ON SONGWRITING
Bob Dylan and the Band - Live 1966 Concert Film
dynamics instead of ten different notes. I found
that what you do on your instrument actually is
as big a part of writing the song as writing the
lyrics. It’s the character of the song. I started
wanting t he instrument to speak with emotions
between the lines more than doodling around all
over the strings.”
Robertson loves to pick out transcendent
moments of sound from songs across his
career. “I did that tremolo thing again on a
song I produced for Van Morrison, ‘Wonderful
Remark,’ when I did the music for the Martin
Scorsese movie The King of Comedy. On the
song ‘Resurrection,’ from Storyville, at the end
of the song I’m playing this solo and all of a
sudden I go into this thing on it just before the
song ends. Eric Clapton listened to it and he
said, ‘You’re playing Jimmy Smith on the guitar.
You’re doing a Hammond organ thing.’ He knew
what I was trying to do and that’s a great joy,
‘cause a lot of what you do is aimed at people
like that. On ‘Breaking All the Rules’ from
the same album, I used an Epiphone Howard
Roberts guitar that I hadn’t used in years. I
MAY / JUNE
think the last time I played it was in 1969 on
‘When You Awake’ from The Band album.”
“Washburn sent me a guitar with kind of a
Strat-type body but with extra frets on it. The
sound I get out of that has a chime-like quality
and there’s a certain harmonic resonance that
I haven’t been able to get out of anything else.
I used it on ‘Day of Reckoning’ where I tried
a thing where instead of turning the guitar up
full and turning the amp up full, I went in the
other direction. I used a small amp and I turned
the volume down on the guitar and I used this
effect called a Slow Gear—they don’t make it
anymore—and I decided to play at such a light
volume that I was able to get another kind of
sustain that I’d never heard before. It’s not
a distorted sustain. It was so chimey, and so
ringy, and so fluid that I felt it was a little bit of
a breakthrough for me.”
“I always liked Stratocaster guitars but
because I played with a flatpick—and I used
to play with two National fingerpicks, too—the
middle pickup always got in the way for me and
sometimes those steel fingerpicks would stick
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