Gleason. Bob Dylan had come to San Francisco with his new backing band, the Hawks. The noise they made was stupendous, and most eyes were focused on the center of the stage, where the action seemed to be, with Dylan and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson facing each other for the choruses, playing head to head, hand to hand. Gleason, though, was drawn to the left, where the young bass player moved with an uncannily graceful yet somehow violent rhythm, as if he were cracking the rest of the band like a whip—as if, secretly, he were the scientist behind the alchemy. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dylan’s Bay Area shows, Gleason, thinking of the concrete cylinder that shoots up over the city from Telegraph Hill, summed up Danko more directly: “He looked,” wrote a man who had covered Hank Williams, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Elvis Presley, “like he could swing Coit Tower.” You can hear that happen on a song that emerged on the Dylan-Hawks tour, “Tell Me, Momma,”
