“Sure,” I said. “It would be good to hear what he’s got in mind.”
Albert then asked if I wanted to check out a young road manager by the name of Jon Taplin. Albert said Jon’s goal was to work with the Band, to be our official road manager. He seemed to think Jon had potential—he had been working with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band while he was still studying at Princeton. So I agreed to see him.
The following week, Bill Graham showed up at Albert’s house, and we sat out back under a big tree with the pool in view. Bill had style and grace. He complimented you on everything but your shoes, and you felt sure he was just about to get around to that. You could tell he had the chops for dealing with musicians and truly loved what he did. He told me a short version of his story about escaping Nazi Germany and making it over to America to fulfill his dreams. He was a fascinating, vital character, all the more so when he got down to business.
Somehow Bill was under the impression that we weren’t planning to play live at all. “You’ve got to show up,” he implored. “You’ve got to come out and be there for ‘the people,’ for the kids that worship your music. It’s the right thing to do. You can’t disappoint ‘the people,’ ” he went on. “It means so much to them. I can’t express strongly enough how much this means.” After that moving sermonette I didn’t want to admit that the Band fully intended to give concerts. But I also didn’t want to go into detail on Rick’s accident and recovery, so I thought the best thing to do was to let Bill give his speech and do his dance, and then act converted. I told him and Albert that we would give them dates when we could play Bill’s venue Winterland in San Francisco and his recently created Fillmore East on Second Avenue in New York. These would be our first shows as “the Band.” Bill got up and bowed like this was a holy moment in his mission to Woodstock.
When he left, Albert looked pleased. “Bill Graham is unquestionably the P. T. Barnum of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “You can put up with all the hot air because the guy really believes his own bullshit…and that’s a big part of being good at what you do. By the way, can you meet soon with Jon Taplin? He’s driving me crazy—calling and leaving messages. I’ll tell you, you’re not going to find anybody who wants the job more than him. I think he’s got some free guitars for you too.” Albert smiled. “At least meet with him and get him off my back.”
Not long after, Jon Taplin showed up at my house with two guitars in his hands. Now, if guitar players have a soft spot, being offered unusual, free guitars is one of them. He handed me one. “Here, you want to try this out?” The instrument was called a Melobar—basically a slide guitar that you could play standing up. It did feel good, and kind of sporty with its modern design. Jon seemed like a very ambitious, smart, dedicated person. He was just about to graduate from Princeton on a film he’d made and claimed that Music from Big Pink had had a profound effect on his life and his view of music. There was nothing he wanted more than to be affiliated with the Band and work as our road manager. Shortly after that, we hired him.
—
Visiting Rick in the hospital was encouraging. As his hair grew back, like Samson’s, so did his strength. He was from tough, hardworking stock, and it showed in how quickly he was recovering. His doctor advised, “You can’t cheat the system, and the healing process will take its own time, especially with a broken neck,” but there was a chance he would be out of traction and able to go home a little earlier than estimated. He had decided to marry his girlfriend, Grace, when he got back on his feet. She had been there for him through the whole ordeal and they had grown very close.
I had started writing a couple of songs for our next album and asked Richard to join me. I had some chord changes that I played for him on guitar, and he had the beginning of a chord progression that I liked, but they were in different keys. Rather than change the key on one of our ideas to accommodate the other, we tried the chords I had in the key of E for the verse and B section and went to the key of C for Richard’s part in the chorus. After the third chorus, I made up an outro section back in E. When we were happy with the structure, I asked him if he had any ideas for words. But he said that lyrics just weren’t coming to him lately, and he would leave that in my corner. I asked him, “What do you think about ‘When you awake, you will remember everything’?” He gave me a thumbs-up.
Sometimes I would get together with just Garth or Levon to see if we could stir something up songwise. Levon would groove along on drums or mandolin, but he was much more comfortable accompanying. Making up a tune made him restless and uneasy, so I didn’t want to push it. With Garth, every time we sat down it was like a musical journey into the cosmos, a lesson in improvisation. Beautiful stuff came out of it, but no defined structures, nothing I could repeat or build upon.
Before we released Big Pink, Albert had asked me how we wanted to handle the song publishing. A mystery loomed around music publishing—like electricity, you needed it but you didn’t know where it came from. Some of this was left over from the song-plugging days when publishing houses would go out and try to get artists to record material they represented. Albert said it was standard for his management company to get a piece of the publishing. The song royalties were typically split 50 percent to the songwriter and 50 percent to publishing. Often in the past songwriters were lucky if they got any of the publishing. That was just one more way artists could get taken advantage of. Hell, it had been much worse in the fifties, when record execs, DJs, or publishers would even steal some of the songwriter’s portion. The record would come out and you’d see someone else’s name as cowriter, much like I had with Morris Levy and Roulette Records when I was fifteen.
I told Albert that, as with our record royalties, I wanted to share the publishing equally with the other guys. He said, “You can if you want, but you certainly don’t have to.” I understood that, but sharing it just felt right. Also, I told him that I’d like to publish all our Big Pink and basement songs with Bob’s publishing company, Dwarf Music. The gesture seemed appropriate given how supportive Bob had been of the Band. Albert said it sounded fine to him, but he reiterated that it was very generous. He didn’t want me coming back later saying, “Why did you let me do something I didn’t have to do?”
When I told the guys I thought we should share the song publishing five ways, they were in total agreement and very appreciative. The idea of publishing our first record and the basement tunes with Dwarf Music was a harder sell. They thought it might be an unnecessary measure. Richard and I, the two main songwriters in the group, pushed for it. Garth wasn’t really objecting; he’d go with the consensus. Rick and Levon took convincing but came around after a couple of meetings. Soon after, while Bob and I were riding along in his automobile, I told him about the gesture we wanted to make, to him and to Dwarf Music. He was genuinely surprised and grateful.
—
Dominique, who was four months into her pregnancy, decided she wanted to do natural childbirth and that we needed to start Lamaze exercises daily. I was very proud of her desire to be a super-healthy mom and deliver the healthiest baby possible. We started a serious regimen of exercise, macrobiotic diet, breathing program—the works. Dominique had always been in good shape, but now—look out! Our marriage and the pregnancy were helping us mature into family mode quite beautifully. She insisted on having the baby in Montreal. It was unimaginable to her not to give birth in her own language, in her own country. And if being there made her feel totally covered, that was all that mattered to me. So she went up to find the right doctor and make arrangements with her parents so we could stay with them when she was due.
I knew it would be tough to get much songwriting done at her folks’ apartment, and there was pressure coming from all around now: if we couldn’t go out and do concerts, we needed to make a new record. Our friend Al Aronowitz said he had been contacted by Rolling Stone to write the cover story on the Band, and he asked us if we would please finally consent. He was a good buddy of ours and a good rock journalist, and if
we were going to do it with anybody, it would be Al. I asked him not to write about Rick’s accident, and not to reveal too much about us personally, and said that we’d give it a shot.
In late August the article hit the newsstands, with an Elliott Landy photo on the cover. It showed the Band, shot from behind, sitting on a bench with not quite enough room for all five of us. Elliott had come around the back of the bench and photographed us from behind to match a shot he’d taken from the front. I thought it was bold of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone to use the back shot, which didn’t show our faces. And Al Aronowitz wrote a nice story without blowing our cover.
Around this time, there was a chord progression and melody rumbling through my head, but I didn’t know yet what the song was about. I played it on the piano one day for Levon. He liked the way it stopped and started, free of tempo. I flashed back to when he first took me to meet his parents in Marvell, Arkansas, and his daddy said, “Don’t worry, Robin—the South is going to rise again.” I told Levon I wanted to write lyrics about the Civil War from a southern family’s point of view. “Don’t mention Abraham Lincoln in the lyrics” was his only advice. “That won’t go down too well.” I asked him to drive me to the Woodstock library so I could do a little research on the Confederacy. They didn’t teach that stuff in Canadian schools.
When I conjured up a story about Virgil Caine and his kin against this historical backdrop, the song came to life for me. Though I did stop and wonder, Can I get away with this? You call this rock ’n’ roll? Maybe!
The next day I sang the chorus of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to Richard and Levon. I still had to shape the lyrics in the verses, but I thought I was on the right track.
Writing “To Kingdom Come” and “The Weight” for Big Pink had felt like a real breakthough and opened a door, but now I felt as if I was entering a whole new realm. The songs that were starting to filter through me rang with a darker mood and an earthiness that offered the clue I was searching for. This new material was more raw. As I wrote, I started thinking about where we should record these songs. If we could find a unique setting, something unexpected might come from it, and I asked Jon Taplin to look into spaces we might convert into a place to record.
Rick was finally out of traction, and we all went to pick him up at the hospital. Hallelujah! Of course, he would have to take it slow and easy for a while, and he walked unsteadily and cautiously, but you could see the joy in his eyes at being set free. He talked immediately about getting a guitar and a bass to start hardening up the calluses on his fingers. At home, I played him some of the song ideas I had cooking. He tried to play along, but we were getting a bit ahead of ourselves and he needed to rest.
True to his word, Rick set a date for his wedding to Grace. When that day arrived, we dressed up to see him down the aisle. He was walking very stiffly; he couldn’t turn his head, and you could see in his hairline where the traction tongs had been. What a trouper, I thought. I didn’t know if I could have pulled it off in that condition.
Now it also looked like Richard and his girlfriend, Jane, might soon take the plunge. You would think from this that we were all growing up and settling down. But not quite. One day I heard Richard spinning a story to Levon about another rent-a-car mishap: “Somebody must have come along in the middle of the night and banged it all up.” He claimed that at Hertz in Kingston they no longer lied to him about not having any vehicles to rent. Instead they would simply lock the door and hide when they saw him coming.
In December, Dominique and I got settled in her parents’ apartment in the Côte-des-Neiges area of Montreal. By then we were deep into the Lamaze breathing exercises, and Dominique was solid as a rock, in great shape for natural childbirth. But soon after we arrived my stomach started bothering me, and Dominique’s father, Georges, made arrangements for me to go see his MD. The doctor felt all over my abdomen and examined me thoroughly. He asked if I was working in Montreal. I told him my wife and I were here to have our baby. “We’ve chosen natural childbirth,” I added proudly.
The doctor looked concerned. “You have a swollen spleen, and a natural birth is very intense. You should not be there for the delivery.”
“I have to be there,” I said. “My wife and I have a whole routine of Lamaze practices, and it’s a partnership. The breathing, the pushing, the communication, the whole works.”
The doctor leaned over his desk and said, “I cannot recommend you do this. You need to remain very calm. No exertion, no strain or stress. If you go through with this, your spleen could rupture and explode.”
I stood up. “Explode? My spleen could explode? I never heard of such a thing.”
“I don’t think this is how you want to find out,” the doctor said.
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.”
On Boxing Day in Canada, the day after Christmas, we turned in for the night. Suddenly Dominique sat up and said, “My water broke!” We leaped into action. Dominique’s father grabbed her suitcase and ran out the door, forgetting his daughter. He came charging back in, and we all carefully headed for the car through ice and snow. I was trying to project my best Zen attitude, even if this was the most exciting moment of our lives.
As we settled in at the hospital, everything was in French, just as Dominique had wanted. Sometimes I didn’t know what was going on, but my job was to go with the flow, stay calm, hold Dominique’s hand, and start the breathing exercises. Smooth rhythm, hours passing, everything going like clockwork, then kaboom! Dominique crushed my fingers in her hand and screamed blue murder.
“Holy fucking hell, I can’t! I can’t, it’s killing me!”
I said, “Breathe…harder, faster…keep breathing”—as I breathed with her—“just do it!”
She screamed, “I can’t, you fucking bastard! Look what you’ve done. Ahhhh!”
The nurse said in French and English, “Push. Push. Pousser…It’s coming.”
“Keep breathing! Keep pushing!” I yelled, thinking, My spleen better not explode now. Oh shit. “Breathe…breathe. Push…push.”
The doctor cried, “Oui! Parfait! Here we go. Yes. Yes! You have a beautiful…petite fille.”
Calmness settled over Dominique immediately, and she cooed at the sound of our baby daughter having a good little cry. What a feeling—something so chilling and so thrilling. I had never seen Dominique this happy, this content, or this glowing before.
Alexandra Fanny Robertson lifted our lives up and forward. Dominique and I spent a couple of days just mesmerized by the fact that now there were three of us. As soon as we got our wits about us, though, the first thing we had to do was to get out of this freezing weather. We had decided to go get “healthed up” in Hawaii and rented a house on the water in Waikiki. It’s a long haul from Quebec to the Hawaiian Islands, and we worried about the baby the whole way. Alexandra sneezed once on the flight over and we panicked. Landing in Hawaii, we went straight to the nearest hospital. Of course she was perfectly fine. Her parents were just new, nervous nellies.
I had made arrangements for John Simon and his wife, Brooke, to meet us in Waikiki so John and I could start going over material for our new record. They settled nicely into our pad as Dominique and I started learning how to become Mom and Pop. John kindly agreed to become Alexandra’s godfather, and we felt that everything was falling into place.
I played John a song I was writing in a new guitar tuning I’d found by accident. I called the song “Unfaithful Servant.” John thought it had a cinematic quality and asked who I had in mind to sing it.
“Rick. For sure, Rick,” I said. “Now that he’s back in action, I believe he’ll do it splendid justice.” I felt strongly that one of my jobs in the band was to wr
ite parts that suited the individual voices of my bandmates.
In the meantime, Jon Taplin found us a house up on Sunset Plaza in the Hollywood Hills where we could do some recording. It was a place Sammy Davis Jr. had owned. Our plan was to turn Sammy’s pool house into a makeshift studio; we’d record our album there, rather than booking time in a professional studio. Nobody was thinking along these lines back then, and Capitol Records thought we were crazy. But my theory was that the Band could do something truly original if we had our own atmosphere, a music machine that ran on our course of time and creativity. We asked Capitol to find us a little recording console, an eight-track machine, some mics, and monitor speakers and amps. Easier said than done, but our A&R man, John Palladino, had faith that we knew what we were doing and put the plan in motion.
Bringing our musical equipment across the country from upstate New York to LA would be a chore in itself. Jon Taplin brought on Lindsay Holland, a friend of his from school, and Bill Scheele, a rough and ready guy who could handle things the rest of us couldn’t dream of. They drove out to California through ice storms and wicked weather that wasn’t for the meek-hearted. Dominique and I flew to LA from Hawaii with Alexandra and met up with Garth, Rick and Gracie, Richard and Jane, and Levon at the Sammy Davis Jr. house. We even brought Mama Kosh out to help with the baby and do some cooking. Having our whole crew with us in this temporary homestead gave us a good feeling, but turning the pool house into a studio was a much bigger undertaking than I had imagined. We had to soundproof the place from the outside, which made it look like some kind of a military bunker. Inside, carpet was laid everywhere to help the sound and to ensure that we could work at all hours without bothering the neighbors. Getting the electronic equipment in and wired seemed to take forever. We carried one upright piano down the hill into the pool house and brought another down to the little apartment area where Dominique and I were staying with the baby.
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