A look at the legendary songwriter and musician’s solo career
by Marshall Bowden
A couple of weeks ago when the live album Before The Flood was noted as celebrating its forty-ninth anniversary, I made a mental note that I wanted to write about the record and how it provided me with a real entre to The Band. Things being what they are, I didn’t get around to it, and now comes the news that The Band’s celebrated songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor Robbie Robertson has passed away after a long illness.
Before The Flood was the recorded document of Bob Dylan and The Band’s triumphant 1974 tour, a tour which vindicated the musical choice Dylan made to go electric as well as The Band’s choice to turn away from fashionable psychedelia towards the blues, folk, country and rock music of America. It featured one side of Dylan and The Band, one side of The Band, a side with half acoustic Dylan and half The Band, and a final side with Dylan and The Band once again reunited.
That record was the first time I actually heard Dylan and The Band playing together, and it was galvanizing. The energy with which The Band infused the opening track, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” made me completely reconsider the song, which I’d always considered to be a bit clunky and awkward. Part of that was undoubtedly the way that Robbie Robertson’s guitar fills rang out sweet and clear at the end of Dylan’s phrases, rising above the churning rhythm. It seemed to push Dylan into high vocal gear, singing with renewed energy and purpose. Robertson’s guitar is there front and center on all the tracks on this first side, supporting, cajoling, and coaxing Dylan through a gorgeous “Lay Lady Lay,” a slinky blues version of “Rainy Day Women #12 &35,” a deep, dark reading of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door,” and strong renditions of “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Ballad of a Thin Man.”
Playing with Dylan, Robertson was forced to solo more frequently and prominently than when The Band was playing their own material, because a lack of guitar heroism was baked into the music that The Band created. So when Robbie cuts loose at the end of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come), his relatively restrained solo explodes into a storm burst that ends the song, and the album, abruptly. When it was time for him to take a few blues choruses and rock out he was certainly up for it (see his solo on “Further on Up the Road” in The Last Waltz), but that was not the way he operated in the studio with The Band. So hearing him with Dylan was a revelation.
I had heard The Band’s ‘hit’ songs on the radio growing up, but I remained mostly unaware of their individual albums at that time (of course I made up for that later). I had borrowed the live album Rock of Ages from the local library and loved it, and I first heard Before the Flood the same way.
When The Band broke up after 1976’s The Last Waltz, Robertson waited ten years before he released a solo record. He kept busy working on the mixing, editing, and cutting of The Last Waltz movie with Martin Scorsese, and he co-wrote, produced, and starred in the movie Carny, released in 1980. In ’88 he released Robbie Robertson, a solid album of songs that sounded like the time they were recorded in, but avoided some of the excesses of eighties production. There are some powerful songs here—“Fallen Angel,” “Showdown At Big Sky,” “Broken Arrow,” “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” “Hell’s Half Acre,” “Sonny Got Caught In the Moonlight.”
Robertson’s next solo record, 1991’s Storyville, was based on the sounds, sights, history, ambience, and music of New Orleans. Robertson had visited the Crescent City before on songs like “Ophelia.” That live Rock of Ages album had included a horn section arranged by Allen Toussaint, and now Robertson called on Aaron Neville, George Porter Jr., Rebirth Brass Band, and other denizens of New Orleans as well as musical friends from across the spectrum. His songwriting was stunning on this record, recalling the work he’d done with The Band while demonstrating the skills he’d learned since, and I’d consider it my favorite overall Robbie Robertson album both in the beauty of the melodies and lyrics and in the execution of the record. Robbie produced the record with Gary Gersh, and these sessions have been honed to a fine gloss that really makes the songs shine, though there were listeners who criticized the album as being too slick.
Robbie Robertson’s next record was a soundtrack, really, but not a traditional one in many respects. Composed for Ted Turner’s film, Music For The Native Americans was more complex than anything else he had done and incorporated Native American musical elements in ways that were instantly recognizable yet respectful of tradition. Robertson wrote and performed some amazing songs for this set–“Golden Feather,” “Ghost Dance,” “Skin Walker,” but it is on the instrumental tracks featuring the Red Road Ensemble that Robertson really allowed himself to experiment with different structures and sounds and to use the studio to create a different sound than could be achieved by a live band. The opening track, “Coyote Song” is yearning and expansive, creating a vista that straddles the historic world and the world of mythology, reaching towards the cosmos. As Paul Corio wrote in the Rolling Stone review of the album, “Like Ennio Morricone, he has a gift for sound that’s both stately and hip, primal and intricate.”
It seemed at the time as though Music For The Native Americans, satisfying as it was to listen to, was a one time shot, but Robertson wasn’t yet finished exploring his indigenous Canadian roots. Contact From the Underworld of Redboy, released in 1998, is probably the crown jewel of his solo discography in terms of delivering music that takes advantage of Robertson’s musical gift, his ear for melody, and the use of modern technology and studio technique to create music that summons indigenous people’s past while also putting them in the here and now as a force to be reckoned with. “You can bet your ass/I won’t go quietly/making a noise in this world” he sings over the bubbling synth and electronic drumbeat of collaborator Marius de Vries.
Contact From the Underworld of Redboy made quite a stir in the indigenous community and especially in the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, where Robertson spent time with his mother while growing up. It may have appeared to some outside observers as though Robertson had suddenly decided to ‘go Indian’, but in fact his Mohawk roots were always a part of who he was and his decision to become a storyteller in his songs. He visited Six Nations in the wake of Redboy, and his homecoming was documented in the film Making a Noise. His friend Tim Johnson noted that his visits to Six Nations as a child opened “his mind to a fascinating world invisible to the dominant society,” and provided an “early education that what you’re being taught in school is hardly the complete story.” Having used that education to write songs like “King Harvest” and “Acadian Driftwood’ he now turned his sights on the lives of indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States.
These two albums were not a flash in the pan or a way for Robertson to sell records without commitment. He visited and spent time at Six Nations, and he served as honorary chair of the campaign to build the new Woodland Cultural Centre, which supports the indigenous community by hosting open mic nights and workshops for artists and musicians. As part of the Six Nations community since 1972, the Centre was helped enormously by the impact of Robbie’s recordings and the attention that his visits and discussion of Native communities had on those who heard them.
Contact From the Underworld of Redboy mesmerizes from the opening track, “The Sound Is Fading.” Built around a recording of Native singer Leah Hicks-Manning that Robertson found in the Library of Congress, the track layers keyboards and drum programming beneath the vocals. On the song’s chorus, where Robertson intones “The sound is fading/the sound is fading away,’ his guitar squalls are fed through effects and then multiplied, creating a fierce layer of sound.
The in your face use of programming, remixing, sampling, and beats may have been a shock to some longtime fans, but if one listens, Robertson’s trademark understated guitar work is all over Contact. On “The Code of Handsome Lake” it’s easy to hear the connection to The Band in his guitar lines, and he produces a powerful yet controlled burst near the end of the insanely beautiful “Unbound.” Not only that, but his voice has improved since his first solo outings, becoming an instrument that he seems much more comfortable with and in control of, capable of providing the subtle shadings of meaning and emotion that these songs require.
The record ends with the haunting track “The Lights’ that highlights just how far Robertson had come sonically from his days with The Band. Over keyboard programming, Robertson and vocalist Laura Satterfield sing about the connection between indigenous peoples and visitors from the sky:
Indians have always seen the lights
Since the beginning of time
They drew pictures on the rocks
Of our relatives from the sky
The CD includes a bonus track, a remix of the Howie B track “Take Your Partner By The Hand” to which Robertson had contributed vocals. It’s dream sequence poetry over a dance club track about love, lust, fantasy, and ritual. The decision to include it was probably a gambit to get a larger audience to hear the track that was originally included on co-producer Howie B’s album. It’s kind of a techno update to “Somewhere Down the Lazy River” from Robertson’s first solo record, bringing things full circle.
I can’t recommend Contact From the Underworld or Redboy enough. Combining fellow indigenous musicians and singers, electronica, and poetry with his own rock guitar and voice, Robbie created a unique experience that offers compassion, understanding, and healing alongside necessary doses of advocacy and militancy and can resonate deeply with anyone, regardless of their creed or circumstance.
As the years went by without another Robbie Robertson album I recall reading an interview where he was asked about recording something new. What he basically said was that he didn’t feel he had anything to say that he hadn’t said already in one way or another. The last thing the world needed, he opined, was another record of Robbie Robertson rock songs.
He did release another such record, How To Become Clairvoyant, in 2011. In 2019 he released his final album, Sinematic, which I wrote about in NDIM on its release. But most of his time was spent behind the scenes, working with Martin Scorsese on The Irishman and the new Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as helping prepare Once Were Brothers, a documentary about The Band and helping to mix and prepare anniversary releases for each of the group’s original releases.