Word: robertson
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...working the Band vein here, but he is still writing in the American grain. Born in Canada to a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father, Robertson talks about American mythology, about leaving home in Ronnie Hawkins' barbed-wire rock band and touring rural America, about going "down South, where the music and folklore had enormous impact on me." All those great early Band songs (The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Shape I'm In, Up on Cripple Creek) were Robertson's way of measuring and transmuting all that experience. The material on this record just deepens...
...songs, many of them rooted in American Indian spirituality, have stronger stylistic affinities with later, longer and more ambitious compositions like The River Hymn and It Makes No Difference, when Robertson was testing the Band's limits as well as his own. The new record's Broken Arrow, one of the best things he has ever written, brings together a delicate love song ("Do you feel what I feel/ Can we make that so it's part of the deal") with a gentle meditation on Indian pride and mystic communion, all united with a simple refrain: "Who else is gonna...
...Robertson has returned at a time when, as he says, "there's a feeling of a little more substance in the air." The two U2 collaborations on the record (Testimony and the reactor-hot Sweet Fire of Love) were launched on little more than a wing, a prayer, a guitar riff, a tom-tom beat and a horn chart written by Gil Evans (Miles Davis' collaborator on Sketches of Spain). It is not only talent that makes these songs work, it's a finding of common ground between Robertson and the Dublin boys so sudden and intense that the discovery...
...Robertson, who got movie star-style notices for his onscreen presence in The Last Waltz, right now is shining on videos. MTV showcased two separate videos with an interrelated story line, as well as a 30-minute documentary calculated to let a couple of generations catch up on what they missed the first time around. Does the man who made this splendid new record, the man who wrote The Weight and Daniel and the Sacred Harp and set his fingers around some of rock's best guitar, really need an introduction? Business realities suggest that he might, but, in truth...
...pressing questions. Kennedy, for example, would beat Nixon decisively, 52% to 29%. As for following Reagan from Hollywood into politics, the clear favorite is Charlton Heston, followed by Paul Newman and Bill Cosby. (Carson comes in sixth.) Asked which candidates seem the "craziest," voters singled out Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson and Alexander Haig, in that order. Crazy or not, Jackson was the front runner in the Democratic field, with 18%, followed by Michael Dukakis and Paul Simon. But, as some pundits have suspected, some 4% of those surveyed actually think it is Paul Simon the singer who is running...