Podcast #139: Robbie Robertson on Six Nations Inspiration, Bob Dylan, and Goals of the Soul
Robbie Robertson is best known as the guitarist and primary songwriter of The Band. Recently, he released his fifth solo album, How to Become Clairvoyant, featuring Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Trent Reznor, Tom Morello, Robert Randolph, Rocco Deluca, Angela McCluskey, and Taylor Goldsmith. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library podcast, we're pleased to present Robbie Robertson discussing Six Nations inspiration, Bob Dylan, and figuring out his goals for the soul. He is joined in conversation by Steven Van Zandt, a founding member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Asked about where his lifelong commitment to music began, Robertson pointed to experiences with the Six Nations:
"It first struck me when I was maybe eight years old and I would go with my mom, who was born and raised on the Sixth National Indian Reserve, and we would go and visit the relatives regularly. On the reservation, to me, it seemed like everybody played an instrument or sang or danced. There wasn't a lot of touring shows coming through the res. They had to make their own entertainment, and when I saw everybody playing these instruments there'd be the native drums, and there'd be a mandolin with some strings missing and a fiddle. All of this, it looked like a club to me. I thought, I gotta get into this club."
Robertson recalled a trip to the Jersey Shore to play music one summer. Amongst other experiences, Robertson dropped in on a recording session with Bob Dylan:
"During that stay down there, I got a call to go and meet with this folk singer Bob Dylan about something. I had met him in passing. I'd gone to a recording session. John Hammond Jr., blues singer and a friend, he said, 'Oh man, I told my buddy I would stop at his session. Can we stop in for a minute?' And we go into Columbia Records. We go to the studio. I don't know who we're going to see. He doesn't mention a name. And we go in, and Bob Dylan was there and he says to John, 'Do you want to hear something?' John says, 'Yeah, of course.' He said, 'Are you sure? You've never heard anything like this before.' So John kind of grins and says, 'Alright, man.' They hit play on the tape machine and it was the song 'Like a Rolling Stone.' He was right. I hadn't heard anything like that before, and it was like there was some kind of electricity in the room, and listening to this music and trying to gather it all like in the few seconds."
Discussing his work with The Band, Robertson described thinking that their music must resist trends:
"It was like being inside a world that we invented. It was like inside of something that everything that was going on in music, in culture, in everything we stood aside from that and really thought we've got to make our own story. We've got to tell the truth here, and just because people think this is good this week and next week they're going to think that's good, we've got to get off that train. That's not what we're playing here. We've got to find something that could have been done a hundred years or a hundred years from now, and it was kind of a feeling, a goal of the soul, something that could reach that place deep inside us and live on."
You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!