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Hardwick and Hopkins together again on stage Thursday at The Duck
The Hardwick and Hopkins Dixie Duo -- formed more than 40 years ago when the two musicians were Greencastle teenagers -- will ride again this Thursday night.
Dick Hardwick and Robin Hopkins. One night only. In Greencastle. At the Fluttering Duck inside the Inn at DePauw in a special Jazz at The Duck gig.
Jazz at The Duck is free. The musical reunion of the two longtime friends will begin at 8:30 p.m. and continue until 10:30.
The Hardwick and Hopkins saga is a story of friendship, musical aspirations and a love of entertaining spanning five decades or more.
Both still happily make their living entertaining. Hardwick is a comedian who performs all over the world, while Hopkins still plays the plectrum banjo and guitar at gigs all around the country and across Indiana.
"Robin and I have been close friends since grade school," Hardwick reminisced recently, noting that Hopkins was a year ahead of him, graduating from Greencastle High School in 1970, followed a year later by Hardwick.
"My dad Tom Hardwick and his dad, Wayne Hopkins, were also great friends and loved to play music together," he added. "My dad on the bass and Wayne on the xylophone along with many of our dads' friends and bandmates in the famous Greencastle John Wood Combo (with whom Hopkins returned to perform in October 2012).
"It's funny, when I think back, my first set of drums at age 10 was Robin's brother Donny Hopkins' old Leedy red, white and blue pearl covering with a palm tree painted on the bass drum head and a light bulb inside to light it up."
Hopkins, meanwhile, recalls playing the county fair circuit with his older sister and little brother as a trio that seemed destined to come in second at talent contests around west-central Indiana.
"The four-year-old female twirler, of course, always placed first," he joked.
When the garage band craze struck, Hopkins was 12 and had an electric guitar even though he admits having had little knowledge of how to tune it.
"The next four years were spent playing numerous fraternity and sorority parties on the DePauw campus, high school dances, and community pool parties, and teen clubs, etc.," he recalled. "I did manage to begin to use traditional guitar tuning and learn a few chords."
When the rock band Susie & The Q's broke up, Hopkins was 16, and the course of his musical career was changed forever.
"I believe that could be attributed to hormonal dictates -- or rather more important things to do on Saturday night," he joked. "That was the end of my musical career until college."
While Hopkins was at Indiana University, the folk craze was gaining momentum.
"Everyone, it seemed, played guitar and sat around singing," he recalled. "I didn't have an acoustic guitar, so I decided to bring the tenor banjo from home. In the spring of 1971, I went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and had the opportunity to hear Pete Fountain at his club, and my life was forever changed."
Hopkins left college and came home to Greencastle, bought a five-string banjo and teamed up with Hardwick. After playing local service clubs, they moved to New Orleans in the fall of 1972 where Hopkins began "a life-long love of the plectrum-style banjo and the music of the 'Jazz Age,' the roaring '20s, as well as the '30s and '40s."
Hardwick picks up the story there.
"I was a drummer and had been playing in several rock groups during junior high and high school, including Hannibal & The Invaders, Dove Tail and The Resurrection Blues Band," he said.
"Robin had also been playing around on the banjo and when we got the invitation to go to Marti Gras, I took my harmonica, which I could carry in my pocket, and Robin took his banjo. We had a blast, as you can imagine, and ended up jamming in the French Quarter. After seeing Pete Fountain's band play at his club on Bourbon Street, Robin and I fell in love with Dixieland music."
Upon returning to Greencastle they tried to form a full seven-piece Dixieland band.
"But to our chagrin, we couldn't find anybody that could play trumpet, trombone, clarinet or anybody else our age that played anything like Dixieland jazz," Hardwick noted. "So, we formed our own duo with Robin on the banjo and me on drums.
"With a little help from my dear old pal Doc Dunn and my dad Tom, we landed a gig at the American Legion, playing the old standards that our parents and their friends loved. They all supported us by coming out and before long we started to draw a big crowd."
That led to bookings at local places like the VFW and the Elks Lodge but also to thoughts of bigger and better things.
"My aunt and uncle in New Orleans knew we were pining to give it a try at the big time," Hardwick said, "so they made us an offer we couldn't turn down, a free place to stay. So we packed up and moved to 'The Big Easy.'"
Beginning with engagements in the French Quarter Vieux Carre in New Orleans, the Hardwick and Hopkins Dixie Duo next spent the better part of a year south of Washington, D.C., in the Potomac River resort town of Colonial Beach.
Those engagements soon led to performances in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts and upstate New York as the duo found an agent who booked them in Holiday Inns and Ramada Inns up and down the East Coast.
"And as luck would have it again," Hardwick remembered, "we met a guy that got us an audition on the Delta Queen Steamboat whose home port in 1974 was Cincinnati."
They landed the gig, and went rolling on the river for more than a year.
Early in 1975 Hopkins decided to take a break, and Hardwick went back on the Delta Queen to play in the band and act as interlocutor, which was the master of ceremonies.
"It gave me an opportunity to expand from being just the drummer to an entertainer as well," Hardwick said, noting that was where he started to "pick up comedy bits and pieces of 'shtick.'"
"I put together a trio with another banjo player pal, Doug Mattocks, and a one-legged piano player named Steve 'Stubby' Heist while on board," he added. "We left the Delta Queen to form a show with our musical talents on the Robert E. Lee restaurant docked in front of the arch in St. Louis."
They worked there most of 1976 before getting an offer to take the show to Costa Rica and then back to the U.S. and out on the road.
Meanwhile, Hopkins landed at Terrace Hilton in Cincinnati, performing at a room the hotel called "Joe's Bar." It was the second most profitable room in the entire Hilton corporate chain, he said.
"We performed six nights a week, five hours a night," Hopkins recalled. "It was not unusual for there to be an hour wait to get in. During my engagement there, I was entertaining visiting baseball players and celebrities who were in town for their own shows. I had guest artists sitting in, most notably Liebert Lombardo would bring in his trumpet, and I recall that Maury Wills had just gone from baseball to Vegas nightclub act. He played plectrum banjo and sang."
Hopkins found himself playing for such celebrities as Guy Lombardo, Jack Jones, Gary "'Radar" Burghoff, Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman.
"Also during that time period," he noted, "I had the honor of performing at the Midwest Governors Conference for Jimmy Carter, Linda and Lady Bird Johnson, and also appeared on 'The Nick Clooney Show' and local feed of Jerry Lewis Telethon."
Meanwhile, Hardwick went west, ending up in Reno "playing behind a buffet line at the now-defunct Onslow Casino."
"It looked that our careers were almost over," he said. "Our piano player quit, but that same night Doug Mattocks learned that comedian Jerry Van Dyke was playing at Harrah's down the street. He had met him years before, went to see him and came back with the incredible news Jerry needed a drummer and banjo player in his band. We took the gig and played the lounge at Harrah's in Reno and Lake Tahoe and followed Jerry to Hollywood after the gigs in 1977."
There Hardwick auditioned at Disneyland and was put into an evening show in the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, playing the drums and washboard. Eventually he was tapped by comedian Wally Boag, the comedic star of the Golden Horseshoe Revue (the day show in the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland at Disneyland) to understudy him.
"Wally retired in 1981," Hardwick said, "and I took his place as the only other full-time comic in the show, landing my name in the Guinness Book of World records under the longest running stage show. I also met and married my sweet wife Claudia who was one of the can-can girls in the show."
Both Hopkins and Hardwick continue to play and entertain their way all over the country.
Hopkins moved back to Indianapolis, and in 1982, joined Tom Mullinix and the Naptown Strutters Dixieland jazz band, keeping busy with a steady engagement and society parties and functions throughout the Midwest before a move to Milwaukee.
Again returning to Indianapolis in 1989, Hopkins spent six months at The Jam Cellar at Union Station and 18 months at the Boggstown Inn.
"While at Boggstown I teamed up with Kathleen Miller, one of the regular singers," he said.
But after seeing that Dixieland and ragtime in clubs was becoming a thing of the past, Hopkins and Miller put together a show for theatrical venues and also started a company to promote shows for tour groups.
"I must say that one of my most memorable experiences was an exciting weekend at the Grand Hotel, being featured with the Grand Hotel Orchestra on the bill with Pete Fountain and Herbie Hancock."
In 2010, he formed a traditional jazz group, Hopkins and Miller's Sunset Stomp Jazz band.
"We have taken that group to the Central Illinois Jazz Festival twice. Performed at Grugelfest in Toledo. We have also had concerts for the Indianapolis Jazz Club, the Juvae Jazz Society in Decatur, Ill., and the Central Ohio Hot Jazz Society. Most recently, the group had been invited to participate at the Suncoast Jazz Classic on Sand Key in Clearwater Beach, Fla. More exciting was the invitation to return for the upcoming November 2014 edition."
The group also performs monthly at The Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis, and will be at the Paramount Theatre in Anderson on April 24 and at the Indiana History Center in June as part of its Concerts on the Canal series.
Hardwick, meanwhile, will be on the Seven Seas cruise ship March 10-19 from Rio to Dakar and just got back from Australia where he reported having done "two killer shows."
While trying to reminisce about it all, Hardwick said, "I'm missing a ton of great anecdotes, places and people I've worked with, incredible moments on stage, most great but some disastrous.
"I've had the pleasure of doing my comedy show on countless corporate shows, concerts and many cruise lines the last 30 years."
He will be headlining aboard Oceania's Regatta Sept. 7-15 and on Seven Seas Mariner Nov. 10-16.
"With only a 40-year lapse," Hardwick said, he wiil be returning to the Mississippi River to headline on the American Queen Steamboat March 27, May 5, 19, Oct. 14 and the Empress Queen Steamboats March 29, 31 and May 24, 25.
Hardwick also has created a three-comic theater show titled "Classic Comedy Live" with two comedian friends that they are marketing currently.
"I have so many wonderful memories of shows, concert halls, unbelievable venues," he concluded, "but the most grounding performances were the shows I got to do traveling to Iraq with the Air Force Reserve in 2006 and 2008 to entertain our troops with Lee Greenwood, Restless Heart and the New England Patriot cheerleaders.
"I'm embarrassed to be listing all these names, places and credits but after 42 years of being a professional entertainer, one is bound to have a few to drop," he laughed.