Good ol' Ronnie Hawkins an’ everybody

Good ol' Ronnie Hawkins an’ everybody

Suddenly the wold is hearing about Ronnie Hawkins. And all because John Lennon made him an international figure by staying at Ronnie’s Canadian home for ten days. Never underestimate the power of the Beatle.

Wewere talking in his living room, sitting beside his Christmas tree decorated with white doves and green-iced cookies shaped like the peace symbol. In the middle of the tree was a simple white card bearing the words “From John and Yoko”.

“John didn’t want to stay in a hotel,” Ronnie explained, “so I had this place out in the country and I guess he remembered our conversations and thought of me.”

Ronnie is surrounded by the biggest names in the business. The John and Yoko visit topped off the publicity he’d been receiving because of The Band. Dylan’s old group, now one of the biggest in the business, is Hawkin’s old group, The Hawks. He brought them together and shaped them into the group they are today.

Although a little bitter toward some bad things The Band has been saying about him, Ronnie still reminisces about the days of the old Hawks.

“ Robbie Robertson was about 15 and I kept him from going to jail and brought him into the group as a road manager. He’d written a tune even then that I recorded. I eventually had my lead guitarist, Fred Carter, teach him bass. Then Fred left so we put Robbie on lead. He had a hard time making it and in fact we were about to throw him out when he really started practicing. He got to the point where he was one of the greatest blues pickers in the world.

Robbie became somewhat of a legend in Canada, or rather his sound did. Robbie’s sound was not hype. There was something about the way he played his guitar that brought chills to your body and tingles to your head.

’’Hundreds of guitar pickers would come up to us and ask him how we’d get that sound,“ Ronnie said. ”We’d tell them things like ‘You got to cut your speakers with a knife, then put pennies in there.’ We must have torn up thousands of dollars worth of equipment/4

Rick Danco was an apprentice butcher in Simcoe, Ontario when Ronnie found him and got him to play bass for the group. And Garth Hudson was asked to join the group as a teacher, not a player. ’’The Hawks had gone as far as possible and I wanted tojget somebody to teach them music. Garth had a group in Stratford, Ontario. They’d gone to Detroit and starved to death so they had to break up. So I brought Garth in as a teacher at the start/4

For several years Ronnie whipped The Hawks into shape. ”1 was tough on them. I had rules like they’d get fined $200 if I caught them smoking pot. I was worried about getting deported. Levon and I came up from Arkansas together and we weren’t Canadians. All we had to do was have one bust and we would be deported. We also had big arguments about music. Not long before they left me they wanted to do deep funk and I wanted commercial stuff. Now, I love funk stuff but it didn’t go over at clubs, which is where we made our money. When they left me, they played around Toronto but they didn’t make. Then John Hammond offered them a job, then Dylan. But then they weren’t playing funk anyway. They were playing what I call educated country. When they left me they were 10 times the musicians they are now, because they don’t play enough.44

Ronnie may enjoy talking about old days with The Hawks, but the real sparkle gets into his voice when he talks of his first years playing the Memphis circuit.

”On that circuit you’d play with Carl Perkins and some of those cats. You’d travel one-nighters then, and some of those dates were 400 or 500 miles apart, That’s why I ended up in Canada. A friend of mine, Harold Jenkins, was playing in Hamilton, Ontario, and he convinced me to come up there because you could play one club for six nights at a stretch. He eventually wrote a song called It’s Only Make Believe, changed his name to Conway Twitty and split.44

’’There were so many of these real good rock-a-billy acts that came out of Memphis that you’ve never heard of. Maybe, they had one hit in the Memphis area and that’s all. People like Warren Smith who had the Ubangi Stomp. Some of them have kicked out

now. I know Bill Black is gone and Johnny Burnette. There was Johnny and Dorsey Burnette with their big old slim cousin playing guitar. They were the ones that showed Elvis Presley how to play a little bit. That was when he had pimples, broken teeth and blond hair.44

”1 could name ten real big giants that came out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town of 300 or 400 people.44

’’Down there we’d play Hank Williams tunes. Now they are like, special songs to those people and you don’t mess with them. But we’d hop up these songs. I almost got run out of town for rockin’ up Mansion On The Hill. Like we were being sacrilegious or something. The South is still hard-shell Baptist and they don’t like you to hop up religious tunes. They’d still run you out of the state, I think.44

Ronnie may be facing the biggest money-making period of his life. He’s recording for Cotillion Records, has an album out and John Lennon is running around the world promoting Ronnie’s first single on his new label, Down In The Alley. As a matter of fact, Ronnie himself recently set out on a four to six week around-the-world trip, expecting to visit up to 16 countries.

Whether he gets to the big money bracket or not is still up in the air, kut Ronnie will be making at least a couple of thousand a night for a while. Then it’s probable the old rock-a-billy king will retire to run a booking agency and managing firm. ”i was planning on running my businesses and letting the band work for itself up until all this happened. Now I’ll be working again for awhile."

Mike Gormley