Can we talk openly about Robbie Robertson for a moment? He may have been an electric guitar inspiration for Bob Dylan and the songwriting genius behind most of The Band’s best songs, but he was also an upwardly mobile snoot whose inspiration dried up and who stuck a knife in The Band’s back, putting paid to one of the world’s best groups. And for what? To work on soundtracks with Martin Scorsese, for starters, and to do a bit of acting while he was at it. To which I say big deal. This here is the fellow who wrote “The Weight,” for Christ’s sake.
By the time Robertson finally condescended to record a solo LP, which emerged in 1987, approximately 10 years had passed since the demise of The Band. But anyone who expected the self-titled album to constitute a continuum with Robertson’s work with his former cohorts was bound to be disappointed, as it was, well, an abomination. Or, to be more charitable, an experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Gone were the wonderful folk-rock masterpieces that still stand amongst the premier works of Americana, replaced by a big, Anglophilic and blustering bunch of songs that had nothing to do with driving old Dixie down but everything to do with the hip crowd Robertson was hanging with, namely Peter Gabriel and Bono of U2. As Robert Christgau noted caustically at the time, “Once established as an icon of quality, [Robertson] always took himself too seriously, and age has neither mellowed him nor wised him up.”
Robertson went all out on this one, engaging, in addition to the services of U2 and Gabriel, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko of The Band, sometimes Frank Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio, and the BoDeans. Unfortunately the results are both bloated and pretentious, to say nothing of derivative—“Sweet Fire of Love,” on which U2 plays, is basically a U2 song, and a second-rate one at that—or, in the case of “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” with its ridiculous Sam Spade narration, both hackneyed and dumb.
The stabs at hard rock (“American Roulette,” “Hell’s Half-Acre,” “American Roulette”) are ill-conceived at best, with Robertson making a desperate attempt to sound contemporary with a big, mundane drum beat and enough backing vocalists to drown out the fact that Robbie was never a singer; he sang lead on exactly one Band tune, and legend has it that The Band would unplug his vocal mike during shows to prevent him from fucking up the group’s wonderful harmonies. If The Band had anything going for it, it was soul, and the plodding losers on Robertson’s solo debut have about as much soul as ELP.
Peter Gabriel joins Robertson on “Fallen Angel.” a tribute to Richard Manuel, The Band singer/pianist who committed suicide in 1986, and no surprise, the song sounds like a Peter Gabriel song, although Gabriel receives no songwriting credit for his efforts. What the impish but haunted Manuel would have made of this maudlin eulogy we can’t know, but I see him rolling in his grave, laughing. And once again we are confronted with the simple fact that Robertson, great talent or no, is certainly one pompous snit, as is also demonstrated on the cloying “Broken Arrow,” on which Peter Gabriel provides keyboards and drum programming. As for the faux-funky “Testimony,” it’s nothing less than an embarrassment, despite the presence of U2, the Gil Evans Horn Section, and the backing vocals of the Neville Brothers’ Ivan Neville.
“Sonny Got Caught in the Moonlight” is the only tune on the LP that doesn’t offend my delicate sensibilities, although it cries out for the drumming of Levon Helm and I wish the backing vocals of Rick Danko were more prominent. And that wailing? Where is it coming from? And how do I make it stop? Ah, but if I’ve been decrying song bloat and pretention throughout this piece, you will find no better example than the grandiose “Showdown at Big Sky,” which also cries out for Helm and raises suspicions that Robertson was listening to lots of Talking Heads at the time. Only the chorus, ponderous as it is, captivates, thanks in most part to the backing vocals of Bill Dillon.
The Band broke up in large part because Robertson’s songwriting skills dried up, and this LP demonstrates that despite a decade-long hiatus he hadn’t come up with a single decent new tune. Listening to Robertson ape the likes of U2 and Peter Gabriel—pompous fellows themselves, come to think of it—is sad, because there isn’t a single tune on this album as good as the worst tune on The Band’s first two, and best, LPs. Or, come to think of it, any of their LPs period. At best it’s a pastiche of borrowed ideas, at worst, just a bad album, plain and simple.
Not that there’s a simple song on it, and that’s the problem. The Band made even their most difficult tunes sound natural, free, and easy. They knew how to swing. On this one everything sounds forced. That it somehow managed to win Canada’s Juno Award tells me that either Canada is a deranged nation or the folks who selected this album for the award were in reality acknowledging Robertson’s past contributions to music, and not the likes of “Fallen Angel” or “American Roulette.” As humble as the later contributions of such Band members as Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were, they at least stayed true to a great tradition, and possess an authenticity that this big lie of an LP could never hope to achieve.
Period.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
