ROB
BIE
ROB
ERTS
ON
MAY / JUNE
ON SONGWRITING
stuff I’ve ever heard in my life.’ And then the
world changed. We didn’t change. With time,
everybody started to say, ‘No, no, no, that was
good all along. That was fine. I didn’t mean
what I said.’ People changed their stories on it –
audiences did, critics did, everybody did.”
Even Robertson will admit that he might have
gone a bit haywire in his soloing style during
those Wild Mercury days. But his boss liked it so
he kept it in the act. “I was like this new trick
he had. When we toured, I thought I played
too many guitar solos; but for Bob it was a new
feeling of power and excitement in the music.”
No wonder. After ducking too many bottles
and hurled abuses, Robertson, as well as Dylan,
found respite in the country life in Woodstock
whittling songs in the basement at Big Pink
that no one in the world would ever hear, let
alone boo. Even as the Band was recording their
first album, Music from Big Pink, those raucous
arenas were the furthest thing from anyone’s
mind.
“By then everybody had turned up to 10,”
Robertson observed of that post-Dylan period.
“Everybody was playing loud and violently.
I thought, these guys are playing a million
notes a second and it’s beginning to bore me.
I started looking at the guitar more from a
sound approach. I wanted to do these tasty
little things. I didn’t want to play one note
that’s unnecessary. I loved Curtis Mayfield’s
guitar-playing—sweet, soulful, kind of crying
little guitar moments. Jamming became very
unimportant in my life. It was all about the
songs. So I just went the other way completely.
Everybody was wearing psychedelic clothes and
polka-dots; and we looked like Amish people
and did not know for one second that what we
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