Robbie Robertson “Robbie Robertson”
Having a weak singing voice is a problem. In karaoke it can be tolerated through drinks. But as a recording artist, unless you stick to instrumentals, you have a situation. There are many imperfect voices out there — Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson. But they offer something in return that the shiny voices lack: character, authenticity, weight, charm, experience — something. Robertson’s voice has none of these things. It is strained and airy at its comfortable register. And then when it drops down for something of weight, it sounds like Cookie Monster.
There’s a lot being done on Robbie Robertson’s self-titled first solo album to counteract this issue. Daniel Lanois provides rich, moody, layered production. The opening track, “Fallen Angel,” starts weaving a spell, like something serious is coming. It sounds as if it could be an outtake from the work Lanois did on Peter Gabriel’s “So” – wait, isn’t that Peter Gabriel here, on this Robbie Robertson album? Oh, it is. Peter Gabriel is singing the parts that sound good. There’s a similar smoke and mirrors going on when another Lanois collaborator, U2, show up on “Sweet Fire of Love” and “Testimony” Those sound better because — oh, right — that’s Bono.
“Broken Arrow” does manage to get some vulnerability out of Robertson’s vocal shortcomings (would a bag of lozenges in the studio helped?). While a pretty song, I can’t help but think that the chorus is a setup for a punchline:
Who else is going to bring you a broken arrow?
Who else is going to bring you a bottle of rain?
Forest Gump? My kooky Aunt Tilly? Would I believe these lines he wrote if Levon Helm was singing it? I wonder. Robertson’s voice does the trick for me on “Kingdom Come”, the rare lead vocal he took on The Band’s first album. That song sounds a bit like he just got kicked in the nards. But it works. Maybe that was his secret and he couldn’t stand it anymore.
On the solo album’s debut single, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” Robertson speaks half the lines like a smoky, jaded actor in a Skinemax film. As a man, he had clocked enough to be jaded and weathered, but as a voice actor this is not a character I believe. It’s the last in a series of tricks trying to spin a negative into a positive. He belts out the chorus as good as he can — probably his best vocal on the album. But Robertson is then immediately bested with one line sung from back up singer Sammy BoDean, who sounds like he actually lives on that crazy river. There are a lot of voices and sounds and effects on the album that keep pointing out you’d rather hear something other than the artist’s voice.
In 1987 it had been eleven years since Robertson left The Band. There’s some animosity towards him in Band fan circles because as the primary songwriter and most savvy hustler he was the one who got most of the money, despite the Band’s music conjuring up the spirit of an egalitarian commune. There were a lot of drugs and dysfunction in the Band and Robertson spoke of feeling like he had to keep everything running like a den mother. What happened to Mom after the divorce ? He went a bit wild apparently and ramped up his own substance abuse, dating models and being a famous burn out.
There are a couple of guitar forward tracks here that seem to process this self destruction: like “American Roulette” which charges forward and poetically spurts out the dangers of fast living — like if Sammy Hagar went to college. Neither this nor the other power track, “Hells Half Acre,” make the case for Robertson’s guitar as the reason The Band has the feel it did. These licks are all tight and on time. The Band was so loose, like it was effortless. Is this an evolution or art reduced to craft?
Robertson ended up doing a lot of soundtrack work for Scorsese over the years — jukebox picking of popular songs to fit in his movies. It’s a curatorial position. Did he curate The Band? Like he curated his famous concert film “The Last Waltz” into a history of American music? Is his whole solo career, atmospheric and modern, just a smokescreen to cover up the fact that he was not the lead creative force in his famously salt of the earth collaboration? I tried to imagine Levon Helm, Rick Danko or Richard Manuel singing these songs in that barn. Does it all come together? Is this album really from the same artistic voice that gave us all those songs that sounded like a new American Bible; music that might lead us somewhere a little more connected to each other? Robertson’s voice is a symptom, but I want to know if something else In Robertson died, or was that something never there in the first place?
I have no reason to doubt the feelings behind these songs. The raw material seems present but the delivery locked inside. The opening track was written for Robertson’s former bandmate Richard Manuel after his suicide. The saddest tragedy of all is that the song dies without Richard to sing it.