POP MUSIC : Robertson Rides Rock Train Again

Robbie Robertson has always made rock ‘n’ roll that is stylish, soulful and smart--music that is adult but in a youthful and inspiring sense.

As guitarist and chief songwriter in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with the Band, the Toronto native captured elements of the American musical and social character so gracefully in songs such as “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” that the material sounded as though it had been handed down for generations.

The group’s first two albums--”Music From Big Pink” and “The Band”--remain among the most acclaimed of the modern pop era, and its 1974 tour with Bob Dylan is widely regarded as one of the decade’s most triumphant.

So, the rock world was caught off guard in 1976 when Robertson and the group called it quits with a spectacularly success farewell concert in San Francisco that was the basis of the Martin Scorsese film “The Last Waltz.” Rather than rush out a solo album, Robertson turned to movies--acting in and producing a film (“Carny”) and writing the score or developing the music for three Scorsese films, including “Raging Bull” and “The Color of Money.”

It wasn’t until 11 years after “The Last Waltz” that he again turned his primary focus to music and made his first solo album. Robertson, 48, returns this week with his second album, “Storyville,” and it’s an even more ambitious work about innocence and redemption. The album was recorded chiefly in New Orleans with some of that city’s most admired musicians . (See review, Page 75 .)

Sitting in a West Los Angeles workshop recently, Robertson said he’ll tour before he starts shooting “Insomnia,” an introspective psychological drama he will star in that Scorsese will executive produce, late next year. And he spoke about how he has been able to maintain his own pace in a record business that is always hungry for new “product.”

Question: It’s interesting that you, Paul Simon, Don Henley, Sting all left the safety of big groups to pursue your own musical instincts. Is that because there is too much compromise necessary in a group setting?

Answer: My decision was more (complicated) than just my relationship with the Band. I felt I had earned the right to walk away. I was really sick of all that “You’ve got to do an album. You’ve got to do a tour. You’ve got to do an album and a tour.”

I’m not Willie (Nelson) or whoever, someone who seems to exist for the (studio or the road). I don’t put those people down, because that’s their makeup, but it isn’t mine. I had been on the road to places and to a depth where it doesn’t get any deeper . . . any further down or any higher up. . . .

It just wasn’t any longer a learning process for me, and I had this hunger for something different. I wanted time to dream and think and read . . . renourish myself.

Q: Were you tired of rock music itself?

A: I felt like I had to get off the train for a while. At the very beginning of rock ‘n’ roll (in the ‘50s), there was this big wave of music that overcame my life and many other people’s lives. By 15 or 16, I was on the rock ‘n’ roll train. I wrote songs that Ronnie Hawkins recorded and I was in his band, which is where the Hawks (later the Band) got started. . . .

Then we joined up with Bob Dylan and there was another wave that happened in music in the middle and late ‘60s, and this wave affected everybody’s life. So, I figured that’s what life (in rock) was going to be like . . . a series of these great waves. But it didn’t happen that way in the ‘70s. What was happening in the world and in music didn’t affect our lives the way these other two did.

I came to the conclusion that it was perhaps the end of an era. . . . And I didn’t want to just keep going around and around in the storm. Maybe it was time to get off the train and take a look around.

Q: But you were used to such attention and acclaim. Didn’t you worry that you would lose all that? How did you know there would be another train?

A: It was a roll of the dice. But it gave me a chance to learn more . . . to experiment. Working on “The Last Waltz” introduced me to Martin Scorsese, and I had been a movie bug since I was a young kid. My literature used to be reading movie scripts . . . “Touch of Evil,” all the Bunuel, Bergman, John Ford movies.

There’s a bookstore in New York where you could buy scripts, and I got addicted to them because they were easy, quick reads . . . and the pictures were so vivid. “The Weight” was definitely influenced by Luis Bunuel . . . and the impossibility of sainthood, this thematic thing that would come up in his films.

Q: After critics praised your screen presence in “The Last Waltz,” everyone predicted that you were going to become a movie star. Was that a goal?

A: I was interested in film, but not (simply) as a film star. For years after “The Last Waltz,” I got all kinds of silly movie offers--or, maybe, not silly, but parts that are not my calling. . . . lots of offers to play some wonderful boyfriend. . . .

Q: There were lots of stories after “The Last Waltz” about you and Scorsese having pretty wild lifestyles. That’s surprising because the Band always had this image of great discipline and taste--not part of the fast-lane excesses of rock or Hollywood.

A: I guess you’d call it wild times, but we were just kind of rolling with the flow. We didn’t invent anything. . . . The only thing we were inventing was this film (“The Last Waltz”). The rest just seemed to come along with it. It’s what happens when nobody tells you, “No.” It was kind of like, “Jesus, we can do anything we want, and no one seems to want to turn us down.” We were just living the decadence that that provides.

Q: Weren’t both you and Scorsese separated from your wives for a while?

A: Our wives threw us out at the same time, and we insisted on taking the misunderstood artist’s point of view. We felt they just didn’t understand the passion of our work. It was only after that period that I could see the other side of the coin and say, “They are absolutely right . . . the insanity of this kind of work.”

You eventually see how you give all this stuff to our work and take the rest of our life--which may be the richest part--for granted. In my case, I realized there was a hole inside me--a part missing--without my family, and I found out how much I wanted them back.

Q: But being around Scorsese must have also been an education for you in films.

A: It was. Marty used to be a film teacher at NYU, so I’d get back from the film studio at night (during work on “The Last Waltz” in 1977) and he’d have a film or two ready to go. We both made out lists of films we wanted to see. I’d usually write down a Rossellini film I meant to see or a Howard Hawks or Orson Welles film I had missed.

But Marty’s list was trashy B movies . . . about vampire lovers. It was so funny: this film maker who everyone had so much respect for and everything and he wanted to look at these trashy movies. But he’d find a certain scene that intrigued him and he’d go, “Look, look . . . how they did it.” So, he was teaching me about film and a lot of it would translate into music for me. I got deeper and deeper into the connection between film and music, and it changed the way I (approach) my music now.

Q: What led to start making records again in 1987? Did you finally decide it was overdue?

A: Not at all. I had no (pledge) to myself to ever make another album. I wasn’t obsessed with it by any means. I was enjoying working or studying . . . with people like Alex North, who, with Nino Rota, is one of the greatest writers of film music. I became really intrigued by the effect that music could have on film. But all of a sudden I thought of an idea for a song, then I thought of another one, and that thing inside told me it was time.

Q: What did you learn from making the first album?

A: Mostly, the experience told me that I wanted a thread that ran through the album the next time I made one--something I had been promising myself to do ever since 1969. I wanted one piece of music from beginning to end, something you find in records like (Van Morrison’s) “Astral Weeks” and (Marvin Gaye’s) “What’s Goin’ On.” I thought the songs on the first album were kind of interesting on their own, but the album itself was still a variety pack.

Q: Why did you want to focus on New Orleans in the new album?

A: I’ve always been in love with that Delta-flavored music . . . the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto. That’s how long this thing has been incubating for me.

Q: What finally pushed you in that direction?

A: I read a book years ago . . . about the French Quarter of New Orleans, and there was this thing in it about a place called Storyville. It was an area made up (at the start of the century) of cabarets, saloons, bordellos, gambling, wide-open kind of stuff.

It was a place where you heard a lot of ragtime, barrelhouse, bluesy, jazzy--music with a little danger to it, music that was a little risque. So, that was an interesting setting to me, though the story isn’t really about Storyville. It’s just a place that the two people in the songs meet--sort of the way Chinatown comes up in the movie “Chinatown.”

Q: How did the story come about?

A: I wanted something that would give me a direction and a thread for the album. Plus, I was tired after all these years of just sitting down saying, in effect, “What fascinating aspect of my life shall I write about today?” That embarrasses me. It makes me uncomfortable when other people write me, me, me songs.

So, I wrote this kind of “Frankie and Johnny” story--these people who weave in and out of each other’s lives at critical times. It’s sort of in the Dante and Beatrice tradition, only I didn’t want it set in the heavens or the universe but downtown or out on the blue highways.

Q: Are you enthused again about making music?

A: This was a thrilling project for me--the chance to work on these songs with so many of the great New Orleans musicians. Plus, “Storyville” is a very romantic story. When I was writing stories in the early days for the Band, I could never write these kind of stories. But now I am at a point where I can abandon that embarrassment and I can see the beauty in those emotions.

Q: What is it like now singing your own songs? Had you been frustrated in the Band because the other members of the group did the lead vocals?

A: No. I’d (often) play the songs (in the studio) for the Band and someone would (suggest) that I sing the song on the record. But my instinct told me that it would kill the band if if I wrote the songs, took the guitar solos and sang them. The focus would shift to me, and I never wanted that. I wanted it to be a real group, and it was.

Q: What about touring? Why didn’t you go on the road after the last album?

A: I didn’t have a band that I felt I could go to war with--that I could get in the trenches with. Having just hired guns didn’t make me feel secure enough and I didn’t feel like I quite had the ammmo after the one album. I can’t go out and do a pickin’ and a singin’ like I used to do. It has to be a theater of music to excite me--something dramatic and emotional.

Q: Are you going to try to involve some of the New Orleans musicians from the album on the tour?

A: Sure. I want to work with the Meters, the Rebirth Brass Band and (others). . . . I’d like to have them march across the stage and disappear, then another person joins in--real sense of theater. I now have two albums worth of material--and I’ve figured out a way to translate some older songs I have written in a way that works for me now. We’ll probably do it early next year--maybe even a cable TV special first from New Orleans.

Q: Do you see the album and the tour a parallel at all to the cultural exploration of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” or “The Rhythm of the Saints”?

A: There is something about (those approaches) that is too intellectual to me. I’m uncomfortable with the feeling that he has figured out something. . . . This is nothing i have discovered. I don’t know about Brazil. I don’t know about Africa. I couldn’t go there (to those countries to make an album) in a million years. But I do know about New Orleans. It has been part of my musical experience for as long as I can remember.

Q: Is this a good time for music generally?

A: The hard thing about that question is that we know of a period when they where you had Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and on and on. It was a point in history where the times provided everyone with this inspiration. There was a thing going on with the youth in the country and . . . there was the assassination of our leaders, a war we were united against.

It’s hard today to find that same inspiration and unity--unless you come from Compton, where you do have something to talk about and someone like Ice Cube (who does talk about it).

I like bits of things today. I’ll hear something by the Cure and that’s fantastic or I’ll hear a chant on some record and I’ll think that nails it. That great moment could come from anywhere. It could just be in a piece of a Jesus Jones song and I’ll think, “That’s wonderful. This guy was in the zone.” But I don’t get many albums that are in that (emotional) zone, but pieces of the record.

Q: What about this new contingent of writers who are bringing new maturity and sophistication to pop? Do you feel part of that

A: Words like maturity and sophistication and clever concern me. The reason I got on the rock train had to do with emotions, not because the songs were trying to teach me something. I accepted it from some of Bob Dylan’s work and a couple of other cases, but other than that it tends to piss me off because (messages in music) goes past the place where I think is real . . . past the place where I think a guy is pouring his gut out.

“When a Man Loves a Woman” is as good a song as you can have and Curtis Mayfield’s “I’ve Been Trying” by Curtis Mayfield just tears my chest out. I don’t know how you can communicate certain feelings any better than those songs or Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”--but I would never apply the word clever to them.”

I’ve tried to do what I’ve done in good taste or as honestly as I could over the years, but that’s about it. In finishing this record or in finishing anything I’ve ever done, I’ve always thought, “Can I live with this in 10 years or am I going to look at this and say, “Was that stupid.” That’s my only barometer.

Q: But wasn’t one of your most celebrated songs--”The Weight”--clever? Even today, it seems like a masterful pop riddle.

A: You could say that it’s clever, but you could probably just as easy say it’s stupid--”Crazy Chester”? Whatever it is, I never thought I wrote it out of smartness. It was just an explosion of emotion. That’s where I think our best work comes from. When I sense something is being penned, I worry about it. That’s one of our biggest dangers in music: thinking something to death.