robbie robertson on KCRW

I have been a big fan of Robbie Robertson since his solo release came out when I was ten years old. I just listened to a podcast interview that KCRW did with him recently.

Robbie has working on a big The Band retrospective called A Musical History as well as working on a Native American Broadway musical. he also finished up the soundtack to Raging Bull that has been 25 years in the making. I guess it was very hard to get permissions to all the songs they used in the movie.

No new solo albums though. ahh well...i'll have to settle for previously unreleased tracks then.

The retrospective of The Band sound pretty amazing. It has a ton of songs that had never been released. Some of these songs had never even gotten mixed properly and Robbie talked about how he had completely forgotten about these songs. He also talked about how he first met up with Bob Dylan and the early days of The Band touring the Chitlin' circuit. They toured then as Levon and the Hawks. Basically they played down south in really sketchy clubs - he describes it as:

almost an initiation...to play these places and come out alive.

I got a message to come and meet with him (Dylan) in New York...We weren't from the >folk music side of the tracks. They made that music in coffee houses and stuff. Where >we played, nobody was drinking coffee.

However, they did meet, hit it off amazingly well, and started playing together.

In addition to "A Musical History", Robbie Robertson's original two solo albums are being reissued together as well with some never before released tracks. One of them is a take of the song Testimony (from his first solo album) with U2 and horns by Gil Evans. that's getting released Dec 9 from Geffen Universal. I can't find a link for that album yet on Amazon.

Side note about KCRW: My one complaint about KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic podcasts is that sometimes they don't play full songs on the podcasts. I don't know if this is a problem with certain labels or whether the music is being played live or what. But I wish they would play full songs on their podcasts - they get you all into the song, then cut it off. Please please play the whole song...I promise I will still buy the album!

Link to podcast Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes