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Hawkins billed himself as "the king of rockabilly" (an ancestor of country rock—by rock 'n' roll out of hillbilly). Calling the members of his band The Hawks, he led them from the grubby nightspots on Toronto's Yonge Street to clip joints in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. "Those places were so tough," Hawkins now likes to recall, "you had to show your razor and puke twice before they'd let you in."
A fine front man, Hawkins had a Rabelaisian capacity for talk, among other things. Yet by The Band's accounts, his memories are little exaggerated. "At one bar in Dallas called the Skyliner Club," says Robbie, "they had these dancer chicks, and one of them who was dancing had only one arm. It was a rough joint. Bullet holes in all the walls."
On the money side, things were grim. The group occasionally had to work together in grocery stores, one buying something like a loaf of bread while the others tried to steal what they could. "We didn't have nothing to eat," Robbie explains. "And no money." One night, really desperate, Levon and Robbie decided to stick up a crap game with a pot that often ran to $7,000 or $8,000. With masks made of pillow cases they moved out on their mission —only to find the game had broken up early and everybody was gone.
"Hawkins," a friend says, "worked the living hell out of those boys." But the years with the king of rockabilly were not wasted. "He could be funny onstage," says Danko, "and he taught us a lot about music and life." Well, life, anyway. Hawkins liked to throw all-night parties in his apartment above Toronto's Le Coq d'Or club. "Ahh, boy," recalls Manuel, "lots of bring-out-the-wine-and-turn-the-music-up, lots of people in one room just sweating." That one room usually drew a large slice of the unsalubrious downtown playboy set. "The more parties you had," says Manuel, "the more people would come to the nightclub, 'cause they were hoping to get invited to a party later."
With Hawkins cheering them on as a Mephisto-like master of ceremonies, they reveled in a horror chamber of life: the whole scene, with pot and pills thrown in as a matter of course. Somehow they emerged on the other side un scathed. Also they began to realize that they had nothing more to learn from Hawkins. A musician they could learn from was Bob Dylan, and when in 1965 he suddenly asked them to join him for a tour, they quickly accepted. "We knew who he was," says Robbie, "but we didn't know he was near as famous as he was." That was the point in Dylan's life when he turned his back on his folk-purist fans and met rock head on. The rock he met was provided by The Hawks—who became known as "the band." The result was folk rock. In some ways, that was the most decisive moment in rock history. One reason is that rock thereafter began to make increasing use of the modal harmonies then prevalent in folk music. "Yeah, Dylan's the one who really mixed everybody up, which was definitely a good thing," says Robbie. "It opened a lot of doors and closed a lot of doors."