APPRECIATION : Ted Hawkins: Forgotten, Now Gone

When Ted Hawkins suffered a stroke on Dec. 29, slipping into a coma and dying two days later, it was but the last of many rugs that had been pulled out from under the singer’s feet.

Hawkins had a voice bursting with the full experience of life: There was humor, warmth, pain, sorrow, love and loss. In any just world, Hawkins would have been acclaimed as the greatest living soul/blues singer, as the rightful heir to Sam Cooke.

It only compounds the injustice that Hawkins was hailed with exactly those accolades by the British press in 1987, yet he wound up right back where he’d been, sitting on a milk crate on sidewalks, singing for change. It seemed to be the pattern of his life: Things would look promising for a time, his talent would begin to get its due, and then he’d wind up back on the street.

That pattern looked finally to be changing last year, after singer Michael Penn got Geffen A & R man Tony Berg to listen to Hawkins singing at Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade. Berg signed him to Geffen and produced Hawkins’ “The Next Hundred Years,” a stunningly beautiful album that was taken to heart by critics and alternative radio programmers, though few others got the chance to hear it. At the time of his death, Hawkins remained the greatest singer you’ve never heard.

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Hawkins claimed to have been the virtually abandoned child of an uncaring prostitute. He related eating out of garbage cans and being nicknamed “Dirty Junior” by school kids in his hometown of Lakeshore, Miss. By the time he was 8 he was acquainted with jail cells, and for stealing food at age 15 he was sent to the notoriously harsh Parchman Farm prison.

At age 12, while Hawkins was in reform school, New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair visited the school and taught him his first song. He fell in love with music, and for years his life alternated between singing on streets and run-ins with the law for a series of nonviolent offenses.

At the time when his first album, “Watch Your Step,” came out on Rounder Records in 1982, Hawkins was incarcerated at the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville. Rolling Stone gave the album a five-star review, but few people noticed, and when Hawkins was released in 1984, after which he had no further brushes with the law, he returned to street singing in L.A.

While he may have been singing unnoticed in “the entertainment capital of the world,” he received his first taste of audience approval here in Orange County.

Entertainer Jonathan Richman was a huge fan of Hawkins, citing Hawkins as his idea of what rock ‘n’ roll was all about. When Huntington Beach’s now-defunct Safari Sam’s club booked Richman for a four-night stand in the summer of 1986, owners Sam Lanni and Gil Fuhrer tracked down Hawkins to open for him.

It was the first time Hawkins had played before an attentive nightclub audience, and on the debut night he clearly was petrified. He haltingly began his set with the safe-and-sure Motown and Sam Cooke hits he’d sing for passersby on the Venice Boardwalk.

Despite his fear--he was shaking visibly for the first few songs--and even though he was playing for alternative-oriented fans three decades his junior who were more accustomed to the Meat Puppets than to a pepper-bearded black man in his 50s, Hawkins got a resounding ovation. He certainly could be forgiven if he basked in it.

The second night was a repeat of the first, with Hawkins sticking to a set of familiar oldies, again stunning the audience with that emotional torrent of a voice.

Come the third night, Hawkins still was balking at singing his own songs. Before he performed, Richman offered to bet him $20 that Hawkins could win the audience over even better with his own songs instead of the oldies. Richman’s guitarist Brennan Totten then took Hawkins aside and offered to put up the $20 if Hawkins lost the bet, making it a no-lose situation. So, betting on himself to lose, Hawkins went onstage.

What followed was one of the finest, most moving performances this writer has seen. Hawkins began even more tentatively than he had the previous two nights, faltering on his simple guitar chording and nearly whispering the vocals. Long before the song was through, though, Hawkins was caught in his own spell, his voice raining down the lyrics.

The emotion he’d lent to the professionally written Motown oldies he’d sung the other nights was no preparation for the way his voice fleshed out the sad and deep experience of his own songs: “The Lost Ones” with its tale of children on their own; “Sorry You’re Sick,” where the only remedies he can offer an ailing lover are liquor-store snacks; the naked pleadings of “I Gave Up All I Had” and “Stay Close to Me.”

Hawkins clearly was transported somewhere else as he sang, and when, between songs, he became aware of the audience, he seemed dazed by the response he’d earned: the packed room applauding wildly, some in tears from the sheer, sad beauty of his songs. Many stood on chairs for the encore calls.

Later that year Hawkins had the opportunity to get used to such adulation. BBC disc jockey Andy Kershaw had been championing Hawkins’ music in England, and when he was booked for shows there, audiences and the press went wild, proclaiming him the next Cooke.

He stayed in England for several months, and in a phone interview at the time confessed that he was afraid to return to his native country.

“In America I was invisible,” he said. “Over here, people see me. I’d have to be crazy to give up all this good, to stop to go back over there. I’m scared to, because I don’t want to wind up on the Venice Beach again.”

He recalled how in L.A. he had camped out on the doorsteps of record labels and TV studios, only to get sarcastic and indifferent responses.

His stint in England soured when the British press replaced praises with stories of his criminal record. He came home, winding up right back on his milk crate at his “postage stamp” domain on the Venice boardwalk. And there he remained--or at other sidewalk locales--for another six years, until Berg signed him.

It’s one of the great ironies of popular music that a talent as great as Hawkins’ could have gone ignored for so long in the belly of a city considered the world’s entertainment center. Now, at the end of his life, glowing obituaries are being run in papers across the nation. (A fund is being established to aid the wife and four children Hawkins left. For more information, call Nancy Meyer at the Cameron Organization, (818) 566-8880).

For an artist of 58 years, there isn’t much of a recorded legacy: last year’s “The Next Hundred Years,” and two Rounder albums, “Watch Your Step” and “Happy Hour.” If you really scrounge, you might turn up imports made from Venice Beach recordings.

It almost seems a final cruel joke that Hawkins would die right as he finally was getting some of the notice he deserved. But had his life been different, his music undoubtedly would have been too.

The comparison of his voice to Sam Cooke’s was apt, but it sounded as Cooke’s might have if he’d been shunned by the limelight and smiles, abandoned to the streets. It was a voice that could express just how rare beauty is, and how rich sorrow.

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Hear Ted Hawkins

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