Poet, songwriter and cabbie Bill Hawkins leaves obscurity behind with a new album, Brad Wheeler writes

It was Dec. 11,1966, when Bill Hawkins decided he'd had enough. The poet-songwriter was the creative spark for the underground Ottawa arts scene in the 1960s and his group the Children were finishing an opening set for Lovin' Spoonful at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens. During the final number, as the house lights revealed a crowd of wound-up teens, Hawkins turned to band-mate Bruce Cockburn and said "that's it" and that he was finished.

More than 40 years later, the Leonard Cohen contemporary is back in the spotlight. Canadian record label True North has just released Dancing Alone, a graceful double-disc set produced by Ian Tamblyn that collects Hawkins's lyrical songs. There are performances by former band members such as Cockburn and Sneezy Waters, as well as Brent Titcomb and Murray McLauchlan, who, in his autobiography, hailed Hawkins's Gnostic Serenade as "one of the finest songs ever written."

"I didn't push the envelope," Hawkins says now of his aborted early career, "something frightened me."

Some people fight through that fear - hear Robbie Robertson's Stage Fright: "Now deep in the heart of a lonely kid, who suffered so much for what he did" - while others give in.

Hawkins was of the latter, descending into bouts with drink, drugs and rehab, while keeping an even enough keel to maintain a living as a cab driver in the nation's capital. There he's the favoured charismatic chauffeur of politicians, judges and journalists, squiring them about in his big blue sedan. "The word on the street is that it's 50-50 that McKenna's going to run," he says over the phone, offering a tip about what he's heard regarding the former New Brunswick premier trying for the Liberal Party leadership.

The odds that Hawkins, at age 68, would attempt a comeback himself would have been much more than even-money.

Here was an acid-tongued guy - take that both ways - who was voted in the 1960s as one of "Ottawa's Outstanding Young Men" along with Rough Riders' star quarterback Russ Jackson. But where the crew-cut Jackson was a thrower, Hawkins was a stoner, using the plaque he was awarded to cut hash. Hawkins's last great moment was in 1968, when another group he was in (the New Heavenly Blue, with Amos Garrett, Sandy Crawley and Darius Brubeck) performed at Pierre Trudeau's victory party.

Hawkins thrived in the artsy Ottawa scene that he spearheaded. In addition to getting his work published (in his own collections, and, in 1966, in Raymond Souster's anthology New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry), Hawkins and his wife ran the coffeehouse Le Hibou, a bohemian-scene hub that saw the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Judy Collins pass through. One night, Jimi Hendrix (in town for a concert at the Capital Theatre) dropped in to see Joni Mitchell perform. Afterward, at a record-label party in Vanier, Hawkins serenaded Mitchell with Scorpio, a haunting song written for her. "It didn't work," Hawkins says, with a laugh, "but she said it was good, and so did Jimi."

For Dancing Alone, Mitchell was the first choice to cover the song, but, says Hawkins, "She's a busy girl," so Ottawa's Lynn Miles does the honour, terrifically, with a grace that recalls Roy Orbison.

The album's genesis stems from his 2005 book of poetry, Dancing Alone: Selected Poems, published by Broken Jaw Press. At a launch event at the National Library Auditorium, a song-circle of Waters, Neville Wells and Sandy Crawley tossed around a few of Hawkins's tunes. It went well.

"It was a revelation when we heard those songs sung again," recalls Harvey Glatt, who managed the Children and later went on to found Ottawa radio station CHEZ-FM.

In the 1960s Glatt had tried to publish Hawkins's music but, he says, "Times were changing, rock was moving in." At the book launch some 40 years later, Glatt heard the elegiac style of songwriting in a new light.

"We realized that times had changed back again, that there's interest in songs like these, and everybody thought they stood up well."

But has Hawkins stood up? The man who used to start a day with two grams of cocaine and pass the rest of the hours with a fifth of vodka - "that can be paranoia-inducing, trust me on this" - says he is now relatively straight. "It was a problem I dealt with for most of my life," he says of his substance abuse, which ended at age 55. "I just can't do it any more."

Hawkins admits Stone Solid Blue, sung strongly on Dancing Alone by young Ottawa singer-songwriter Ana Miura, is his story. "It's about me," he says, "I really did bottom out." And then there's the line about throwing the dice once or twice. Is it time again? "Yes," he replies, almost sure of it, "I'm thinking of taking another crack at music."

If he doesn't perform with many of Dancing Alone's artists tonight at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, Que., outside Ottawa, he'll at least recite the poem (Memories) that closes an album that's gathering positive reviews.

Those who know him will tell you that Hawkins's earlier-life apprehensions stemmed from a fear of success. You wonder now how Hawkins is handling the spotlight.

"It feels good," he says. "I don't really know why, it just feels different. I feel different."

Bill Hawkins and friends perform tonight at 8 at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, Que. (http://www.theblacksheepinn.com).The concert is being taped for future broadcast on CBC Radio 2's Canada Live.