December 20, 2016 • 44 mins
At age 15, Robbie Robertson packed up his guitar and took a train from Canada to the Mississippi Delta—or as he calls it, the “holy land of rock n’ roll.” Inspired by his Mohawk relatives' musical talents, Robertson was determined to make his own mark on the music scene—and did. After playing backup for Bob Dylan’s 1966 world tour, he joined forces with other talented musicians to form a group humbly crowned: “The Band.” Operating out of a big pink house in New York, the lyrical genius and his band mates penned classics like The Weight—still considered a masterpiece today. As his new autobiography Testimony hits the shelves, Robertson talks to Here’s the Thing host Alec Baldwin about the Indian reservation where he first learned music, the makeshift basement studio where he wrote it, and the final performance that nearly got Martin Scorsese fired.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.
I'll ruled in another room. I will beating by hand
past and give me to find a place where I
can leave my head. And Mr Canna tell me where
(00:31):
a man I find it be. He just branded shook
my hand and new we're going to see. At age fifteen,
Robbie Robertson wrote his first two recorded songs. A year later,
he packed up his guitar and took a train from
Canada to the Mississippi Delta, what he calls the holy
(00:54):
Land of rock and roll. By the mid nineteen sixties,
he'd be touring the world with Bob Dylan, then taking
center stage with a group of his own, happily named
The Band. Operating out of a basement in upstate New York,
he penned classics like The Weight, still considered a masterpiece today.
A blend of country and rock and roll, the band's
(01:16):
music transcendent generations, pushed boundaries and changed the face of
music forever. In his new memoir Testimony, Robbie Robertson travels
back to the place it all began, the Six Nations
Indian Reservation, where his mother a mohawk was raised. That's
where I was introduced to music. It seemed to me
(01:38):
that everybody played an instrument, saying dance, did something because
there wasn't much entertainment coming through the Reds, so they
had to make their own and it and it felt
like a club, and I thought, I gotta get into
this club. Everybody plays something. How much time did you
spend there? Oh, we spent lots of time there because
(02:00):
that's where you know, my mom's relatives were, so we
would go several times a year. And that was your
mother's side of the family. So yeah, yeah, and uh.
And it felt to me like I was. I was
that they allowed me into this world that I thought
(02:20):
was so special. So all of these things in music,
and it was the first time I ever saw anybody
playing an instrument a few inches from me, and the
sound of it from that place that I thought, I've
got I've got to learn something about this. So some
of my cousins and uncles and every they would show
(02:41):
me a few little tricks on the guitar, a couple
of chords, and over time I liked it and liked it.
And then when I was about eleven or twelve years old,
I thought, I'm getting as good as they are at
this and they're grown ups. Something's happening here, all of
this coming out of the Indian Reservation where it's supposed
(03:05):
to be deprived. It was a glorious part of my
growing up. So then when I was thirteen years old,
I was standing there at the crossroads with a guitar.
Rock and Roll came along and I just reached puberty.
(03:27):
It was a setup. I had nowhere else to go.
I had to follow this path and so it was.
It was like it was laid out before me and
all I had to do was follow it. So I
started getting in the little groups and things. I had
a group called Robbie and the Robots, and I, you know,
we had another group called Thumper, Thumper and the Trambones,
(03:50):
and then Yeah, and then I played. I had a
group and we opened for Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks
at a dance hall and they were amazing. They were
all from the South and it was pure, pure rockabilly,
hard hitting rock, the American stuff. Not South Toronto, No,
(04:13):
it was from the South. So for me, it was
authent Arkansas. They were all from Arkansas then, and and
in the group I was, and we played and I
tried to play good and everything and I and I
caught Ronnie Hawkins eye a little bit, and that it
gave me the opportunity to hang around a little bit.
(04:35):
I wanted some of this to rub off on me.
I wanted to learn this authenticity. But to interject this,
which is when you're there and you're at the reservation
and they're they're playing the music, and you start to
keep up with them, and then you say, quote unquote,
Ronnie Hawkins has his eye on you. Is that something
that you've benefited from? Which is people saw that you
(04:56):
stood out and they recognized that, they almost mentored you.
You know, there's something that happens, it's it's it's mysterious
and you don't know where it comes from, and you
don't know how. You just know something happens. And if
somebody pat you on the back for that, what was
Ronnie Hawkins patting you on the back? Four? He thought
this kid looks to me like he might have potential. Right.
(05:19):
And then when I was fifteen, which was at that time,
I was fifteen years old, I wrote two songs that
he recorded, and so that was kind of a big
thing to the first recordings that I had. And then
when I was sixteen, he said, I want to try
you out. I want you know, I want to see
if you can if you can handle it. And so
(05:42):
I went from Canada from Toronto on a train down
to the Mississippi Delta to the holy land of rock
and roll to join up with Ronnie Hawkins and the
Hawks passed away. Yeah. My, my, my mother, she was horrified.
I was going to say six yeah, and and and
(06:05):
I'm going to the Mississippi Delta and describe Ronnie Hawkins
for people who know him, Was he uh in a
suit and tie they have a bow tie and a
crisp shirt on? Or was he? He was an amazing character,
an incredible showman, so funny and could get away with anything.
And to see him perform it was like some uncaged animal,
(06:28):
it was, but beautiful. You know. He would come leaping
through the air down and land on his knees behind
the piano player and start winding him up like as
if you know, it was like a monkey, you know
playing you know, and yeah, like the Oregon. He would
be binding him up and then come in singing at
(06:51):
the last second, and then you know, leap over here.
He was like and years ago when we played like
Alan Freed shows and that nobody wanted to go on
after Ronnie Hawkins. He was just one of those. Yeah,
he was just an exciting performer. So in my mother
I knew of Ronnie Hawkins having not well but had
(07:13):
met him. But when I said, I'm going down there,
I'm going to try out for Ronnie Hawkins and the
Hawks because if I don't do this, I'll be sorry
the rest of my life. And I've got to find
out whether this is my calling or not. She said,
all right, you can try it, but if it doesn't work,
(07:36):
you go right back to school. And I said, it's
a deal, right, But you never had to keep that too.
I was on a mission when Hawkins said, when you
wrote a couple of songs for him, and he was
going to use those songs before you got in the band,
describe for me, because you are a very uh you know,
famous for your songwriting. Because what was your performing? What
(07:58):
was that like for you? I mean even as a
child to me, you're young kids are When he said that,
I kept looking for the key, the key to the highway.
I kept looking for some way to impress him. I
wanted into this world, and I thought, he said he
needs some songs. I had been writing songs, not very
(08:19):
good ones, but you know, I was. I was doing it,
and I thought, let me give it a shot, you know.
And I went and I wrote two songs, brought them
to him, played them for him, and he said, well,
I'll be damned, I'm going to record both those songs. Son.
You remember what the songs were. Yeah, one was called
(08:41):
someone Like You and another one was called Baba Lou
and I uh, and I just I wrote them like
in one sitting because I was anxious and I was young.
But here's the pepper in this. He goes records these songs,
makes a new album, brings me the album. I nervously
(09:04):
opened this record. I look on the label. There's my
name on the label, but it says Robertson and McGill.
So I said, there's no McGill there. When I wrote these,
who the hell's McGill? And he said, wow, it's a
kind of a long story. I don't know if you
want to and I said, no, there was nobody else there.
(09:26):
I even I wrote it. I wrote these, what's going on?
So he said, here's the real deal. This is a
pseudonym for Maurice Levy, my lawyer. He owns the record company.
He owns Roulette Records, and he's a hardcore mobster. And
he puts his vague and that's his vague, exactly half
(09:48):
the songwriting. And I thought, you can do that. You
can lie about this stuff, you can put it out
there and nobody ever says anything. And so Ronnie explains, no, no, no,
you don't forget about it, Robbie, it's Chinatown, that's right.
It was like that. He said. Morris is famous for
having his guys hold somebody out his office window by
(10:12):
the ankles, saying either you sign this or we let
your very cuddly character. So so after the after this
songwriting thing, Ronnie brings me to New York. He said,
if you can write songs for me, maybe you would
have a good ear and hearing songs would be good
(10:32):
for me to record. So I meet Lieber and Stoller
and Thomas and Schumann and Otis Blackwell all of these writers,
and I sit in rooms and they play me songs,
and I think this is kind of like being in heaven.
So then Ronnie says to me, Now we're gonna go
up to Roulette Records. We're gonna go up to see
(10:53):
Morris Levy. Um, I have to, you know, do some
things with him. So I'll introduce you and everything. I'm
thinking to myself, Oh yeah, well, now we're going to
discuss this songwriting misunderstanding. I want to work with you, Morris.
You know, no, it's kind of like that I was
that young that I was thinking you weren't in the room.
(11:15):
You weren't there when I wrote these songs. You do
really want an explanation, Mars, right. So anyway, so we
go into his up to his office. It looks like
a scene out of a Damon Runyon thing. There are
gangster guys standing around with crooked noses and bulging mohair suits,
you know, where they're backing squares. There's good there's secretaries
(11:37):
with blonde hair over one eye. You know. It's like
this is a movie and we're a count. Basie's playing
in the background. We come in. Morris comes out of
his office and he says, Ronny, Ronnie, I love this guy.
What a crazy guy he is. Come on in here, Ronnie,
you know, And he's saying to everybody there. You know,
(11:58):
I love this guy, and I think what happens to
gangsters when their kids said their voices go like this?
Why does he talk, you know this way? So we
go into his office. Ronnie's doing the camel walk on
the rug and calling him hoss and and he just
he loves Ronnie, so it's it's really fun. And Ronnie
(12:19):
says to him, Morris, I just came up here just
to see if there's any papers you want me to sign,
right knowing the story about hanging people out there give
you a pint of blood. So anyway, we sit down
and I'm thinking, all right, okay, you know, I see
how this is going. And he's talking to Morrison. He says, Morris,
(12:41):
this is the kid that I was telling you about
that I really think has some potential. Morris looks over
at me and he says, yeah, he's a nice looking kid.
If you ever have to do time, would be good
to have him with you. I thought, what what he said.
I bet you don't know whether to hire him or
(13:03):
just have sex with him, you know, And I think
I'm going to forego the songwriting dispute. I'm just gonna
let that go for now you know. Yeah, so you
leave Hawkins, Yes, and you're with him for how long?
A couple of years? Uh? When I joined him at sixteen,
(13:24):
left probably around yeah, something like that. And you leave
to form your bed. No, it is. Over the years
leave on. And I have helped hire people to replace
people that were leaving the Hawks, and they were all
(13:46):
Canadians because we were spending a lot of time up there.
Ronnie liked it because he made more money and the
hours were easier. So we were seeing all these really
talented guys. And because I kind of opened that door
a little bit, and and we would see this other talent,
we'd say, oh my god, that guy is something special
(14:08):
about him. That Rick Danko, We better hire him. And
then boy, when this Richard Manuel sings, jeez, just there's
your heart out. And Garth Hudson there's never been a
keyboard player on that level ever. And if he was
in our group, we would learn more, we would be better.
Everybody gets better. Yeah. So anyway, we put together this
(14:31):
group and Ronnie has now an amazing band of music.
And we are young and growing up and we outgrow
what we were doing with Ronnie, and we just said
at some point, we gotta go do our own thing.
Where did you first meet leaving? I met leve On
(14:51):
Um when I first when my group opened for Ronnie
Hawkins and the Hawks. And then so Levan was with
Hawkins already. Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, he was one of
the original Hawks. So and he joined the group I
think when he was eighteen or something like that. Um.
But when I went south and Levon introduced me to
(15:14):
his family and everybody there, we we became very close,
just like a brotherhood. And so we were picking out
these other guys. And after we put this group together,
Levan was then the only Southerner left in the group.
And we had these guys and then we just felt
like we have to go out in the world and
(15:36):
discover our own thing now. And we did that, and
we were out there and playing the Chitland Circuit down
south and joined you know, in New York and Jersey,
and we were playing in a place in Jersey and
and that's when I got this call from Bob Dylan
(15:56):
two that he wanted to talk to me about something
and how do he find you? He we had a
reputation of being a pretty you know, a good band,
a really good band. There was that, and he always
had his thinker in the win for that kind of thing.
He um, he was wanting to make this transition from
(16:19):
being a folk hero to being a guy that had
a band of you know, instruments, powerful rock and roll
band to turn it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah,
So so I I went. I met with him, and
I didn't know what this was going to be about,
(16:39):
but what the plan really was what they were thinking.
He needed a guitar player and wanted to hire me
to play guitar um on some dates he was doing.
And I said, I have a group. We don't do that,
you know, I said, but maybe for these two dates,
if we could have leve On come too, we might
(17:01):
be able to slip this in without making the other
guys feel left out. Or so we did these couple
of days. It was ridiculous. I mean we were playing
places and people were so upset about this music and
you know, this electric music from our folks man, and
it was like it wasn't working. It. It was not
(17:25):
what they wanted at all from him, from him, they
this is not so what was the venue? We played
Forest Hills Stadium here what forests and people literally are like,
when's Bob Dylan coming on? Know that people were charging
the stage and throwing things and trying to disrupt it
(17:45):
and booing and booing. So we played Forest Hills in
the Hollywood Bawl did these days. We thought about that
was weird. And then Bob says, we're gonna book a
whole tour. Now, let's do a whole tour. And I
was like, no, no, no, no, no. We have a group.
We are a group. We are not going off to
(18:06):
do this. And the only way that we could even
consider it if we did it with the whole group.
So he came and heard us play and said, yeah,
let's do this. And so we ended up touring of
North America, Australia, Europe, and people booed and threw stuff
(18:27):
at us every night. How does that possible? You could
hear people saying to him and his manager, you've got
to get rid of these guys. They're ruining everything. And
the people love you, but you've got to get rid
of those guys. And Bob never budged, He never took
a step back, and we continued and we did this
(18:50):
whole tour and stuff. Back then we would listen sometimes
after the show to a tape of the show, just thinking,
you know, we're to see what's wrong. What do we
think that's happening with? Right? Right? How can they high?
And there was a point in all of that, and
(19:10):
because some of it was just helpful to put get
the music better and do this song slower and this
one that there was one night we're listening to the
tape and I said to the other guys in the
Hawks and the Bob they're wrong. The world is wrong.
(19:30):
This is good, this is really powerful, and they are wrong.
And there was a boldness that came out of this
that we felt like, oh yeah, really, I'll show you something,
you know. And it was like get him in the ears,
you know, get him in the eyes. It was an
(19:50):
attitude that allowed us to carry on. All of these
concerts are as we speak, are coming out, they're being released,
all of them. I don't want to hear the music
that the band did with Bob Dylan was booed around
the world. That I've got to say. But then if
it's recorded on an album and no, it's all coming out,
(20:11):
god knows it wasn't released, then it wasn't released. Then
it's being released. Now, yeah, but eventually it stops. Ends.
Why what happened was after we finished the European tour,
we came back and they were booking more dates. They
were getting you know that he wanted to do a
(20:31):
tour of Russia. He wanted all kinds of things, you think,
and it was kind of like he wanted to be
booed in every corner of the world. Hello, Greenland. So
so he came back and he had an accident on
a motorcycle, accident, and he fractured his neck, and so
they had to cancel any upcoming dates and he never
(20:55):
did another tour after that for eight years. They God Blessing,
keep you all that you wish is all they always do.
(21:15):
That you coming up? Why Martin Scorsese risked getting fired
from New York, New York to direct the band's final
concert in nineteen seventy six, a film that would become
the last waltz to hear Other musical legends explore the
Here's the Thing Archives. In nineteen sixty six, Herb Albert
(21:37):
and the Tijuana Brass did the unthinkable. They outsold the Beatles.
But that was just the start. In sixty uh seven,
were I was doing a special for NBC. Jack Hayley Jr.
Was directing. He said, why don't you sing a song?
I said, well, if if I can find the right song,
I'll give it a go. So, you know, I go
(21:58):
through my Barolla decks and I called Bert back rack.
I said, Bert, is there a song that you have
that do you think I could handle? That? You have
tucked away in your drawer someplace where you find yourself
whistling in the morning, or you know a tune that
haunts you. Well. Three days later he sent me this
Girl's in love with you. Take a listen, and here's
the thing. Dot Org, this is Alec Baldwin and you
(22:23):
were listening to Here's the thing. Robbie Robertson and the
Band shook the foundation of America in the nineteen sixties,
weaving together the rustic and romantic into hits like the
Night they Drove Old Dixie Down. But if their sound
was innovative, their first recording studio was the opposite. It
was a house up in West Sagredis in New York.
(22:45):
Who found it, um Rick Danko, And it said, guys,
I think I've found it because we were having a
lot of trouble in the city finding a place where
we could make music, because it was the business was
still here that it had more moved to. Right, no, no,
But but we'd be disturbing. They'd say, turn on the
music in there. You know. It's like it was hard
(23:06):
to find a place even a studio, well a studio,
but we couldn't afford to lady or something like that.
Right no, no, no. And this was to write and
to create and to think of what we're gonna do next.
So Albert Grossman, our manager, talks us into moving up
to Woodstock. He said, you can get a place there
(23:27):
and nobody will bother you. You won't bother anybody, bring
your food, it'll be. It'll be just because I had
this dream that I wanted to have a workshop, a
clubhouse where we all congregate every day and we go
there and we create, and we have a wonderful time
together and we build some kind of a musical noise
(23:51):
that we could send out around the world. So we
find this place out in the middle of a hundred acres.
Nobody to bother it is this horribly ugly pink house.
What had it been? It was no, it was just
a house. On a big profit. It was. It was both,
(24:12):
but had not been a working farm, not a farm,
just a house. But anyway, in this house, it had
a basement, and I thought, that's it. That's what I've
been looking for. We can set up our equipment down here,
and we can have some microphones and we can and
(24:35):
we can be way off the grid, we can have
nothing to do with what's going on in the world
and really discover what we're here for. It served that
kind of purpose in my imagination. So we set it up.
We got the things, the instruments in there, all organized
in a certain way, a few mike's, a little mixer
(24:57):
and everything. I bring this engineer, recording engineer, friend, sound
mixure guy, and I said, look at this, this is
what you know. I said, what do you think? He
looks at it and he says, well, it's all concrete,
glass windows, a big furnace over here. This is probably
going to be the worst sounding place you've ever heard
(25:18):
in your life. It's a disaster. And I said, acoustic nightmare.
And I said, thank you, that's just what I was
looking for. I want to break Yeah, And you know
where you find the sound. It's like this, This is
Frampton when he did the show with us, Frampton who
like you sixteen years old on the road and uh,
(25:40):
same thing. When you listen to Frampton, he was like
he was when I was a kid. I was into
sound you do well. I wanted was just sounds and
what kind of sounds I want? And you're fascinated by that,
like you just said that, that kind of uh, you know,
savantage thing. So you're up there and Dylan comes. He
(26:00):
lives up there. So one day I say to him, Bob,
you gotta come and see the setup we got out here.
You see, yeah, it's you know, And and he's, you know,
he's just recorded in studios, you know, traditional recording and everything.
I'm thinking, I don't know whether you know, he's gonna
(26:21):
think I'm crazy and this is meaningless or whatever. So
we drive out there and we're driving and driving, and
then up this side road and we're driving. We're driving.
He says, where the hell is this? He said, you're
right about nobody bought out here, I can say. And
we go in and we go into this house and
(26:42):
it's it's hard to put your finger on it, and
said one of the guys is making some coffees, and
they got checkerboards set up on these tables and he's
looking it over and I said, come on, check this out.
And we go down into the basement and he goes, WHOA,
look at this. Can you can you record stuff down here?
(27:05):
I said, we got a little tape recorder right there.
We're gonna record stuff. And we're you know, this is
where we are going to experiment and make some discoveries.
How long did that go? So he said, listen, I've
got a couple of songs that I've been messing around with.
Maybe we could try them together here. So we said, yeah, sure,
(27:28):
we're all set up. So anyway, we ended up recording
the basement tapes there. I don't know, there's something like
a hundred and forty songs or something in the course
of this. And what we would do is every day
we would go to Big Pink, We'd have some coffee,
play some checkers. Bob would write. He wrote on a
(27:51):
typewriter all the songs. He would just ding ding, you know,
And I'd seen him do that before. It was just
and I didn't know people wrote that way, but but
he did. And so he would type something up. We'd
go down into the basement grab everybody would grab whatever
(28:11):
instrument was close, might even not be the one you
play anything, because there was no rules. We'd sit on,
we'd mess around, play through a tune and would say, wow,
that felt kind of good. We'd listen to it, and
then pretty soon it would turn into a combination of
(28:31):
new material that he was writing, that we were writing,
and a lot of songs that I discovered that he
had a memory of lyrics that no person in the
world could have. This to remember the lyrics to his
own songs was a phenomenon, right, And it was an
(28:56):
amazing time and amazing and it was private. And so
in the course of that, he was getting songs to
send to his publisher, because people recorded Bob Dylan songs,
right and they needed some new material. So we would
lay down some songs you could send to the publisher,
and then we would record songs that nobody should ever hear.
(29:19):
It was just private, just between us, and some of
it was so hilarious, brilliantly funny, and we and it
was cool because it was just us. We were hurting
anybody doing this. And then and then the first bootleg
record that I ever knew of came out with some
(29:40):
of these songs on it, and it was like somebody
peeking in your closet was like, whoa wait a minute here,
this isn't right, especially on a bootleg re. Explain to somebody,
how does that happen? You record this stuff with never
already any intention because a lot of people think the
bootleg takes are leaked by you. No no, no, no no,
I'm saying you did, But a lot of people think
(30:01):
that the guys like you and Dylan and the band
and leave on everybody you do the leaking because you're like, well,
we don't want this stuff to come out. This is
very proprietary. My god, if you're up there and again
it's it's in your in a vault in the middle
of nowhere and nobody can get to you, how does
that material get leaked? As your guests. So what was
happening was some of the material that was legitimate that
(30:24):
other people could cover, and a lot of people did.
That was sent to the publishing company and they would
they and you hand the tapes over to people that
you trusted, but only certain things. There was like I said, whatever,
there was a hundred and forty tracks or something that
we had recorded, and so they sent out maybe fifteen
(30:47):
that was for people to cover. That's what it was.
Because people heard these tapes and said, oh my god,
this is amazing this stuff. So they started sharing it
as kind of a cool underground actor and then bootleggers
came along, and then they put it out and tried
to sell it. But we still had all of this,
(31:07):
tons of other stuff that nobody ever heard because a
lot of it was covers. A lot of it wasn't
yeah originally. So so now years later they release all
of it because nowadays it's all out there. It's everything.
There's no point in sitting on anything anymore. Um it
(31:30):
ends with him? How I mean you're recording? Uh Pink House?
Did that wind down? It wound down in Uh? Why no, No,
it was because it was time for us to go
and record music from Big Pink, the first album by
the band, right, and then Bob went on. The band
(31:54):
had never recorded. We had recorded songs here and there
as the Hawks, not as the best the band, but
now the band's debut album, Yeah Yeah. Sixty seven was
the Basement tapes, and sixty eight was music from Big Paint.
Dylan perform on the on the on the album. No,
(32:16):
he painted the cover, He did a painting for the cover,
and then he went off to make another record in Nashville,
and we went off to do our thing, and then
the band became recognized as the band. And and then
a few years later we did a tour together, the
(32:37):
Bob Dylan the Band Tour in nineteen four and he
hadn't done a tour until then. So when you go
from Hawkins to the to the Basement tapes and then
on to do your own album, does the personnel change?
Where's the same unit that becomes the band? It never changes,
(32:57):
never changes. And when we when you well right up
into Last Waltz, it's the same guy, same keyboards and everything.
And when you do last Waltz, and so the story
goes that you pitched Marty. Yeah, I was trying to
figure out who because this thing kept growing, the idea
(33:18):
of it and it became it was becoming a real
musical celebration with all of these people coming together, your friends. Yeah,
you knew up front this was a farewell show. It
was the show. This was it, this this we were
going to bring all of this to a conclusion. The
band had been together for sixteen years, and we had
(33:40):
seen it all up and down that highway. We had
been to the grungiest places. We played Jack Ruby's club
in Fort Worth, Texas, right just before he has assassinated Oswald,
and we had played Woodstock and Watkins Glen, the biggest
concert in the world in the isle of what We
(34:01):
had done everything that you could do under the sun.
And during that period two in the seventies in ninety six,
it became very dark out there. There's a lot of
drug abuse, there was a lot of madness. It was
just crazy in the air. And what we were trying
(34:22):
to do is think, how do we survive this? So
why don't we bring this episode to a conclusion and
then we can get out of the spotlight and figure
out creatively what comes next for us. That's what the
plan was for us or individually, the individually, and I
(34:45):
don't want to pry, but there was no acrimony, There
was no nobody, just everybody collectively said it's time for
a change. Yeah, we're all gonna go do our own thing.
And what a beautiful way to do it in this
in this celebration of music, but in the name of
music in the name of the band and and respect
for one another. And all of these people that brought
different flavors of the music you know out for us
(35:08):
Dr John from the New Orleans Sound, Muddy Waters from
the Chicago Blues, and Eric Clapton from the British Blues,
and the Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. So all
of this is it's growing. Then certain people were saying, God,
you gotta document this somehow. This is one of those things,
is you know, something like this may never happen again.
(35:31):
So it starts out We're gonna have a couple of
video cameras black and white. Then they say, well, that's
not gonna look very good. Why don't we do it
in sixteen millimeter like all of these music let it
be everything, Yeah, everything in sixteen And it's growing, and me,
being a movie bug, I started thinking who would be
(35:52):
terrific to do this? There Hall Ashby and and George
Lucas you know with America and graffiti, and I'm going
down the list and I feel bold like I could
ask anybody you know to do this. But there was
one guy that I saw something in his instincts for
music and movies that was different than everybody else. There
(36:17):
was something so powerful about this that I couldn't let
it go. So when I started to make a list
of these directors that I was going to ask, I
wrote down Martin Scorsese, and I thought, let me talk
to him first. Music in mean streets. There was something
really special about this, and and on and on and
(36:40):
on in his movies. So I met up with him
and I asked him if he would be interested in
in directing this, and he said, all of these people,
these are all my favorites. Oh my god, he said,
but I'm in the middle of shooting a movie and
(37:01):
they don't like it when you go and make another
movie while you're shooting a movie. Movie was the shooting
at the time, New York, New York. So he said,
you know, I, you know, I don't know how to
do this. And so we hung out that evening. We
talked about it, and we talked about you know, Eric
(37:23):
Clapton is going to be coming and where you know,
all of these musical ideas that that we have, and
finally says, the hell with it. They can fire me,
they can crucify me. I don't care. I have to
do this. We have to find a way for me
to do this. So we had to put this together underground,
(37:46):
and nobody could know that Martin Scorsese was going to direct.
You know, capturing was a top secret project, it really was.
It was completely underground and recording over what period of time,
four days, no one, take one we recorded and so
then through these cinematographers as Kovacs and Bilimo Sigmund, they're saying,
(38:11):
we don't want to shoot this in sixteen millimeter. We
gotta shoot it int you know. Yeah, yeah, we're making
a movie. And so they said, but the problem is
that Michael Chapman, who became the DP. Yeah, Michael Chapman says,
these cameras won't run for the length of this concert.
(38:34):
They will melt, they will break. Yeah, it's they'll never
make it. So we got so we had to figure
out a system of certain songs out there so they
could reload, change batteries. There's no digital happening here. This
is real film. And Marty directed this thing on what
he wanted to capture in the whole. It wasn't like
(38:56):
everybody shooting and we'll see how it cuts together. No, no, no,
it was scripted, but take one when when you saw
the film, knowing Marty as I do. You probably saw
the film nine years after you finished, because he's cutting
for nine years in them. But when you saw the film,
did you just did you just kill you to see
(39:17):
memorialized by Scorsese. You're great Bow, you know you're a
great sign off with that band. Well, first of all,
very few people have had that moment, I know the
Beatles unintentionally. Yeah. No, what happened was when Marty saw
the footage the thirties, some of the thirty five millimeter footage,
(39:40):
he said, I think we've got something here, but we
have to We're making a movie and and we have
to know what this is about. So I want to
shoot you guys telling stories, telling tales of the road.
What is this about? How did we get here? What's
happening in this? And and then I said to him,
(40:06):
here's something that I feel is missing too, because there
was you know, we had all these flavors of music
that kind of make up what we're all of, what
we're all about. But I said, we didn't get to
pay honor to gospel music or country music. And I've
written a theme a theme from the last waz, why
(40:30):
don't we shoot those three things on a sound stage
so you can move, so you can move the camera
the way you move the camera. He's famous for where
how he moves the camera. So we did that and
that put the icing on the cake. We told the
stories and then he cut it together like it was
(40:54):
a movie and not a concert documentary with him. Interesting
to that, you didn't do your first solo album until seven.
That's why is that I was doing other things. There
was a lot of film projects that people were coming
to me with, and in this pretty much immerse yourself
in movies and Marty's movies. You do after the Last Walls,
(41:17):
I went off to do Carney and Marty went off
to do Raging Ball, and you did music for Raging Bull,
King of Comedy, Color of Money, then Onto a Casino,
then Crossing Guard, Phenomenon, Any Given Sunday, Gangs of New York,
onto Latter forty nine, The Departed, Shutter Island, Wolf of
Wall Street. And you're asking me, you know, how come
(41:39):
you didn't Wren when weren't you doing But no, no, no,
but I'm well, But but my point is that when
you're doing that kind of work with him you're doing
score or soundtrack or both all of the above and
every movie. So when he asked you for us to
he'll have you right incidental music or a full pe
(42:01):
orchestral or otherwise, or you're writing in in another style
as an orchestral. It's that's what I'm saying. It's it's
always a different experience, and and sometimes we just collaborate
on ideas and I suggest things and it's oh, that's good,
that's good, Okay, let's put some of this and there.
Did he come to you and say, in terms of soundtrack,
(42:22):
will you say, what's a song, an extant song that
that can be city, What do you think would play
well there? Because he's obsessed with that of us, right, So,
but I'm saying that it's the whole gamut of different
things with music. It sounds, it is like what makes
this thing come to life in that way? And it
(42:42):
just feels so real you can't deny it. And it
doesn't matter if I write it, if I find it,
if I you know, if I disturb it and do
something beautiful with it that works for the movie. All
good You were a guy that was this leading man.
Good looking women were crazy about you, and but you
(43:05):
didn't play that, and it was just about the music man,
and I hope so you never lost sight of the
fact that really all you cared about was music. Damn
true enough. Robbie Robertson and the band influenced everyone from
(43:36):
Pink Floyd to Elton John, the latter of whom said
in two thousand and eleven that the group's first album,
Music from Big Pink, changed his life. He's not alone.
This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
the Thing. M
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.
I'll ruled in another room. I will beating by hand
past and give me to find a place where I
can leave my head. And Mr Canna tell me where
(00:31):
a man I find it be. He just branded shook
my hand and new we're going to see. At age fifteen,
Robbie Robertson wrote his first two recorded songs. A year later,
he packed up his guitar and took a train from
Canada to the Mississippi Delta, what he calls the holy
(00:54):
Land of rock and roll. By the mid nineteen sixties,
he'd be touring the world with Bob Dylan, then taking
center stage with a group of his own, happily named
The Band. Operating out of a basement in upstate New York,
he penned classics like The Weight, still considered a masterpiece today.
A blend of country and rock and roll, the band's
(01:16):
music transcendent generations, pushed boundaries and changed the face of
music forever. In his new memoir Testimony, Robbie Robertson travels
back to the place it all began, the Six Nations
Indian Reservation, where his mother a mohawk was raised. That's
where I was introduced to music. It seemed to me
(01:38):
that everybody played an instrument, saying dance, did something because
there wasn't much entertainment coming through the Reds, so they
had to make their own and it and it felt
like a club, and I thought, I gotta get into
this club. Everybody plays something. How much time did you
spend there? Oh, we spent lots of time there because
(02:00):
that's where you know, my mom's relatives were, so we
would go several times a year. And that was your
mother's side of the family. So yeah, yeah, and uh.
And it felt to me like I was. I was
that they allowed me into this world that I thought
(02:20):
was so special. So all of these things in music,
and it was the first time I ever saw anybody
playing an instrument a few inches from me, and the
sound of it from that place that I thought, I've
got I've got to learn something about this. So some
of my cousins and uncles and every they would show
(02:41):
me a few little tricks on the guitar, a couple
of chords, and over time I liked it and liked it.
And then when I was about eleven or twelve years old,
I thought, I'm getting as good as they are at
this and they're grown ups. Something's happening here, all of
this coming out of the Indian Reservation where it's supposed
(03:05):
to be deprived. It was a glorious part of my
growing up. So then when I was thirteen years old,
I was standing there at the crossroads with a guitar.
Rock and Roll came along and I just reached puberty.
(03:27):
It was a setup. I had nowhere else to go.
I had to follow this path and so it was.
It was like it was laid out before me and
all I had to do was follow it. So I
started getting in the little groups and things. I had
a group called Robbie and the Robots, and I, you know,
we had another group called Thumper, Thumper and the Trambones,
(03:50):
and then Yeah, and then I played. I had a
group and we opened for Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks
at a dance hall and they were amazing. They were
all from the South and it was pure, pure rockabilly,
hard hitting rock, the American stuff. Not South Toronto, No,
(04:13):
it was from the South. So for me, it was
authent Arkansas. They were all from Arkansas then, and and
in the group I was, and we played and I
tried to play good and everything and I and I
caught Ronnie Hawkins eye a little bit, and that it
gave me the opportunity to hang around a little bit.
(04:35):
I wanted some of this to rub off on me.
I wanted to learn this authenticity. But to interject this,
which is when you're there and you're at the reservation
and they're they're playing the music, and you start to
keep up with them, and then you say, quote unquote,
Ronnie Hawkins has his eye on you. Is that something
that you've benefited from? Which is people saw that you
(04:56):
stood out and they recognized that, they almost mentored you.
You know, there's something that happens, it's it's it's mysterious
and you don't know where it comes from, and you
don't know how. You just know something happens. And if
somebody pat you on the back for that, what was
Ronnie Hawkins patting you on the back? Four? He thought
this kid looks to me like he might have potential. Right.
(05:19):
And then when I was fifteen, which was at that time,
I was fifteen years old, I wrote two songs that
he recorded, and so that was kind of a big
thing to the first recordings that I had. And then
when I was sixteen, he said, I want to try
you out. I want you know, I want to see
if you can if you can handle it. And so
(05:42):
I went from Canada from Toronto on a train down
to the Mississippi Delta to the holy land of rock
and roll to join up with Ronnie Hawkins and the
Hawks passed away. Yeah. My, my, my mother, she was horrified.
I was going to say six yeah, and and and
(06:05):
I'm going to the Mississippi Delta and describe Ronnie Hawkins
for people who know him, Was he uh in a
suit and tie they have a bow tie and a
crisp shirt on? Or was he? He was an amazing character,
an incredible showman, so funny and could get away with anything.
And to see him perform it was like some uncaged animal,
(06:28):
it was, but beautiful. You know. He would come leaping
through the air down and land on his knees behind
the piano player and start winding him up like as
if you know, it was like a monkey, you know
playing you know, and yeah, like the Oregon. He would
be binding him up and then come in singing at
(06:51):
the last second, and then you know, leap over here.
He was like and years ago when we played like
Alan Freed shows and that nobody wanted to go on
after Ronnie Hawkins. He was just one of those. Yeah,
he was just an exciting performer. So in my mother
I knew of Ronnie Hawkins having not well but had
(07:13):
met him. But when I said, I'm going down there,
I'm going to try out for Ronnie Hawkins and the
Hawks because if I don't do this, I'll be sorry
the rest of my life. And I've got to find
out whether this is my calling or not. She said,
all right, you can try it, but if it doesn't work,
(07:36):
you go right back to school. And I said, it's
a deal, right, But you never had to keep that too.
I was on a mission when Hawkins said, when you
wrote a couple of songs for him, and he was
going to use those songs before you got in the band,
describe for me, because you are a very uh you know,
famous for your songwriting. Because what was your performing? What
(07:58):
was that like for you? I mean even as a
child to me, you're young kids are When he said that,
I kept looking for the key, the key to the highway.
I kept looking for some way to impress him. I
wanted into this world, and I thought, he said he
needs some songs. I had been writing songs, not very
(08:19):
good ones, but you know, I was. I was doing it,
and I thought, let me give it a shot, you know.
And I went and I wrote two songs, brought them
to him, played them for him, and he said, well,
I'll be damned, I'm going to record both those songs. Son.
You remember what the songs were. Yeah, one was called
(08:41):
someone Like You and another one was called Baba Lou
and I uh, and I just I wrote them like
in one sitting because I was anxious and I was young.
But here's the pepper in this. He goes records these songs,
makes a new album, brings me the album. I nervously
(09:04):
opened this record. I look on the label. There's my
name on the label, but it says Robertson and McGill.
So I said, there's no McGill there. When I wrote these,
who the hell's McGill? And he said, wow, it's a
kind of a long story. I don't know if you
want to and I said, no, there was nobody else there.
(09:26):
I even I wrote it. I wrote these, what's going on?
So he said, here's the real deal. This is a
pseudonym for Maurice Levy, my lawyer. He owns the record company.
He owns Roulette Records, and he's a hardcore mobster. And
he puts his vague and that's his vague, exactly half
(09:48):
the songwriting. And I thought, you can do that. You
can lie about this stuff, you can put it out
there and nobody ever says anything. And so Ronnie explains, no, no, no,
you don't forget about it, Robbie, it's Chinatown, that's right.
It was like that. He said. Morris is famous for
having his guys hold somebody out his office window by
(10:12):
the ankles, saying either you sign this or we let
your very cuddly character. So so after the after this
songwriting thing, Ronnie brings me to New York. He said,
if you can write songs for me, maybe you would
have a good ear and hearing songs would be good
(10:32):
for me to record. So I meet Lieber and Stoller
and Thomas and Schumann and Otis Blackwell all of these writers,
and I sit in rooms and they play me songs,
and I think this is kind of like being in heaven.
So then Ronnie says to me, Now we're gonna go
up to Roulette Records. We're gonna go up to see
(10:53):
Morris Levy. Um, I have to, you know, do some
things with him. So I'll introduce you and everything. I'm
thinking to myself, Oh yeah, well, now we're going to
discuss this songwriting misunderstanding. I want to work with you, Morris.
You know, no, it's kind of like that I was
that young that I was thinking you weren't in the room.
(11:15):
You weren't there when I wrote these songs. You do
really want an explanation, Mars, right. So anyway, so we
go into his up to his office. It looks like
a scene out of a Damon Runyon thing. There are
gangster guys standing around with crooked noses and bulging mohair suits,
you know, where they're backing squares. There's good there's secretaries
(11:37):
with blonde hair over one eye. You know. It's like
this is a movie and we're a count. Basie's playing
in the background. We come in. Morris comes out of
his office and he says, Ronny, Ronnie, I love this guy.
What a crazy guy he is. Come on in here, Ronnie,
you know, And he's saying to everybody there. You know,
(11:58):
I love this guy, and I think what happens to
gangsters when their kids said their voices go like this?
Why does he talk, you know this way? So we
go into his office. Ronnie's doing the camel walk on
the rug and calling him hoss and and he just
he loves Ronnie, so it's it's really fun. And Ronnie
(12:19):
says to him, Morris, I just came up here just
to see if there's any papers you want me to sign,
right knowing the story about hanging people out there give
you a pint of blood. So anyway, we sit down
and I'm thinking, all right, okay, you know, I see
how this is going. And he's talking to Morrison. He says, Morris,
(12:41):
this is the kid that I was telling you about
that I really think has some potential. Morris looks over
at me and he says, yeah, he's a nice looking kid.
If you ever have to do time, would be good
to have him with you. I thought, what what he said.
I bet you don't know whether to hire him or
(13:03):
just have sex with him, you know, And I think
I'm going to forego the songwriting dispute. I'm just gonna
let that go for now you know. Yeah, so you
leave Hawkins, Yes, and you're with him for how long?
A couple of years? Uh? When I joined him at sixteen,
(13:24):
left probably around yeah, something like that. And you leave
to form your bed. No, it is. Over the years
leave on. And I have helped hire people to replace
people that were leaving the Hawks, and they were all
(13:46):
Canadians because we were spending a lot of time up there.
Ronnie liked it because he made more money and the
hours were easier. So we were seeing all these really
talented guys. And because I kind of opened that door
a little bit, and and we would see this other talent,
we'd say, oh my god, that guy is something special
(14:08):
about him. That Rick Danko, We better hire him. And
then boy, when this Richard Manuel sings, jeez, just there's
your heart out. And Garth Hudson there's never been a
keyboard player on that level ever. And if he was
in our group, we would learn more, we would be better.
Everybody gets better. Yeah. So anyway, we put together this
(14:31):
group and Ronnie has now an amazing band of music.
And we are young and growing up and we outgrow
what we were doing with Ronnie, and we just said
at some point, we gotta go do our own thing.
Where did you first meet leaving? I met leve On
(14:51):
Um when I first when my group opened for Ronnie
Hawkins and the Hawks. And then so Levan was with
Hawkins already. Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, he was one of
the original Hawks. So and he joined the group I
think when he was eighteen or something like that. Um.
But when I went south and Levon introduced me to
(15:14):
his family and everybody there, we we became very close,
just like a brotherhood. And so we were picking out
these other guys. And after we put this group together,
Levan was then the only Southerner left in the group.
And we had these guys and then we just felt
like we have to go out in the world and
(15:36):
discover our own thing now. And we did that, and
we were out there and playing the Chitland Circuit down
south and joined you know, in New York and Jersey,
and we were playing in a place in Jersey and
and that's when I got this call from Bob Dylan
(15:56):
two that he wanted to talk to me about something
and how do he find you? He we had a
reputation of being a pretty you know, a good band,
a really good band. There was that, and he always
had his thinker in the win for that kind of thing.
He um, he was wanting to make this transition from
(16:19):
being a folk hero to being a guy that had
a band of you know, instruments, powerful rock and roll
band to turn it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah,
So so I I went. I met with him, and
I didn't know what this was going to be about,
(16:39):
but what the plan really was what they were thinking.
He needed a guitar player and wanted to hire me
to play guitar um on some dates he was doing.
And I said, I have a group. We don't do that,
you know, I said, but maybe for these two dates,
if we could have leve On come too, we might
(17:01):
be able to slip this in without making the other
guys feel left out. Or so we did these couple
of days. It was ridiculous. I mean we were playing
places and people were so upset about this music and
you know, this electric music from our folks man, and
it was like it wasn't working. It. It was not
(17:25):
what they wanted at all from him, from him, they
this is not so what was the venue? We played
Forest Hills Stadium here what forests and people literally are like,
when's Bob Dylan coming on? Know that people were charging
the stage and throwing things and trying to disrupt it
(17:45):
and booing and booing. So we played Forest Hills in
the Hollywood Bawl did these days. We thought about that
was weird. And then Bob says, we're gonna book a
whole tour. Now, let's do a whole tour. And I
was like, no, no, no, no, no. We have a group.
We are a group. We are not going off to
(18:06):
do this. And the only way that we could even
consider it if we did it with the whole group.
So he came and heard us play and said, yeah,
let's do this. And so we ended up touring of
North America, Australia, Europe, and people booed and threw stuff
(18:27):
at us every night. How does that possible? You could
hear people saying to him and his manager, you've got
to get rid of these guys. They're ruining everything. And
the people love you, but you've got to get rid
of those guys. And Bob never budged, He never took
a step back, and we continued and we did this
(18:50):
whole tour and stuff. Back then we would listen sometimes
after the show to a tape of the show, just thinking,
you know, we're to see what's wrong. What do we
think that's happening with? Right? Right? How can they high?
And there was a point in all of that, and
(19:10):
because some of it was just helpful to put get
the music better and do this song slower and this
one that there was one night we're listening to the
tape and I said to the other guys in the
Hawks and the Bob they're wrong. The world is wrong.
(19:30):
This is good, this is really powerful, and they are wrong.
And there was a boldness that came out of this
that we felt like, oh yeah, really, I'll show you something,
you know. And it was like get him in the ears,
you know, get him in the eyes. It was an
(19:50):
attitude that allowed us to carry on. All of these
concerts are as we speak, are coming out, they're being released,
all of them. I don't want to hear the music
that the band did with Bob Dylan was booed around
the world. That I've got to say. But then if
it's recorded on an album and no, it's all coming out,
(20:11):
god knows it wasn't released, then it wasn't released. Then
it's being released. Now, yeah, but eventually it stops. Ends.
Why what happened was after we finished the European tour,
we came back and they were booking more dates. They
were getting you know that he wanted to do a
(20:31):
tour of Russia. He wanted all kinds of things, you think,
and it was kind of like he wanted to be
booed in every corner of the world. Hello, Greenland. So
so he came back and he had an accident on
a motorcycle, accident, and he fractured his neck, and so
they had to cancel any upcoming dates and he never
(20:55):
did another tour after that for eight years. They God Blessing,
keep you all that you wish is all they always do.
(21:15):
That you coming up? Why Martin Scorsese risked getting fired
from New York, New York to direct the band's final
concert in nineteen seventy six, a film that would become
the last waltz to hear Other musical legends explore the
Here's the Thing Archives. In nineteen sixty six, Herb Albert
(21:37):
and the Tijuana Brass did the unthinkable. They outsold the Beatles.
But that was just the start. In sixty uh seven,
were I was doing a special for NBC. Jack Hayley Jr.
Was directing. He said, why don't you sing a song?
I said, well, if if I can find the right song,
I'll give it a go. So, you know, I go
(21:58):
through my Barolla decks and I called Bert back rack.
I said, Bert, is there a song that you have
that do you think I could handle? That? You have
tucked away in your drawer someplace where you find yourself
whistling in the morning, or you know a tune that
haunts you. Well. Three days later he sent me this
Girl's in love with you. Take a listen, and here's
the thing. Dot Org, this is Alec Baldwin and you
(22:23):
were listening to Here's the thing. Robbie Robertson and the
Band shook the foundation of America in the nineteen sixties,
weaving together the rustic and romantic into hits like the
Night they Drove Old Dixie Down. But if their sound
was innovative, their first recording studio was the opposite. It
was a house up in West Sagredis in New York.
(22:45):
Who found it, um Rick Danko, And it said, guys,
I think I've found it because we were having a
lot of trouble in the city finding a place where
we could make music, because it was the business was
still here that it had more moved to. Right, no, no,
But but we'd be disturbing. They'd say, turn on the
music in there. You know. It's like it was hard
(23:06):
to find a place even a studio, well a studio,
but we couldn't afford to lady or something like that.
Right no, no, no. And this was to write and
to create and to think of what we're gonna do next.
So Albert Grossman, our manager, talks us into moving up
to Woodstock. He said, you can get a place there
(23:27):
and nobody will bother you. You won't bother anybody, bring
your food, it'll be. It'll be just because I had
this dream that I wanted to have a workshop, a
clubhouse where we all congregate every day and we go
there and we create, and we have a wonderful time
together and we build some kind of a musical noise
(23:51):
that we could send out around the world. So we
find this place out in the middle of a hundred acres.
Nobody to bother it is this horribly ugly pink house.
What had it been? It was no, it was just
a house. On a big profit. It was. It was both,
(24:12):
but had not been a working farm, not a farm,
just a house. But anyway, in this house, it had
a basement, and I thought, that's it. That's what I've
been looking for. We can set up our equipment down here,
and we can have some microphones and we can and
(24:35):
we can be way off the grid, we can have
nothing to do with what's going on in the world
and really discover what we're here for. It served that
kind of purpose in my imagination. So we set it up.
We got the things, the instruments in there, all organized
in a certain way, a few mike's, a little mixer
(24:57):
and everything. I bring this engineer, recording engineer, friend, sound
mixure guy, and I said, look at this, this is
what you know. I said, what do you think? He
looks at it and he says, well, it's all concrete,
glass windows, a big furnace over here. This is probably
going to be the worst sounding place you've ever heard
(25:18):
in your life. It's a disaster. And I said, acoustic nightmare.
And I said, thank you, that's just what I was
looking for. I want to break Yeah, And you know
where you find the sound. It's like this, This is
Frampton when he did the show with us, Frampton who
like you sixteen years old on the road and uh,
(25:40):
same thing. When you listen to Frampton, he was like
he was when I was a kid. I was into
sound you do well. I wanted was just sounds and
what kind of sounds I want? And you're fascinated by that,
like you just said that, that kind of uh, you know,
savantage thing. So you're up there and Dylan comes. He
(26:00):
lives up there. So one day I say to him, Bob,
you gotta come and see the setup we got out here.
You see, yeah, it's you know, And and he's, you know,
he's just recorded in studios, you know, traditional recording and everything.
I'm thinking, I don't know whether you know, he's gonna
(26:21):
think I'm crazy and this is meaningless or whatever. So
we drive out there and we're driving and driving, and
then up this side road and we're driving. We're driving.
He says, where the hell is this? He said, you're
right about nobody bought out here, I can say. And
we go in and we go into this house and
(26:42):
it's it's hard to put your finger on it, and
said one of the guys is making some coffees, and
they got checkerboards set up on these tables and he's
looking it over and I said, come on, check this out.
And we go down into the basement and he goes, WHOA,
look at this. Can you can you record stuff down here?
(27:05):
I said, we got a little tape recorder right there.
We're gonna record stuff. And we're you know, this is
where we are going to experiment and make some discoveries.
How long did that go? So he said, listen, I've
got a couple of songs that I've been messing around with.
Maybe we could try them together here. So we said, yeah, sure,
(27:28):
we're all set up. So anyway, we ended up recording
the basement tapes there. I don't know, there's something like
a hundred and forty songs or something in the course
of this. And what we would do is every day
we would go to Big Pink, We'd have some coffee,
play some checkers. Bob would write. He wrote on a
(27:51):
typewriter all the songs. He would just ding ding, you know,
And I'd seen him do that before. It was just
and I didn't know people wrote that way, but but
he did. And so he would type something up. We'd
go down into the basement grab everybody would grab whatever
(28:11):
instrument was close, might even not be the one you
play anything, because there was no rules. We'd sit on,
we'd mess around, play through a tune and would say, wow,
that felt kind of good. We'd listen to it, and
then pretty soon it would turn into a combination of
(28:31):
new material that he was writing, that we were writing,
and a lot of songs that I discovered that he
had a memory of lyrics that no person in the
world could have. This to remember the lyrics to his
own songs was a phenomenon, right, And it was an
(28:56):
amazing time and amazing and it was private. And so
in the course of that, he was getting songs to
send to his publisher, because people recorded Bob Dylan songs,
right and they needed some new material. So we would
lay down some songs you could send to the publisher,
and then we would record songs that nobody should ever hear.
(29:19):
It was just private, just between us, and some of
it was so hilarious, brilliantly funny, and we and it
was cool because it was just us. We were hurting
anybody doing this. And then and then the first bootleg
record that I ever knew of came out with some
(29:40):
of these songs on it, and it was like somebody
peeking in your closet was like, whoa wait a minute here,
this isn't right, especially on a bootleg re. Explain to somebody,
how does that happen? You record this stuff with never
already any intention because a lot of people think the
bootleg takes are leaked by you. No no, no, no no,
I'm saying you did, But a lot of people think
(30:01):
that the guys like you and Dylan and the band
and leave on everybody you do the leaking because you're like, well,
we don't want this stuff to come out. This is
very proprietary. My god, if you're up there and again
it's it's in your in a vault in the middle
of nowhere and nobody can get to you, how does
that material get leaked? As your guests. So what was
happening was some of the material that was legitimate that
(30:24):
other people could cover, and a lot of people did.
That was sent to the publishing company and they would
they and you hand the tapes over to people that
you trusted, but only certain things. There was like I said, whatever,
there was a hundred and forty tracks or something that
we had recorded, and so they sent out maybe fifteen
(30:47):
that was for people to cover. That's what it was.
Because people heard these tapes and said, oh my god,
this is amazing this stuff. So they started sharing it
as kind of a cool underground actor and then bootleggers
came along, and then they put it out and tried
to sell it. But we still had all of this,
(31:07):
tons of other stuff that nobody ever heard because a
lot of it was covers. A lot of it wasn't
yeah originally. So so now years later they release all
of it because nowadays it's all out there. It's everything.
There's no point in sitting on anything anymore. Um it
(31:30):
ends with him? How I mean you're recording? Uh Pink House?
Did that wind down? It wound down in Uh? Why no, No,
it was because it was time for us to go
and record music from Big Pink, the first album by
the band, right, and then Bob went on. The band
(31:54):
had never recorded. We had recorded songs here and there
as the Hawks, not as the best the band, but
now the band's debut album, Yeah Yeah. Sixty seven was
the Basement tapes, and sixty eight was music from Big Paint.
Dylan perform on the on the on the album. No,
(32:16):
he painted the cover, He did a painting for the cover,
and then he went off to make another record in Nashville,
and we went off to do our thing, and then
the band became recognized as the band. And and then
a few years later we did a tour together, the
(32:37):
Bob Dylan the Band Tour in nineteen four and he
hadn't done a tour until then. So when you go
from Hawkins to the to the Basement tapes and then
on to do your own album, does the personnel change?
Where's the same unit that becomes the band? It never changes,
(32:57):
never changes. And when we when you well right up
into Last Waltz, it's the same guy, same keyboards and everything.
And when you do last Waltz, and so the story
goes that you pitched Marty. Yeah, I was trying to
figure out who because this thing kept growing, the idea
(33:18):
of it and it became it was becoming a real
musical celebration with all of these people coming together, your friends. Yeah,
you knew up front this was a farewell show. It
was the show. This was it, this this we were
going to bring all of this to a conclusion. The
band had been together for sixteen years, and we had
(33:40):
seen it all up and down that highway. We had
been to the grungiest places. We played Jack Ruby's club
in Fort Worth, Texas, right just before he has assassinated Oswald,
and we had played Woodstock and Watkins Glen, the biggest
concert in the world in the isle of what We
(34:01):
had done everything that you could do under the sun.
And during that period two in the seventies in ninety six,
it became very dark out there. There's a lot of
drug abuse, there was a lot of madness. It was
just crazy in the air. And what we were trying
(34:22):
to do is think, how do we survive this? So
why don't we bring this episode to a conclusion and
then we can get out of the spotlight and figure
out creatively what comes next for us. That's what the
plan was for us or individually, the individually, and I
(34:45):
don't want to pry, but there was no acrimony, There
was no nobody, just everybody collectively said it's time for
a change. Yeah, we're all gonna go do our own thing.
And what a beautiful way to do it in this
in this celebration of music, but in the name of
music in the name of the band and and respect
for one another. And all of these people that brought
different flavors of the music you know out for us
(35:08):
Dr John from the New Orleans Sound, Muddy Waters from
the Chicago Blues, and Eric Clapton from the British Blues,
and the Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. So all
of this is it's growing. Then certain people were saying, God,
you gotta document this somehow. This is one of those things,
is you know, something like this may never happen again.
(35:31):
So it starts out We're gonna have a couple of
video cameras black and white. Then they say, well, that's
not gonna look very good. Why don't we do it
in sixteen millimeter like all of these music let it
be everything, Yeah, everything in sixteen And it's growing, and me,
being a movie bug, I started thinking who would be
(35:52):
terrific to do this? There Hall Ashby and and George
Lucas you know with America and graffiti, and I'm going
down the list and I feel bold like I could
ask anybody you know to do this. But there was
one guy that I saw something in his instincts for
music and movies that was different than everybody else. There
(36:17):
was something so powerful about this that I couldn't let
it go. So when I started to make a list
of these directors that I was going to ask, I
wrote down Martin Scorsese, and I thought, let me talk
to him first. Music in mean streets. There was something
really special about this, and and on and on and
(36:40):
on in his movies. So I met up with him
and I asked him if he would be interested in
in directing this, and he said, all of these people,
these are all my favorites. Oh my god, he said,
but I'm in the middle of shooting a movie and
(37:01):
they don't like it when you go and make another
movie while you're shooting a movie. Movie was the shooting
at the time, New York, New York. So he said,
you know, I, you know, I don't know how to
do this. And so we hung out that evening. We
talked about it, and we talked about you know, Eric
(37:23):
Clapton is going to be coming and where you know,
all of these musical ideas that that we have, and
finally says, the hell with it. They can fire me,
they can crucify me. I don't care. I have to
do this. We have to find a way for me
to do this. So we had to put this together underground,
(37:46):
and nobody could know that Martin Scorsese was going to direct.
You know, capturing was a top secret project, it really was.
It was completely underground and recording over what period of time,
four days, no one, take one we recorded and so
then through these cinematographers as Kovacs and Bilimo Sigmund, they're saying,
(38:11):
we don't want to shoot this in sixteen millimeter. We
gotta shoot it int you know. Yeah, yeah, we're making
a movie. And so they said, but the problem is
that Michael Chapman, who became the DP. Yeah, Michael Chapman says,
these cameras won't run for the length of this concert.
(38:34):
They will melt, they will break. Yeah, it's they'll never
make it. So we got so we had to figure
out a system of certain songs out there so they
could reload, change batteries. There's no digital happening here. This
is real film. And Marty directed this thing on what
he wanted to capture in the whole. It wasn't like
(38:56):
everybody shooting and we'll see how it cuts together. No, no, no,
it was scripted, but take one when when you saw
the film, knowing Marty as I do. You probably saw
the film nine years after you finished, because he's cutting
for nine years in them. But when you saw the film,
did you just did you just kill you to see
(39:17):
memorialized by Scorsese. You're great Bow, you know you're a
great sign off with that band. Well, first of all,
very few people have had that moment, I know the
Beatles unintentionally. Yeah. No, what happened was when Marty saw
the footage the thirties, some of the thirty five millimeter footage,
(39:40):
he said, I think we've got something here, but we
have to We're making a movie and and we have
to know what this is about. So I want to
shoot you guys telling stories, telling tales of the road.
What is this about? How did we get here? What's
happening in this? And and then I said to him,
(40:06):
here's something that I feel is missing too, because there
was you know, we had all these flavors of music
that kind of make up what we're all of, what
we're all about. But I said, we didn't get to
pay honor to gospel music or country music. And I've
written a theme a theme from the last waz, why
(40:30):
don't we shoot those three things on a sound stage
so you can move, so you can move the camera
the way you move the camera. He's famous for where
how he moves the camera. So we did that and
that put the icing on the cake. We told the
stories and then he cut it together like it was
(40:54):
a movie and not a concert documentary with him. Interesting
to that, you didn't do your first solo album until seven.
That's why is that I was doing other things. There
was a lot of film projects that people were coming
to me with, and in this pretty much immerse yourself
in movies and Marty's movies. You do after the Last Walls,
(41:17):
I went off to do Carney and Marty went off
to do Raging Ball, and you did music for Raging Bull,
King of Comedy, Color of Money, then Onto a Casino,
then Crossing Guard, Phenomenon, Any Given Sunday, Gangs of New York,
onto Latter forty nine, The Departed, Shutter Island, Wolf of
Wall Street. And you're asking me, you know, how come
(41:39):
you didn't Wren when weren't you doing But no, no, no,
but I'm well, But but my point is that when
you're doing that kind of work with him you're doing
score or soundtrack or both all of the above and
every movie. So when he asked you for us to
he'll have you right incidental music or a full pe
(42:01):
orchestral or otherwise, or you're writing in in another style
as an orchestral. It's that's what I'm saying. It's it's
always a different experience, and and sometimes we just collaborate
on ideas and I suggest things and it's oh, that's good,
that's good, Okay, let's put some of this and there.
Did he come to you and say, in terms of soundtrack,
(42:22):
will you say, what's a song, an extant song that
that can be city, What do you think would play
well there? Because he's obsessed with that of us, right, So,
but I'm saying that it's the whole gamut of different
things with music. It sounds, it is like what makes
this thing come to life in that way? And it
(42:42):
just feels so real you can't deny it. And it
doesn't matter if I write it, if I find it,
if I you know, if I disturb it and do
something beautiful with it that works for the movie. All
good You were a guy that was this leading man.
Good looking women were crazy about you, and but you
(43:05):
didn't play that, and it was just about the music man,
and I hope so you never lost sight of the
fact that really all you cared about was music. Damn
true enough. Robbie Robertson and the band influenced everyone from
(43:36):
Pink Floyd to Elton John, the latter of whom said
in two thousand and eleven that the group's first album,
Music from Big Pink, changed his life. He's not alone.
This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
the Thing. M
Host
Alec Baldwin
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