Review: Ronnie Hawkins - Ronnie Hawkins (1959)

Tracks: 1) Forty Days; 2) Odessa; 3) Wild Little Willy; 4) Ruby Baby; 5) Horace; 6) Mary Lou; 7) Need Your Lovin’ (Oh So Bad); 8) Dizzy Miss Lizzy; 9) One Of These Days; 10) Oh Sugar; 11) What’ Cha Gonna Do (When The Creek Runs Dry); 12) My Gal Is Red-Hot.

REVIEW

"He looked like a shitkicker, but he spoke with the wisdom of a sage. He was like a gladiator that wrestled and raced in some nondescript Roman arena. You expected him to wear a toga instead of that ratty cowboy hat." That’s Bob Dylan on Ronnie Hawkins, the man who is mostly remembered today for putting together the first proper backing band for Bob — The Band, to be more precise — and whom most of us only ever see just once in our life, whenever we finally get around to watch Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, where he shares a bit of a tender «family reunion moment» with his original band, in one of those «and now we’re gonna bring our lumberjack Dad out of his log cabin for a bit... thanks, Dad, see you in another ten years, don’t forget to wave back!» episodes.

As is usual for him, Bob sounds like a wisecracker in that interview, but actually speaks with the snarkiness of a bullshitter; it is never recommendable to take his words at face value, even if they always mean something — just not really what you would expect them to mean at the outset. Neither in the literal nor in the straightahead-figurative sense was Ronnie Hawkins ever a «sage» or even a «gladiator». In reality, he was a rough and tough kid from Huntsville, Arkansas, who used to make money by running bootleg liquor from Missouri to Oklahoma, studied physical education, and, for a while, played in a band with four black musicians calling themselves the Blackhawks — no mean feat for an integrated bunch of young guys in the American heartland of the mid-1950s.

By 1959, when Ronnie got his first record contract with Roulette Records in New York, the «integrated stage» was long past him, and his Hawks consisted of Jimmy Ray Paulman on guitars, Will ‘Pop’ Jones on piano, and an ambitious 19-year old drummer called Levon Helm (who’d actually joined back in 1957, with Hawkins still having to negotiate his acceptance into the band with his parents). What these guys wanted to play was simple enough — rock’n’roll, with a little bit of soul on the side — but with American public interest in the genre beginning to fade, especially around their natural habitat of Southern states, they kept struggling for acceptance until they unexpectedly found it for themselves in Canada, which was a wee bit more open-minded for wildly energetic rock’n’roll acts in 1959 than most American venues, much like Hamburg welcomed early British rockers with more verve than London around the same time.

And "wildly energetic" is key, because this is really where the «gladiator» analogy comes in. Ronnie Hawkins loved the music he played — adored it, in fact — but he did not himself play any instruments (not seriously, at least), he was hardly an accomplished singer, and all of his songwriting was strictly conventional and derivative. The only thing he had that made him special was energy, an almost limitless supply of it, and he made it sure to push the physical boundaries of rock’n’roll to the absolute limit, at least, the absolute limit of what could be considered «legal» back in 1959. When it came to moving around, Elvis had nothing on this guy, who would do backflips, moonwalk across the stage decades before Michael Jackson made it cool for everybody, and whip his bandmates into total musical frenzy in almost cartoonish fashion. No other frontman in a rock’n’roll band at the time showed comparable stage freedom — then again, no other frontman was a nearly-professional athlete who’d only narrowly missed graduation to concentrate full-time on a musical career.

Unfortunately, history has not properly preserved for us what a complete live performance of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks in their youthful prime might have looked like; the closest you shall ever get to a squinted glimpse of that is Ronnie’s brief appearance at the Dick Clark show in full country-western garb, lip-syncing to his first single ‘Forty Days’ (basically just a retitled version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Thirty Days’) with as many antics as possible, to a select audience of clearly bewildered teenage girls. The important thing to notice is how every member of the band is trying to adapt to the «wild» schtick as well, completely going against the predominant grain at the time — with rock’n’roll growing more «smooth» and «polite» with each new day, Ronnie’s idea was all about having wild (though not maliciously wild) cowboy fun. And I’m not really using the word ‘cowboy’ in vain here: there is a definite saloon spirit in all of Hawkins’ music — his vision of rock and roll is compatible with how it would have been if rock and roll had been invented somewhere out there in the Wild West around the late 1880s or 1890s, rather than born in Memphis in the 1950s and then quickly exiled, like a nasty prodigal child, to the big progressive cities on the East and West coasts.

Ronnie’s voice itself — at least, in his younger days — is reminiscent of the typical «young cowboy hero» voice in so many Western movies: high-pitched, Southern-swirlin’, a little sly-tricksterish, a little exuberant, brimming with a lust for love and life but hardly ever descending into burly machismo, which is almost weird for such an obviously «physical» type of entertainer. To use a Magnificent Seven analogy, he’s far more Horst Buchholz than Yul Brynner or Steve McQueen: part-time young romantic, part-time slapstick clown, part-time ambitious glory seeker. Sometimes the clown takes way too much over, bordering on annoying (‘Horace’ in particular dips into low-level vaudeville territory), but usually all the three sides are kept in decent balance, and whenever he is rattling off those lyrics at top speeds, demonstrating great breath control and powerful dynamics, it really gets infectious.

Yet the really important thing is that this short LP — twelve songs that do not even go over thirty minutes in total — is really very much a band artifact. Although billed as just «Ronnie Hawkins» in front, the back cover does not forget to put «Ronnie Hawkins And The Hawks» in big type, and this is essential: all the three Hawks are not merely backing up Ronnie, they have to demonstrate precisely the same level of physical fitness and energy as the bandleader. Particularly astonishing are, of course, the chops of Levon Helm, who plays here with such speed and fury as you have probably never heard him play in his classic years with The Band — not even on an album like Moondog Matinee, where he and his bandmates were supposed to nostalgize about precisely the kind of music they were playing in the Ronnie Hawkins era, but instead tried to play it through their own Rock-of-Ages filters and quickly got boring as hell.

Here, though, oh boy — just listen to Levon doing all those speedfreak fills on ‘Forty Days’ or ‘Wild Little Willy’, taking his cues from the more maniacal rock drummers of the day such as D.J. Fontana but pushing the skill even further, pounding those skins with the light-but-tight youthful ferociousness that we wouldn’t really begin to get accustomed to until the young bands of the early 1960s came along. It’s all the more amusing considering how tinny his little drum kit sounds, almost as if he were using some toy set made out of cardboard — but he still kicks and pounds the shit out of it, never ever satisfied with a strict 4/4 beat, filling up as much space as possible, ravaging those cymbals and setting up maniacal tempos which the guitar, piano, and sax players are finding it hard to keep up with. (In the overall frenzy, you barely even notice that the band does not have a bass player: after Jimmy Paulman’s brother George had been fired for unruly behavior, the band remained without a bassist for quite some time, with the guitar and piano player taking on bass responsibilities wherever necessary... and looks like it wasn’t always considered necessary).

As for the songwriting, well, who needs songwriting when you’ve got Levon Helm playing drums for you? The actual credits for most of these songs are a bit of a nightmare — most of the songs, regardless of whether they are complete rip-offs or at least a wee bit original, are credited to Ronnie Hawkins and a certain mysterious «Jacqueline Magill», who, as the official The Band site suggests, may have been an actual girlfriend of Roulette Records’ boss Morris Levy, although even Ronnie himself was not entirely sure of that; hilariously, this «Magill» (but not even Ronnie!) is even listed as co-writer on a cover of Larry Williams’ ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ (!), whose riff, by the way, is played by Jimmy Paulman with a sort of «I really have to go!» high-pitch intensity. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the Roulette guys just concocted it all so that they could land as much cash in their pockets as possible — but I’m also pretty sure the album did not sell well even in Canada, let alone Arkansas, so all these shady business intricacies would be for naught anyway.

The actual songs are okay, crudely cobbled together by Ronnie from bits and pieces of his favorite folk and country tunes and translated into the rock’n’roll idiom. ‘Mary Lou’ is probably the most soulful one, and, along with a couple others, could be mistaken for a plaintive Elvis tune if only that voice were just a bit lower — on the other hand, Ronnie’s «young cowboy» vibe may fare a little better if he wants to raise sympathy from the listener with his pitiful tale of how "she took my diamond ring, she took my watch and chain, she took the keys to my Cadillac car...". The catchiest one is probably ‘One Of These Days’, which I was certain Ronnie ripped from somewhere... then remembered that it was actually the Searchers who would cover it later on their Sugar & Spice album! Hmm, maybe I should actually try and re-evaluate his competence as a genuine songwriter...

Anyway, the important thing is not the actual chord sequences here, but rather this charismatic, subtly sophisticated musical persona that Ronnie has painted of himself. With his vocals always really high in the mix, he creates the impression of a volatile, explosive Jack-in-a-box, with his bandmates constantly adding fuel to the fire — and yet, because of the light elements of comedy and vaudeville, he never makes himself feel too serious. It’s a never ending ego trip that hardly ever gets to be annoying, in precisely the same way Horst Buchholz endears himself to the audience in the Magnificent Seven: you just sense that he’s got a good heart behind that clownish nature.

And although Ronnie would go on to have a pretty long-winded recording career, with and without the Hawks, one might seriously argue that he never ever got any better than on these short, simple, frenetic early recordings — later on, he’d get more bluesy, more complex, more gruff and hairy, largely losing himself in the huge crowd of similarly scruffy blues-rockers and rootsy prophets, but on this album, he’s got a corny, hicky, and surprisingly adorable youthful personality which, in 1959, you could not confuse with anybody else. Throw in the unprecedented and — seriously! — the never-to-be-matched-again exuberance of young Levon Helm, and what you get is a rather unique, if not particularly dirty or aggressive, brand of rock’n’roll that would certainly stand its ground against the general atmosphere of the era.

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