Other men had previously shown these qualities, but only over an historical range as long as their own conscious lifetimes. 1 don't count this as a situation to be smug or proud about - I simply suggest that the situation exists, and faces a practitioner of Robertson's outstanding gifts with some uncomfortable choices.Īt a time when the serious rock lyricists in this country were still learning about Randy Newman from Alan Price albums, Robertson struck home as the most compact, compressed, clean-edged talent thus far to emerge. These effects in their full force are available only to an élite. The mass acceptance of the Band has obviously got very little to do with Robertson's unique range of effects as a lyricist. We should be able to deduce from this piquant little scene - if we can't deduce it from larger and often catastrophic events - that the rock culture is a mass audience and that the individual talent if it wishes to preserve itself, must in part treat acceptance by this mass audience as hostile. Joan Baez made Robertson a million while simultaneously showing him that his talent was, for all practical purposes, over-refined: its subtleties hadn't registered. It was one of those moments when the air was vibrant with the flap and wrangle of chickens coming home to roost. It had never done much to pay Robertson his due tribute by analysing his precisions and structures - precisions whose importance Baez underlined by transforming them into imprecisions, structures to whose emotional coherence Baez paid inadvertent homage by reducing them to prettified wreckage. But the critical outcry (and there was some of that, to do the rock press credit) had only a shakey base to work from. There was something heroic about the casual violence of her assault on the lyric, which would probably have received more reverential treatment from Lulu. The rock culture's tribute to the Band reached its logical culmination in the Joan Baez hit version of 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. And this, in turn, has probably got a lot to do with the fact that his initial virtues as a lyricist were not identified for him by the rapturous critical reception that praised the Band for everything except its most singular quality - its radiant compound of words and music. It's much more likely that something has occurred to dissuade his intelligence from operating. To put it briefly, I don't think any cosmic triple-whammy or Indian sign has been put on Robertson in order to deprive him of his creative intelligence. ![]() The Band's (and particularly Robertson's) incapacity to keep up the pressure of completed, filled-out achievement can most probably be written down to those sociological conditions which only an acutely self-preserving personality like Randy Newman has so far been able to out-flank. ![]() I don't want to be thought of as suggesting that this rapid boom-and-bust was written in the stars or has got something to do with an inherent inability of rock to sustain its own creativity: rock seems to me a form which can be worked with to infinity, and whatever laws govern the behaviour of its practitioners, they are not astral. In Cahoots Robertson's writing is reduced to plasma and the Band's musicality has started to sound mechanical. In Stage Fright the Band maintains its musicality but Robertson's lyricism is already softening its focus. In the second album they are both at their peak, producing one of the few rock artifacts in which every potentiality is completely realised. In Music from Big Pink both the Band and Robertson are on the climb. Abruptly and crudely, these convictions run as follows. In the second place, it will conform with my own convictions - perhaps idiosyncratic, certainly not widely professed - about the relative worth of the four Band albums we have had so far. In the first place, this will be a necessary step in trying to isolate Robertson's characteristics as a lyricist. There are good reasons for keeping these priorities, but for my own purposes I want to stand them on their heads, talking about Robertson as the master spirit and leaving the Band, with a capital 'B', out of account. Please do not copy or redistribute.ĬONSIDERING the Band, we tend to think first about its marvellous ensemble musicality and only incidentally about Jaime Robbie Robertson. Robbie Robertson - In the Shadow of The BandĪrticle copyright © Clive James. Clive James: Robbie Robertson - In the Shadow of The Band<</p>
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