TUNED IN TO THE PAST
ROBERTSON EXPLORES HIS EARLY MUSICAL JOURNEY
Testimony, Robbie Robertson’s recently published memoir, is nearly as remarkable for what it leaves out as what it contains.
There’s no Somewhere Down the Crazy River, or a discussion of any of the other hits off the 73-year-old Canadian musician’s multi-platinum 1987 solo album. There’s nothing about any of his solo records, for that matter.
Nor is there anything about working with Martin Scorsese on films like The King of Comedy and The Wolf of Wall Street, or producing, or any of his myriad other activities that occurred outside of a certain time period.
What the book does cover is fascinating enough. Testimony mainly covers the years Robertson went from a teenage journeyman guitar player from Toronto with First Nations roots with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks to the final days of the groundbreaking group that practically invented a new musical genre, The Band.
“When I was writing it, I was really retracing my footsteps,” he said. “It was about having a voice and a rhythm and a feel, where one thing flows into the next thing and takes you over here and through these valleys and up here to the mountains. I wanted that feeling.”
An already hefty 500 pages, Robertson says the book was originally longer by 300 pages. Amazingly, he relied mostly on memory, though he does keep notes.
“It’s not so much for remembering incidents, but about remembering an idea or a phrase. But those notebooks remind me of things. And they bring things back to me, though not in an on-the-nose kind of way. But they push a little button, and I go back to that place.”
Nor did Robertson consult with any of the participants while writing the book, or read any other memoirs — not even Chronicles, the book by his former collaborator Bob Dylan.
In his life and career, Robertson has been a Zelig-type figure — someone who has been witness to, and often participant in, many pivotal moments in music history, from meeting rock ’n’ roll icons like Jerry Lee Lewis while touring with Hawkins to recording with Dylan in the mid-’60s to helping to create, with The Band, the music genre we now call Americana, to producing the groundbreaking concert doc The Last Waltz.
“I’ve just had such an incredible journey, and I really wanted to share all of this,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Can you believe it?’ I can’t.”
Robertson says that, in writing the book, he had no scores to settle. But he takes some satisfaction when recalling the epic tour he and The Band undertook with Bob Dylan in 1974, The Rolling Thunder Revue.
“When we did that tour, it was the first time we (The Band) had done a tour with Bob, since the (1966) tour where everyone was booing us. Now we do this tour, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, this is great, I knew it all along.’ And I think, deep inside me, ‘No you didn’t. No you didn’t.’ The world was wrong. And now we’re doing it, and everybody claims that they knew it all along.”
Testimony is particularly affecting in the early passages, when Robertson is a teenage guitarist making his bones with Ronnie Hawkins.
Then, in the early ’60s, Robertson was so young that Hawkins would place him toward the back of the stage in the hopes that bar owners or any lurking authorities wouldn’t be able to see he was too young to be there. But he was learning from the best.
“Those early days of playing the chitlin circuit down South, and all the way up to New York and New Jersey and up into Canada, of playing all of these places and picking up pieces of musicality, and gathering and gathering, eventually became the character of who we were in our music,” he said.
“It was so important to pay those dues and to woodshed. We learned our craft. We studied it, and we had music in our bones.
“And so, when it came time for us to come out of the darkness, and make a record, boy, we had the goods. And so there’s flavours in there of just about everything you can imagine. There’s gospel, there’s mountain music, there’s blues, there’s soul, there’s rock ’n’ roll, there’s rockabilly.
“All of those pieces of the dream are scattered throughout that music. It was incredibly valuable.”