The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub-
genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’
So it’s refreshing to find that Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson, the two notable rock memoirists this festive season, have both dispensed with the ghostly intermediary, dusted off their PCs, loaded a thesaurus programme and writ large. Doorstop large.
In Robbie Robertson’s case, we are assured that every word of Testimony is his own, even if there are signs of an ongoing battle with his long-suffering American editor. The decision to intercut childhood memories with risqué anecdotes of time spent in Ronnie Hawkins’s Hawks — Canada’s early Sixties answer to the British blues boom — certainly chances a literary arm. It’s abandoned after 150 pages, perhaps after seeing the sales figures for the last rock memoir to bypass straight narrative.
Anecdotes are sprinkled liberally throughout, but all too often they read like those of an after-dinner speaker failing to recall Steve Martin’s observation: ‘The point of an anecdote is that it has a point.’ Reading Testimony is like stumbling into a name-droppers’ convention.
Perhaps this should come as no great surprise. If there is a defining image of Robbie Robertson — the guitarist-songwriter who put the E in the Electric Dylan, patented the sound of Americana and hijacked Levon Helm’s Band — it is the ruggedly handsome, clean-shaven musical director of The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s famous 1978 movie of a 1976 Winterland gig intended to draw a curtain across 16 years of The Band on the road.
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