The Band song that Robbie Robertson doesn’t understand
While The Band were still working on Music From Big Pink, ideas for a track that later became ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ kept coming to guitarist Robbie Robertson. After spending time in Woodstock, he left for Montreal, and soon after, his daughter Alexandra was born. Montreal was bitterly cold, and Woodstock was covered in a blanket of snow.
In need of a change of scenery and some warmth, Robertson headed to Hawaii. “Really,” he explained in 2022, “As some kind of a way to get some warmth and to begin preparing for making our second album”. It was his long travels in search of sunnier climes and inspiration that shaped the song, which follows a drunken mountain man and his love interest, Bessie.
“I think it was really pieces and ideas coming on during that travelling process that sparked the idea about a man who just drives these trucks across the whole country,” said Robertson. “I don’t remember where I sat down and finished the song, though.” Likewise, although the man Robertson wrote about is a fully fleshed-out character, one who likes to gamble on horses and watch his girl dip doughnuts in her tea, Robertson didn’t seem to know where he came from.
“We’re not dealing with people at the top of the ladder. We’re saying, ‘What about that house out there in the middle of that field?'” he explained. “What does this guy think, with that one light on upstairs and that truck parked out there? That’s who I’m curious about.” The curiosity lent itself well to the lyrics, which spell out “a drunkard’s dream” in such a hazy way that you can tell Robertson wasn’t sure where this fictitious man came from.
Musing on the man he’d imagined, he said he was “just following the story” as it came to his. “This person, he just drives these trucks across the whole country, and he knows these characters that he drops in on, on his travels,” he said. “Just following him with a camera is really what this song’s all about.”
That said, there are flashes of Robertson’s inspirations, namely in the line: “Now me and my mate were back at the shack / We had Spike Jones on the box.” Jones, an eccentric bandleader from the ’40s, was an enduring fascination of Robertson. “I thought the way that he treated music was a healthy thing,” he said. “He could take a song and do his own impression of it that was so odd and outside the box – and in many cases hilarious. I liked him a lot.”
While there are brief moments that come close to the autobiographical, the song’s brilliance stems from the fact Robertson couldn’t even make sense of its formation himself.
