The Second Coming of Robbie Robertson
A few years ago Robbie Robertson decided that he wanted to make a film called American Roulette. The script tells the story of a Sixties rock & roll legend who has disappeared for some 15 years. A notorious abuser of drugs and alcohol during his heyday, this onetime guitar hero is believed by many to be dead, perhaps of an overdose. But no one really knows what has happened to him. And by the Eighties, no one cares.
The film would focus on this rocker’s teenage son, who is searching for his father. The journey is a coming of age for the boy, who dreams of someday becoming a big-time rock guitarist himself. Along the way, he plays in a roadhouse band, gets beaten up in a parking lot for flirting with the wrong girl, smokes dope for the first time, loses his virginity and comes face to face with his dad’s old manager, an eccentric character now living on a grand estate in Woodstock, New York.
Eventually, the boy finds his father, who is alive and well, living a quiet, anonymous and drug-free life since he dropped out of the rock & roll world.
Robbie Robertson still hopes to turn this script into a movie. It’s easy to understand why: if you could combine the father and the son into a single character, you’d almost have The Robbie Robertson Story.
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Eleven years ago, Robbie Robertson shut down the Band and walked away. At the time, the Band was a living legend. One of the first rock groups to appear on the cover of Time. Headliners at Woodstock. Like their friend and former boss Bob Dylan, the members of the Band cloaked themselves in myth and mystery. And just before they called it quits, Robertson assembled a cast of some of the most prestigious names in Seventies rock — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell — to perform at their final concert, an elaborate affair called the Last Waltz.
After 16 years — Robertson had hit the road in 1960, at age 16 — the rock & roll life had lost its allure for Robertson. What had begun as a fantastic adventure had become a job — “like selling shoes,” he says. He had other plans — perhaps a career in films. “The Band was just fine until we became successful,” says Robertson, who is now 44. “And then here came this strange phenomenon. It’s like a disease. … It just wasn’t a creative process for me anymore. And I felt guilty of being one dimensional in my life. I wanted to just be able to sit down or play with the dog or something. I was dying to be able, when someone asks, ‘What are you doing?’ to say, ‘Nothing.'”
The author of such classics as “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight” had run dry. “I just had nothing left to say,” Robertson says. “I would look around, and I would see all these other people who had nothing to say either, but they insisted on making records. I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I felt like I’d made a hundred records. I thought, ‘I just want to clear the air, do something else for a while, and maybe, at some point, I’ll feel inspired and I’ll do it again. Or maybe I’ll never do it.'” He pauses for a moment, and a sly smile creeps across his face. “Either way, it intrigued me.”
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“I can’t just make a record,” says Robbie Robertson one night as he cruises through Santa Monica, California, in his jet-black BMW 733i sedan. “I have to make a move.”
After a decade in the shadows — which included a separation and reconciliation with his wife of 19 years, a flirtation with the movie business, a period of wild living, fueled by drugs and alcohol, and the tragic suicide of Band singer-pianist Richard Manuel, who hanged himself in a Florida hotel room last year — Robertson is, finally, making his “move.” “All of a sudden, I had this yearning, I had this need,” he says. “I felt angry. I felt possessed. It was all very instinctual, like breeding time.”
His first solo album, Robbie Robertson, a brilliant, autobiographical work, should reestablish him as one of the preeminent rock & roll artists of his generation. The album, produced by Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel) and Robertson, with contributions from Gabriel, U2, the BoDeans, former Band members Rick Danko and Garth Hudson and jazz arranger Gil Evans, is a lyrical and musical masterpiece.
“It’s really Robbie’s story,” says Daniel Lanois. “I was talking to Bono about this. ‘Testimony’ and ‘Fallen Angel’ and ‘Broken Arrow’ — they’re all about him. Not that many writers of songs have seen enough of the world to make a record like that sound interesting. But Robbie has. It’s fiction based on truth, based on his life.”
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