backing a singer none of them would still be backing five years later.

They spent those years earning their reputation the unglamorous way, through extended residencies at Le Coq d'Or Tavern on Toronto's Yonge Street, where Hawkins ran his own club upstairs, the Hawk's Nest, and where the band played for months at a stretch until they could do the whole set without thinking about it. A 1962 recording of the group, made at a high school gig in Fayetteville, wouldn't see official release until 2021, decades after everyone involved had either become famous or died.

The end came over the kind of grievances that sink most bands: money and control. Hawkins liked his musicians visible and unattached during shows, mingling with the crowd rather than sitting with girlfriends, and an altercation with Danko over exactly that in 1963 became the last straw in a longer list. Hawkins fined players for bringing women around. He skipped shows and left the Hawks to play without him, then balked when Helm argued they should be paid more for those nights. The music itself had started pulling in a different direction too, away from the strict rockabilly revue Hawkins wanted and toward something rougher and more varied. In early 1964, Danko, Helm, Robertson, Manuel, and Hudson gave Hawkins two weeks' notice and left, on terms good enough that Hawkins would go on inviting them back for reunions and guest spots for the rest of his life.

They didn't have a name yet. For a stretch they called themselves the Levon Helm Sextet, adding a sixth player, saxophonist Jerry Penfound, before settling on the simpler Levon and the Hawks. Whatever they were called, they were on their own for the first time, with nobody left to steal them from.