Word: dankos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Over in Simcoe, Ont., a young butcher's helper and part-time bass-guitar player named Rick Danko felt a similar urge. Driving up to his parents' home one evening in a friend's Cadillac, he cried out: "I've got to leave tonight; it's now or never!" He borrowed a coat, packed and was gone. One by one, Garth Hudson in London, Ont., Richard Manuel in Stratford, Ont., and Levon Helm, down on a bare subsistence farm in Marvell, Ark. (pop. 1,200), were making similar plans. To Helm, it was especially urgent. "You get out of school...
...often closed in what seems to be creative ecstasy, he stands punching out notes and laying out funky phrases like "the mathematical guitar genius" Bob Dylan used to say he was. Levon Helm approaches his drums with what is, in rock music, unparalleled subtlety and restraint. On bass, Rick Danko occasionally puffs his cheeks as if he were playing a horn. At the piano, Richard Manuel looks like a teen-ager masquerading as a pirate...
...glad to pay those union dues," the farmer sings. "Just don't judge me by my shoes." But then comes the refrain. With Danko and Robertson on guitars, creating a controlled hush that is just the right rustling background, Manuel and Helm sing in low unison...
...young, and they were brought up singing and playing hymns and folk songs with their families. The only American, Levon, was playing mandolin, drums and guitar in his early teens, and once won first prize at a county fair, accompanied by his sister on a homemade washtub bass. Rick Danko, whose father is a Simcoe tobacco farmer, was given a mandolin at five and soon joined his three brothers at Saturday night musicales...
...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...