Robbie Robertson Making Great, Greater
Musician Robbie Robertson was the primary songwriter and lead guitarist for the music group, “The Band.” Songs like “The Weight”, “Up on Cripple Creek”, and “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down” were just a few of the great songs that Robertson wrote during this time with The Band. He recently stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about a new box set featuring Live Performances at The Academy of Music in 1971. A few excerpts from the interview appear below. You can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.
Ron Bennington: This album which everybody loved when it came out, it was considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. You went back and remixed it again.
Robbie Robertson: Yeah, there was a situation that I mixed this album, and I did the best I could at the time, under the circumstances. I was mixing it up in Bearsville, [New York] and Bearsville Studio wasn’t finished being built, yet, but I didn’t have any choice. I had to do what I had to do on this, and we got it pretty good. But, over all these years, I thought, I didn’t nail that. I knew the music, there was something more vivid in the music, there was something there sonically that I couldn’t capture there with the limitations that I had. So, a few months ago, when the record company came to me and said, “Hey, we got all the tapes from The Academy of Music Show, we found all the tapes, and then we found live footage from it, and then we found all these photographs that no one has ever seen before,” and it was like this reservoir of something. Then they said, “What do you think about doing a set for this?” And immediately, I went to that place of, “I can finally get this the way I wished I could have back then.” So, when it came out it got great reviews, was considered one of the great live albums. It was doing really well and everybody was happy, except me. (Laughing)
Ron Bennington: You were the only one? Because you could hear something, that you couldn’t quite hear on that album.
Robbie Robertson: That’s right, and now I was able to come back, remix the whole thing, plus stuff that no one has ever heard before, with Bob Clearmountain, and we aced it. So then, we were doing that, Bob and I wanted to make the record as big and beautiful sounding as the record could be. Then the record company asked my son Sebastian to mix the Friday night show. It was four nights and the last night was New Year’s Eve, and they said, “Why don’t you mix the Friday night show, just the way it went down, everything in there blemishes – all of it, beginning to end. And that’s when Bob Dylan showed up, after midnight and we played together. It was just – that whole night there was something extraordinary about it, because it was our last night of doing this. And Sebastian went and mixed it, and his attitude was – I want it to be raw, real, hiding nothing, and I want it to sound like the best sounding bootleg record you’ve ever heard. And that’s what he did. I’ve never heard of a record before that comes out and it has two versions, sonically, of the record. What Sebastian did is incredible, and a lot of the reviews are really toting that, just because it’s so raw, and real.
Ron Bennington: And you’re really capturing something that night. It’s one of those Dylan performances that, here you guys are out there for a couple hours and he just hits the stage running. It’s a real Bob Dylan rock and roll night, which is a really fun thing. But, explain how mixing works to most people, because it’s somewhat mysterious.
Robbie Robertson: Well, at the time we were recording this on 24-tracks, and we had Allen Toussaint and a New York City horn section accompanying on a lot of the songs. So, we needed the tracks where we could get everybody on tape and have some kind of control over what everybody did. When you mix it, you try to make each thing – everything sound as good as it can and blend together as well as it can. And so, what I did back then, we didn’t have the equipment in the studio yet, back then, that I could really show off all of the delicacies and all of the subtleties that was in the music. And now, with Clearmountain coming back and doing that, I hear things in the music that I never even knew was there.
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Robbie Robertson Talks About Doc Pomus
Ron Bennington: One of the things that I love that you wrote in your essay [for the new album] is that Doc Pomus showed up, and you put him down front, and that made you and Levon, in particular, want to bring it up a notch, because that’s one of the people that you pulled from. There’s a great documentary out on him, right now, too, that his family has done. But, that was the musical knowledge that The Band had, where all the music came from.
Robbie Robertson: Well, Doc Pomus was an old friend. I met Doc when I was fifteen years old. Doc, and his partner, Mort Shuman. And Pomus and Shuman were two of the big songwriters. I met Leiber and Stoller also big songwriters. Otis Blackwell – and I was friends with Mort and Doc all their lives. The same things with Leiber and Stoller, from when I was fifteen years old.
Ron Bennington: So you knew the big songwriters long before you started writing yourself?
Robbie Robertson: No, I had written some songs for Ronnie Hawkins, that he recorded. He thought that if I could write songs for him that he liked, maybe I could hear songs that would be good for him to record. So, he sent me to the Brill Building, and I went from songwriter to songwriter and they played me songs.
Ron Bennington: Wow.
Robbie Robertson: (laughing) It was odd, because I was a kid. They’d be playing me a song and I’d say, “Oh, my God, that was fantastic, do you have another one?” And they’d play another one. Finally, they’d say, “Wait a minute, who are you again?” I was just so thrilled to be there.
Ron Bennington: I have never heard that story, by the way, I had no idea that you had that experience. Which, would have been phenomenal alone, if that was the only thing you’d ever done in your life. But, songwriting has always been very important to you, as a young person?
Robbie Robertson: Yeah, I had my first songs recorded when I was fifteen, so there was something engrained in me that was like, “oh, I’m a songwriter,” so then, I went on this mission of being a guitar player. I wanted to be a great guitar slinger, then, when I hooked up with Ronnie Hawkins and my focus really went there. Over the years, whenever it came up that we had the opportunities to do some recording or something the other guys always said, “You need to write a song, or something” and I would. But, it wasn’t until “Music from Big Pink”, that we really had the opportunity to say, “Ok, now we’re going to write some songs.”
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Robbie Robertson Talks About His New Book
Ron Bennington: You’ve also written a book with some other people, for young people, about music.
Robbie Robertson: Yeah, it’s called “Legends, Icons & Rebels: Music That Changed the World” and this idea came along a few years ago, that somebody – it seemed like there was a missing link, and that this idea was long overdue. And the possibility of putting together a collection of some of the greatest recording artists of all time. That have influenced our lives, and changed our lives, and these people, this music, has stood the test of time. It’s as great now, as it will be in fifty years. This isn’t going away. The idea was, if a kid has the opportunity at a certain stage in their life where they can absorb something like that, to know who Billie Holiday was, to know who James Brown was, to know who Johnny Cash was, Bob Dylan, and on and on. There are twenty-seven of these artists and everyone of them is unquestionably a master. As we got into this thing, it just got more serious, and more serious, and we didn’t care how much time it took to do it, and we have completed this book now, and it is a knock-out. Visually, it’s in the shape of an LP, this book, so it’s big and the artwork in it is phenomenal. The stories that we tell in it about these artists are really told from a very soulful place. There is my own personal reflections on how all this music struck me. There are facts on these people that we think that we know about them and there is stuff that nobody really knew about them before. There are two CDs in this book, with all of the artists music on it. We didn’t know this, we went into it a little naive, as it turns out, it’s impossible to clear all of this music for a book, it’s impossible, these people just automatically say no. Unless, their manager says, “They’re going to write you a big fact check”. They just say no. What happened was, this idea of doing this book for kids from 9 to 99, that this could change their lives and introduce them to a foundation in music, that would stay with them for the rest of their lives, everybody ended up staying yes.
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Robbie Robertson Talks About Seeing Ray Charles Play When Robbie Was A Kid
Ron Bennington: There is a respect to the music and the people that were there before you.
Robbie Robertson: Absolutely. I talk about it in the book, too, one time when I was maybe fourteen years old, something like that, I went to a concert and Ray Charles was playing on the show. In the course of his performance, he had a song that he recorded called “Drown In My Own Tears” and a person that became a friend of ours and a record producer that we worked with, Henry Glover wrote this song. And, Ray Charles is playing this song and he has this band, he didn’t have a big orchestra, he had a little orchestra then, and he was this very quiet, stern, image on this stage, up there, this blind man in the light. He was singing these songs and it was almost anti-show business, it was like music – music – music, that’s what I’m here for and I’m going to slay you with what I’m going to do sitting here at this piano. And he sang “Drown In My Own Tears” and it was so powerful and so moving that I, after that, I had to leave. I couldn’t take it anymore, the music was that strong. The fact that he wasn’t wailing around or doing anything, he was just singing into a microphone and it killed. I came back, because he was playing a couple of nights there, I came back the next night and was able to sit through the whole show, but it was that stirring, and that’s what we’re trying to get across, in this book.
Ron Bennington: It is about the music, the love of music, having that companion, that teacher that music can be when so many other things are gone in your life. Particularly, I think for young people, that you don’t listen to one great album without it leading to another great album. When you go back and you watch “The Last Waltz”, and the stories come through, you start to see the quilt of music. It was never any one band, the media might sell it, if it’s Elvis Presley, but when you go back and go through this, Elvis was just one of the squares in this giant checkerboard, that we have. Last time I talked with you, you were saying you were going to write an autobiography, have you been working on it?
Robbie Robertson: I’m deep in on it and boy do I have some stories to tell.
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Ron Bennington: “Live at The Academy of Music 1971”. It’s such a phenomenal sounding record, with four CDs, one DVD, great stuff that Robbie has already wrote about what was happening at that time. And the book is called “Legends, Icons & Rebels: Music That Changed the World”, so great to see you again, my friend.
Robbie Robertson: So great to see you, too, Ron. Thank you so much.
Ron Bennington: And I’ll see you back in here when you finish the book. Take care.
Robbie Robertson: You bet.
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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.
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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.
