Robbie Robertson: 'Why I Turned Down Playing on Bob Dylan’s New Album'

By editorial board on July 1, 2020

I would’ve loved for us to work together on that,” says Robertson on Dylan

Robertson explains on a recent episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, when Dylan reached out to him late last year, he simply wasn’t available. “I was just slammed with work,” he says, noting that he had just finished his album Sinematic as well as the score for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and a reissue of the Band’s self-titled 1969 album. “I said, ‘Right now, I’m in the middle of this stuff,’ and I think that he just felt like it was cooked and he needed to bring it out of the oven. So he went in and recorded this album.”

At the time, Dylan read Robertson some of his new lyrics (likely from “Murder Most Foul”) over the phone, and the Band co-founder was deeply impressed. “I thought, this is just terrific writing and something that only Bob could do,” says Robertson. “And I would have loved for us to work together on that. But I just couldn’t do it at that time… I was gonna check in with him and just say, ‘God, I’m sorry I wasn’t available then, but let’s see if we can cause some trouble down the line.'”

 

 

Bob Dylan and I started on opposite sides of the same road. When I first heard it I was already in a band, and I played rock & roll. I did not know much about folk music. (Robbie Robertson)

I did not know how important that songwriter was. I remember someone put on Oxford Town, from The Freewhelin 'Bob Dylan. I thought, "There's really something here." His voice sounded interesting to me, but I did not understand why until I started playing together.

 

He is a powerful singer and a great musical actor, many characters are hidden in his voice. I well remember the politics of the first pieces. It was exciting to hear the songs of someone who had something to say. But what really struck me was the influence that the road had on his music, the abandonment of Minnesota, the journey and New York. There was a harshness in the way he treated his characters, a rebellion, in a sense, against the purity of folk. When he wrote Like a Rolling Stone or Ballad of a Thin Man, he certainly was not fooling around. He was a rebel against the rebels. 

Working with Bob I immediately realized that he did not like dealing with musicians. He preferred poets, like Allen Ginsberg. When we went to Europe, poets appeared everywhere. His writing was profoundly influenced by poetry, he worked in images opposed to the tradition of rock & roll. I saw him sing Desolation Row and Mr. Tambourine Man in acoustic, in '65 and '66. I had not seen anything like that, nobody could communicate as much as he did with only a guitar and a harmonica.

When we went to Nashville to work on Blonde on Blonde in 1966, I saw a singer behind a typewriter for the first time. We went into the studio and started working on the lyrics, on what he was supposed to sing. I remember the noise - click, click, click, ring, at high speed. He wrote those words so quickly, he had so many things to tell.

It changed continuously, even during the recordings. And that's another thing I learned quickly. The Hawks needed to understand the direction of the song, the chords, the bridge. Bob did not like proof. He was used to doing everything on his own, with the acoustic guitar. I remember asking him, "Well, how's the song ending?" And he answered "Well, when it's over, it's over. We stop".

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