A Sense of Doubt blog post #1628 - Broken Arrow - Musical Monday for 1908.05
I love this song.
The blogger I reprint below agrees with me, but he only considers Robbie Robertson's first solo album an "okay listen" and not worth keeping in his collection.
I culled my collection of CDs and albums when I moved out west and of course I kept mine. Robertson is mythic, poetic, and cuts straight to the self root.
For one thing alone. Robertson should be celebrated.
He wrote "The Weight," one of the greatest songs of all time in any genre, any classification.
When I am making a certain kind of mix, many kinds of mixes, I have to work to NOT include "The Weight" every single time.
I know it's somewhat of a specious argument to claim that everything Robbie Robertson does is great because he wrote one of the greatest songs of all time, but then, that talent is in everything he does.
"Broken Arrow" is one of my favorite songs and a powerful love ballad. The lyrics touch my heart, lines such as "who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain" and "I want to breathe when you breathe" perfectly target feelings I have and yet to connect to a wider, more intricate spiritual and cultural fabric.
So, here's today's feature, "Broken Arrow," and some other content about it (someone's blog post), some links, a Carly Simong connection, and an article about Robertson's most recent album, from 2018, How to be Clairvoyant.
Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow
Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain
There he goes moving across the water
There he goes turning my whole world around
Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain
There he goes moving across the water
There he goes turning my whole world around
Do you feel what I feel
Can we make that so it's part of the deal
I gotta hold you in these arms of steel
Lay your heart on the line this time
Can we make that so it's part of the deal
I gotta hold you in these arms of steel
Lay your heart on the line this time
I want to breathe when you breathe
When you whisper like that hot summer breeze
Count the beads of sweat that cover me
Didn't you show me a sign this time
When you whisper like that hot summer breeze
Count the beads of sweat that cover me
Didn't you show me a sign this time
Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow
Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain
There he goes moving across the water
There he goes turning my whole world around
Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain
There he goes moving across the water
There he goes turning my whole world around
Can you see what I see
Can you cut behind the mystery
I will meet you by the witness tree
Leave the whole world behind
Can you cut behind the mystery
I will meet you by the witness tree
Leave the whole world behind
I want to come when you call
I'll get to you if I have to crawl
They can't hold me with these iron walls
We've got mountains to climb
I'll get to you if I have to crawl
They can't hold me with these iron walls
We've got mountains to climb
Source: LyricFind
Song of the Day #80: ‘Broken Arrow’ by Robbie Robertson
It’s funny how there are some songs that sort of take over your listening life for a time and mean a whole lot to you, but then a few years later they drop completely off the map.
I think this happens to me somewhat often because I’m an album guy. I don’t really listen to individual songs, even in the age of the iPod. I play full albums, start to finish, almost without exception.
So take an album like Robbie Robertson’s self-titled solo debut… it’s ok, maybe a little better than ok, but it wasn’t something I found myself playing very often. Or at all, really. So when I did a massive review of my CD collection a few years ago, I sold that album back.
But in the process, I sold my only copy of ‘Broken Arrow,’ which is a friggin’ awesome song. It’s a powerful love ballad with a strong sense of mysticism in its lyrics and sound. Robertson is part Mohawk and weaves that mythology into a lot of his music. In this song, the “broken arrow” and “bottle of rain” are symbolic offerings given by somebody seeking a peaceful and lasting bond.
Rod Stewart butchered, er, covered this song and his version is probably much better known than Robertson’s, which is a shame. Nothing against Rod Stewart, but why is it he always has hits covering music that’s so much better in its original form? At least he has good taste in songwriters.
Anyway, writing these Song of the Day posts has reminded an album guy like me that I’m really missing out on a lot. Perhaps I’ll create a playlist of all these songs and burn them onto albums of their own.
 |
| Pop singer Carly Simon developed a close relationship with Robertson thanks to Albert Grossman. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) |
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/at-67-robbie-robertson-has-nothing-left-to-prove/article4201023/
"I play guitar quite a bit, because I'm always in search of something," says Robbie Robertson, who in spite of his reputation as a premier rock guitarist is seldom seen in public with an instrument in his hands. "I don't play to jam, but because I'm fishing. I'm looking for something, that I hope you can never find. If I do find it, I'm afraid I won't have a need to do this any more."
Robertson is 67 now, wears graduated lenses, and looks softer in the face and belly than the lean-jawed guitarist captured by Martin Scorsese in his classic 1978 concert film, The Last Waltz. The Toronto-born musician pads around his comfortable hotel room in black slippers, speaks in a lazy but intent baritone, and likes the word "excited" – he uses it a lot during our conversation about storytelling on his new album (which came out Tuesday) and in his forthcoming autobiography.
Robertson's career as a fisherman for things that may not be findable falls into two distinct phases: with the Band, and without. The first was public to an extreme degree, spent largely on the road touring with Bob Dylan and others, playing shows for nearly 20 years. The second began with the concert chronicled in The Last Waltz, after which Robertson left the Band, stopped touring and never took it up again. He's come the closest of any rock royalty to following the example of Glenn Gould, who gave up concerts at the peak of his performing career and only ever played thereafter for a microphone.
Robertson, who spent part of his youth on Ontario's Six Nations reserve and now lives in Beverly Hills, has spent much of the past few decades in the film world, providing soundtracks for several Scorsese films (including Raging Bull, Gangs of New York and Shutter Island), signing acts and working on movies for DreamWorks, chronicling the history of the Band, and occasionally surfacing with whatever he's fished up during his private expeditions with a guitar.
A lifetime of trawling those waves recently earned him a place in the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, which he'll accept during a ceremony in Toronto tonight. His latest catch is called How to Become Clairvoyant, and it's his first solo record since 1998. You might think the title is purely metaphorical, but Robertson also means it literally: With so much behind him, he'd really like to know what's coming, just like Nero and King David and everyone else who prized the advice of seers and prophets.
"I'm like them, I want to be clairvoyant," he says, with a grin, adding that the disc's enhanced edition, coming later this year, will include a tarot deck. "If I could see around the corner, I could get ahead a bit quicker. It's a practical thing, but it comes from spirituality." Robertson, who was born Jaime Royal Klegerman to a Jewish father and Mohawk mother, can claim an interest in divination from both traditions.
"I always like to keep one hand in the tepee and the other hand in the synagogue," he says. "Wouldn't it be great if there was a combination of the two? You could go to synagogue, and it would be really hot in there."
He converted early to the faith of rock 'n' roll, partly under the tutelage of Ronnie Hawkins, who took him into his rockabilly band, the Hawks, when Robertson was 16. As a Hawk, he encountered "all these extraordinary carnival characters" who populated the music scene in the sixties.
Some of those characters flit through the new record, which in spite of its title is strongly oriented toward times past. Its dozen songs touch on Robertson's time in the South, his departure from the Band, and his generation's flamboyant role in the socio-political history of the mid-century. Straight Down the Line portrays three major musicians who pooh-poohed rock 'n' roll (Sonny Boy Williamson, Mahalia Jackson and Frank Sinatra); When the Night Was Young includes a cameo for Andy Warhol, seen "waiting for the late night muse; / but she won't be back before morning / she's gone downtown to hear some blues."
"We were working with Bob Dylan," Robertson explains. "I was living at the Chelsea Hotel, and Edie Sedgwick [the doomed Warhol acolyte whose life spawned the feature film Factory Girl]would always come and hang out in my room in the hotel. Andy Warhol was so fascinated with her, he would come there looking for her. They would call up to my room and say, 'Mr. Warhol's in the lobby, and he's wondering: Is Miss Sedgwick in your room?' And she'd be" – his voices drops to a whisper – " 'No, no, tell him I'm not here.' "
The story has more kick in the non-musical version, which may bode well for the autobiography Robertson has just agreed to write for Random House Canada (Crown in the U.S.). It's one of three volumes he has on the go: The others are a young-adults book about music for Tundra Books in Toronto; and a version of the Six Nations story of Hiawatha and the Peacemaker, for Abrams Books of New York.
"He's a born storyteller," says Random House publisher Louise Dennys, who suggested he write his own life after hearing him recount tales last summer at the Nantucket roost of Indigo Books & Music CEO Heather Reisman and financier Gerry Schwartz. "We're expecting to publish in 2013," says Dennys, "but it's very early stages for Robbie."
Maybe, though the task has been on his mind in some form for years. He has fielded several pitches from people interested in writing his biography, began collaborating with three of them, but opted out each time.
"I thought, 'You just can't tell these stories like I can tell them,' " he says. Writing his own books also fulfills, in a new way, his long-standing romance with the written word, conceived when he played Southern schools with Ronnie Hawkins and envied the kids learning things he had skipped over as a high-school dropout.
Musically, his new album shows him standing close to the oak-aged blues-rock he has been crafting most of his life, with some sonically adventurous furnishings by guitarist Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) and multi-instrumentalist Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails). The album's mood and subject matter occasionally evoke Tom Waits, without the junkyard funeral-band sound or rusted-chain scrape of Waits's voice. Robertson's slight singing voice is just a shade or two heftier than Marlon Brando's in The Godfather, and a much less compelling instrument than his incisive, crying guitar. His fans may be surprised by the mellowness of a few tunes: Fear of Falling, Robertson's duet with Eric Clapton, would fit into many an easy-listening compilation.
In some ways, the record seems addressed to those who already know Robertson's story, who will appreciate small steps taken out of previous pathways, and gaps filled in tales already told. He doesn't feel he has anything to prove, and that in itself is a measure of how the elder Robbie Robertson sees the world and himself.
"There's a lack of bravado to Robbie, for someone who has accomplished so much," says long-time friend Reisman. "He has a wonderful soul, and a warmth and integrity that I find irresistible. He has a very natural, engaged relationship with his children, too" – the divorced Robertson has three, who have all settled in Los Angeles – "and what better reflection is there than that?"
Those qualities may come to the fore most of all in his biggest live project, a grand musico-dramatic piece about native culture that he has been trying to bring to fruition for over a decade. His current production partner is Michael Cohl, the pioneering Canadian stadium-rock promoter who knows a thing or two about seeing around corners.
"We're trying to put together the greatest celebration of the native people of North America that the world has ever imagined," Robertson says, with maybe a hint of bravado. "It has nothing to do with cowboys and Indians, or 'Oh, we were treated unfairly.' Everybody's told that story. This is another angle on it altogether, and it has a spiritual quality to it. I'm very excited about it."
Robbie Robertson will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame today at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
Robertson by the numbers
1943
Year Jaime Royal Klegerman (Robbie Robertson) was born in Toronto.
16
Age Robertson began playing and touring as a professional guitarist with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.
16
Years Robertson played with the group that began as the Hawks and morphed into the Band.
1980
Robertson's film debut, playing a role opposite Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in Carny, which he also produced and co-wrote.
1987
Debut of Robertson's self-titled solo album, with production by Daniel Lanois and appearances by U2 and Peter Gabriel.
5
Years Robertson worked for DreamWorks on new bands, animated films and other projects – a job he describes as "a tremendous sandbox."
2
Number of Robertson songs to be performed on Saturday during his gala induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame: The Moon Struck One (played by Daniel Lanois) and Broken Arrow (covered by Wintersleep).
4,000
Approximate distance in kilometres between the Six Nations reserve southwest of Hamilton, where the young Robertson spent summers with his mother's family, and Beverly Hills, Calif., where he now lives.
Robert Everett-Green
Robertson, to the letter
"The letter that I sent to you, was it lost in the mail?" Robbie Robertson sings on his new album, How to Become Clairvoyant. As of this summer, he could ask if that letter had his face on it. Robertson is one of the latest Canadian musicians to have his mug slapped on a stamp by Canada Post.
The new 59-cent issue will be available in June, in an eight pack with stamps honouring Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Ginette Reno, and another musician whose name Canada Post is still keeping under cover. The style of the stamps will be similar, though each musician has a say in whether the photograph used is old or new.
Gordon Lightfoot, honoured in 2007, went for a 30-year-old album-cover image, while Bryan Adams chose a recent self-portrait. We'll have to wait till May 27 to see what Robbie picked, though I'm betting he chose a recent image by his pal, rock photographer Anton Corbijn.
Robert Everett-Green
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1908.05 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1493 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment