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Today is the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan plugging in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, an event blown up into the book Dylan Goes Electric! The Night That Split the Sixties which, in turn, inspired the recent film A Complete Unknown. While much is made of Dylan’s now mythical July 25, 1965 appearance with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the pairing pales in comparison with the huge role that Toronto’s Levon & the Hawks (later The Band) played in transforming the folk icon into a rock trailblazer.  It began quietly one night that September when Dylan flew up to Toronto to check out a super-tight rock group at Friar’s Tavern recommended to him by Mary Martin, ...

On the night of January 9, 1974, my buddy Bill Gardner and I joined the flood of people pouring out of Maple Leaf Gardens, babbling with excitement over what we’d just witnessed: a two-hour-plus concert by Bob Dylan and The Band who’d stoned us with the raucous opener “Rainy Day Women” and dressed us so fine with the euphoric penultimate “Like a Rolling Stone, asking us how we felt. As if we needed to be asked. The elation carried us along Carlton Street, undimmed despite nostril-freezing temperatures and a sudden snow squall. “Wanna go for drinks?” asked Bill. “Ronnie’s playing down at the Nick.” The thought of seeing Ronnie Hawkins on the same night and in the same building where Dylan had...

Stepping off a Greyhound bus from Toronto in 1961, a 17-year-old boy found himself in West Helena, Ark., by the banks of the Mississippi River, unable to believe his senses. “It smelled different and moved different,” Robbie Robertson recently recalled. “The people talked and dressed different. And the air was filled with thick and funky music.” The experience left an indelible impression on the budding guitarist and songwriter. Years later, Robertson drew on it to write some of rock’s most evocative songs—including “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” And he performed them with his group, The Band, which critic Greil Marcus has called “the best rock ’n’ roll band...

He was such a good ol’ boy, a teller of such tall tales and the master of so many self-deprecating one-liners it was often easy not to take Ronnie Hawkins too seriously. “I’m a legend in my spare time,” he liked to quip. Calling himself the “Geritol Gypsy,” he claimed to have been playing rockabilly “since the Dead Sea was only sick.” But when the veteran singer-bandleader – for whom the “big time” was always “just around the corner” – died on Sunday, the entertainment world mourned the loss of a bona fide legend whose greatest legacy was his mentoring of some of Canada’s finest musical stars. Mr. Hawkins was born in Huntsville, Ark., on Jan. 10, 1935 and studied physical education at the st...

The concert began and ended badly. Minutes before the members of Blue Rodeo were due onstage at the student lounge of Erindale College in suburban Toronto, the band’s manager, John Caton, had been refused admittance. A student security guard with a penchant for protocol insisted that because Caton had no photo identification proving he was old enough to drink, the manager—who is 39—could not go in. Undeterred, Blue Rodeo gave a spirited two-hour performance. Yet some people in the audience of 300 failed to give the show their full attention: it had been exam week, and several students were more interested in consuming large quantities of beer than in listening to the band’s thoughtful brand ...