Robbie Robertson Quotes

Garth was a reservoir of brilliant music, and I wanted to dive in deeply to learn and understand enough of it to appreciate its rewards.

[Springsteen] sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.

their ambitions have a good deal to do with Robbie Robertson’s statement of his ambitions for the Band: “Music should never be harmless.

Robbie Robertson of the Band said he always knew when they were playing in the south, because that’s where everybody claps on the backbeat. Exactly.

This talk of exploding spleens scared the hell out of me. I went back to the apartment and told Dominique what the doctor had said and that he had advised me not to participate in the natural childbirth. She thought it all sounded preposterous. “If anybody’s going to explode, it’s me if I don’t have this baby soon.

One evening in our bedroom, with Dominique asleep and me up watching TV, I was startled by a bird flying manically around the room. After a moment I realized it wasn’t a bird at all—it was a bat. I’d duck every time it flew over the bed, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually I crawled along the floor to the wall and opened a window, and it flew right out. The

No one was a match for Ronnie Hawkins. Garth’s parents gave their blessing, and he became a Hawk. Ronnie paid Garth his customary salary, but the clincher was that the rest of us had to pay Garth ten dollars a week for music lessons. We were thrilled that Garth was finally in the group, but in quiet moments we wondered: Did we just get scammed?

By now I was in the zone. I grabbed an acoustic guitar, tuned it to an open D, and sang for the guys my first draft of “Acadian Driftwood.” The song was inspired by a documentary I had seen in Montreal a while back called L’Acadie, l’Acadie, where for the first time I understood that the name “Cajun” was a southern country slurring of the word “Acadian.” The documentary told a very powerful story about the eighteenth-century expulsion by the British of the Acadians: French settlers in eastern Canada. Thousands of homeless Acadians moved to the area around Lafayette, Louisiana. When I finished playing the song through, Levon patted me on the back and said, “Now that’s some songwritin’ right there, son.” I was proud that he felt so strongly about it. “We’ve got to find the sound of Acadian-Canadian-Cajun gumbo on this one,” I told the guys. “We have to pass the vocal around like a story in an opera. There has to be the slightly out-of-tune quality of a French accordion and fiddle, the depth of a washtub bass—all blending around these open tuning chords on my guitar like a primitive symphony.” When we were recording the song, it felt as authentic as anything we’d ever done.

From a very early age I remember a phrase being quietly passed around among our relatives at Six Nations: "Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.

Let's go over to Salvador Dali's suite at the St. Regis Hotel for a nightcap." This sounded like a surreal idea to me.

Albert said he wanted to invent a delicious sandwich glue so nothing would ever slip out.

Bad habits, we were collecting them like coins, and we knew how that worked: the more you get, the more you want.

The news was somewhere between an incredible accomplishment and a huge disaster.

But it's hard to be judgmental about anybody when you're no angel yourself, so you live and let live without recognizing danger up ahead.

As were images of Shakespeare’s times. An eye-witness to Dylan in Australia that same year, remembered that it “was amazing to watch him work on a song. He would have the poetry of it worked out in his head, and he would say to Robbie [Robertson, guitar player]: ‘…just imagine this cat who is very Elizabethan, with garters and a long shepherd’s horn and he’s coming over the hill with the sun behind him. That’s the sound I want.’”14