Testimony

by Robbie Robertson

  The guys and I were in search of a new clubhouse, a place where we could gather and write and record songs but that offered a higher level of recording possibilities than we’d had at Big Pink. Our search led us to a strange ranch-type place off the Pacific Coast Highway, across from Zuma Beach. The more we found out about it, the more we liked it. It was called Shangri-La and consisted of a large house with little motel-like rooms built on the end. The walls were covered in velvet, and just outside were corrals for horses. No one could figure out quite why a house would need a little motel attached to the back of it, until we learned that it used to be a whorehouse for cowboys who worked in the area. If those walls could talk.

  We turned a big playroom area into a full-on recording studio. Our soundman, Ed Anderson, was in charge of making it work, and Rob Fraboni helped figure out how to get the most professional setup and what gear we needed. Soon it was starting to feel like the real thing—a little music factory.

  While the studio was coming together, the Band went out on the road to finish the dates Elliot Roberts had set up for us, but Richard wasn’t doing so well. The bottle and drugs were sneaking up on him and wearing him down, night after night. He tried to not let it affect his performing, but he often complained about losing his voice or feeling sick. We grew more worried. In Cleveland, toward the end of the show he collapsed, and we had to get the paramedics. As they carried Richard past us on a stretcher, Levon called out, “Get up and walk like a man!” Richard looked over at him with a shocked expression on his face.

  Levon had reached his limit with Richard not holding up his end and always making excuses. We were all fed up, but it surprised us that he chose to voice his opinion at such a sensitive moment. Eventually the doctors confirmed that Richard was terribly run down from alcohol and drug abuse and needed time to recover, so we canceled the remaining dates of the tour.

  Still, we weren’t off the road for long, and by the middle of September we were at Wembley Stadium in London. Elliot had put together a show there with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Joni Mitchell, and us. The day before the gig I found myself on a little stage somewhere blowing the roof off the joint in a jam session with Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Neil Young, and others. Jimmy and I traded licks back and forth, just messing around. Neil tried to turn something into a song, but it was a bit too loose for that. John Bonham wasn’t bashing and crashing but floating, scaling the surface like a seagull on the hunt.

  London felt alive and stirring, and bringing our North American sound over fit in nicely there. Our collective forces, though, brought out the most wicked rock ’n’ roll behavior, with Stephen Stills and David Crosby leading the charge. London, for whatever reason, cried out for pure madness. Trouble was brewing, and we couldn’t wait to grab hold of it: first the drugs, then the whiskey, then the rock ’n’ roll. There were so many crazies hanging out, it felt like we could have elected Keith Moon as prime minister. Rick gathered up Bianca Jagger and Britt Ekland from the side of the stage and pulled them into our web. I don’t remember what happened that night, but when I saw Rick the next day, he was clean-shaven. I hadn’t seen him clean-shaven in years.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Who knows?” said Rick. “Someone didn’t want whisker burn. But it’s like the glass slipper in Cinderella. To find her we’d have to search the kingdom and see who has the most sensitive skin.”

  I remember vividly the day I got home to Malibu and walked in the front door. Delphine wrapped herself around one of my legs, and Alexandra around the other. Sebastian was bouncing in a Jolly Jumper device at the end of the hall. Best feeling in the world. Dominique made the girls let go of my legs after a few steps, knowing I must be feeling like a zombie after flying for twelve hours.

  —

  I started pushing to get our new clubhouse studio, Shangri-La, sounding great and ready for action. Soon as I could, I got in there and started making an album with Hirth Martinez. Notwithstanding his “Hirth from Earth” moniker, he truly was a musical alien, and his diverse style of songwriting gave me an opportunity to study and explore different ways of producing. I asked Hirth if he did any live gigs around town. “Oh yes,” he said. “I sometimes play at a Laundromat in Hollywood. And on occasion I go to a mental hospital and do a set or two. They completely get my music—good crowd.”

  On one of the songs I told Hirth, “We need a girl to sing background.”

  “I know someone who sings with me at the hospital who’d be great,” he said. Soon a beautiful girl named Maud showed up, and her voice blended wonderfully with Hirth’s. She ended up becoming Garth’s girlfriend, and then his wife. Right on, Hirth.

  One day I invited Bob over to check out how the Shangri-La studio was coming along. While we were chatting, he mentioned another bootleg of our basement tapes coming out, and how it really annoyed him and Columbia. I suggested going back to the original tapes to see if there were some tracks we could release properly. We didn’t want to put out music that was sonically unacceptable, but with the technology of the time, I thought maybe Rob Fraboni and I could reduce some of the hiss and improve the sound quality. Bob agreed to see what we could do.

  As Garth, Rob, and I experimented with different devices, the guys would stop in and make suggestions. On one song Rick thought that the bass got lost in the original mix, and he wanted to redo it. Richard might want to add a tambourine, just trying to upscale a bit. All of the music originated in the Big Pink basement, but not all of its recordings were finished there. We would choose some of the best songs that had the best sound quality. Anyway, we did all that was possible at the time to make the music sound more presentable and less like a field recording. We didn’t want the public to feel ripped off. When we looked back on it later, though, we realized we liked field recordings.

  A friend of Rick’s named Larry Samuels had come aboard to help the Band out in any way he could. His disclaimer was that he didn’t want to be paid—he had a trust fund of some kind and didn’t need the money—but he would manage Shangri-La and take care of any business we needed just because he wanted to be part of our world. Too good to be true? Of course. Rick took in this sweetheart of a mad dog. Larry fit right into the mold, and we liked him, for better or for worse. He was enthusiastic and protective, and the timing was right—we’d had no real management since we left Albert. Elliot Roberts was mainly just getting us gigs here and there—he probably knew better than to get in deeper, plus he had his hands full with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young and Joni. Since Tour ’74 Elliot had become a friend, and though we only saw each other on occasion it was always a great time. One of the most classic moments happened when he and I were out getting dinner at a restaurant.

  “You wanna go in the restroom and do a bump?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  In the bathroom Elliot poured some cocaine out on the sink. After he mushed it and made some lines, he took out a crisp dollar bill, rolled it up, and started to snort it. Just then, while he was in midsnorting motion, someone opened the door and walked into the bathroom. Without missing a beat, Elliot stood up and said to the person, “It’s not what you think.”

  —

  With Shangri-La in full bloom, I was itching to get in there and start recording. Given all the other projects and gigs we had going, I hadn’t been in much of a writing mode in the last couple of years, since Cahoots. But something changed for me in the next period of time. I started writing without the strain of what was happening with the motor, or under the hood, of the Band. I wrote a song called “It Makes No Difference,” and it sent a signal that I needed to get back in the studio and make some noise.

  At Shangri-La, I sat at the piano and played a new song for the guys called “Twilight.” Rick said, “Boys, if you don’t mind, I’d like to stake a claim on that one. I gotta sing this baby. Love that sentiment. ‘Don’t leave me alone in the twilight, ’cause twilight is the loneliest time of day.’ ”

  Richard g
rinned. “I’ll flip you for it,” he said. “Heads, I win. Tails…well, you know.”

  Garth was reaching a higher plateau with his electronic sound experimentations. On the one hand he had very traditional organic flavors and at the same time cosmic sounds I had never heard before. I wanted to write some songs where he could really flaunt his magic. I had just finished writing a tune called “Forbidden Fruit” that felt like holding a mirror up to our current state of affairs, kind of a “check yourself before you wreck yourself” reminder. I could hear Levon singing this one with real authority. We had a good time cutting the track; everybody showed up in force and it set a standard for what I was hoping to get out of the record. I didn’t try to push the other guys to participate in the writing, which took pressure off everybody. I just assumed my position and dug in.

  After we recorded the master take on “It Makes No Difference” and Rick sang his heart out, I thought it was a classic. That was forever. Garth and I played some sweet solos. His tone on the soprano sax sounded like Rick’s voice being squeezed through a miniature saxophone—sad and sexy.

  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.

  Coincidentally, around this same time some French-Canadian music people were visiting the Malibu Colony. The actress Geneviève Bujold had moved in a few houses down from us, and between her place and ours we housed songwriters Luc Plamondon and François Cousineau, with singer Diane Dufresne. I wanted a little singsongy vocal riff for the outro of “Acadian Driftwood,” so I asked Luc and François what a French Acadian phrase for this would be. They helped me find a lovely little farewell for Rick to sing in the end fade.

  There was another tune I was anxious to spring on Levon because I thought it had his name written all over it. The song dealt with the mysterious disappearance of Ophelia, and I had an old-timey-type chord progression to go with a whole new spin on the story. I liked having a modern-day Shakespearean character that Hamlet couldn’t get, and neither could I. Ophelia—they don’t have names like that anymore, or maybe they do in Denmark. I loved the way the track felt after we cut it. The combination of horns and keyboards Garth overdubbed on this song was one of the very best things I’d ever heard him do. It was definitely the cherry on the cake, and completed this musical odyssey. “Ophelia” became my favorite track on the album, even if it didn’t have the depth of some of my other songs. The pure, jubilant pleasure of that tune swayed me.

  The creative energy at Shangri-La felt productive, and we thought we now had the technology and staff to mix the album there. All the guys were involved, and it was good to have the gang back in a circle. We called on Reid Miles, the photographer who’d shot the cover for the official release of The Basement Tapes, to shoot this cover too. We built a fire out behind my house on the beach and Reid shot us by the firelight in the twilight hour.

  With the album, called Northern Lights–Southern Cross, finished, the boys and I sat down to listen to a test pressing. We felt better about this record of new songs than anything the Band had done in a while. It felt so good to get this record under my belt; before writing these new songs, I hadn’t been sure whether a new record from the Band would be in the cards.

  A couple of days later, Richard told me he was really sorry that he hadn’t contributed to the Band’s songwriting for such a long time. “I just didn’t live up to my part of the deal.” He reminded me that in the early days we had even talked about becoming a songwriting team in the tradition of Pomus and Shuman, Bacharach and David, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. I held no resentment for that; I knew you can only create when you feel the spirit. But Richard said, “The plan in the beginning was that we would all write, and that’s why you insisted that we share the publishing equally.” He felt bad about it, and offered for me to buy out his end of the publishing. I disagreed. “They say never give up your publishing.” But he said he didn’t want to have this burden hanging over him and he could use the money now. Rick overheard the conversation and said he also thought he hadn’t come through on his end of the bargain. If I could afford it, he’d like to be bought out too. I didn’t know quite how to process this. I had been writing all of our songs for a long time and realized that wasn’t about to change, but I had no idea whether I had the means to buy them out. When I discussed this with Garth and Levon, Garth was quick to say he had something he wanted to buy and could use the cash. Levon was hesitant, and I reminded him what they say about publishing and asked him to hang onto it. If at a later date he wanted to sell it to me, I’d see if I could manage it. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  I called Marshall Gelfand and asked if I could afford to purchase Richard’s, Rick’s, and Garth’s publishing. He said he would look into it and thought I might have to take out a loan, but that it wasn’t a bad idea since I had written most of the songs anyway. He asked, “Why don’t you buy Levon’s end too?” But I told him I didn’t want to pursue it unless Levon insisted.

  —

  I hadn’t seen Bob in a couple of months when he called to say he had done some recording in New York. I was curious to hear what he’d cut, and he played me an early version of Blood on the Tracks. It was tough, bold, and dark, more powerfully personal than anything I’d heard him do in a long time. I really enjoyed it. Bob’s friend Louis Kemp kept nodding at me after some key biting lines, as if to say, You know what that’s about. “Wait till you hear the one called ‘Idiot Wind,’ ” he said. Some months later Bob told me, “I recut the record up in Minnesota. You wanna hear it now? It’s much better.” This new version was more up-tempo and energetic, but the first recordings he had played for me still stuck in my mind.

  Living in Malibu with so many creative people around, you never knew quite what each day would bring. One afternoon I swung by Rick’s house out on Broad Beach for a little smokeski. When I got there, he seemed nervous. “Man, I’m gonna need your help. I saw something pretty weird from my upstairs window. We have to go down by the water.” We trudged over the sand toward the shoreline, and as we got closer to the water I could see someone lying where the tide was coming in. Concerned, we started half running toward the surf.

  “Grab his leg,” said Rick when we reached the body, “and we’ll pull him up further on the sand.” As I picked up a leg, I realized I was looking down at Keith Moon, drummer of the Who. He was dressed in a Nazi uniform and completely passed out, with the waves lapping over him. As we dragged him up on the bank, we saw someone who appeared to be looking for him, and Rick yelled out that he was okay. “You better get him inside, though.” He pointed down. “He looks pretty sunburnt on one side of his face.”

  David Braun called me. “I’d like to introduce you to someone else I represent, Neil Diamond. He’s your neighbor in the Colony, and he’d like to talk to you about producing his new record.” This caught me completely off guard. I mumbled something about not necessarily being the right person for the job, but Da
vid told me what a great guy Neil was and that I should at least meet him. I said it would be a pleasure. I liked a lot of songs he’d written: “Solitary Man,” “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “I’m a Believer,” “Red, Red Wine.”

  I ended up digging Neil right away—he was a real New York City songwriter from the classic Tin Pan Alley tradition. He still had the classic good looks that had led some people to refer to him as the Jewish Elvis. His kind and open manner made my family take to him right away. But I still wasn’t sure producing this record was right for me. I gave Neil the typical excuses for not being available—my obligations to the Band, my newborn son, et cetera. Neil was cool about it. “Okay, just keep it in mind.”

  But David Braun must have thought I was holding out for more money, which wasn’t the case at all. Every couple of weeks he would come back with another offer, and Neil would check in to see if my schedule might be permitting. In the meantime, friends and music associates kept telling me, “This is ridiculous. You can’t do a Neil Diamond record. That’s just wrong.” But the more I heard that, the more I wanted to rebel, and thought, Don’t tell me what to do.

  One day, Neil and I were having coffee, hanging out, and we stumbled upon the thought that our common crossroads was the Brill Building in New York City. We had both gone there at a young age with a dream: if you could write songs like those Brill Building guys and send them out into the world—man, that would be the best. We talked about that scene, that story, and the legacy of Tin Pan Alley—how we were part of the generation that had watched that tradition fade into the distance.