This is sure stirring up some ghosts for me," says Robbie Robertson on the first album he's made since the demise of the Band more than a decade ago – but he's not talking about the ghosts of "The Weight" or "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" or any of the other slices of elemental backwoods rock he wrote while leading that outfit. The Band's music sounded as if it had sprung out of some deep, unsettling North American subconscious; a surprisingly high-tech slice of Eighties rock, Robbie Robertson could have come only from painstaking sessions in
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a modern-day recording studio. That it still has enormous power is tribute to Robertson's ability to summon up ghosts wherever he is.
Though the man is a certified, class-A legend, the album's success was by no means a sure thing: after they changed the course of rock & roll with Music from Big Pink and The Band in 1968 and '69, Robertson and the Band never again hit those peaks. And after the Last Waltz concert in 1976, Robertson sometimes seemed in danger of becoming one of his own dead-end characters: sleepy eyed, whiskey voiced, purposefully dissolute and romantic as hell, he let his undeniable presence carry him through things like the 1980 movie Carny while keeping his music in the background, except for occasional soundtrack work for his pal Martin Scorsese.
You wanted to believe that the guy still had a great record in him – and you admired him for resisting whatever pressures there were to join his old colleagues in the sadly reunited Band – but when he finally went into the studio to make a solo record and then stayed there for three years, you could only hope that the man who wrote songs as evocative as "King Harvest" and "Chest Fever" still had something left.
It turns out that he did, though it took some unlikely cohorts to bring it out. From the start, Robbie Robertson sounds tough, defiant and assured, but it also sounds like a record made by the guys who back Robertson up. The first song, "Fallen Angel." is a heartbreaking elegy to the late Richard Manuel, the Band's singer-pianist – but even before Peter Gabriel sings the chorus alongside Robertson, the melancholy wash of synthesizers and Manu Katché's stutterstep drumbeats make it sound like something straight off Gabriel's album So. And "Sweet Fire of Love" is even more dramatic: the opening guitar riff could only come from the Edge, and the song itself is a classic exercise in the expansive, hard-rocking side of U2, right down to Bono's wail (which Robertson matches, more or less, in his affecting but gravelly fashion).
They're remarkable songs, both of them, but in a way they sidestep the question of Robertson's own artistic vitality. That's where the rest of the album comes in: not only does Robertson's distinctive sensibility turn a batch of seemingly disparate musical stances into a coherent, focused whole, but you begin to
