Larry Schwartz
Robbie Robertson remembers the racist taunt clearly. When he was a boy, his cousins snapped a branch off a tree and carved a bow and arrow for him. Bigger boys gathered around as he tried it out.
“Hey, redboy,” one yelled.
“A jolt of electricity went through me and a pit went into my stomach which has been there all my life,” he says.
Born to a Jewish father and Mohawk mother, Jaime “Robbie” Robertson grew up “straddling two worlds” – an inner-city section of Toronto called Cabbagetown, and Six Nation Reservation in Grand River above Lake Erie in Canada.
Robertson took his name from his mother’s second husband. His father, whose surname was Klagerman, died in a car crash. He remembers him as “a young sharpie in fancy suits” who won cars and mortgages playing cards for a living. “It had nothing to do with luck,” Robertson says. “It
had to do with mathematics and memory.”
With his new album, his own memory has come into play, something his mother can appreciate. “There’s so much stuff in here that she remembers,” he says. “There’s sounds, melodies, chants, rhythms. She knows where this inspiration comes from.” None of the songs Robertson wrote in
his days with the Band confronted his native American heritage in the way he has done on Contact From The Underworld Of Redboy.
“I realised that I was going to have to do this right,” he says. “I was going to have to be very honest and very bold about trying to push those emotional buttons.”
Robertson has enjoyed critical acclaim since emerging as a solo artist in 1987, a decade or so after organising the famous farewell concert, The Last Waltz, for the Band. (It has played on erratically in recent years without his taut, understated guitar and the songwriting genius that yielded
The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Arcadian Driftwood.)
His career has been diverse, including acting in movies (Carny and The Crossing Guard) and collaborating on soundtracks, notably for his friend and one-time housemate, Martin Scorsese.
Redboy, his third solo album, continues the exploration of his heritage he began on a collaborative work, the 1994 soundtrack for the documentary Music For Native Americans. The album continues the fascination with state-of-the-art recording technology that has distinguished
Robertson’s work since he turned to producer Daniel Lanois and ex-Zappa drummer, Terry Bozzio, on his 1987 solo debut. Hip-hop producer Howie B and Bjork collaborator Marius de Vries help give a contemporary sound to a musical collage that includes a traditional “throat singing” duo
and American Indian “roadmen” (peyote shamen).
“I wanted to make a record that represented things in Indian country in today’s light,” Robertson says. “I didn’t want the old story. So many people are just tired of the stereotypical thing.”
One track features a 1942 Library of Congress field recording of the chant of a 16-year-old girl; another a recorded telephone comment in which activist Leonard Peltier, serving a life sentence for his role in the 1976 deaths of two FBI agents, outlines his predicament.
An English critic has noted “an element of anger running through (the) album like a thread of steel”.
“Hopefully it’s healthy anger,” Robertson says. “It’s not bitterness and it’s not just being pissed off.”
Back in 1966, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and others in the British rock aristocracy came to draw inspiration from the incandescent electric backing the Band (then known as the Hawks) gave Bob Dylan. (“The only mathematical guitar genius that I’ve ever run into who does not
offend my intestinal nervousness with his rear-guard sound,” Dylan once said of Robertson.)
Robertson hasn’t yet read Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, which is based on the celebrated “basement tapes” recorded by Dylan and the Band as demos and for fun in Woodstock in 1967.
“Greil sent me the book and I haven’t been able to bring myself to retrace my footsteps,” he says.
He has little contact with Band drummer Levon Helm, who co-wrote a memoir in which he expressed his frustration with Robertson for leaving the group.
“I haven’t been in a very close relationship with Levon for a very long time,” Robertson says. “But I talked with him around the time that the Band box set was coming out. And he acted like we were just old dear friends who hadn’t been in touch recently and that’s the way I honestly feel about
it.”
In 1980, Band keyboard player Richard Manuel committed suicide and Robertson wrote Fallen Angel: “this kind of love letter to a dear buddy of mine who passed away”.
“At the time nobody understood it at all,” Robertson says. “But in hindsight, it’s very easy to understand that this was the disease of alcoholism. “
By contrast, his new recording may be “good medicine,” he says, for himself and others who identify with it. Even so, “I couldn’t have made this record just a few years ago … It wasn’t in the air that people would have had open ears and open hearts to even listen to something like this. It would have been too obscure. And it’s weird … because this is the original roots music from north America.”
The Sunday Age 5th of July 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer