Recording - February 2020 - 20

Robbie Robertson, Then...
Inside the 50th Anniversary of The Band

Photo: © Elliott Landy / www.elliottlandy.com

You worked with Dylan at studios like Columbia. Then you
did the well-documented The Basement Tapes, then you
returned to the pro studio to record Music from Big Pink.
Why did you then take over a pool house and turn it into
a studio for the second Band album?
It was an extension of what we started back at Big Pink. It was
a creative outpost, a clubhouse, a workshop, a sanctuary, where
we could make the music that these musicians needed to make. For
years, while we were on the road, I would say to the other guys in
the band, one of these days...if only we could just have a place that
we could go every day and meet and work on our music... We
were coming from a purely musical place. Nobody in this group ever
thought about becoming big pop stars. It was more like, how do we
take our sounds and experiences and transfer them into our music?

Which started at Big Pink.
Big Pink was paradise, that was our clubhouse. I got our
equipment put in and Garth Hudson hooked up some microphones into a little tape recorder we had. We had a small
mixer and an echo machine that we could put some things
through. I thought, now I can write songs, and I can create the
way I've imagined all along, this was my dream coming true. I
brought Bob Dylan over to check it out, and he asked if maybe
we could try out some tunes together-and I said, "Absolutely."

It really was like the first home studio.
This was 1967, nobody was doing this back then. The only
person I ever heard doing anything like it was Les Paul. Every
day we would come to the clubhouse, hang out, make some
music and have some fun. When Bob would leave, the guys
and I would work on where we were going musically. When it
was time to actually record Music from Big Pink, the music we
created was written, it was invented, in that basement.
20 RECORDING February 2020

But you went into a proper studio to record the album?
John Simon, our producer, said we had to go into a real studio
so it would sound as good as it could. Our setup for The Basement
Tapes wasn't good for making a real record. So, we went into a
studio in New York, and it started off not very good. They told us,
you sit here, the drums go over there, this goes here, these baffles
go here-and it didn't work. I said, no, we have to sit in a circle.
If we don't see one another, we don't know the signals. We don't
know how to play together if we're all in separate cubbyholes.

How did they react to that?
They complained, they said it was going to sound terrible,
but they had to do it to make us happy. But it turned out having
a quality that didn't sound like every other record.
When we were going to make our second record, I thought
we needed to have our own environment. I don't want to go into
somebody else's place and work around their schedules and work
around their rules. I thoroughly appreciated what these engineers
had learned over the years and how to make records sound fantastic and all that. But I knew this group, its talents and instruments,
and I thought, we've got to have our own environment-whether
I was right or wrong. It was my strong philosophy about how I
could make the best music I could make with these guys.

So that's how you ended up in Sammy Davis' pool house.
The record company didn't get it. They said, you're in Los
Angeles, just come over to Capitol studios, it's one of the best
studios in the world, and I said no. Luckily, they went along with
it because of the success of Music from Big Pink. We put together
this environment, and we were living and breathing the music together. All we had to do was get up in the morning, go down to
the studio by the pool, and I'd play them something. Then we'd
start exploring the possibilities of how to record it.

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Recording - February 2020

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