Robbie Robertson is on the line from a studio at an undisclosed somewhere, doing an undisclosed something, whilst in the simultaneous process of readying a new documentary about his life with the Band to open the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, releasing his first solo album in nearly a decade, scoring the next Martin Scorsese movie and writing a second volume of his memoirs. So why not just toss him a total lowball to open the interview and see where it goes?
“Up to anything exciting?”
A measured pause and then a laconic reply: “I think it’s all very exciting.”
“Well, you’ve certainly got a lot on your plate right now.”
“Yeah,” drawls Robertson. “That equals ‘exciting.’ ”
At 76, Robbie Robertson is definitely keeping busier at the moment than most rock ’n’ rollers of his vintage. Busier than he has to, anyway.
The aforementioned documentary, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band — directed by Daniel Roher and based on Robertson’s very readable 2016 autobiography, Testimony — brings the living Can-rock legend back to his native Toronto to be feted at TIFF’s opening-night gala at Roy Thomson Hall on Thursday.
A noirish new record entitled Sinematic, his first since 2011’s How to Become Clairvoyant, follows on Sept. 20, to be followed not long after by a “deluxe” 50th-anniversary reissue of the Band’s classic sophomore album The Band.
His soundtrack for old pal Scorsese’s latest gangster flick, The Irishman, will also get its first official public airing when that film premieres at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 27. Meanwhile, in the background, Robertson will be rolling up his sleeves at the (figurative) typewriter and knocking out a followup to Testimony, which he now envisions as the second instalment in a trilogy.
Clearly, the man’s not lacking for things to do nor stories to tell. Robertson does concede, however, that the multimedia storm in which he’s centred is more a product of happenstance than design.
“It is,” he says. “It is. This wasn’t a planned thing. This was more of a ‘when it rains, it pours’ kind of thing. But I’m glad for it. It’s exciting, and all of these things connecting and feeding one another is all a good thing.
“It’s just the way things add up. You go down the path and different things are happening and different things are connecting and certain things just come together, in a way. … It’s just that one thing leads to another and feeds another and, in some cases, in a very enthusiastic way that makes you feel like, ‘Oh, god, I’ll do more of that.’ ”
Robertson has straddled the worlds of music and film fairly consistently since he and the Band linked up with Scorsese to take a final collective bow onscreen in The Last Waltz in 1978.
He maintained an intermittent working relationship with his one-time housemate on soundtracks dating back to Raging Bull (1980) and running through The Color of Money and Casino, to The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), so all the impending TIFF hubbub around Once Were Brothers is nothing terribly new to him.
Trivia buffs will note, in fact, that Sinematic’s lead single “I Hear You Paint Houses” marks the first time Robertson and Van Morrison have shared space on a track together since they contributed “Wonderful Remark” to the soundtrack of Scorsese’s endlessly more-brilliant-in-hindsight The King of Comedy back in 1983.
Robertson’s lineage as a half-Indigenous/half-Jewish artist with roots in a Mohawk reserve outside Brantford recently had him onscreen, too, in the 2017 documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World.
Still, returning to the hometown that gave him that crucial first “in” with fellow Toronto expat Ronnie Hawkins as a teenage guitar slinger during the early ’60s as a conquering hero still ranks as a big freakin’ deal.
“It’s not foreign territory, but this event — the opening of the film festival, when they’ve never opened it with a documentary before — I’m quite honoured by that and I really hope that the people enjoy sharing this journey. I’m looking forward to coming to Toronto and celebrating this beautiful thing that they’re doing for me,” says Robertson, who still considers this town “home” despite the fact that post-millennial Toronto is far more the “world class city” than it aspired to be when he left for the States more than a half-century ago.
“Oh yeah. It’s my ’hood. Always. When I see a bunch of the change, I just think, ‘Wow, look at the change.’ It’s just growing. And sometimes I do think about a much more ‘neighbourhood-y’ part of that city and now it’s on such a grand-scale level and everything, but that’s OK. It’s always been a great place and still is.”
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Sign Up NowRobertson’s actual involvement in the making of Once Were Brothers was fairly hands off, he admits.
As he puts it, the high-powered team that helped put the documentary and its vast treasure trove of archival footage together was composed of people who are “all really good at what they do.” And although it was a “roll of the dice” to put a young, relatively untested director like fellow Toronto boy Roher in charge, Robertson enthuses that “you couldn’t have a better soldier than him working on it.”
“I thought, ‘I’m in pretty good hands here, so I’ll just get out of the way and let them do a really good job,’” he says. “And then when I did get involved with it, it was really a matter of accuracy and authenticity — just things that I know that nobody else really knows. So I mostly just helped with that. Sometimes you’ve just gotta know when to get out of the way.”
As its title suggests, Sinematic is indeed coloured by Robertson’s experiences working on two movies at once. The Irishman’s influence looms large in the form of subtly menacing, blues-tinged songs about mob hit men, Chinese opium lords and other shadowy characters, while there’s an uncommonly autobiographical element running through tunes like “The Shadow” — a fond ode to listening to the old Orson Welles radio serial with his family back in the day — and “Dead End Kid,” which offers a middle finger (and some smouldering guitar licks) to all the people who thought the young Robertson would “probably end up in prison / Or maybe down on the skids.” It features the anthemic proclamation, “I’m gonna play my song / Out across this lake / From Scarborough Bluffs / Over to New York state.”
The poignant “Once Were Brothers,” for its part, wasn’t expressly written for the movie that shares its name, but it’s a rather lovely elegy for the Band, three of whose members are no longer with us. “There’ll be no revival / There’ll be no encore,” rasps Robertson. “Once were brothers / Brothers no more.”
In the past, he says he might have tried to keep these various projects separate in his mind to “avoid confusion or stepping on other toes,” but in this case Robertson decided to “put it all in the blender” and see what came out.
It was, as he puts it, “just a lot of fun.” And his reminiscences of familial tethers to “Jewish gangsters” and his days rolling with Hawkins amid the nascent Toronto rock ’n’ roll nightlife on the Yonge St. strip dovetailed rather more conveniently with his work on The Irishman — a film based on the life of professed mob killer-for-hire Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran — than you might think. The hard-living Band definitely spent some time on the wrong side of the tracks, as it were.
“Oh, yeah. There’s tons of seediness from all of those years down south and all the way up to Canada,” laughs Robertson. “Working on The Irishman, it reminds me of early years playing with Ronnie Hawkins when we were on Roulette Records and Morris Levy was the head of the company and he was completely an ‘underworld’ character. So all of these things — my past in Toronto with my family and everything and where we played — there were a lot of underworld characters. Everywhere. None of it strikes me as, ‘Oh, my god, what have we got ourselves into?’ It sounds like home.”
The easy thing for Robertson to do now that the Band is getting a posthumous moment in the spotlight would be to cash in with some kind of “Robbie Robertson plays the Band!” nostalgia trip rather than making yet another challenging, forward-looking solo album that will appeal to a far more “niche” market.
“Yeah or write about who you’re f--king,” he says. “You know what I mean? In pop music, the stories are all the same. It’s just a different person — a different naked person standing there — and I don’t want to write those songs. I don’t want to write about that. I want to tell stories. And everything being ‘Me, me, me’ and ‘I got up this morning and I had some cereal,’ I don’t care. I don’t care what you had this morning. It’s not my point of interest.”
Robertson’s written enough royalty-rich evergreens over the years that he doesn’t have to cash in, mind you, but he doesn’t take that for granted.
“I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for that ability,” he says. “Because I don’t make a record to go out and tour, as an excuse to do another tour. You know, I make a record because it’s really a point of inspiration and I’ve got stories to tell. So in many ways, just in what I work on and the way I work on these things, there are times when I think, ‘God, I’m in a different line of work.’ My program is not the way that it works in this business. And for that I’m grateful, too, because it allows me to pull different rabbits out of the hat.”
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September 05, 2019 at 04:00PM
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