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Helm discusses finding Richard Manuel dead in his hotel room and the half-joking pact they'd made years before that if someone died on the road, they'd put him on ice and bring him home in a storage bay under the bus. That made me think a lot about the fragile nature of life on the road and the difference between the beautiful music Danko and Manuel made and the horrible ways they died.
-Jason Isbell |
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JamBase: I wanted to start by asking you to tell me a little bit about the first time you met Ronnie Hawkins. I'd read somewhere that before he recorded a few of your songs or you joined the band that you were a roadie. Can you tell me a little bit about the first time that you met Ronnie?
Robbie Robertson by Joseph Sia |
Robbie Robertson: The first time that I can remember meeting him, I was playing in another band and we were the opening act for Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks at a place just on the outskirts of Toronto. I remember being so impressed with them, just the way that they played and the whole thing. It was the most real thing I had ever seen at the time and Ronnie was, and is, just an amazing Americana character. God broke the mold when he created Ronnie Hawkins. He's an amazing character and I picked that up right off the bat and was just drawn to the music. They were from the South, which is where his music really came from. The whole thing for me just had an authenticity that was really overpowering, especially since I was only 15 years old then. I wasn't really a roadie. I was just someone who was trying to pick up as much as I possibly could musically and trying to learn the secrets of how you do something really well.
In that process, what kind of really got me in the graces of Ronnie Hawkins was that I wrote these couple of songs. When I played them for him, he liked 'em both and said he wanted to record them. I was shocked, you know? I tried to pretend that this kind of stuff happens all the time but if I could've jumped in the air, I would have. It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, "There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?" Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, "There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question." That was one of my early music industry lessons right there [laughs].
JamBase: Is it true, like you said in one of the interview segments of The Last Waltz, that he promised you more pussy than Frank Sinatra to join the band?
Roberstson: Well, that wasn't just a comedic line on his part. Ronnie was serious and so was I [laughs].
From everything I understand about Ronnie and those other chitlin circuit bandleaders, they all kind of ruled with an iron fist. They were very much antithetical to the hippie values that seemed to form so much of the scene in the late 60's that you guys, rightly or wrongly, are so identified with. Did the band function better under that kind of strong leadership? Further, did you slide into that role after you left Hawkins? Was there any kind of "who died and made you king" resentment from the other guys in The Band if and when you assumed that role?
Ronnie and the Hawks |
First of all, Ronnie Hawkins did that because that is what you did back then. It was the kind of thing that if you didn't do something as a member of one of those bands, you got fined. Or if you were late, you got fined. That was just the way things operated. Most of those groups operated in that way because it needed it to be that way. There was a certain respect for discipline and Ronnie pushed really hard. He pushed us so hard to be really good at what we did that we got so good that we ultimately left him. We had outgrown him. You know, I have never said this to him over the years, but it's kind of his own fault. We'd come to the point that what we were interested in playing was just more advanced than what we were doing with him. So we had to go. With the way things continued on years later with our own group, we'd already been in Ronnie's boot camp of music, we didn't need to go through boot camp again. We knew what the rules were and we operated by those rules. In The Band, whatever needed to be done, whoever could do it, that's just the way it worked. As things became more and more responsible, I had to take the position of being more and more responsible and take the bull by the horns to just do what needed to be done.
It's so interesting to me that that The Band's music is inherently linked to the egalitarian values of the '60s yet you guys came from this background of a strong leader where the bands were just super, super tight. It seems very antithetical to the looseness of the '60s psychedelic aesthetic.
The Band |
Oh, yeah. That's very true and maybe so even with those English bands, too. When you think about The Who or The Rolling Stones, they had that old mentality but there was a rebellious spirit as well. You just evolved at that time with what was going on, just the way that the business worked. It was plenty loose at the same time as things being organized. Things got very loose later on in The Band's existence.
I want to hit on one specific memory because I feel like it was a watershed moment for you as a musician. Can you tell me about your visit to The Home of Blues record shop on Beale Street in Memphis when you rode the train down from Toronto to join Ronnie and the Hawks. How influential was that experience?
For the music that we were into – the guys playing with Ronnie Hawkins at that time –having the opportunity to go to a record store that had that kind of selection was unbelievable. It seemed to me that the Home of Blues had everything. What they really had was everything that I was interested in at the time, which was like 1960-61, right in there. It was like being early to the party of how influential blues music would become on rock 'n' roll. We knew that delta blues music was the combination of mountain music and essentially black slave music and gospel coming together but the stuff we found at the Home of the Blues was different. This was Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Muddy Waters – people that would go on to have an incredible influence on music and what came out of England and ultimately what was going to happen in American music. Being early and being able to go to the Home of Blues, it was incredible. I went there and I spent every penny I had on records. Those records were really my musical schooling. Those were the only music lessons I've ever taken...
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