‘Life is a Carnival’: How a teenage job in the travelling circus helped to shape Robbie Robertson’s art
Life is a carnival, believe it or not. Just ask Robbie Robertson.
When he wasn’t trying to sell you a watch, real cheap, Robertson was best known as the chief songwriter, lead guitarist and de facto bandleader for the group, which were at times variously known as The Hawks, Canadian Squires, The Honkies and The Crackers, and, best of all, simply as The Band.
Robertson worked across plenty of different roles and jobs in his lifetime; taking on supporting gigs first behind Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan, leading his own Band to glory, working as a session man and sometimes producer for other artists, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond, Hirth Martinez and Carly Simon, as well as working as a long-time musical collaborator, composer and music supervisor for Martin Scorsese, but it was a couple of early formative jobs which really had an impact on his later life and work.
Born Jaime Robertson in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1943, Robertson’s family were of Native American origins, and so he spent a lot of his youth travelling to the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve southwest of Toronto with his mother. It was here that he learned to play the guitar, but it was two brief summer jobs he took on at the age of 14 that taught him about the life on the road that was to come for him.
Already used to making his own way around, Robertson worked a couple of jobs in the late 1950s on the travelling carnival circuit. First off, doing odd-jobs for a few days with a troupe around Toronto before a longer engagement as an assistant at a freak-show for three weeks during the Canadian National Exhibition (Canada’s largest annual community event).
In his early days of notoriety, Robertson’s later collaborator Bob Dylan often told tall tales about working as a carny in his youth to anybody who would listen. Dylan never actually worked in a circus, though, but carnivalesque images would run through so many of his songs, like ‘Desolation Row’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Obviously Five Believers’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and later on all through his underrated movie Masked and Anonymous.
Like Dylan, Robertson incorporated circus images and elements into his own music and moviemaking, though unlike Dylan, he had some actual first-hand experience in what he was writing about.
In songs like ‘Thinkin’ Out Loud’ and, especially, ‘Life is a Carnival’, Robertson relived some of his youthful days in his songs, but surely would have felt the life he was leading was following a familiar pattern, as well. Rolling from town to town, night after night, to put on a show for a new audience, running the gamut of emotions and all the while surrounded by a revolving cast of changing faces, hangers-on and hucksters, freaks, geeks and snake-oil salesmen alike, life in a band can’t be all that different from life in the carnival crew.
Even once Robertson decided to leave the life on the road with his Band behind him and move into moviemaking, he brought the feeling of the circus with him, co-writing, producing and starring in -alongside Jodie Foster and Gary Busey – the 1980 picture Carny.
Though the film received mixed reviews and is not so well remembered today, Robertson’s love of his subject matter particularly caught the attention of the critics. Legendary film reviewer Roger Ebert said that “Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals than it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.”
Life is a carnival, believe it or not.
