The song Robbie Robertson wrote as a tribute to his “brother” from The Band
Even though two of his former mates from The Band, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, appear as guest musicians on the album, Robbie Robertson’s self-titled 1987 solo debut sounds very little like Music from Big Pink and a lot more like two of the other big, lush pop-rock albums of this late 1980s era: Peter Gabriel’s So and U2’s The Joshua Tree.
The connective tissue was producer Daniel Lanois, who had a hand in all three albums and helped bring Robertson together with both Gabriel and U2’s Bono for guest appearances on the Robbie Robertson LP. The two songs featuring Gabriel are really the standout tracks here, and feel like genuine collaborations, as Robertson travelled to the former’s studio in Bath in hopes of harnessing some of the complex layered vocals and ethereal keyboard sounds he’d admired on the musician’s earlier work. Those more haunting tones were particularly important in generating the mood Robertson wanted for what would become the album’s powerful opening track, ‘Fallen Angel’.
Inspired by the 1986 suicide of The Band’s former pianist and singer, Richard Manuel, ‘Fallen Angel’ begins with a faint heartbeat rhythm and the slow fade-in of guitar reverb and a synth part that functions like a funeral organ. The song is a tribute to Robertson’s fallen friend, but also an exploration of death itself, as he wanted the music to evoke the idea of a soul passing into the next realm. Gabriel’s backing vocals further add to the effect, and the whole thing takes on the feel of a heavy, spiritual unmooring of a weight that Robertson had likely been carrying with him for a long time, dating back to The Band’s disintegration a decade earlier. “I don’t believe it’s all for nothing / It’s not just written in the sand / Sometimes I thought you felt too much / And you crossed into the shadowland”.
Speaking to the Chicago Tribune after the album’s release, the then 44-year-old said that Richard Manuel had been “like a brother to me. All of those guys [from The Band] are like my brothers”.
He elaborated further in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Age, describing ‘Fallen Angel’ as “this kind of love letter to a dear buddy of mine who passed away. At the time [of Manuel’s death], nobody understood it at all,” Robertson said, noting, “but in hindsight, it’s very easy to understand that this was the disease of alcoholism.”
By 1987, Robertson had at least temporarily found himself back on good terms with the other surviving members of The Band. Even Levon Helm—the only ex-member who doesn’t appear on this album—claimed he would have been happy to play on it if not for some scheduling conflicts. Coming to terms with his past, however, didn’t mean Robertson wanted to try to recreate it musically.
“I distinctly did not want to make a record that sounded like The Band,” he told the Winnipeg Sun. “I didn’t want to jump on the turnstile that so many so-called dinosaurs seem to get caught up on. But, at the same time, I wanted to make an authentic album that, like The Band, relied almost entirely on real playing, rather than electronic effects.”
While fellow singer/songwriter and Robertson fan Elvis Costello later criticised Gabriel’s additions to ‘Fallen Angel’ as giving it the effect of being “inflated with steroids”, it’s actually something of a magic trick that the song retains its emotional core and organic authenticity even amidst the sort of ocean of sounds that Gabriel brings to it.
When he died at just 42, Richard Manuel became the first of the core five members of The Band to shuffle off this mortal coil. Now, 40 years later, they’re all gone, as the deaths of Robertson in 2023 and Garth Hudson earlier this year marked the end of one of rock’s great stories, the rag-tag crew of Canadian rockabilly players who wound up backing up Bob Dylan and arguably inventing modern American folk-rock. When I heard the news of Robertson’s unexpected death, I felt compelled to listen to ‘Fallen Angel’ and hear that sound of the soul moving on, as Robbie himself had imagined it.
