Dancing Alone – William Hawkins (True North)

So I’ve got this idea for a movie script. It’s about this guy. His friends call him The Hawk. Or Big. Or Billy. Something like that. He’s this crazy coffee shop owner in Ottawa in the sixties and he has big dreams of being a poet and a musician. Bands play there and he loves to jam with them. Jimi Hendrix drops by. Joni Mitchell loves his stuff. Richie Havens parties on his way to Montreal. Alan Ginsberg sees his poetry and invites him to come study. He starts a band, The Children. They’re making it big, supporting The Beach Boys and The Lovin’ Spoonful when suddenly he spins out, quits the band and moves to Mexico. Forty years later he’s penniless and driving a taxi. His old friends rally round and record all his old songs, have a big party and release the CD.

So, what do you think? Throw in some alcoholism and drug-running and we’ve got a deal? No problem. And the best part? It’s all true, or as true as a sixties hippy myth can ever be. William Hawkins was, so they say, the focal point of the Ottawa hippy scene. The 25 songs on this two-CD release are a tribute by his contemporaries to a man they clearly have a huge fondness for. People like Sneezy Waters, Kellylee Evans, Suzie Vinnick and Brent Titcomb. Brent Titcomb is my favourite.

The songs aren’t what I was expecting, although I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. They’re a weird, mock-eclectic lot, each referencing a different and almost pin-downable sixties artist, but mostly falling under the same bluegrassy banner. I have faint but still gut-churning memories of being sat down to listen to my Grandpa’s old “comedy” albums as a young child and gripping the seat of my chair tighter and tighter as each song was shoehorned ever more painfully into a stock genre template, dreading, DREADING the moment when they’d surrender to the inevitable and do a calypso. Thanks for letting me share, that’s been festering for 30 years. Anyway, there’s no danger of that here. Every song has its roots written all the way through it like a stick of gentle-bluegrass-bar-country-rock.

I wondered what people would think if you played this to an unprepared audience. I’d guessed the reaction would be something like “What the fuck is this that you’ve put on?” So I tried it. After less than 10 minutes I got a direct hit. “What the fuck is this that you’ve put on?” So I explained, to an unfettered display of belms and wanky-wanky gestures (which is exactly what my Grandpa would have seen, if I’d just been 10 years older, and braver, and less generally respectful to old, bald, well-meaning relatives), and determined not to ever do that again.

Some of the songs are really beautiful. One of the versions of Gnostic Serenade (you’d need at least two) is chokingly good. The Brent Titcomb version, obviously. The rest will do very nicely for background music for the bio-pic that the studio makes once I sell them this script. Whaddaya mean “too generic”? It’s TRUE I tell ya.

Stephen Taylor