Tell me, we want to turn to the genesis of the Band's sound, when you went to Woodstock, it was such a different sound following that tour in so many ways. Phil Spector considered what you guys were doing a form of the wall of sound influence.

I've never heard that before.

That dense. And whereas the Band's music is totally different. How did that happen?

Um. I don't exactly understand how these things happened, especially when they're not completely obvious. Because what we, the Band, the sound that came out on the first record that we met, made, was nothing like what we had done with Bob Dylan, what we had done with the Hawks, what we had done with Ronnie Hawkins. But it was definitely a culmination of all of these things. And stuff that we had picked up along the way, years and years ago, a lot of songs that I wrote were things that were impressions, Southern impressions to me, that I went with these naive eyes 16 years old to the South and I saw things, and it just, they go somewhere inside you and the just live there until I guess there's time, a time to use them. And they came out in these songs. And one of the clues to the, there was a velocity to the music that went in the complete other direction than everybody else was going. And none of this was done on purpose. It wasn't like everybody's getting bigger amps and getting louder. We're getting smaller amps and we're getting quieter. It wasn't like that. It looked like we were rebelling against the rebellion. But it was never conscious. When we went from New York City, we were living there, to upstate New York to live in Woodstock, we went for a practical reason. In New York we couldn't find anyplace to go and write and practice. And if we could find it, we couldn't afford it. So up in Woodstock there was lots of places. You could just rent some house in the middle of nowhere and scream your brains out and nobody could ever hear you or care. So we found this house out in the middle of nowhere, the basement that we could set up our equipment in. And it was such a great feeling to have a place where everybody could come in the daytime. And it was just, you would go there and you didn't have to make music but that's what it was there for. And it just felt good to have, you know, the clubhouse thing. You know everybody would just come, hang around, talk, play a little music, do something else, play a little music. And things started happening very natural. But because a lot of this music was being played in the basement or the living room, it would be ridiculous to play loud, it would be annoying, you know, uh, to yourself. You know what I mean? Because you're in a place where you're, there's just nowhere for it to disperse. So we got into a thing where we would call in the huddle. And we would set up in a way where everybody was there and we would balance around just the natural acoustics of the room we were in. And if you couldn't hear the drums anymore, you were too loud. It's a good musicality, it's a good teaching thing. And we knew that on other levels, but we'd never had much of an opportunity to set up in basements and living rooms and get this balance. And it was really good then we got. So we would start balancing around the singing. If you couldn't hear the singing, and it wasn't like we had a big p.a. system, it would be a microphone and maybe a little something that the voice is coming out of. It could be that, or it could be just hearing the voice in the room. And if you're drowning out the singing, then the balance was off. And it made for a certain kind of music in itself. And for like, what I was talking about earlier, and just the subtleties in the music coming through, and that it wasn't all just hammerhead, bashing away, stuff that, when you're young, you're inclined to want to just bash. And then not that we were very old at this time, we were probably you know, in our early 20s, 23, 24, something like that. But we'd been around the block already, and we were past the point of like guys that have gotten new instruments for Christmas and were wanting to just turn them up. You wanted to turn them up usually because you couldn't play very good. And it would hide it a little bit because it was so noisy, you know, you couldn't tell. But when you started playing in the balance of the room, it taught us a lot, and it evolved into a style and a way to, and then the harmonies, we needed to hear the harmonies in the room. And it was just dealing with what you had, whatever tools you have, if you make those work, something usually, uh, good will come out of this. And it was, and it was really simply that. And when we made this record and listened to everything else that was going on, it was like, uh-oh, this doesn't fit in anywhere. These are like semi-patriotic, parent-respecting music, when what was going on at the time was like, kill you parents, turn it up louder, and uh, and uh, and political. All of our things were backwards, we realized, and, and it could've been completely disregarded because it just didn't fit into the -- but the mainstream then wasn't very main, you know? It was kind of like, well, I don't know, whatever works, works. People didn't really have the formulas. They were discovering the formulas but they weren't made up yet. So when we came along and we just went completely left when everybody else went right it was okay, it didn't get treated like this doesn't fit in. What happened was a whole bunch of people then went left. And uh, that's kind of, there's a nice reward in that. To really, you know, it was like everything we were doing since the beginning, after leaving Ronnie Hawkins and playing music that nobody wanted to hear in bars, and then playing with Bob Dylan, who was doing something that it seemed like nobody in the world wanted him to do, and then making our first record, where everybody was playing louder and louder and we were playing softer and softer, it seemed like we were always going in the opposite direction, but when those thing paid off, there was a real nice feeling, musical reward in that.

After we made "Music From Big Pink" and it was received in a way that didn't make it seem as near as obscure as it might have, and then came a thing like, now, what do you, you've done, what are you going to do now? And I thought about something that maybe I wanted to do even before we did "Music From Big Pink" but now I felt like I had perhaps the confidence to try it. And that is I wanted to write music that felt like it could've been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday, that had this timeless, lost in time kind of quality to it. And I really didn't like the idea of doing anything that was faddish. Whatever the latest thing that was going on in music was just what I didn't like. And I wanted to try and go in another direction with that. So I wrote songs that were from just a whole other era, and with a different flavor to them. And I was trying to get at this to speak to a different part of your soul, than the way we were getting used to receiving music. And I wanted to find another place for that. And the geography of the soul, and the, and when we finished this record, I felt like this is something that I'd been meaning to do all my life. All of this stuff, since I was a young kid. Talking about picking up little pieces along the sides of these back roads and in these names and characters, I finally found a novel for these to fit into.

Can we go back to what you were talking about the sense of that album being a culmination of a lot of experiences.

At that time there was something very unusual about using fiddles and mandolins and, and with an electronic keyboard, and just kind of mixing something very old and something very new together. And it all, it all added up to me in this timeless idea of just trying to get something that just seemed like it was always there. You just hadn't, you hadn't heard it yet. And uh, and in writing the songs I was trying to capture that as well. And when "The Band" album was released, that just the way people talked about it too, people that were writing about, they spoke about it, and I felt, good, they, they understood where we were trying to head with that. And once again it wasn't fitting into any formulas and so if found a voice of its own. So, yeah, I felt very grateful about trying these experiments and they were received in the way that you meant in your heart to come off to something like that.

We want to turn to some specific songs. "The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down," how was that written, what was the process?

"The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down" is a prime example of something that I've been carrying around for a long time. This is, um, probably the most obvious example of me coming from Canada, going to the Mississippi Delta and these things washing over me down there and making a very deep impression on me, but there was no, nothing to do with it at the time. It just went and lived somewhere inside for several years and once it became aged enough it was, uh, uh, I found a way to bring it out and find some use for it. And for people that lived there, I know at the time that it seemed strange that somebody from Canada would be writing this Southern anthem kind of song, but it was just because I didn't take these things for granted. I was very moved by this whole story. And friends of mine down there would say phrases like, yeah, Robbie, the South's going to rise again. And they were used to saying these kinds of things. I hadn't heard it before and it was very touching to me, and, and uh, it, I found a story in this, a tale that I made up that was like novels that people write that are half truths and half fiction, and, and it was a way of writing a song that, uh, I didn't think about the originality of it at all. It was, all I could think of at the time really, but, uh, there wasn't much of that around, um, when I wrote it. And I remember it, it got a lot of talk, you know, when writers, music writers were writing about our music. And, and that's really what it was. It was an impression for me that, uh, that people that lived there, that nobody could've, I felt nobody could've, because they didn't write a song like that, it took somebody coming in from the outside to really see these things. I saw a film years ago called "Southern Exposure" that the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made. And he was hired by the government of Mississippi to come and do a documentary on Mississippi. And what he chose to look at in this you could see was really somebody coming in with a fresh eye in this. And uh, and, and I felt the same way. I felt a fresh eye and a fresh ear as well. And uh, I don't, I don't know, uh, why I was so taken with these stories and with these people other than it was just so new and I was at such a vulnerable age, 16 years old, it was like, whew.

What about the influence of films in your songwriting. I've read somewhere that "The Weight" was actually inspired by… or something like that.

Yeah. Um, I, when you're traveling on the road, you don't get an opportunity to go to the movies a lot. You're playing every night or else you're going somewhere and so, I had to work at seeing films, because I was a big admirer of great films and I wanted to know more about it all the time. I went through a period where there was a store in New York on 47th Street called Gotham Book Store, there still is. And in there you could buy the, the scripts for classic films. And for years, that was my reading material. Rather than buying books, I was fascinated by, because I would see these films and I'd think, uh, how, how much of this was on the paper. How did they come to this conclusion in this film to make it like this, stylized. And so it would tell you how much the director did beyond what was written. And I liked the way that it just, uh, it didn't dance around too much. It, it got to the point. This is Joe, this is what Joe said while he was here. And I didn't mind that kind of literature. And, and in a lot of times, in writing songs, many songs that I've written that I've thought of them as little movies. And uh, and uh, "The Weight" is one example. I had seen a few Bunuel films and read the scripts as well. And there was the theme going through these films about the impossibility of sainthood. That someone tries to do good, but in the way that human nature works, it doesn't, it, it ends up working against you. And these religious undertones played a big part in that as well. And uh, and again, "The Weight" was directly influenced by several of Luis Bunuel's films, thematically. And, and many other songs. I wrote a song, uh, my friend Martin Scorsese, uh, mentioned this song to me early on, a song I wrote called "Daniel and the Sacred Heart." And this was a film to him as well. And uh, it was one of his faves and he pointed that out to me and he busted me, that was absolutely true, that's exactly where it came from.

So do you feel they share techniques, films and songwriting?

Um, I don't know. But I've talked with Marty at different times, because he uses music in his films, and music before his films. He figures out what he's going to do in a film to music or through music. And I felt that I did the same thing through films. And we've sat up many a night, a late night, and, and confessed that he was just a frustrated musician, and I was the frustrated filmmaker. So I guess that's where it comes from.

Do you actually cast the voices in your songs?

Yeah. I, I think that, um, I'm, on records that I've done recently, and I think about the sounds of people's voices, uh, really being right for the part or not right for the part. Not just sound good, or being able to sing really well, but actually, the character. You can hear the character through the sound and their voice. I did this, um, one example, I wrote this song called "Somewhere Down The Crazy River," and I had this group called The Bodines from Wisconsin, and one of the guys in The Bodines, Sammy Bodine, there's a particular quality to his voice, on his records, but I heard something else, just by accident, and when we were doing something. And I had him do this answer to me in "Somewhere Down The Crazy River." And it just had a quality to it that I thought that's, that's the right character to be answering this thing. And after I did it, people who would say, hey, who was that old woman singing, uh, in the song. Well, I hope he doesn't hear about this. But it wasn't an old woman.