Levon & The Hawks & THE SUMMER OF ’65
The Summer of ’65 is still a landmark, watershed year in the
memory of those who were there, lived it and are still alive today to remember
what happened. Of course we didn’t recognize it was so special while it was
happening, it was only years later when we looked back that we recognize how
significant it was.
That was the summer that Levon and the Hawks came into our
lives, unobtrusively and practically unnoticed, and in fact, we probably didn’t
notice they were here until they were gone. Unlike most bands Levon & the
Hawks and the Band never had a top ten single, though some of their songs would
hit the bottom rungs of the pop charts, and a few were hits for other people.
To put things into perspective, the top songs that fading winter
were the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine,” “Ticket to Ride” and ‘Eight Days A Week,” the
Surpemes’ “Come See About Me” and “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “My Girl” by the
Temps, “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Fellin’” by the Righteous Brothers, Petula
Clark’s “Downtown,” and “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis & the Playboys.
As spring came in, among the songs that hit the top of the
pop charts were, “I’m Telling You Now” by Freddie and the Dreamers, “Game of
Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman’s Hermit’s “Mrs. Brown,
You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VII,
I Am,” and as the summer got underway there was The Supremes’ “Back in My Arms
Again” and the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).”
The British invasion also included The Rolling Stones that
year, as they came in to Atlantic City
to play the Steel Pier behind their hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
Eventually these songs were surpanted by a new and unique
song, The Byrd’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which unknowingly
herald in what would be a new era, when folk music met rock and roll.
While the story of
the Band has been told so many times it has entered the realm of myth, I
will try to stick to the facts as best I can reassemble them.
It probably began early in the spring of 1965 with a
telephone call from Tony Marotta’s office in the little shack behind Tony
Mart’s Café in Somers Point, at the New Jersey shore, to the talent booking
office of Colonel Kutlets in Toronto, Canada, with Tony, in his husky voice,
and between puffs of on a cigar, asking Kutlets if he had a band that would
play the summer as the house band, mainly before and between sets of the main
headliners.
Kutlets, it turned out, had just the band for Tony, as they
had finished playing a few years on the road behind rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins,
and were tired of touring, needed a steady job, and wanted a place where they
could play and settle down and not move around so much. The pay wasn’t very
good to start, but they could stay in the rooms above the club and if they fit
the bill they would get a raise, and if they stayed the entire summer, until
the end of Labor Day weekend, they would get a bonus.
The band was Levon and the Hawks, as they were known from
their stint with Ronnie Hawkins, and Levon was Levon Helm, the only American in
the quintet of Canadians that Hawkins had recruited a few years earlier.
Although young, they were seasoned musicians, and Tony liked
them because, unlike the psychedelic rock groups that would come after them,
they were polite, well-mannered, dressed in suites and ties and respected him.
Decades later I went looking for the local links to The
Band, and went to Tony Marts, where above the door was the sign “Through these
doors walk the most beautiful girls in the world.” Next to the door was a small
bar where I found Anthony “Tony Mart” Marotta, sipping a drink, smoking a cigar
and watching the band on stage. Did he remember The Band?
“You mean Levon & the Hawks?”
“Yea, I remember them, the Bums,” he said. “They left me
without a band on Labor Day,” and then after a pause, “but they was good boys.”
How did they find their way to Somers Point?
Tony Martotta’s son Carmen Marotta later recalled, “That was
the Harold Kutlets agency, out of Hamilton,
near Toronto. My father met him
through MCA out of New York. They
were a promotions, talent, productions, booking company. Kutlets is the man who
is eventually credited with picking up and representing the Hawks, Levon &
the Hawks who became The Band.”
“They were with Ronnie Hawkins and were the Fabulous Hawks –
that’s where the name Hawks comes from – the rockabilly, rhythm & blues
singer. Then when they lost Ronnie Hawkins, they had a fight with them or
something, they became Levon & the Hawks. Even though they were a Canadian
group they couldn’t get any work in Canada
at the time, and they were touring down south, we’re talking about the winter
of 1965. They were kicking around the south, some of them were from Arkansas,
and Kutlets called dad up and said he had this great band that needed a break.
They would work cheap. Dad put them in in April. They played six nights a week,
four or five sets a night, for $700 total, plus rooms, they lived over top of
the bar. They worked their way up to $1300 a week. Now this is for five guys
and a manager, a character named Bill Avis, and of course Harold Kutlets got a
cut of that.”
Ted Shall did the display advertising for the Press of
Atlantic City and wrote an entertainment column called Nightly Whirl, in which
Shall wrote: “Don’t forget that tonight is going to be a big one in Somers
Point, and at Tony Mart’s in particular. The renown Conway Twitty arrives at
the offshore nightspot to join a Canadian group that has rated plaudits for a
number of weeks – Levon and the Hawks.”
“Then, as the story goes, and its been corroborated, that
they became such a legendary talent, that Dylan himself came here. The way it
was told to me was that people from Boston to Georgetown, D.C. were coming here
just to hear Levon and the Hawks, and hear Richard Manuel sing Ray Charles and
Ottis Redding and James Brown, and see Garth Hudson play the sax and do Junior
Walker and the All-Star’s “’Shotgun.’”
Playing six nights a week, three or four sets a night, they
kept the house in the house when the main act – usually Conway Twitty, was on a
break. Bay Shores
across the street and Steels Ship Bar next door, as well as a number of other
clubs in the area, also featured live bands, so when the most popular act was
off stage, many of the people left. The job of the house band was to keep the
people from leaving, and the Hawks did their job really well.
In fact, after a week or so, they had earned their keep,
were given a raise and moved into a house down the street.
Carmen: “I was only nine years old at the time, fourth,
fifth grade, but I remember The Band. I remember The Band being great. I
remember hearing them play. They had two keyboards, there was a railing that
ran along the stage and they had Richard Manual on the left hand side, looking
at it. It was the center stage, which the L-bar was built around. On the right
was Garth Hudson’s organ, a B-3, and all his saxophones and accordions – he was
always playing different instruments. In the middle was the drum riser with Levon
Helm, and Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson were out front.”
“I remember how great they were. I remember the soulful
blues they played. I think that Richard Manuel was the greatest blues singer to
ever sing at Tony Marts. I think he was one of the greatest under-rated white
blues singers, and he was known for that, as was their music, their jamming,
their diversity. They would do, “Little Lizza Jane – I got a girl and you got
none….” That was unusual to hear a hillbilly song being played with a rock beat
in Tony Marts. They also played, “They Call Me Mr. Pittiful,” “Please, Please,
Please,” “Shotgun,” “Blue, Swede Shoes,” “Memphis,”
and a lot of the songs on their album, “Moondog Matinee” they played at Tony
Marts. Richard Manuel and Levon Helm used to do some of the old southern
stuff.”
Before the summer was out people were coming from
Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York just to see Levon & the Hawks, the
house band at Tony Marts, and others were taking interest, including some music
industry heavies like Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan.
There’s three versions of how the Hawks hooked with Bob
Dylan. One has Levon and Robbie Robertson going to New
York to record and meeting or running into bluesman
John Hammond, Jr., whose father was the talent scout for Columbia
records and is credited with discovering and signing Billy Holiday, Dylan and
Bruce Springsteen, among others.
Another version has Dylan coming to Somers Point and sitting
in the audience to check out what he heard was the best rock & roll band on
the east coast.
The most likely version however has Dylan visiting the New
York city officers of his manager, Albert Grossman,
and explaining to Grossman how he wanted to break out of his folk music shell,
plug in his guitar and “go electric.”
The Byrds had made a popular hit of his “Mr. Tamborine Man,”
and Dylan felt that he needed to go in that direction. Dylan said he needed a
rock and roll band to back him up, did Grossman know any?
Grossman may have had a few band in mind, but his secretary,
Mary Martin, a Toronto girl, having overheard the conversation, spoke up, and
put a plug in for the band she saw back at home in Toronto, the Hawks, who she
said were a very remarkable group who played the blues, rockabilly and rock and
roll. It didn’t take her long, a few phone calls, to track them down at Tony
Marts in Somers Point.
Dylan himself mad the call, and got Levon on the phone. “You
want to play Hollywood Bowl?” Dylan asked.
Not having heard of Dylan before, or knowing that he could
draw a crowd that could fill the Hollywood Bowl arena, Helm asked, “With who
else?”
“Just us,” said Dylan, who Rick Danko, in the background,
tried to explain, was a big folk star.
So when they had a night off, Robertson and Helm drove up to
New York and met with Dylan and
jammed with him a little, enough to convince Dylan he wanted them to back him
at his Forest Hills concert on Labor Day weekend.
The only problem was Tony Marotta, the boss, who they not
only promised to play for until after Labor Day, they had signed a contract
they had to fulfill. But they would try to get around that.
Back in Somers Point they told Tony their predicament, and
Tony called Col. Kutlets, who said he had another hot band who could fill in
for them - … who had a hit song on the charts, “Devil with the Blue
Dress.”
Carmen notes that,“Dylan took them from dad the week before
Labor Day. But dad still loved them and even gave them a cake and party for
them on their last night, but he was mad that they couldn’t stay that last week
of the summer. But of course Dylan didn’t care about that, and he took the
band. But dad was able to get Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels to finish the
last week of the summer. It was big times in those days.”
So Tony said okay, he would let them out of the contract,
and even through a farewell party for them, complete with cake, on their final
night.
While only Levon and Robertson played behind Dylan at Forest
Hills, where they were roundly booed at first, they both insisted
that the rest of the Hawks be included in the world tour that Dylan had booked,
and Dylan agreed.
But Levon had a hard time with the folk purists who booed
Dylan at every stop, so he left and took a job on a gulf oil rig rather than be
booed.
Then Dylan had a motorcycle accident, and began a lengthily recuperation
at the rural home of his manager, Albert Grossmann, in Woodstock,
New York, in the Catskill Mountains.
A century old artist’s colony, Woodstock
was quite familiar with interesting characters, so when the Hawks arrived they
didn’t garner much attention. Dylan kept them on the payroll, and three of them
leased a pink spit level house where they lived with their friends, families
and hangers on. Setting up a place where they could jam in the basement, a
typewriter on the dining room table was frequently used to type out verses for
songs they made up on the spot. Dylan came around more and more frequently, as
he got better, and after dropping the name the Hawks, began being referred to
by their friends and neighbors as the Band.
While Garth had recorded many of the Big Pink basement
sessions on a reel to reel tape recorder he kept behind the oil heater, later
widely bootlegged and later released as the “Basement Tapes,” when they wanted
to record an LP, they wanted to do a live show, but the local town counsel was
afraid of an influx of hippies and out of towners, so they nixed the idea. The
same counsel also refused to permit others from holding a festival nearby a
year later, so while the festival became known as “Woodstock,”
it was really held about thirty miles away in Bethel,
New York. But the fact Dylan and The Band
lived in Woodstock and The Band was
booked to play the festival set the stage for the myth of Woodstock
even before it happened.
On to fame and fortune, they released their own LP “Music
From Big Pink” and their masterpiece second album, “The Band,” and went on to
back Dylan on a number of tours, released a number of original albums and then
recorded and filmed “The Last Waltz,” which was supposed to be their final,
parting shot. All of this is well
documented so I won’t rehash it.
As Robbie Robertson put it, they were tired of touring and
the whole music industry, at least he was, and for him, that life was over and
he parted ways with the Band. The rest of the group wanted to continue playing
however, and after awhile, playing and recording solo and with others, they
regrouped, without Robbie Robertson.
Robertson, it seemed, was sadly vindicated when keyboardist
and vocalist Richard Manual committed suicide while they were on tour in Florida.
Around the same time Tony Marotta and Albert Grossman also
passed away, though like Hubert Sumlin and Dick Clark, they had both lived
long, and fulfilling lives, while Richard, the soul and primary voice of The
Band, had left life too early.
Levon, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson continued The Band with a
wider variety of new sidemen, and they returned to Somers Point to play a Tony
Marts Reunion show at Egos, a new disco nightclub that had been built where the
old Tony Marts had one stood.
Driving a leased car down Route 9 from Woodstock, Garth
Hudson drove around town and down Bay Avenue, looking for some landmarks that
he could remember – Dicks Dock, Dolfin Dock, the Anchorage, Gregory’s and Charlie’s
were familiar, but for the most part, the old Somers Point that he knew – Bay
Shores, Steels, Gateway Casino, were gone. All of the old nightclubs that used
to feature live bands were now mostly discos or restaurants, and they were the
only live show in town that night. A remarkable night it was though.
Hooking up with Carmen Marotta again Levon and Carmen
entered into a partnership in a New Orleans
nightclub, Levon’s All American Café, which featured live music and was known
for its jam sessions and as the place where musicians would frequently meet.
Levon also found an acting career, playing most famously as
Loretta Lynn’s father in “Coal Miners Daughter” and as a test pilot in “The
Right Stuff.”
In his autobiography “This Wheels On Fire,” Levon set the record
straight about “The Last Waltz,” in no uncertain terms, and made pubic the
personal feud with Robbie Robertson, who had copyrighted many of The Band’s
songs as his own, including “The Weight” and “The Night they Drove Old Dixie
Down,” both of which feature Levon on vocals and, in Levon’s view, were jointly
written by the whole band, though Robertson did write the lyrics.
I wondered if their stay in Somers Point had any affect on
their most creative period, and found a few hints in some of the lyrics.
On their first album, both “The Weight” and “Chest Fever”
offer possible clues. When Griel Marcus tried to analysize what their songs
really meant, he was warned by Robertson, that he was way off, but there are
some interesting, apparent connections.
Although riff with biblical images, Robertson says that the
line in the Weight, “pulled into Nazareth,
feeling about half past dead,” doesn’t refer to the Nazareth
in the bible, but to Nazareth, Pennsylvania,
where the Martin Guitar factory is located, and where he once visited, possibly
I wondered, when they were living in nearby Somers Point.
Then there’s the line in “Chest Fever,” which is primarily
known for Garth Hudson’s grand, electric organ solos, but includes the line,
“going down to the Dunes, with the goons,” – that some say refers to the old
Dunes, after hours all night nightclub, which was located on a sandbar on the
bay between Somers Point and Longport, and where the tough bouncers were known
to be “goons.”
The Band also played Gardner’s
Basin in Atlantic City one summer,
and Levon and Garth Hudson were part of Ringo Star’s All Stars when they played
the makeshift theater they set up in the Bally Casino parking lot on the
Boardwalk one summer.
Then Levon and his daughter and friends from Woodstock
came down to play the Bubba Mack Shack in Somers Point on more than one
occasion.
Then Levon, while he was still recuperating from cancer and
didn’t sing, went on a limited tour with and opened for the Black Crows in
Atlantic City, a show that I caught, before finally Levon got to headline his
own show at Borgata.
More recently Levon had been holding Midnight Ramblin’ shows
in his Woodstock barn, where he recorded Dirt Farmer and then Electric Farmer,
both earning him Grammy Awards. The World Café’s David Dye, out of WXPN in Philadelphia,
visited Levon at the barn and did a show about it that should still be archived
in the internet.
As for Tony Marts, 30 years ago – in the spring of 1982,
they filmed a major motion picture Eddie & the Cruisers at Tony Marts,
which effectively caught the spirit of the legendary nightclub on celluloid, but
shortly thereafter it was purchased by Harris Berman, Esq., who had earlier
purchased Bay Shores across the street, and tore that down and built The Waterfront.
He also demolished Tony Marts to make room for Egos, then billed as the East
Coast’s most lavish disco.
The Rock & Roll era was officially over.
“You can’t spend what you ain’t got and you can’t lose what
you never had.”
- Levon Helm
