The Conjurer

COAXING NEW SOUNDS FROM OLD EFFECTS, ROBBIE ROBERTSON RAISES THE GHOSTS OF HIS YOUTH ON SINEMATIC.

- Michael Ross

“IT’S THRILLING, AFTER all of this time, to be both making new noises and rediscovering things I found stimulating at a very early age,” Robbie Robertson says. That sentence could conceivably sum up the legendary, songwriter/guitarist’s artistic career. Before the world had discovered Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, John Hammond’s 1965 album, So Many Roads, helped introduce many blues fans to the full glory of the electric guitar. As wielded on that record by Jamie “Robbie” Robertson, the Fender Telecaster became a slashing, piercing sword, eliciting our first thoughts of “What is that, and how do I do it?” Rife with energy and an almost punk attitude, it was an amalgam of twang and deep R&B roots unlike anything we had heard before — the bite of Muddy Waters’ slide interpreted through the fingers of a 22-year-old white boy who had been playing chicken-wire bars from Toronto to Arkansas for six years.

The history has become legend. For the uninitiated, it’s recounted in Robertson’s autobiography, Testimony. He joined Ronnie Hawkins’ group, the Hawks, at 16. In 1964, the Hawks went on their own and eventually backed the newly electrified Bob Dylan. The group then left Dylan and went from being a band to the Band, before breaking up and marking their dissolution with an iconic all-star 1976 concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film The Last Waltz. The book leaves off there, but Robertson went on to score music for a number of movies, act in a couple, and make five solo records, including his latest, Sinematic (Universal). Like his memoir,