If any student at Rock & Roll High School were to be voted Least Likely to Experiment with Electronic Music, surely it would be Robbie Robertson. Best known for writing the Band's cinematic, elegiac songs lamenting the passing of the old, weird America, Robertson spent his two '90s solo albums exploring Native American music and the sounds of New Orleans. So what's he doing working with DJ and U2 collaborator Howie B? Growing, apparently. Though the beats and samples on his new album may throw longtime fans for a loop, so to speak, Robertson navigates the future with more grace than his peers: his new album is harder-hitting than Rickie Lee Jones' trip-hop trope and more natural-sounding than David Bowie's latest set of strange changes.
One of the things that makes Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy such a compelling listen is the way Robertson combines cutting-edge sounds with a subject obviously close to his heart: the traditional Native American music the half-Mohawk guitarist was exposed to in his youth. And even though Robertson is treading new stylistic ground, the songs on Contact are as heavy with history as Band classics like "Acadian Driftwood" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." "The Code of Handsome Lake" limns one man's personal turning point against a backdrop of larger conflict, while "Sacrifice" features a moving speech from Native American activist Leonard Peltier that sounds all the more haunting because it was phoned in from a Federal prison.
Even though his new album has more to do with chanting and DJs than words and guitars, Robertson is giving interviews about Contact while ensconced in a Waldorf-Astoria suite he's staying in for a few days after inducting New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Dressed in his trademark black, drinking from a bottle of Evian, Robertson shared his thoughts about this continent's oldest music, Europe's most futuristic sounds and how he went about linking the two.
You've always been very conscious of rock's roots, working with people like Allen Toussaint and the Meters. How did you come to collaborate with a guy like Howie B?
I'm just naturally curious about what's going on. I heard some things he did on other people's records, like that Everything But The Girl record, and I heard some remixes and I liked some of the work he did on the Passengers record. I don't think too much about it as being futuristic or anything like that. He just sounds like a good music maker to me. Same thing with Marius de Vries, this other guy I worked with ... I didn't think, 'Boy, they're cutting edge.'
Have you been listening to a lot of electronic music?
Yeah, anytime I can hear something interesting I check it out. I listen to Timbaland just as much as the Chemical Brothers. Remember that show Four on the Floor on VH-1? I was one of the guests [a while back] and they asked who everyone was listening to and I said 'the Chemical Brothers.' Everyone was, like, who?
You've been relatively quiet since you released an album of Native American music in 1994. Have you been working on this record since?
I took some time off and I was doing soundtrack work on some films -- Casino, Phenomenon. I started writing some songs in a completely different direction and I thought, 'Well, this is really good medicine for me.' A friend of mine asked me what I was doing next, and I started to tell him and he said to me, 'You opened the door [to Native American music] and now you're going to walk away.' In that half-second, I said, 'No I'm not.' I felt so busted, you know. It seemed so cheesy to say 'I did that; now I'm moving on.' I thought I owed it to myself and to some people who have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this modern version of the sounds of the Native community.
So you basically took elements of some very old music but worked with some decidedly modern musicians.
To me, it's about casting, about putting together a group of musicians for your next record. Sometimes you'd want to work with Booker T and the MGs, and sometimes you'd want to work with other people, older guys, throat singers. I just thought, 'People just don't know this music.' And the fact that it's right here, under your nose, and nobody's turned you on to it ... it seemed like I had a bit of a responsibility to open up those doors and make it available.
Many of the Band's songs deal with the promise of America, for lack of a better phrase, and some of these songs deal with the ways the country has betrayed that promise. Have your feelings about the U.S. changed a lot over the years?
Years ago, when I was writing the Band songs, they were just like little movies to me. I was quite taken with the great American writers like Steinbeck and Faulkner -- you could really feel these people. Also, there were all those years of traveling around down South. When I was 16 years old, when I first went down from Toronto to southeast Arkansas, where Levon Helm is from, I went to his house and his dad was there. And one day in passing, he just said, 'You know Robbie, the South is going to rise again.' Those words echoed in my memory. When I got more acquainted with that part of the world, it became a life-changing inspiration for me. I had the opportunity to come into it very fresh, very young, and I didn't take any of it for granted because I didn't know any of it. It wasn't any big, heady thing for me -- just what I was inspired by at the time.
At the time, my Native heritage was just heritage -- not different from someone else's, you know? People say, 'You never talked much about your connection to the Native community back then.' That's all it was. It's just part of my heritage. I didn't feel it was my obligation to go around chanting, you know?
Who's Red Boy?
It's a character -- and the only derogatory term I've ever been called in my life. When I was a kid, I was playing with my cousins in a field with bows and arrows and some older kids came along and said, 'Hey, red boy.' I didn't get it, but when I looked at my cousins ... boom, it really hit me, what it meant. It was one of those things that just stays with you.
In 1993, Levon Helm wrote an autobiography in which he talks about some of the conflicts surrounding the Band's final years. Have you read it?
I haven't read it. People told me about it, but I just thought I didn't want to rehash this whole thing. And I didn't want to hear about any bitterness or anything. There was another book on the Band [around that time] -- I read like the first 30 pages of it, and there were so many inaccuracies that I just stopped reading. I thought the guy was guessing.
You're one of the few '60s acts who have never really reunited. Are you still in touch with those guys?
Once in a while. Garth Hudson played on one of my solo records. And Richard [Manuel], too, before he died. I have a lot of great memories and I don't have bad thoughts about it. I just feel that I grew out of that and needed to go somewhere else. Challenges, you know?
ROBERT LEVINE
