Evening Standard, February 1970
They’d told me that Ronnie Hawkins used to hold parties Nero would have been ashamed to attend, so when the invitation came I didn’t need any arm-twisting.
‘We’re in the Penthouse at the Playboy. Come right up,’ were the instructions, and that seemed to be just about Ronnie’s lifestyle all right.
And yes, it was quite a party. God knows who all the people were: record company employees, girlfriends and pick-ups, I imagine. There was a lot of drink around, too, some really dirty picture books from Sweden (and I mean dirty) for those who had no one to talk to, and a lot of low, behind-the-barn humour.
And sitting there right in the middle of it all was Ronnie Hawkins, the host, alternating the shapes of his lips to take sips of brandy, puffs of his cigar and drags on a weedy little home-made cigarette that had a funny smell.
‘I never did get much from marijuana’, he says. ‘Some cats can take a puff and wow! they’re high, gone, faster than a July snow. But it never did nothing much for me, just made me sleepy.
‘I remember one time I went up to this woman’s farm I knew. And she was breeding all kinds of animals there – every kind you ever saw. And I was sitting there having me a smoke and patting this dog’s back and, you know, I began lolling off. And while I was dozing one of my friends replaced this dog for the tiniest little horse you ever saw. Its body was like that of an ordinary horse, but the legs wasn’t longer than eighteen inches. Special bred little thing it was. And when I woke up, there I was looking at this horse when it should have been a dog, and thinking, “Jesus that hash sure is something.” And I turned to a guy who was alongside me and said “For God’s sake tell me that that goddamned horse is standing in a two-foot hole.”’
This is Ronnie Hawkins in his element: boasting, bragging, telling stories, the centre of the party, the man with nothing but friends. Get him going and neither he nor you want him to stop.
‘For eighteen years I’ve been paying my dues playing the skid row bar circuits, and boy I can tell you we’ve played in some pretty tough places. One time I remember particularly. We were playing in one of Jack Ruby’s clubs, the Skyliner in Dallas I think it was, and they had a revue with girls stripping and all that. And we were just sitting watching when we noticed that one of the stripper girls didn’t have but arm. Can you imagine that?’ And Ronnie Hawkins guffaws till it looks as though he’s going to come bursting out of his Levis.
Unless you’re absolutely besotted with nostalgia about the rock music of the fifties, you might be forgiven for having forgotten (if indeed you ever knew) who Ronnie Hawkins is.
One of the very first rock and roll singers to come out of the South, he’s now a very big man, with a neatly clipped beard, military style haircut, straw cowboy hat, and a taste for cigars about the size of Giant Redwoods. He is also generous to the point of absurdity, grateful to an equal degree, and more outspoken than almost any man you’re likely to meet.
This week he has been staying in London on the last stop on a month’s round the world tour. ‘It’s the first vacation I’ve ever had in my life. When we left home in Canada there were seven of us, but one by one all the others dropped out along the way. They couldn’t stand the pace. Now there’s just Ritchie and me.’
Ritchie is Australian freelance journalist, Ritchie Yorke, who put Hawkins back into the big time when he wrote an article about him in the American rock newspaper Rolling Stone. The article brought all kinds of offers from big recording companies and now the two are firm friends.
It was Ritchie, indeed, who arranged for Ronnie to play at being host to the Lennons when they made Hawkins’s home in Streetsville, Ontario, the base for their Christmas peace mission to Canada last Christmas.
That was Ronnie’s second stroke of luck. The resulting publicity was, he figures, the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. When he gets back from his holiday this weekend he’ll be done with the low-class bars for good, he says. He’ll be done with paying his dues.
‘I was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I started out playing with the bands when I was sixteen. I always had a lot of good little bands right through. They may not have been good in comparison with the musicians of today, but they were good for then. I started off by hopping-up country and hillbilly songs, and I was the first in that area to add drums and start playing with electrical instruments in my band. And from that day to this I just been a rockie-roller.
‘One time I had an all negro group, but in them days there just wasn’t any integration, and the only places we could play were army bases, and negro clubs, so eventually we split up. All the guys I played with were much older than me, so I guess they must all be about fifty by now.
‘We played all over the South . Those places were so tough you had to show your razor and puke twice before they’d let you in. Times were so bad we always carried an Arkansas credit card – that was a siphon, a hose and a five-gallon can. You see we didn’t have much money and the only way we could get from one place to the next was by siphoning off somebody else’s petrol from out of their cars while they were inside drinking.
‘I tell you I was the only rock and roll singer in the South who had chapped lips for three years. I was belching up ethyl and regular and even a bit of diesel now and again.
‘We were poor because rock and roll music used to be the lowest form of music in the world, and only the people who couldn’t afford anybody else would hire a rock and roll band. The young people always dug it, but the older ones never could stand it. One cat once called me the abortion of music. If I’d known what abortion meant I would have hit him.’
His anecdotes and stories come rolling out with the ease of a man who has spent the last eighteen years telling them.
I met him first when I stayed at his home with the Lennons a couple of months ago. For the full three days I was there he just stood back from the hustling and hassling that was going on at a frenetic pitch all around, and grinned and laughed, and spoke to his famous guests only when he was spoken to.
He had been married for eight years to a Canadian girl called Wanda, and they have three children. But that doesn’t deter him from telling just about every interviewer he meets of the wild times he has had.
He says: ‘We were just like any band you care to name. They all have these orgies and parties, with pretty little girls and drink and raising hell. Wanda? Well, she knows how I am. I’ve always been this way. I suspect maybe she thinks it’s just me bragging and showing off, and not really meaning none of it. She’s a good woman.
‘But to tell the truth I’m getting so old that I can’t go chasing the girls like I used to. And if I do chase ’em, when I catch ’em I’m fit for nothing. You know them oysters that are supposed to make you passionate. Well, I’m so old that if I take half a dozen, only five of them work.’
Sitting with us, cherishing every moment, are a couple of antiques from a prehistoric age, a couple of London rockers, Wild Willie and friend, they tell me, all done up in their fingertip-length jackets, with velvet collars, drainies tighter than a bark around a tree, and hair greased back and pompadoured like sticky plumes. They’ve been fans for years, and although Ronnie himself didn’t know exactly when he was to arrive in England, they found out and were faithfully there to meet him off the aeroplane.
Elated at having such a ready audience, Ronnie is in full swing about his recent holiday: ‘We had trouble everywhere we went. In Tahiti there was a typhoon out of season; in Hong Kong we crossed into No Man’s Land and were likely to get shot at by the Red Chinese; and in Tokyo I had me one of them baths I’ve always been reading about with them geisha girls and that. I must have been expecting too much, because nothing happened like I thought it would.
‘Bangkok’s the place though. I reckon a man could do just about anything in Bangkok – but I didn’t because we didn’t have no time. When we were there a man comes up to me in the street and says “Ten dollars I can take you to a place where you can see a man making it with a chick.” But I said “Well, looks to me as though for ten dollars I could get my own chick and do it myself.”’
All he wants now, he jokes, is to be a teenage idol all over again. ‘After that article in Rolling Stone about me all the big record companies came offering me money like I’d never heard of. One even flew me out to Hollywood, California, and offered me a quarter of a million dollars front money to sign for them, and they’d never heard me sing a note. But I signed with Atlantic because the way I see it is – if anyone is going to make it at all, he’ll make it with Atlantic. Everything they do is just right.
‘I’ve got my little band practising now so that when I get back I’ll be able to go out again. They’re a great little band.’
And if there’s one thing Ronnie Hawkins knows about it’s bands. Wasn’t it he who hired, put together and trained individually all the members of Dylan’s backing group The Band? ‘We played together for about five years, but we were going nowhere and they got tired of the bars. I can understand that. And they also wanted to start playing more blues and try for the big time. But I couldn’t take the chance. The way I saw it was we had a good regular living in where we were, and I had a wife and kids and couldn’t take the chance. So they left me and joined up with Dylan and went to live in Woodstock, New York.’
What about that blue disfigurement under his beard and along his cheek, I ask. ‘How did I do that? Well let me tell you. I’ve been singing and hollering for so long that I went and burst a god-damned blood vessel.’
And that great big man laughs like a tickled bear, and sips from a large glass of brandy.
‘With a couple of glasses of brandy inside me I just become irresistible – least I figure so. That’s me, the housewives’ companion and the working girls’ friend.’
POSTSCRIPT Ronnie Hawkins is one of those guys who never quite made it. After being lumbered with many of the bills for telephones and house repairs after John and Yoko used his home for their Christmas peace assault in Canada in 1969, he had a few months of some notoriety before slipping back into the semi-obscurity of Toronto night-life.
