T H E S TAT E | I N S I D E R
An Auditory Snapshot
Levon and the Hawks Recorded Live at the Fondalite Club gives us a glimpse back in time.
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L-R: Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson went on to tour with Bob Dylan after an electric performance at Tulsa’s Fondalite Club. Photo courtesy Connell Miller
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e’ve all seen them, in books or museums or maybe in someone’s collection: snapshots from bygone times, capturing forever via an amateur’s lens something of great historical importance. It might be a political figure at a microphone, barely recognizable above the heads of the listening crowd. It could be a little black-and-white candid of a kid at play, taken by a friend or family member, well before the youthful subject grew up to be a familiar superstar. It might even be a shot snapped in a smoky club, the feeble light of the flashbulb illuminating a few members of a now-legendary band, onstage in a forgotten venue, playing for a crowd of youngsters who are now old or dead. I don’t know about you, but I love those sorts of photos. Granted, they’re not professional, and sometimes their clarity and focus aren’t the best, but in a way that’s a part of their charm. They’re the only lasting record we have of something that needs to be remembered, and we should be grateful they exist at all. Which brings us to Levon and the Hawks Recorded Live at the Fondalite Club, a brand new CD whose source material was a 56-year-old reel-to-reel tape. The disc is, in many ways, the aural equivalent of one of those old photos, an auditory snapshot that gives us a fascinating glimpse of a big event. In this case,
OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | APRIL 2022
it’s the final Tulsa appearance of a group that would soon become famous as Bob Dylan’s electric band and then, in 1968, as simply The Band. Under that name, the members would record Music from Big Pink, one of those albums that changed the face of rock music forever. Three years before Big Pink’s ’68 debut, Connell R. Miller was a young rock ‘n’ roll guitarist based in Arkansas, playing the college circuit in and around his home state and also doing some work for a music figure named Dayton Stratton, who was not only a busy booking agent but also the co-owner of a Fayetteville club with rocker Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins and Stratton were Arkansawyers as well; however, by the early ‘60s Hawkins had become such a draw in Canada that he had moved north of the border with his drummer Levon Helm and hired a new group of musicians from Ontario: pianist Richard Manuel, guitarist Robbie Robertson, bass-
