Robbie Robertson Rides Again : A Once-Prolific Rocker Gets Rolling Again With a Solo Album

“I wasn’t sure I had anything more to say” is not the sort of thing you’d ever expect to hear out of a proud pop star’s mouth.

And when someone once as prolific as Robbie Robertson--the chief creative force behind the Band in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and one of the most influential songwriters in rock history--swears he sat out an entire decade without ever once being struck with the urge to pen another tune, let alone record an album, you tend not to believe him.

Surely, occasional sound track work with director Martin Scorsese and spending time at home with the family couldn’t have been enough to satisfy the creator of such soulful rock classics as “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight.”

But Robertson insists that it wasn’t until 1986, almost 10 years after the Band’s “Last Waltz” swan song, that the dormant muse finally returned and he commenced work on his first post-Band solo album, “Robbie Robertson” (released last week to rave reviews from hungry press and radio alike).

So what if during that time the folks who grew up with--and had their lives changed by--the Band were out there waiting for fresh output? To dissuade him from the studio, he had only to look to the product of some of his musical compatriots, who continued making more and more mediocre albums, year after year, because it was their job .

“I thought of a lot of people from the same era when I was making a lot of records that had continued making a lot of records,” he says now with a chuckle. No naming names here. “A lot of it didn’t seem terribly inspired. It gave me some evidence that my instincts were right. This isn’t carpentry work, you know. You have to call upon something way inside, and if you can’t reach it. . . .”

Nor was Robertson tempted to rejoin his former Band-mates when they reformed without him for several small tours--following the “Last Waltz” concert, movie and record, which purported to document the end of the Band as a touring unit. (One member, Richard Manuel, has since died--a suicide during one such Band “reunion” tour.)

But there’s another intriguing--and, for artists, perhaps frightening--hypothesis about why Robertson chose to sit on the sidelines for so long: the suggestion that even in as new an art form as rock--or perhaps especially in rock--the musical elements may be a depletable resource.

“I don’t think that it’s an endless pit,” he affirms. “Since this kind of music began--with Louis Jordan & the Timpani Five, with certain blues artists that were doing things everybody stole from, since the early ‘50s--a lot of the great lines, great melodies, great rhythms have been used up. And it means you have to search a little bit more.

“I’m writing and I think, ‘Oh, I’ve heard this before. Somebody’s already done this, or something like it.’ . . . A lot of great ideas and a lot of great pieces of inspiration have been used up in this music. It’s not an easy thing to say, that there are only so many stars in the sky. You think, ‘Well, that’s still a lot.’ But over the last million years, a lot of them have been counted already. To find a new star in the sky is pretty hard.”

What Robertson finally found he had “to say” anew at last had a great deal to do with his roots--not rock roots, but genetic ones.

At 44, Robbie Robertson still has one of the lowest hairlines in rock ‘n’ roll. With his normally fluffy ‘do slicked back, his countenance can appear quite ... severe , despite his usually amiable demeanor.

Sitting in the office he keeps above a Los Angeles recording studio, Robertson reaches into a desk and pulls out a portrait of himself taken with a primitive camera in an early 20th-Century style, and points out the similarity of his profile to that of a legendary historical figure.

It seems that when he went to a New Mexico Indian reservation recently to shoot a video clip, some of the residents got a little restless, almost violent, even--because, he was later told, of his resemblance to Gen. George Custer, of all people.

Irony of ironies: Robertson’s mother is an American Indian.

His interest in that culture--evidenced in new songs like “Broken Arrow” (a love song riddled with Indian symbolism) and “Hell’s Half-Acre” (the story of a Native American sent to fight in Vietnam)--is no passing fancy, he assures.

As a boy, Robertson visited Indian reservations in Canada with his mother, and even now his office is adorned on all walls with paintings of and by American Indians. And when he sings “Come bear witness, the half-breed rides again” in the spirited closing song, “Testimony,” it’s a rare autobiographical allusion.

“It’s something that’s always intrigued me,” says Robertson, “but I didn’t feel right imposing this on the Band. It was just too much my background and my trip. I felt I was doing best if I could write on behalf of our music. And now that I don’t have a band to be responsible to, it feels very natural for me to express this thing that I’ve had deep inside me all my life.”

This thing isn’t just lyrical.

Though quick to point out that he wasn’t out to pull a “Graceland,” Robertson reveals that he made tapes of Indian rhythms, and would play them for his musicians before and during the sessions. The end result rarely reveals any blatantly non-pop styles or intonations, but Robertson claims the Indian feel is there throughout--enough, at least, that the Indians on that New Mexico reservation “got it” when he played them the record.

Robertson has just returned from shooting video clips for “Showdown at Big Sky” and “Fallen Angel” at the New Mexico reservation, and his enthusiasm for what he loosely admits was a “religious experience” is beyond words:

“It’s one of the highlights of my life, this last week with the Indians. It just makes everything seem so petty. People here are running around in circles and going nowhere, and those people have been doing the same thing for a thousand years--and it’s so soulful and it’s so pure. The balance is what’s so extraordinary. These people just see what’s special, and what’s not special they ignore and pray for and wish it better.

“I’m not an activist. I just recognize something and feel something, and it makes me feel fantastic, and I want to know more about it. But I’m not trying to preach this thing at all. This is not just a religious trip. This is the most natural thing this country’s ever had.”

Indian culture interests him for more purely literary reasons, as well. Fans of the Band are well versed in the active interest the writer of such songs as “Across the Great Divide” takes in “American mythology”--that is, those strange but palpable events that take place in a shifting shadow land that’s “somewhere over that hill, somewhere over there, where you recognize the place, whether you’ve been there or not.”

“Our country, it’s so young--we don’t have this (ancient) thing to call upon that they do in Europe. So it does mix real life with the myths. The reality is sometimes so unbelievable that it gets caught up in this big swarm of smoke that, when it comes out the other end, they’re mixed together. You can’t separate--’Oh, this is what we do day by day, and this is what we do in our dreams.’ They mix together, and these true ‘tales’ somehow seem valid in this country.

“It’s just something that I love being a part of. And it makes it possible to play the part of the storyteller in that your imagination doesn’t have to be caged by only dealing with the facts. I don’t know what the facts are, and I don’t know what the dreams are. In Americana, the facts and the dreams seem to be all the same to me.”

Long-standing penchant for modern myth-making aside, Robertson has taken the tremendous liberty of virtually reinventing himself, musically speaking, by making a striking departure from the past.

Other than the first single, “Showdown at Big Sky” (one of several tracks featuring backing vocals from the BoDeans), the album is completely contemporary enough to ensure that obvious links with the Band’s sound are few. On several cuts he has successfully placed--in very prominent roles, vocal and instrumental--such modern art-rock stalwarts as Peter Gabriel and U2.

But mention to him that the pan-spirituality of his Indian/Christian references is reminiscent of those artists’ demonstrated religious/transcendent qualities, and he’ll start quoting the opening lines of “The Weight” to remind you that he was there first.

Still, he’s not so proud that he resists the suggestion that the massive popular acceptance of U2’s or Gabriel’s mature and emotional pop blend might have helped inspire his own return to active duty.

“I see a spark on the horizon,” he enthuses. “I chose to work with these people because I feel some connection to what they do, and I think they’re trying to make a very real contribution to something that could just sail along in a very mediocre fashion.

“It’s that thing when certain people stand up and try to do something very special, and it grows and becomes an inspirational period where you feel like everybody’s giving all their hearts and nobody’s coasting. That’s what it was like in the late ‘60s, when from Stax, from Motown, from England, from everywhere, there was so much going on at the same time.

“I’d listen to records then and think, ‘Boy, I better come up with something here. I mean, these people aren’t fooling around--this is strong stuff.’ When you get that snowball effect going in music, it’s very healthy. . . . I think we have a responsibility to try to avoid disposable music and disposable art.”