Inside the Workshop of Robbie Robertson

This post at first appeared in the August 1988 concern of Esquire. To examine just about every Esquire tale ever printed, enhance to All Entry.

When he desires to, Robbie Robertson can disarm you with his candor. Check with him why he stopped earning documents for 10 a long time, and the imaginative pressure at the rear of the Band—the male who wrote “The Weight” and “The Evening They Drove Aged Dixie Down”ߞwill inform you, ‘‘I didn’t have anything else to say.” Inquire him how he ended up in L.A. and he’ll notify you, “I was executing a ton of function in films . .. and I’m not crazy about planes.” But when he starts describing his recording-studio workshop as containing “only the bare essentials,” your skepticism begins to stir. Press the situation and you’re most likely to get the impenetrable seem the usually genial guitarist reserves for the camera. Following way too quite a few a long time in the business enterprise, he’s figured out what it will take to do his career.

“For many years I wrote all night time extended, in delirium. I would just grind them out, pulling teeth, bashing my head against the table.” But this time, when the tunes started off to move once again, in its place of examining himself into a motel as he’d done in the earlier, he checked instantly into this studio, in which he labored for two decades. “Some incredible information have been recorded in this space.” He’s not kidding—Ray Charles, B. B. King, Sly Stone. And if something considerably less than this studio would have saved him from adding his personal breathtaking self-titled comeback album to that record, then in truth, this put is necessary.

But it is a various variety of artist whose presence is discernible in Robertson’s studio these times. For when he was lying very low, he grew to become a collector of present day American Indian art. To his remaining hangs a piece by Darren Vigil, a youthful artist from the southwestern bohemia of Taos, and at the rear of him, one by Arizona artist C. J. Wells. “In the earlier everyone felt a great deal of guilt about the Indian persons. But in these young artists, I get a quite stout, dignified emotion.” In the word stout you hear his Canadian roots. But what his accent will not reveal is that he himself is 50 percent Iroquois. He’s careful about his link to the movement, however. “I’m a breed,” he suggests. “These men and women are all blood. I really don’t want to be wagging a person else’s flag.”

When you ask about the guitars, fatigue creeps into his voice. “Yeah, I have acquired guitars at home, I have acquired guitars upstairs, you know, a guitar here, a guitar there.” But he keeps his favorites below: the Stratocaster he experienced bronzed for The Final Waltza unusual double-necked Gibson guitar-mandolin and the outdated Broadcaster he picked up ahead of the Band’s ’74 tour with Dylan.

Finally, the paradox is way too obvious to go unspoken: How is it that a guy whose songs are so rooted in the earth finds asylum in a windowless box in the middle of a sprawling, artificial metropolis? But he’ll enable you thrust him only so considerably prior to his candor wins out yet again and he delivers the entire conceit crashing down. For the biggest stimulus to his writing is not the paintings, nor the guitars, nor the aura of musicians previous, but the four walls themselves, an inescapable reminder of the mission that brings him here. “It has nothing at all to do with environment,” he ultimately claims. “It has only to do with my imagination.” And for all your trouble, could you have envisioned anything at all else?