Testimony

by Robbie Robertson

  We got in a few songs between the June downpours, and when we finished I yelled, “Somebody’s got to do something. This is going to be a disaster.” Dr. John, the Night Tripper, was also on the two-day festival, and he heard me as we headed into the wings. In his gris-gris New Orleans drawl he said, “I think we can do something about this rain. Might have something in my satchel.” He and his band kicked into their set, defying the downpour, and sounded fantastic—voodoo rising into the night sky. As they finished their first song, Dr. John released his guitar and raised a shaker above his head. And just like that, the rains came to a halt. Now, I’m not making any comment about black magic, but the damn rain just stopped.

  Next we were asked to play the Mississippi Riverboat Festival—and the name sounded so cool I asked Bob if he wanted to come and sing a couple of tunes with us. He said, “Sure, what would you want to do?”

  “Whatever you feel like singing. You want to do something from your last record, the basement, one of the older tunes? You name ’em, and we’ll play ’em. In the words of Jimmy Reed.”

  He nodded. “Okay, we’ll figure it out on the way there.” He knew by now we could tackle any of these tunes on a moment’s notice. It felt so natural playing with Bob again, and together we gave that crowd an unexpected finale that included Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” and an old mountain song called “In the Pines.”

  Albert told me that a 150-year-old stone house straight through the woods from his place had come on the market. The property also had a beautiful, large wooden artist’s studio and a very big swimming pool. Albert said the “Hood House” had previously been owned by Evelyn Hood, a concert violinist. He’d heard stories that she would go into the snow-covered woods and play her violin wearing nothing but a fur coat. I told Albert it was highly unlikely I could afford it. “Yes, you can,” he said. “I’ll help you work it out.”

  —

  For Dominique and me, it was our first real home together, though it needed a lot of fixing up and painting. Our road crew, Jon Taplin, Bill Scheele, and sometimes his brother John, along with Lindsay Holland, helped get the place in shape. Dominique and Alexandra and I stayed in Albert and Sally’s guest house while our new home was being prepared. One day, while I was over at Richard’s working on a new song called “Whispering Pines,” Dominique wanted to get a new crib for the baby and Garth offered to take her to Kingston to pick one up. She told me that when she and Garth got back to the guesthouse, there were some strange people lounging around inside, eating our food. Albert and Sally weren’t around, and not knowing who these people were, Garth went in and kicked them out while Dominique stayed with the baby. It turned out that it was Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. They got back into their psychedelic-painted bus and drove off.

  —

  We went back into New York to record a few more tracks to finish our album at Jerry Ragovoy’s Hit Factory studio on West 48th Street. Jerry, who had written “Time Is on My Side and “Piece of My Heart,” said the place used to be Cecil B. DeMille’s old headquarters, and there were still some artifacts left in a storage room from The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth. Jerry liked to use the stairwell in the building as an echo chamber, but the reverb was too long and echo-ey for the flavor of music we were making. So we changed the type of speaker in the stairwell and moved the microphone closer to it, which shortened the reverb.

  I had a new song called “Jemima Surrender” that I tried to get Levon to work on with me—I had a feeling he might enjoy getting his hooks into this one. And though he did come up with a guitar riff for the intro and turnarounds, he couldn’t get into words or structure. But I was just happy to have him involved. We tried recording it with Levon singing while playing guitar, kick drum, and high hat, all at the same time—a one-man band—but that didn’t fly. So Richard took over on drums and Garth moved to piano while Levon and I riffed on guitar. Levon and Richard’s vocals gave a straightforward and humorous spin to the words. Sometimes I couldn’t be sure if a lyrical idea really worked until I heard it sung just right. “Sweet Jemima won’t you come out tonight, the ground is so warm and the moon is so bright.” We finished off by recording “Whispering Pines.” This mood, this performance, was different from everything else we’d cut. I really liked the haunting quality of the track, the distance and loneliness of Richard’s vocal.

  When it came time to mix the album, we went back to A&R Studios. Tony May was the assigned mixing engineer; he had done an outstanding job on the Isley Brothers’ recording “It’s Your Thing.” But when he heard our recordings he wasn’t thrilled with my and John Simon’s engineering abilities. He kept saying he was going to have to fix this or fix that. At one point Rick asked Tony if he was adding reverb to the bass. “Don’t worry about what I’m doing,” Tony replied. “Let’s just see if I can make these tracks sound any good.” That pissed me off.

  He mixed two songs and I didn’t like his idea of what this music should sound like at all. He tried to shine it up but made it sound ordinary. I wanted to go back to the Hit Factory and work with their recording engineer, Joe Zagarino, who I felt had an understanding of what we were looking for. So we returned to our subtle stairwell-echo-chamber setup, brought in our own monitors, and mixed the record precisely how we thought it should sound. We all had our hands on the faders of the mixing console, getting the moves just right.

  Next John Simon and I went to the highly regarded mastering engineer Bob Ludwig at Sterling Sound. Mastering is the process where they fine-tune the tonality and cut the master disc from which all the records are pressed. Bob listened to our mixes and told us that he thought mastering this record was going to be problematic because the mixes were so dense and heavy. But leave the tapes with him, he said, and he’d see what he could do. I left there feeling let down and worried that our recording experiment might have failed—Bob Ludwig had mastered many, many great records and he knew his stuff. I told the other guys and no one knew what to say. Making a record, you get so close to the music that after a while you realize that your perspective is definitely questionable. Still, I didn’t understand how I could be so wrong.

  A couple of days later Bob Ludwig called me, his words punctuated with nervous laughter; it turned out he was calling to apologize profusely for his misjudgment of the sonic quality of our record. He’d realized that the album had a depth and richness, with a unique character that he couldn’t even describe. He finished off by saying that it was also one of the best records he’d ever heard. Well, that was certainly a tremendous relief to hear.

  —

  In the spring we’d got word that some promoters wanted to put on a huge music festival in Woodstock. Why Woodstock? Why this simple little art colony in upstate New York? “It’s the mystique of the Band and Dylan,” said Albert, “and the way other musicians are converging on the town.” He said he had met with Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, two of the concert organizers, and he liked them. Albert embraced the idea of Woodstock becoming a cultural mecca because he had ambitions of making Bearsville his own center of the universe. I was of two minds: the festival might make the place more interesting, or it could ruin its charm.

  Michael Lang had approached Albert about the Band performing, saying he thought it would be appropriate if we closed things out at midnight on the festival’s final night. The Band would be the only act in the three-day event that actually lived in Woodstock. It all sounded nice on paper, so we agreed.

  The show promoters couldn’t find a site around Woodstock, so they settled on a big farm in Bethel, New York—quite a distance from Woodstock, but they wanted to stick with the name. The festival was set for August 15, 16, and 17, and as it grew nearer, we kept hearing about all kinds of problems cropping up. First, the townspeople of Woodstock were annoyed that the event was being called The Woodstock Festival: 3 Days of Peace and Music. Too much hippiedom in that title for their liking, and, worse, hordes of
people would likely descend on Woodstock itself in search of the festival. Meanwhile, the town of Bethel was panicked about how to supply enough water and food, let alone restroom facilities, for a few hundred thousand people. There was nothing there to start with but an empty field.

  With the stories growing wilder each day, Dominique decided not to attend the festival, and I didn’t feel that much different myself. By the third day of the event, we heard that all roads were closed coming and going around Bethel. Someone said there were now close to half a million people at the site. We had to be flown in by helicopter. Our pilot circled over the crowd on the way in, and it was astonishing. None of us had seen an audience of 500,000 people before, and it was hard to comprehend this vast gathering, with people packed together as far as the eye could see in every direction. On the one hand it was an incredible accomplishment, and on the other, somewhat frightening.

  The helicopter landed in a backstage area that looked like a village unto itself, and as we disembarked, various attendees and staff greeted us like we were entering the gates of Eden. They offered a stream of insights into this eighth wonder of the world, as well as brownies laced with everything under the sun. One of the greeters was someone we’d met before, Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy, a sight to be seen here in white overalls with purple-stained pockets. We soon learned that the stains were from Owsley Stanley’s special LSD pills, which Hugh was handing out like cough drops for anything that might ail you. Experimenting with hallucinogens wasn’t on the menu for us; we had to be on our game for this extravaganza.

  As we were settling in to our little camp area, Michael Lang came over and whispered to me, “We have a slight problem.” How could we not? I thought to myself. “Jimi Hendrix claims he was promised that he could close the show,” Michael said, “and he won’t perform unless he can go on last. I know I said you guys should close, but he’s making a big stink over it. I’m sorry, but would you mind going on at nine, when it gets dark?” I thought if we could do our thing earlier and get out of here unscathed, so much the better. All of it felt a bit out of our comfort zone; that the whole thing was called “Woodstock” made it even more suspect.

  With hours left before we went on, a parade of backstage personnel and musicians kept stopping by to see if we wanted to partake in various intoxicants. I’d never turned down so many offers to get stoned in one day, ever. Albert helped bat away these stoner flies while reading the riot act to the camera crew filming the concert about what they shouldn’t do during our performance: “No cameras on the stage. No running around with handheld cameras.” The film director, Michael Wadleigh, objected to these restrictions, but Albert was exceptionally good at saying no.

  When Jimi Hendrix arrived, I was told he wanted to explain why he insisted on closing the show. I relayed that we were cool, no explanation necessary, but he wanted to say hello anyway. We hadn’t really caught up in years, since back in my Chelsea Hotel days, and it was great to see him. He looked like a different person in his rock-star British garb. And so did I, he remarked. We just stood there for a moment, looking each other over and laughing.

  “Man,” he said, “I wanted to tell you I covered that song you did with Dylan, ‘Crawl Out Your Window,’ and I copied your guitar lick. I borrowed it. I didn’t steal it.”

  “It’s yours. It’s a gift from the old days.”

  He gave me a hug. “Your record Big Pink has changed the musical landscape. It’s like you turned the music world on its head. I dig it.” I appreciated Jimi’s endorsement, especially because our record underplayed lengthy guitar solos. Then he reminded me of when we were hanging out in the Village together, and how badly he had wanted to learn to write songs. “I’m still working on it, baby. Don’t know if I’m getting any better, but I’m trying.” He smiled. “And hey, I’m sorry about this mix-up with who’s going on last. I’m not doing some ego bullshit. They just told me if I agreed to be on the show, I could go on whenever I want.” I assured him it wasn’t in any way an issue with us.

  As the evening wore on, the guys and I took a moment to gauge how everyone was feeling. “I might have to do some dancing during our set,” Rick joked. “You have to keep them entertained, boys.”

  “Well, do you think I should stand on the piano to sing?” Richard joked. “You know, so the people in the back can see.” We all agreed—Oh, yeah, absolutely! These showbiz antics couldn’t have been more adverse to anything we would ever do.

  The show was running way behind, but eventually it came time for us to hit the stage. Albert and Sally were right there to protect and comfort us, knowing how virginal we were to this kind of experience. Michael Lang kept telling us that this was now the largest festival audience in the world; there’d been two babies born, and the gathering now qualified as one of the biggest cities in the tristate area.

  The audience looked and felt manic as we took the stage, a sea of faces and bodies and colors stretching out beyond the horizon. We sensed them wanting to rock, to go crazy. If that was the case, boy, did they dial a wrong number putting us on in the peak hour of the festival’s final night. Most performers on the show wanted to “take you higher,” but we took the stage at 10:00 p.m. and proceeded to play a set that we might have done in the living room at Big Pink…talk about settling things down. Some folks in the crowd were still jumping up and down wanting to go wild, but many sat down and were swaying to the music—taking it in like a spiritual missive. What else could they do? It was overwhelming; I could hardly look out at the crowd. I got so lost inside my guitar that I barely knew where I was.

  When the helicopter flew us out of there around one in the morning, it felt like a relief. As exciting as the event was, it came with a sense of chaos, the feeling that anything could go very wrong at any moment. Looking down at the crowd, you could already see an exodus of people, even though we’d been told by one of the promoters that it looked like the show probably wouldn’t end until dawn. Thank heavens Jimi insisted on playing last, I thought. We would have been like zombies come sunup.

  Back home, there was a chill in the air. Woodstock had suddenly become the most famous small town in the world, and as far as the locals were concerned, that wasn’t good news. They were not keen on the festival at all, and the Band’s participation sent the wrong message. Word got back to us that some of the townspeople felt betrayed that we had in any way encouraged this parade of tourists from hell. They saw it as the attack of the hippie monster. I started noticing that no one would wait on me when I went to the stores. When I asked questions, the clerks just shrugged.

  I understood how the Woodstock folks felt about this invasion of their privacy. At the same time, we were having an invasion of privacy all our own. We heard that quite a few songs from the basement tapes had been released on a bootleg album called Great White Wonder. It might have been naive on our part to think the public would never hear these songs—only certain recording artists and publishers. This was private, personal music being made for us by us, and only a few tracks were meant to be shared with the outside world. This bootleg was becoming a phenomenon, the biggest bootleg record of all time. Lawyers and record companies and publishers all went after the bootleggers, but it was too late. The tornado had come and gone, but more bootleggers were lying in wait. The whole thing pissed Bob off; it was like someone listening in on your phone conversation and stealing from you at the same time.

  We had made a commitment to play at the Isle of Wight Festival in England with Bob just eleven days after the Woodstock event. This would be Bob’s first full live concert since his motorcycle accident. I asked him if I should coordinate things with Albert. But Bob said that he and Al were having some differences these days. I had never heard Bob refer to Albert as “Al” before. It sounded strange, and I was disheartened to hear that they were at odds. Bob and Albert had always seemed to be a great team and a powerful duo. It could have been that Bob saw Albert’s involvement as specific to setting up tours or getting a record de
al, but beyond the Isle of Wight there were no plans for him to go back on the road and tour in the near future. And anyway, Albert was more focused these days on building his empire in Bearsville.

  The arrangement for the Isle of Wight was that we would play a set with Bob and one on our own. We didn’t have much time to run over songs for the show, so we decided to fly over a few days early and rehearse. The Isle of Wight is an island off the south coast of England that had been a home of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Bob rented a house in the small town of Bembridge, with a building where we could work out some material, while the Band stayed at a nearby hotel.

  John, George, and Ringo came down for a visit with their better halves to catch some of the show. John appeared thinner with his shoulder-length hair. He and Yoko were looking similar in spirit as well as physically, and they sat quietly in the corner smiling and holding hands as we rehearsed. George and Pattie cheered us on and made song requests like “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and “To Kingdom Come.” And Ringo made Levon’s day as he marched around the room peering through his sunglasses yelling, “Turn up the drums! We need more drums!”

  Before we hit the stage, we heard that the police were having problems with the crowd. Of course, at such an event there’s going to be some unruly suspects—especially in the British Isles, where they have rivers of beer flowing and lochs of scotch whiskey and gin. But the promoters said the police had German shepherds attacking people who were trying to crash the gates. Not what you wanted to hear before you go on. It sounded ugly and disturbing.