![]() Dylan, if anything, seemed to dig in his heels. Many of Dylan’s legacy fans were no more excited, and the performances were marred by boos and catcalls. Dylan hired them for his subsequent tour, and a new moment in music was born - though, at first, it would be without Helm, who wasn’t interested in being a part of a back-up band anymore. “They were young, strong, and they started drawing good-looking women.”) By 1964, the Hawks were getting their own offers to play, separate from the bar band-hero Hawkins - even as Dylan was in the run up to his genre-bursting, literally electrifying Highway 61 Revisited.įolk music’s newest savior was moving toward rock, even as the Band broke free from an endless series of dead-end saloon-stage jobs. (“They were pretty hip, this bunch of boys,” Hawkins, ever the scamp, says in the film. One key early moment in Down in the Flood - due September 25, 2012, from Sexy Intellectual - finds a remarkably clean-cut Levon Helm performing and singing in a 1959 edition of the Hawks.Īfter Hawkins, with Helm in tow, settled in Toronto to ply his wares, the remaining members of the Band eventually joined in, one by one - first a teen-aged Robbie Robertson, and then Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. They began, however, as a tough R&B-focused group learning the ropes behind the Arkansas rockabilly wildman Ronnie Hawkins. The Band continued to intersect with Dylan off and on over the ensuing decade, perhaps most famously during a lengthy sequence of loose sessions held at an upstate New York farmhouse, later officially released as The Basement Tapes. Together, they would connect the narratives and the imagery of folk music with the dangerous power of rock, forever changing the genre. Down in the Flood, a forthcoming documentary stuffed with new interviews, archival footage and seldom-seen photographs, joins a musical revolution already in progress : “It was as big a thing,” Rolling Stone’s Anthony De Curtis says, “as has ever happened in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, Dylan going electric.”Īnd the band with him in that moment, on a raucous, audience-splintering 1966 tour, was the Hawks - later, known simply as the Band. ![]()
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