Long on Nerve: An Interview with Ronnie Hawkins

THE INTERVIEW EXCERPTED HERE took place in October 2002 under bizarre circumstances. The interviewee, cancer in his pancreas, was assumed near death by himself, by his doctors, and by the archivists in Fayetteville who dispatched the interviewer to his digs in Canada. Ronnie Hawkins had been a prominent and flamboyant figure for a very long time. In on rock and roll's turbulent rockabilly beginnings in the 1950s and, as the '60s dawned, first boss of the combo that would become famous as the Band, he was still living large in the century's final decade, gracing Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural with his august and raunchy presence. It was important, before the final bell, to record his impressions. Things turned out differently, however-humbling, once again and not for the last time, all who claim to know the shape of tomorrow. It's 2006 now, May 7 as this is written, more than three years have passed, and just yesterday, cancer mysteriously, miraculously gone, the man was holding forth at a Hawkins family reunion on the old family homeplace outside St. Paul in Madison County, Arkansas. Enthroned on a wooden bench under a hillside pavilion next to his cousin and fellow musician Dale Hawkins, the lovely Ozark Mountains looming preternaturally green in a light rain, he spun out once again his fabulous, ribald tale, cracking up the men and charming the women. And it was there, beneath the water's gentle patter, that the essential element in rock and roll fame suddenly flashed out again. He s over seventy now, but Hawkins still has a firm hold on what he knew before he was twenty-that one thing above all is expected of the leader of a rock and roll band: the incarnation of Dionysos, master of revels. Country songwriter Harlan Howard is credited with that genre s most succinct characterization-country music is three chords and the truth. Then Bono added the red guitar in U2's version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower": "All I've got is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth." But for Hawkins, as for Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other rockabilly wild men, the red guitar (or piano) was often mostly a prop, and truth was nowhere to be seen, a notion of little interest. Hawkins called it "that monkey act," did backflips on the stage, and moonwalked decades before Michael Jackson. Women charged the stage, so many that when he first hired a teenaged Robbie Robertson, Hawkins told him he couldn't pay much but promised he would get more girls than Frank Sinatra. As the decades passed, the outrages shifted their focus, even as the underlying persona remained unchanged. Where he once violated behavioral conventions, running whiskey and carousing with underage daughters of community pillars ("they said it was an orgy but I called it eight or ten people in love "), he turned in later years to the flaunting of conversational standards. In 2005, at an elegant party celebrating his honorary doctorate at Laurentian University in Ontario, Hawkins announced his arrival in stentorian voice: "The Doctor is in. All ladies line up on the left for physicals." To this day, he bills himself in e-mails as "The Housewives' Companion" and "The Working Girls' Favorite." As an afterthought, way down the epithet list, he adds "Advisor to Presidents" and puts a "Dr." in front of the sign-off thanks to the honorary degree. And there on the hillside he s still at it, youthful Dionysos altered by the years to aged satyr Silenus, but still laughing, still making the ladies blush, ever and always Mr. Dynamo, Rompin' Ronnie, the face of rock and roll, life of the party Nero would be ashamed to attend. This excerpt centers on Hawkins' beginnings-from his birth in rural Madison County and the move in childhood to "the big metropolis" of Fayettevitle, where he went to school and formed his first bands, to the later travels in pursuit of musical goals, first to Memphis and Helena and then, in 1958, to "the promised land" of Canada, where his career really took off. …