I was in 10th grade when a friend introduced me to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde as a sacred mystery. I understood that Dylan had stormed the heavens, suffered hatred from erstwhile fans for deserting folk music for electric rock and roll, and had been booed and jeered night after night on a dragon-slaying tour. Then he had nearly died in a motorcycle accident. And now he was off the radar, leaving us to listen to the immense inner landscapes and gaze at his blurred image left us in Blonde on Blonde.
It was the stuff of legend, especially the tour. Like legends, it was beyond us. I listened to Blonde on Blonde again and again, imbibing its intoxicating enigmas, musing on the myth again and again. (READ MORE: Bob Dylan Wrote a Book Worth Reading)
Then there were the rumors: Dylan has been making music privately with his tour band, somewhere away from everyone else, upstate New York. Oh, if we could ever get our hands on that music! But it seemed it would remain elusive forever.
But it didn’t.
One day, a bootleg recording of the last Dylan tour surfaced. I bought it at the first opportunity and was transfixed. I heard the restive audience, and as a new song was about to start, a betrayed folkie screamed out at Dylan, “Judas!” Dylan’s band builds the sound in response and then Dylan, sounding like Gandalf, answers with a deep voice: “No! You lie!” and with a crash, the band hurtles into the opening bars of Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan hurling at the audience, “Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?” and prophesying the downfall of their pride: “Go to him now he calls you, you can’t refuse, when you ain’t got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose, you’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal.” What a dark and powerful potion! Electric!
The greats, like Robbie Robertson, bring forth the resonances of the best of what came before and summon us to join in.
About the same time, the band that roared behind Dylan emerged in its own as The Band with an album. I hoped I’d hear more of that addictive darkness, the electric roar drowning out the mocking philistines, smashing them down with a juggernaut of amplified sound. But as I heard the album’s first song, Tears of Rage, it was clear there was something very different happening. (READ MORE: Bob Dylan: What Is the Question?)
Instead of an electric juggernaut, there was a strange space between the instruments. There were old-fashioned horns, and the music and lyrics both were permeated by a spirit of something elusive yet durable, plaintive and humble, insistent on truths long overlooked that call to our heart. Dylan was writing in the voice of the parents we rock rebels had left behind: “We carried you in our arms on Independence Day, and now you’d throw us all aside and put us on our way… Come to me now, you know we’re so low and life is brief.”
Robbie Robertson, who played lead guitar in that band and wrote most of its songs, has just passed beyond this old world, and I’m reflecting on how he moved me more than most of the extraordinary artists who blessed that time.
The industry of popular music regularly infects its practitioners with cliché. They repeat their favorites again and again. As long as the money keeps coming and they are spared the cascading uncertainties that a musician’s life entails, they are thankful.
Robertson shook off cliches like water off a dog out of a bath. He did it first by learning how to howl with his guitar — electronic rebellion. He spoke to an interviewer about that tectonic-shift tour with Dylan:
People [were] booing and throwing stuff at you every night … Usually in a case like this, you would say, ‘You know what? The audience isn’t really gravitating toward this. Maybe we should change some things.’ No! It was … just play louder and faster and everything. And it was kind of like a rebellion.
But then he rebelled at the clichés of the rebellion. The album of his new band’s first record featured a photo of The Band’s next of kin all together, setting down in that picture what “Tears of Rage” had put into sound.
Music critics at the time tried to identify The Band with an emerging genre, pointing to the acoustic and country sounds of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Sweetheart of the Rodeo Byrds, and the post-1969 Grateful Dead as the new hot trend.
That was good enough, as far as it went. That pointed to the connection to earlier music, to roots, that surely came out in all these excellent artists. It was no longer enough to have an electronic rebellion and break down whatever stood in the way of a new sound. It was realizing that if creativity wasn’t to be a one-and-done phenomenon, the music had to listen as well as scream.
And here is where Robertson and The Band he led excelled. Especially on The Band’s first two albums, the music opened up space within it. There was a spareness that allowed each note to sound fully in the air and in our imaginations, something like how a great cathedral space helps the voices of the choir ascend to the heavens in our hearing.
Critic Ralph Gleason wrote of The Band’s second album when it first appeared:
I hear these songs as a sound track … to the real documentary of the American truth. They are sparse songs with never a superfluous note or an unnecessary syllable. And yet the sparseness, like a Picasso line, is so right that it implies everything needed. Lean and dusty, perhaps, like Henry Fonda walking down the road at the beginning of Grapes of Wrath, it says volumes in a phrase.
Decades later, novelist Ken Kesey would write of this aesthetic as a central theme in the extraordinary work of Robertson’s friend, Jerry Garcia, who famously rode a private train across Canada with The Band, Janis Joplin, the rest of the Grateful Dead and others, playing music all night long as they rolled from one gig to the next — mostly root music like No Cane on the Brazos.
Here’s Kesey talking to Garcia after his passing:
Like Michelangelo said about sculpting, the statue exists inside the block of marble — all you have to do is chip away the stone you don’t need. You were always chipping away at the superficial. It was the false notes you didn’t play that kept that lead line so golden pure. It was the words you didn’t sing.…
This is what we are left with, Jerry: this golden silence. It rings on and on without any hint of letup. It will still be ringing years from now.
Music, in the end, is not just about what you express — it’s just as much, if not more, about the room you create in which to express it. Music is not just about making sounds — it’s about the sharing of them, about the whole of playing/listening, not the wobbling incompletions of one without the other.
Garcia was blessed with a marvelous poet who gave him stories to sing as he played. Robertson was a storyteller himself, one of the greatest lyrical storytellers of the last hundred years. The stories, like the music, leave room for us to inhabit, to find our lives and their meanings resonating with the stories that came before us and that continue on after. Simultaneously old and thoroughly modern, his stories are unmistakably a part of our common heritage. As an early reviewer wrote, the songs sound as if they could have been played accompanying one of Abraham Lincoln’s campaign stops.
Our politics reflects our culture.
The greats, like Robbie Robertson, bring forth the resonances of the best of what came before and summon us to join in. Together, through sound and the listening, we enter into the music, and as we cherish it, we pass the music and the story on as a chain unbroken.
Robbie Robertson’s vision started outblasting everyone just to be heard. But it wasn’t where it ended.
In our lives together, we Americans have been trying to outblast each other for quite a while now. Can be a good start — if we go on to find a deeper music and a deeper story to tell. It’s a much better prospect than being trapped forever within cliches, irrelevant before our time is through.
Listening to Robertson’s music can sound out for us the bearings of the path within. There is a story — our story — that is still waiting to be told, as soon as we’re ready to tell it.
