Robbie Robertson’s most recent visit to New York was a lot less nerve jangling than his first. Last week, over lunch at the ritzy Café Boulud, he jauntily recalled time spent with the likes of Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese and Salvador Dalí. He was in town to promote “Once Were Brothers,” a documentary based on his 2016 autobiography “Testimony: A Memoir.”
As a founding member of The Band — which recorded classics such as “The Weight” and “Stage Fright” — the guitar player and songwriter born Jaime Royal Robertson, now qualifies as rock royalty. But some 60 years ago, when he was just a teenage guitar prodigy in the hot rockabilly group Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Robertson, now 76, simply wanted to get his due on a songwriting credit and attendant royalties.
To that end, Hawkins brought him up to see Morris Levy — a record-label boss with a habit of adding his name to songs his label put out, whether he contributed to the music or not. Remembering that Levy was flanked by “rough-looking guys in black mohair suits,” Robertson tells The Post, “Morris looks at me, looks at Ronnie and says in a gravely voice, ‘He’s a good-looking kid. If you ever have to do time, it’d be good to have him with you.’ I was, like, ‘Holy s–t!’ I figured that I would forego this problem with the songwriting thing.”
Within a few years, Canadian-born Robertson — the son of a Jewish father and Native American mother — and his fellow Hawks outgrew the bandleader. Out on their own, in 1966, they fell in as the backing group for Bob Dylan when he famously went electric — much to the chagrin of his folky fans.
“I never heard of anyone playing all over the world and getting booed every night,” says Robertson, who became adept at dodging trash thrown by angry audience members. “An ordinary artist would have said, ‘This isn’t going over well. Let’s make adjustments.’ But that never crossed Bob’s mind. We came to the conclusion that what we were doing would change the course of music — and it did.”
Independent of Dylan, christening themselves The Band, the group honed a form of country-dipped rock ‘n’ roll that birthed a new genre and made them into superstars via seven albums. Around that time, Robertson lived in the Chelsea Hotel where he hung out with Edie Sedgwick — “I wouldn’t say we dated; but sometimes she didn’t want to be alone” — and the Warhol crowd.
One night they all visited Salvador Dalí in his smoke-filled suite at the St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. Robertson remembers the Spanish artist having a partly finished sketch of a horse on his dining room table: “Andy said, ‘Maybe I should do a horse.’ Salvador said, ‘You don’t need to do horses. You have ladies’ shoes and soup cans.’” Taking offense, “Andy said, ‘I think we should go.’ Salvador was, like, ‘You must never go! You must never leave!’ I was thinking, ‘Wow, it’s a Salvador Dalí moment.’ ”
Sedgwick was hot stuff by most standards, but Robertson really had his eye on Nico, the entrancing German chanteuse who sometimes sang with the Velvet Underground. “Edie introduced me and said such lovely things about me that Nico thought Edie was my girlfriend and didn’t want to get involved,” says Robertson. “I said, ‘Edie, you oversold it!’”
As for the Velvets, Robertson dryly says, “I thought that if they kept working on it, they might get good. They needed to play a bit better.”
By 1976, The Band was on its last legs. A final concert was planned with guest performers including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Dylan and even Ronnie Hawkins joining them. Martin Scorsese slipped away from directing “New York, New York” to shoot the concert, resulting in a widely acclaimed film called “The Last Waltz.” He and Robertson became fast friends and shared a Beverly Hills, California, home. Of their time there, Robertson has said, “We were like vampires. We never got to sleep before 7 a.m.”
Asked about the loads of cocaine supposedly consumed in their digs, Robertson shrugs it off: “I didn’t know anyone [who didn’t do drugs] — except my accountant.”
He and Scorsese are still tight, and Robertson has scored 10 movies for the director, from “Raging Bull” to his latest, “The Irishman.” As Robertson remembers it, “I had to find a theme and tonality that could live over 50 years [that the film takes place]. Then Marty said, ‘I need you to score the movie. But don’t make it sound like movie music.’ There was the matter of figuring that out.”
It must have worked. Robertson is crafting music for Scorsese’s next movie: “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Native American story on the Osage tribe that takes place in the 1920s. He’s also carving out time for volume two of his autobiography and working on “a bunch of other projects.”
Told that he must enjoy paying tribute to his long and storied career, Robertson replies, “I celebrate it with one hand and move onward and upward with the other.”