He Don’t Love You (and He’ll Break Your Heart) / Stones That I Throw Levon and the Hawks (1965)

Here’s the whole fam-damnily Band “Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson fairly fresh out of their Ronnie Hawkins rockabilly apprenticeship faze, a few minutes before sayin’ Hey! Bob (a-re-bob) and many moon pies before any of them began to think about getting “Big,” let alone Pink.

This is the REAL “A” side. When slipped in with the right bunch of mid-sixties soul 45s, almost everybody believe’s these guys are black. This is a mighty mean and nasty sound to be coming out of four Canucks and an essential Arkansas-American who could hold the whole damn band together and sing his ass off and right back on all over again. It ain’t Levon singing here, it’s my main man, King Richard the Manuel, man. Other blues-influenced bands in 1965 included the Stones, the Animals and Them, but none of those invasive British cats could hold a candlelabra to the band singing and playing on this track.