Mystery Train, 50th Anniversary Edition by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus [Marcus, Greil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2025-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

With Bob Dylan

The Hawks hooked up with Bob Dylan through John Hammond Jr. and Mary Martin, a Canadian working in the Albert Grossman office in New York. Robbie and Levon, with Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on electric piano, backed Dylan at his chaotic August 28, 1965, concert at Forest Hills, New York—Dylan’s first show following the infamous Newport Folk Festival performance where, with Kooper, pianist Barry Goldberg, guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he scandalized much of the audience by subjecting his folk poetry to commercial electric accompaniment, thus demonstrating that he’d sold out to the almighty dollar. (“Cocksucker!” shouted one offended fan at Forest Hills. “Aw, it’s not that bad,” Dylan replied.) An audience tape of the Forest Hills show (startlingly immediate in its capture of what sounds like a continuing riot in the crowd) could be found on Bob Dylan Chronicles: 1965 Revisited (Great Dane), a weirdly completist fourteen-CD bootleg apparently comprised of every 1965 Bob Dylan recorded moment not officially released, if the set itself could be found; thanks to the wonders of modernity the show unwinds from the first acoustic set to the final “Like a Rolling Stone” on YouTube, thanks to Swingin’ Pig, a once-ubiquitous Dylan bootleg label. To Levon and Robbie, to whom rock was as commercial as living off peanut butter and an Arkansas credit card (a rubber hose used to siphon someone else’s car) and nevertheless the staff of life, the response could only have seemed absurd.

Dylan’s Forest Hills combo played one more show, at the Hollywood Bowl on September 3 (see We Had Known a Lion, Vigatone bootleg). The band falls helplessly into the sound of then-current Top 40; only Levon and Robbie have any idea of where to take the music. Except on “Maggie’s Farm” and “From a Buick 6,” where Levon gets a big beat and Robbie snakes solos down the spines of the tunes, the performance is held back by Kooper, Brooks, and Dylan himself. There were walkouts and booing in Los Angeles; with dates in Texas looming, Kooper and Brooks jumped ship (“Look what they did to JFK down there,” Kooper remembers thinking), and Levon and Robbie gave Dylan an ultimatum: all of us or none of us. Almost never credited or even named from the stage—an exception was the Carnegie Hall show on October 1, where handbills listed “Levon & the Hawks”—they played their first show together on September 24, in Austin, Texas; discouraged by the catcalls that rained down on the troupe at almost every stop, Levon quit the group in late November, to be replaced by Bobby Gregg, in early 1966 by Sandy Konikoff (who had once replaced Levon Helm in the Hawks when Helm briefly turned to the guitar), and then by Mickey Jones, at the time Trini Lopez’s drummer, and after that Kenny Rogers’s. Abuse from disillusioned folkies followed the Hawks all the way to Berkeley, San Jose, and

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