Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'll ruled in another room. I will beating by hand
Speaker 1: past and give me to find a place where I
Speaker 1: can leave my head. And Mr Canna tell me where
Speaker 1: a man I find it be. He just branded shook
Speaker 1: my hand and new we're going to see. At age fifteen,
Speaker 1: Robbie Robertson wrote his first two recorded songs. A year later,
Speaker 1: he packed up his guitar and took a train from
Speaker 1: Canada to the Mississippi Delta, what he calls the holy
Speaker 1: Land of rock and roll. By the mid nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: he'd be touring the world with Bob Dylan, then taking
Speaker 1: center stage with a group of his own, happily named
Speaker 1: The Band. Operating out of a basement in upstate New York,
Speaker 1: he penned classics like The Weight, still considered a masterpiece today.
Speaker 1: A blend of country and rock and roll, the band's
Speaker 1: music transcendent generations, pushed boundaries and changed the face of
Speaker 1: music forever. In his new memoir Testimony, Robbie Robertson travels
Speaker 1: back to the place it all began, the Six Nations
Speaker 1: Indian Reservation, where his mother a mohawk was raised. That's
Speaker 1: where I was introduced to music. It seemed to me
Speaker 1: that everybody played an instrument, saying dance, did something because
Speaker 1: there wasn't much entertainment coming through the Reds, so they
Speaker 1: had to make their own and it and it felt
Speaker 1: like a club, and I thought, I gotta get into
Speaker 1: this club. Everybody plays something. How much time did you
Speaker 1: spend there? Oh, we spent lots of time there because
Speaker 1: that's where you know, my mom's relatives were, so we
Speaker 1: would go several times a year. And that was your
Speaker 1: mother's side of the family. So yeah, yeah, and uh.
Speaker 1: And it felt to me like I was. I was
Speaker 1: that they allowed me into this world that I thought
Speaker 1: was so special. So all of these things in music,
Speaker 1: and it was the first time I ever saw anybody
Speaker 1: playing an instrument a few inches from me, and the
Speaker 1: sound of it from that place that I thought, I've
Speaker 1: got I've got to learn something about this. So some
Speaker 1: of my cousins and uncles and every they would show
Speaker 1: me a few little tricks on the guitar, a couple
Speaker 1: of chords, and over time I liked it and liked it.
Speaker 1: And then when I was about eleven or twelve years old,
Speaker 1: I thought, I'm getting as good as they are at
Speaker 1: this and they're grown ups. Something's happening here, all of
Speaker 1: this coming out of the Indian Reservation where it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be deprived. It was a glorious part of my
Speaker 1: growing up. So then when I was thirteen years old,
Speaker 1: I was standing there at the crossroads with a guitar.
Speaker 1: Rock and Roll came along and I just reached puberty.
Speaker 1: It was a setup. I had nowhere else to go.
Speaker 1: I had to follow this path and so it was.
Speaker 1: It was like it was laid out before me and
Speaker 1: all I had to do was follow it. So I
Speaker 1: started getting in the little groups and things. I had
Speaker 1: a group called Robbie and the Robots, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: we had another group called Thumper, Thumper and the Trambones,
Speaker 1: and then Yeah, and then I played. I had a
Speaker 1: group and we opened for Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks
Speaker 1: at a dance hall and they were amazing. They were
Speaker 1: all from the South and it was pure, pure rockabilly,
Speaker 1: hard hitting rock, the American stuff. Not South Toronto, No,
Speaker 1: it was from the South. So for me, it was
Speaker 1: authent Arkansas. They were all from Arkansas then, and and
Speaker 1: in the group I was, and we played and I
Speaker 1: tried to play good and everything and I and I
Speaker 1: caught Ronnie Hawkins eye a little bit, and that it
Speaker 1: gave me the opportunity to hang around a little bit.
Speaker 1: I wanted some of this to rub off on me.
Speaker 1: I wanted to learn this authenticity. But to interject this,
Speaker 1: which is when you're there and you're at the reservation
Speaker 1: and they're they're playing the music, and you start to
Speaker 1: keep up with them, and then you say, quote unquote,
Speaker 1: Ronnie Hawkins has his eye on you. Is that something
Speaker 1: that you've benefited from? Which is people saw that you
Speaker 1: stood out and they recognized that, they almost mentored you.
Speaker 1: You know, there's something that happens, it's it's it's mysterious
Speaker 1: and you don't know where it comes from, and you
Speaker 1: don't know how. You just know something happens. And if
Speaker 1: somebody pat you on the back for that, what was
Speaker 1: Ronnie Hawkins patting you on the back? Four? He thought
Speaker 1: this kid looks to me like he might have potential. Right.
Speaker 1: And then when I was fifteen, which was at that time,
Speaker 1: I was fifteen years old, I wrote two songs that
Speaker 1: he recorded, and so that was kind of a big
Speaker 1: thing to the first recordings that I had. And then
Speaker 1: when I was sixteen, he said, I want to try
Speaker 1: you out. I want you know, I want to see
Speaker 1: if you can if you can handle it. And so
Speaker 1: I went from Canada from Toronto on a train down
Speaker 1: to the Mississippi Delta to the holy land of rock
Speaker 1: and roll to join up with Ronnie Hawkins and the
Speaker 1: Hawks passed away. Yeah. My, my, my mother, she was horrified.
Speaker 1: I was going to say six yeah, and and and
Speaker 1: I'm going to the Mississippi Delta and describe Ronnie Hawkins
Speaker 1: for people who know him, Was he uh in a
Speaker 1: suit and tie they have a bow tie and a
Speaker 1: crisp shirt on? Or was he? He was an amazing character,
Speaker 1: an incredible showman, so funny and could get away with anything.
Speaker 1: And to see him perform it was like some uncaged animal,
Speaker 1: it was, but beautiful. You know. He would come leaping
Speaker 1: through the air down and land on his knees behind
Speaker 1: the piano player and start winding him up like as
Speaker 1: if you know, it was like a monkey, you know
Speaker 1: playing you know, and yeah, like the Oregon. He would
Speaker 1: be binding him up and then come in singing at
Speaker 1: the last second, and then you know, leap over here.
Speaker 1: He was like and years ago when we played like
Speaker 1: Alan Freed shows and that nobody wanted to go on
Speaker 1: after Ronnie Hawkins. He was just one of those. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was just an exciting performer. So in my mother
Speaker 1: I knew of Ronnie Hawkins having not well but had
Speaker 1: met him. But when I said, I'm going down there,
Speaker 1: I'm going to try out for Ronnie Hawkins and the
Speaker 1: Hawks because if I don't do this, I'll be sorry
Speaker 1: the rest of my life. And I've got to find
Speaker 1: out whether this is my calling or not. She said,
Speaker 1: all right, you can try it, but if it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: you go right back to school. And I said, it's
Speaker 1: a deal, right, But you never had to keep that too.
Speaker 1: I was on a mission when Hawkins said, when you
Speaker 1: wrote a couple of songs for him, and he was
Speaker 1: going to use those songs before you got in the band,
Speaker 1: describe for me, because you are a very uh you know,
Speaker 1: famous for your songwriting. Because what was your performing? What
Speaker 1: was that like for you? I mean even as a
Speaker 1: child to me, you're young kids are When he said that,
Speaker 1: I kept looking for the key, the key to the highway.
Speaker 1: I kept looking for some way to impress him. I
Speaker 1: wanted into this world, and I thought, he said he
Speaker 1: needs some songs. I had been writing songs, not very
Speaker 1: good ones, but you know, I was. I was doing it,
Speaker 1: and I thought, let me give it a shot, you know.
Speaker 1: And I went and I wrote two songs, brought them
Speaker 1: to him, played them for him, and he said, well,
Speaker 1: I'll be damned, I'm going to record both those songs. Son.
Speaker 1: You remember what the songs were. Yeah, one was called
Speaker 1: someone Like You and another one was called Baba Lou
Speaker 1: and I uh, and I just I wrote them like
Speaker 1: in one sitting because I was anxious and I was young.
Speaker 1: But here's the pepper in this. He goes records these songs,
Speaker 1: makes a new album, brings me the album. I nervously
Speaker 1: opened this record. I look on the label. There's my
Speaker 1: name on the label, but it says Robertson and McGill.
Speaker 1: So I said, there's no McGill there. When I wrote these,
Speaker 1: who the hell's McGill? And he said, wow, it's a
Speaker 1: kind of a long story. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: want to and I said, no, there was nobody else there.
Speaker 1: I even I wrote it. I wrote these, what's going on?
Speaker 1: So he said, here's the real deal. This is a
Speaker 1: pseudonym for Maurice Levy, my lawyer. He owns the record company.
Speaker 1: He owns Roulette Records, and he's a hardcore mobster. And
Speaker 1: he puts his vague and that's his vague, exactly half
Speaker 1: the songwriting. And I thought, you can do that. You
Speaker 1: can lie about this stuff, you can put it out
Speaker 1: there and nobody ever says anything. And so Ronnie explains, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't forget about it, Robbie, it's Chinatown, that's right.
Speaker 1: It was like that. He said. Morris is famous for
Speaker 1: having his guys hold somebody out his office window by
Speaker 1: the ankles, saying either you sign this or we let
Speaker 1: your very cuddly character. So so after the after this
Speaker 1: songwriting thing, Ronnie brings me to New York. He said,
Speaker 1: if you can write songs for me, maybe you would
Speaker 1: have a good ear and hearing songs would be good
Speaker 1: for me to record. So I meet Lieber and Stoller
Speaker 1: and Thomas and Schumann and Otis Blackwell all of these writers,
Speaker 1: and I sit in rooms and they play me songs,
Speaker 1: and I think this is kind of like being in heaven.
Speaker 1: So then Ronnie says to me, Now we're gonna go
Speaker 1: up to Roulette Records. We're gonna go up to see
Speaker 1: Morris Levy. Um, I have to, you know, do some
Speaker 1: things with him. So I'll introduce you and everything. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking to myself, Oh yeah, well, now we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss this songwriting misunderstanding. I want to work with you, Morris.
Speaker 1: You know, no, it's kind of like that I was
Speaker 1: that young that I was thinking you weren't in the room.
Speaker 1: You weren't there when I wrote these songs. You do
Speaker 1: really want an explanation, Mars, right. So anyway, so we
Speaker 1: go into his up to his office. It looks like
Speaker 1: a scene out of a Damon Runyon thing. There are
Speaker 1: gangster guys standing around with crooked noses and bulging mohair suits,
Speaker 1: you know, where they're backing squares. There's good there's secretaries
Speaker 1: with blonde hair over one eye. You know. It's like
Speaker 1: this is a movie and we're a count. Basie's playing
Speaker 1: in the background. We come in. Morris comes out of
Speaker 1: his office and he says, Ronny, Ronnie, I love this guy.
Speaker 1: What a crazy guy he is. Come on in here, Ronnie,
Speaker 1: you know, And he's saying to everybody there. You know,
Speaker 1: I love this guy, and I think what happens to
Speaker 1: gangsters when their kids said their voices go like this?
Speaker 1: Why does he talk, you know this way? So we
Speaker 1: go into his office. Ronnie's doing the camel walk on
Speaker 1: the rug and calling him hoss and and he just
Speaker 1: he loves Ronnie, so it's it's really fun. And Ronnie
Speaker 1: says to him, Morris, I just came up here just
Speaker 1: to see if there's any papers you want me to sign,
Speaker 1: right knowing the story about hanging people out there give
Speaker 1: you a pint of blood. So anyway, we sit down
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, all right, okay, you know, I see
Speaker 1: how this is going. And he's talking to Morrison. He says, Morris,
Speaker 1: this is the kid that I was telling you about
Speaker 1: that I really think has some potential. Morris looks over
Speaker 1: at me and he says, yeah, he's a nice looking kid.
Speaker 1: If you ever have to do time, would be good
Speaker 1: to have him with you. I thought, what what he said.
Speaker 1: I bet you don't know whether to hire him or
Speaker 1: just have sex with him, you know, And I think
Speaker 1: I'm going to forego the songwriting dispute. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: let that go for now you know. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: leave Hawkins, Yes, and you're with him for how long?
Speaker 1: A couple of years? Uh? When I joined him at sixteen,
Speaker 1: left probably around yeah, something like that. And you leave
Speaker 1: to form your bed. No, it is. Over the years
Speaker 1: leave on. And I have helped hire people to replace
Speaker 1: people that were leaving the Hawks, and they were all
Speaker 1: Canadians because we were spending a lot of time up there.
Speaker 1: Ronnie liked it because he made more money and the
Speaker 1: hours were easier. So we were seeing all these really
Speaker 1: talented guys. And because I kind of opened that door
Speaker 1: a little bit, and and we would see this other talent,
Speaker 1: we'd say, oh my god, that guy is something special
Speaker 1: about him. That Rick Danko, We better hire him. And
Speaker 1: then boy, when this Richard Manuel sings, jeez, just there's
Speaker 1: your heart out. And Garth Hudson there's never been a
Speaker 1: keyboard player on that level ever. And if he was
Speaker 1: in our group, we would learn more, we would be better.
Speaker 1: Everybody gets better. Yeah. So anyway, we put together this
Speaker 1: group and Ronnie has now an amazing band of music.
Speaker 1: And we are young and growing up and we outgrow
Speaker 1: what we were doing with Ronnie, and we just said
Speaker 1: at some point, we gotta go do our own thing.
Speaker 1: Where did you first meet leaving? I met leve On
Speaker 1: Um when I first when my group opened for Ronnie
Speaker 1: Hawkins and the Hawks. And then so Levan was with
Speaker 1: Hawkins already. Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, he was one of
Speaker 1: the original Hawks. So and he joined the group I
Speaker 1: think when he was eighteen or something like that. Um.
Speaker 1: But when I went south and Levon introduced me to
Speaker 1: his family and everybody there, we we became very close,
Speaker 1: just like a brotherhood. And so we were picking out
Speaker 1: these other guys. And after we put this group together,
Speaker 1: Levan was then the only Southerner left in the group.
Speaker 1: And we had these guys and then we just felt
Speaker 1: like we have to go out in the world and
Speaker 1: discover our own thing now. And we did that, and
Speaker 1: we were out there and playing the Chitland Circuit down
Speaker 1: south and joined you know, in New York and Jersey,
Speaker 1: and we were playing in a place in Jersey and
Speaker 1: and that's when I got this call from Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: two that he wanted to talk to me about something
Speaker 1: and how do he find you? He we had a
Speaker 1: reputation of being a pretty you know, a good band,
Speaker 1: a really good band. There was that, and he always
Speaker 1: had his thinker in the win for that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: He um, he was wanting to make this transition from
Speaker 1: being a folk hero to being a guy that had
Speaker 1: a band of you know, instruments, powerful rock and roll
Speaker 1: band to turn it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So so I I went. I met with him, and
Speaker 1: I didn't know what this was going to be about,
Speaker 1: but what the plan really was what they were thinking.
Speaker 1: He needed a guitar player and wanted to hire me
Speaker 1: to play guitar um on some dates he was doing.
Speaker 1: And I said, I have a group. We don't do that,
Speaker 1: you know, I said, but maybe for these two dates,
Speaker 1: if we could have leve On come too, we might
Speaker 1: be able to slip this in without making the other
Speaker 1: guys feel left out. Or so we did these couple
Speaker 1: of days. It was ridiculous. I mean we were playing
Speaker 1: places and people were so upset about this music and
Speaker 1: you know, this electric music from our folks man, and
Speaker 1: it was like it wasn't working. It. It was not
Speaker 1: what they wanted at all from him, from him, they
Speaker 1: this is not so what was the venue? We played
Speaker 1: Forest Hills Stadium here what forests and people literally are like,
Speaker 1: when's Bob Dylan coming on? Know that people were charging
Speaker 1: the stage and throwing things and trying to disrupt it
Speaker 1: and booing and booing. So we played Forest Hills in
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Bawl did these days. We thought about that
Speaker 1: was weird. And then Bob says, we're gonna book a
Speaker 1: whole tour. Now, let's do a whole tour. And I
Speaker 1: was like, no, no, no, no, no. We have a group.
Speaker 1: We are a group. We are not going off to
Speaker 1: do this. And the only way that we could even
Speaker 1: consider it if we did it with the whole group.
Speaker 1: So he came and heard us play and said, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do this. And so we ended up touring of
Speaker 1: North America, Australia, Europe, and people booed and threw stuff
Speaker 1: at us every night. How does that possible? You could
Speaker 1: hear people saying to him and his manager, you've got
Speaker 1: to get rid of these guys. They're ruining everything. And
Speaker 1: the people love you, but you've got to get rid
Speaker 1: of those guys. And Bob never budged, He never took
Speaker 1: a step back, and we continued and we did this
Speaker 1: whole tour and stuff. Back then we would listen sometimes
Speaker 1: after the show to a tape of the show, just thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, we're to see what's wrong. What do we
Speaker 1: think that's happening with? Right? Right? How can they high?
Speaker 1: And there was a point in all of that, and
Speaker 1: because some of it was just helpful to put get
Speaker 1: the music better and do this song slower and this
Speaker 1: one that there was one night we're listening to the
Speaker 1: tape and I said to the other guys in the
Speaker 1: Hawks and the Bob they're wrong. The world is wrong.
Speaker 1: This is good, this is really powerful, and they are wrong.
Speaker 1: And there was a boldness that came out of this
Speaker 1: that we felt like, oh yeah, really, I'll show you something,
Speaker 1: you know. And it was like get him in the ears,
Speaker 1: you know, get him in the eyes. It was an
Speaker 1: attitude that allowed us to carry on. All of these
Speaker 1: concerts are as we speak, are coming out, they're being released,
Speaker 1: all of them. I don't want to hear the music
Speaker 1: that the band did with Bob Dylan was booed around
Speaker 1: the world. That I've got to say. But then if
Speaker 1: it's recorded on an album and no, it's all coming out,
Speaker 1: god knows it wasn't released, then it wasn't released. Then
Speaker 1: it's being released. Now, yeah, but eventually it stops. Ends.
Speaker 1: Why what happened was after we finished the European tour,
Speaker 1: we came back and they were booking more dates. They
Speaker 1: were getting you know that he wanted to do a
Speaker 1: tour of Russia. He wanted all kinds of things, you think,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of like he wanted to be
Speaker 1: booed in every corner of the world. Hello, Greenland. So
Speaker 1: so he came back and he had an accident on
Speaker 1: a motorcycle, accident, and he fractured his neck, and so
Speaker 1: they had to cancel any upcoming dates and he never
Speaker 1: did another tour after that for eight years. They God Blessing,
Speaker 1: keep you all that you wish is all they always do.
Speaker 1: That you coming up? Why Martin Scorsese risked getting fired
Speaker 1: from New York, New York to direct the band's final
Speaker 1: concert in nineteen seventy six, a film that would become
Speaker 1: the last waltz to hear Other musical legends explore the
Speaker 1: Here's the Thing Archives. In nineteen sixty six, Herb Albert
Speaker 1: and the Tijuana Brass did the unthinkable. They outsold the Beatles.
Speaker 1: But that was just the start. In sixty uh seven,
Speaker 1: were I was doing a special for NBC. Jack Hayley Jr.
Speaker 1: Was directing. He said, why don't you sing a song?
Speaker 1: I said, well, if if I can find the right song,
Speaker 1: I'll give it a go. So, you know, I go
Speaker 1: through my Barolla decks and I called Bert back rack.
Speaker 1: I said, Bert, is there a song that you have
Speaker 1: that do you think I could handle? That? You have
Speaker 1: tucked away in your drawer someplace where you find yourself
Speaker 1: whistling in the morning, or you know a tune that
Speaker 1: haunts you. Well. Three days later he sent me this
Speaker 1: Girl's in love with you. Take a listen, and here's
Speaker 1: the thing. Dot Org, this is Alec Baldwin and you
Speaker 1: were listening to Here's the thing. Robbie Robertson and the
Speaker 1: Band shook the foundation of America in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: weaving together the rustic and romantic into hits like the
Speaker 1: Night they Drove Old Dixie Down. But if their sound
Speaker 1: was innovative, their first recording studio was the opposite. It
Speaker 1: was a house up in West Sagredis in New York.
Speaker 1: Who found it, um Rick Danko, And it said, guys,
Speaker 1: I think I've found it because we were having a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble in the city finding a place where
Speaker 1: we could make music, because it was the business was
Speaker 1: still here that it had more moved to. Right, no, no,
Speaker 1: But but we'd be disturbing. They'd say, turn on the
Speaker 1: music in there. You know. It's like it was hard
Speaker 1: to find a place even a studio, well a studio,
Speaker 1: but we couldn't afford to lady or something like that.
Speaker 1: Right no, no, no. And this was to write and
Speaker 1: to create and to think of what we're gonna do next.
Speaker 1: So Albert Grossman, our manager, talks us into moving up
Speaker 1: to Woodstock. He said, you can get a place there
Speaker 1: and nobody will bother you. You won't bother anybody, bring
Speaker 1: your food, it'll be. It'll be just because I had
Speaker 1: this dream that I wanted to have a workshop, a
Speaker 1: clubhouse where we all congregate every day and we go
Speaker 1: there and we create, and we have a wonderful time
Speaker 1: together and we build some kind of a musical noise
Speaker 1: that we could send out around the world. So we
Speaker 1: find this place out in the middle of a hundred acres.
Speaker 1: Nobody to bother it is this horribly ugly pink house.
Speaker 1: What had it been? It was no, it was just
Speaker 1: a house. On a big profit. It was. It was both,
Speaker 1: but had not been a working farm, not a farm,
Speaker 1: just a house. But anyway, in this house, it had
Speaker 1: a basement, and I thought, that's it. That's what I've
Speaker 1: been looking for. We can set up our equipment down here,
Speaker 1: and we can have some microphones and we can and
Speaker 1: we can be way off the grid, we can have
Speaker 1: nothing to do with what's going on in the world
Speaker 1: and really discover what we're here for. It served that
Speaker 1: kind of purpose in my imagination. So we set it up.
Speaker 1: We got the things, the instruments in there, all organized
Speaker 1: in a certain way, a few mike's, a little mixer
Speaker 1: and everything. I bring this engineer, recording engineer, friend, sound
Speaker 1: mixure guy, and I said, look at this, this is
Speaker 1: what you know. I said, what do you think? He
Speaker 1: looks at it and he says, well, it's all concrete,
Speaker 1: glass windows, a big furnace over here. This is probably
Speaker 1: going to be the worst sounding place you've ever heard
Speaker 1: in your life. It's a disaster. And I said, acoustic nightmare.
Speaker 1: And I said, thank you, that's just what I was
Speaker 1: looking for. I want to break Yeah, And you know
Speaker 1: where you find the sound. It's like this, This is
Speaker 1: Frampton when he did the show with us, Frampton who
Speaker 1: like you sixteen years old on the road and uh,
Speaker 1: same thing. When you listen to Frampton, he was like
Speaker 1: he was when I was a kid. I was into
Speaker 1: sound you do well. I wanted was just sounds and
Speaker 1: what kind of sounds I want? And you're fascinated by that,
Speaker 1: like you just said that, that kind of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: savantage thing. So you're up there and Dylan comes. He
Speaker 1: lives up there. So one day I say to him, Bob,
Speaker 1: you gotta come and see the setup we got out here.
Speaker 1: You see, yeah, it's you know, And and he's, you know,
Speaker 1: he's just recorded in studios, you know, traditional recording and everything.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, I don't know whether you know, he's gonna
Speaker 1: think I'm crazy and this is meaningless or whatever. So
Speaker 1: we drive out there and we're driving and driving, and
Speaker 1: then up this side road and we're driving. We're driving.
Speaker 1: He says, where the hell is this? He said, you're
Speaker 1: right about nobody bought out here, I can say. And
Speaker 1: we go in and we go into this house and
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to put your finger on it, and
Speaker 1: said one of the guys is making some coffees, and
Speaker 1: they got checkerboards set up on these tables and he's
Speaker 1: looking it over and I said, come on, check this out.
Speaker 1: And we go down into the basement and he goes, WHOA,
Speaker 1: look at this. Can you can you record stuff down here?
Speaker 1: I said, we got a little tape recorder right there.
Speaker 1: We're gonna record stuff. And we're you know, this is
Speaker 1: where we are going to experiment and make some discoveries.
Speaker 1: How long did that go? So he said, listen, I've
Speaker 1: got a couple of songs that I've been messing around with.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could try them together here. So we said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: we're all set up. So anyway, we ended up recording
Speaker 1: the basement tapes there. I don't know, there's something like
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty songs or something in the course
Speaker 1: of this. And what we would do is every day
Speaker 1: we would go to Big Pink, We'd have some coffee,
Speaker 1: play some checkers. Bob would write. He wrote on a
Speaker 1: typewriter all the songs. He would just ding ding, you know,
Speaker 1: And I'd seen him do that before. It was just
Speaker 1: and I didn't know people wrote that way, but but
Speaker 1: he did. And so he would type something up. We'd
Speaker 1: go down into the basement grab everybody would grab whatever
Speaker 1: instrument was close, might even not be the one you
Speaker 1: play anything, because there was no rules. We'd sit on,
Speaker 1: we'd mess around, play through a tune and would say, wow,
Speaker 1: that felt kind of good. We'd listen to it, and
Speaker 1: then pretty soon it would turn into a combination of
Speaker 1: new material that he was writing, that we were writing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of songs that I discovered that he
Speaker 1: had a memory of lyrics that no person in the
Speaker 1: world could have. This to remember the lyrics to his
Speaker 1: own songs was a phenomenon, right, And it was an
Speaker 1: amazing time and amazing and it was private. And so
Speaker 1: in the course of that, he was getting songs to
Speaker 1: send to his publisher, because people recorded Bob Dylan songs,
Speaker 1: right and they needed some new material. So we would
Speaker 1: lay down some songs you could send to the publisher,
Speaker 1: and then we would record songs that nobody should ever hear.
Speaker 1: It was just private, just between us, and some of
Speaker 1: it was so hilarious, brilliantly funny, and we and it
Speaker 1: was cool because it was just us. We were hurting
Speaker 1: anybody doing this. And then and then the first bootleg
Speaker 1: record that I ever knew of came out with some
Speaker 1: of these songs on it, and it was like somebody
Speaker 1: peeking in your closet was like, whoa wait a minute here,
Speaker 1: this isn't right, especially on a bootleg re. Explain to somebody,
Speaker 1: how does that happen? You record this stuff with never
Speaker 1: already any intention because a lot of people think the
Speaker 1: bootleg takes are leaked by you. No no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: I'm saying you did, But a lot of people think
Speaker 1: that the guys like you and Dylan and the band
Speaker 1: and leave on everybody you do the leaking because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we don't want this stuff to come out. This is
Speaker 1: very proprietary. My god, if you're up there and again
Speaker 1: it's it's in your in a vault in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere and nobody can get to you, how does
Speaker 1: that material get leaked? As your guests. So what was
Speaker 1: happening was some of the material that was legitimate that
Speaker 1: other people could cover, and a lot of people did.
Speaker 1: That was sent to the publishing company and they would
Speaker 1: they and you hand the tapes over to people that
Speaker 1: you trusted, but only certain things. There was like I said, whatever,
Speaker 1: there was a hundred and forty tracks or something that
Speaker 1: we had recorded, and so they sent out maybe fifteen
Speaker 1: that was for people to cover. That's what it was.
Speaker 1: Because people heard these tapes and said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is amazing this stuff. So they started sharing it
Speaker 1: as kind of a cool underground actor and then bootleggers
Speaker 1: came along, and then they put it out and tried
Speaker 1: to sell it. But we still had all of this,
Speaker 1: tons of other stuff that nobody ever heard because a
Speaker 1: lot of it was covers. A lot of it wasn't
Speaker 1: yeah originally. So so now years later they release all
Speaker 1: of it because nowadays it's all out there. It's everything.
Speaker 1: There's no point in sitting on anything anymore. Um it
Speaker 1: ends with him? How I mean you're recording? Uh Pink House?
Speaker 1: Did that wind down? It wound down in Uh? Why no, No,
Speaker 1: it was because it was time for us to go
Speaker 1: and record music from Big Pink, the first album by
Speaker 1: the band, right, and then Bob went on. The band
Speaker 1: had never recorded. We had recorded songs here and there
Speaker 1: as the Hawks, not as the best the band, but
Speaker 1: now the band's debut album, Yeah Yeah. Sixty seven was
Speaker 1: the Basement tapes, and sixty eight was music from Big Paint.
Speaker 1: Dylan perform on the on the on the album. No,
Speaker 1: he painted the cover, He did a painting for the cover,
Speaker 1: and then he went off to make another record in Nashville,
Speaker 1: and we went off to do our thing, and then
Speaker 1: the band became recognized as the band. And and then
Speaker 1: a few years later we did a tour together, the
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan the Band Tour in nineteen four and he
Speaker 1: hadn't done a tour until then. So when you go
Speaker 1: from Hawkins to the to the Basement tapes and then
Speaker 1: on to do your own album, does the personnel change?
Speaker 1: Where's the same unit that becomes the band? It never changes,
Speaker 1: never changes. And when we when you well right up
Speaker 1: into Last Waltz, it's the same guy, same keyboards and everything.
Speaker 1: And when you do last Waltz, and so the story
Speaker 1: goes that you pitched Marty. Yeah, I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out who because this thing kept growing, the idea
Speaker 1: of it and it became it was becoming a real
Speaker 1: musical celebration with all of these people coming together, your friends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you knew up front this was a farewell show. It
Speaker 1: was the show. This was it, this this we were
Speaker 1: going to bring all of this to a conclusion. The
Speaker 1: band had been together for sixteen years, and we had
Speaker 1: seen it all up and down that highway. We had
Speaker 1: been to the grungiest places. We played Jack Ruby's club
Speaker 1: in Fort Worth, Texas, right just before he has assassinated Oswald,
Speaker 1: and we had played Woodstock and Watkins Glen, the biggest
Speaker 1: concert in the world in the isle of what We
Speaker 1: had done everything that you could do under the sun.
Speaker 1: And during that period two in the seventies in ninety six,
Speaker 1: it became very dark out there. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: drug abuse, there was a lot of madness. It was
Speaker 1: just crazy in the air. And what we were trying
Speaker 1: to do is think, how do we survive this? So
Speaker 1: why don't we bring this episode to a conclusion and
Speaker 1: then we can get out of the spotlight and figure
Speaker 1: out creatively what comes next for us. That's what the
Speaker 1: plan was for us or individually, the individually, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to pry, but there was no acrimony, There
Speaker 1: was no nobody, just everybody collectively said it's time for
Speaker 1: a change. Yeah, we're all gonna go do our own thing.
Speaker 1: And what a beautiful way to do it in this
Speaker 1: in this celebration of music, but in the name of
Speaker 1: music in the name of the band and and respect
Speaker 1: for one another. And all of these people that brought
Speaker 1: different flavors of the music you know out for us
Speaker 1: Dr John from the New Orleans Sound, Muddy Waters from
Speaker 1: the Chicago Blues, and Eric Clapton from the British Blues,
Speaker 1: and the Canadians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. So all
Speaker 1: of this is it's growing. Then certain people were saying, God,
Speaker 1: you gotta document this somehow. This is one of those things,
Speaker 1: is you know, something like this may never happen again.
Speaker 1: So it starts out We're gonna have a couple of
Speaker 1: video cameras black and white. Then they say, well, that's
Speaker 1: not gonna look very good. Why don't we do it
Speaker 1: in sixteen millimeter like all of these music let it
Speaker 1: be everything, Yeah, everything in sixteen And it's growing, and me,
Speaker 1: being a movie bug, I started thinking who would be
Speaker 1: terrific to do this? There Hall Ashby and and George
Speaker 1: Lucas you know with America and graffiti, and I'm going
Speaker 1: down the list and I feel bold like I could
Speaker 1: ask anybody you know to do this. But there was
Speaker 1: one guy that I saw something in his instincts for
Speaker 1: music and movies that was different than everybody else. There
Speaker 1: was something so powerful about this that I couldn't let
Speaker 1: it go. So when I started to make a list
Speaker 1: of these directors that I was going to ask, I
Speaker 1: wrote down Martin Scorsese, and I thought, let me talk
Speaker 1: to him first. Music in mean streets. There was something
Speaker 1: really special about this, and and on and on and
Speaker 1: on in his movies. So I met up with him
Speaker 1: and I asked him if he would be interested in
Speaker 1: in directing this, and he said, all of these people,
Speaker 1: these are all my favorites. Oh my god, he said,
Speaker 1: but I'm in the middle of shooting a movie and
Speaker 1: they don't like it when you go and make another
Speaker 1: movie while you're shooting a movie. Movie was the shooting
Speaker 1: at the time, New York, New York. So he said,
Speaker 1: you know, I, you know, I don't know how to
Speaker 1: do this. And so we hung out that evening. We
Speaker 1: talked about it, and we talked about you know, Eric
Speaker 1: Clapton is going to be coming and where you know,
Speaker 1: all of these musical ideas that that we have, and
Speaker 1: finally says, the hell with it. They can fire me,
Speaker 1: they can crucify me. I don't care. I have to
Speaker 1: do this. We have to find a way for me
Speaker 1: to do this. So we had to put this together underground,
Speaker 1: and nobody could know that Martin Scorsese was going to direct.
Speaker 1: You know, capturing was a top secret project, it really was.
Speaker 1: It was completely underground and recording over what period of time,
Speaker 1: four days, no one, take one we recorded and so
Speaker 1: then through these cinematographers as Kovacs and Bilimo Sigmund, they're saying,
Speaker 1: we don't want to shoot this in sixteen millimeter. We
Speaker 1: gotta shoot it int you know. Yeah, yeah, we're making
Speaker 1: a movie. And so they said, but the problem is
Speaker 1: that Michael Chapman, who became the DP. Yeah, Michael Chapman says,
Speaker 1: these cameras won't run for the length of this concert.
Speaker 1: They will melt, they will break. Yeah, it's they'll never
Speaker 1: make it. So we got so we had to figure
Speaker 1: out a system of certain songs out there so they
Speaker 1: could reload, change batteries. There's no digital happening here. This
Speaker 1: is real film. And Marty directed this thing on what
Speaker 1: he wanted to capture in the whole. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: everybody shooting and we'll see how it cuts together. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it was scripted, but take one when when you saw
Speaker 1: the film, knowing Marty as I do. You probably saw
Speaker 1: the film nine years after you finished, because he's cutting
Speaker 1: for nine years in them. But when you saw the film,
Speaker 1: did you just did you just kill you to see
Speaker 1: memorialized by Scorsese. You're great Bow, you know you're a
Speaker 1: great sign off with that band. Well, first of all,
Speaker 1: very few people have had that moment, I know the
Speaker 1: Beatles unintentionally. Yeah. No, what happened was when Marty saw
Speaker 1: the footage the thirties, some of the thirty five millimeter footage,
Speaker 1: he said, I think we've got something here, but we
Speaker 1: have to We're making a movie and and we have
Speaker 1: to know what this is about. So I want to
Speaker 1: shoot you guys telling stories, telling tales of the road.
Speaker 1: What is this about? How did we get here? What's
Speaker 1: happening in this? And and then I said to him,
Speaker 1: here's something that I feel is missing too, because there
Speaker 1: was you know, we had all these flavors of music
Speaker 1: that kind of make up what we're all of, what
Speaker 1: we're all about. But I said, we didn't get to
Speaker 1: pay honor to gospel music or country music. And I've
Speaker 1: written a theme a theme from the last waz, why
Speaker 1: don't we shoot those three things on a sound stage
Speaker 1: so you can move, so you can move the camera
Speaker 1: the way you move the camera. He's famous for where
Speaker 1: how he moves the camera. So we did that and
Speaker 1: that put the icing on the cake. We told the
Speaker 1: stories and then he cut it together like it was
Speaker 1: a movie and not a concert documentary with him. Interesting
Speaker 1: to that, you didn't do your first solo album until seven.
Speaker 1: That's why is that I was doing other things. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of film projects that people were coming
Speaker 1: to me with, and in this pretty much immerse yourself
Speaker 1: in movies and Marty's movies. You do after the Last Walls,
Speaker 1: I went off to do Carney and Marty went off
Speaker 1: to do Raging Ball, and you did music for Raging Bull,
Speaker 1: King of Comedy, Color of Money, then Onto a Casino,
Speaker 1: then Crossing Guard, Phenomenon, Any Given Sunday, Gangs of New York,
Speaker 1: onto Latter forty nine, The Departed, Shutter Island, Wolf of
Speaker 1: Wall Street. And you're asking me, you know, how come
Speaker 1: you didn't Wren when weren't you doing But no, no, no,
Speaker 1: but I'm well, But but my point is that when
Speaker 1: you're doing that kind of work with him you're doing
Speaker 1: score or soundtrack or both all of the above and
Speaker 1: every movie. So when he asked you for us to
Speaker 1: he'll have you right incidental music or a full pe
Speaker 1: orchestral or otherwise, or you're writing in in another style
Speaker 1: as an orchestral. It's that's what I'm saying. It's it's
Speaker 1: always a different experience, and and sometimes we just collaborate
Speaker 1: on ideas and I suggest things and it's oh, that's good,
Speaker 1: that's good, Okay, let's put some of this and there.
Speaker 1: Did he come to you and say, in terms of soundtrack,
Speaker 1: will you say, what's a song, an extant song that
Speaker 1: that can be city, What do you think would play
Speaker 1: well there? Because he's obsessed with that of us, right, So,
Speaker 1: but I'm saying that it's the whole gamut of different
Speaker 1: things with music. It sounds, it is like what makes
Speaker 1: this thing come to life in that way? And it
Speaker 1: just feels so real you can't deny it. And it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if I write it, if I find it,
Speaker 1: if I you know, if I disturb it and do
Speaker 1: something beautiful with it that works for the movie. All
Speaker 1: good You were a guy that was this leading man.
Speaker 1: Good looking women were crazy about you, and but you
Speaker 1: didn't play that, and it was just about the music man,
Speaker 1: and I hope so you never lost sight of the
Speaker 1: fact that really all you cared about was music. Damn
Speaker 1: true enough. Robbie Robertson and the band influenced everyone from
Speaker 1: Pink Floyd to Elton John, the latter of whom said
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven that the group's first album,
Speaker 1: Music from Big Pink, changed his life. He's not alone.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing. M