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43 f Mrs Robbins’ Son


Gosh, we even have Hollywood actpersons beating a folk-driven path to fRoots’ door these days! Colin Irwin meets the ‘immensely likeable’ Tim Robbins.


“I


definitely come from folk music,” says Tim Robbins, all laconic drawl and swarthy charisma. “That’s my roots and I’ve been pretty lucky to


meet some great people through that. When I did the movie Bob Roberts I want- ed something pure and beautiful at the end to cleanse the palate and I found this song I Gotta Know by Sweet Honey In The Rock so I contacted them. They weren’t particularly interested but said I’d have to get the rights from the Guthrie estate. So I phoned Nora Guthrie and she came to see the movie and loved it and I got to know Nora and started doing tributes to Woody and did a show for the Huntington’s Dis- ease issue with Billy Bragg and Steve Earle and Tom Morello. And then I got to know Pete [Seeger] a little…”


The call had come out of the blue from Barbara Charone, the legendary Chicago PR who looks after Madonna, Christina Aguil- era and various other people who never give interviews. Hollywood actor/ film director Robbins had made an album and was in London and the one publication he’d expressed a specific interest in being interviewed by was fRoots! On reporting this to fRoots HQ, I’d heard the distant sound of the Editor falling off his chair…


See, we don’t get many Hollywood superstars round these parts and the news of Robbins releasing his self-titled debut solo album at the age of 51 will doubtless inspire the cynical, if understandable, sus- picion of a vanity project resulting from a rampaging ego. But you aren’t long in his company before being reassured about both his musical credentials and his sinceri- ty, for this is a man who certainly knows his (f)Roots. A man, after all, who named his second son Miles Guthrie Robbins… presumably after Davis and Woody, Tim? “Well, I just liked the name Miles, but Guthrie was definitely after Woody.”


Immensely likeable if unfeasibly tall, Robbins greets you warmly, listens intently to the questions and locks you with pierc- ing eyes as he delivers weighty, carefully considered replies. Occasionally, often unexpectedly, he laughs – a mighty, infec- tious thunder of laughter – and the whole building seems to shake with him.


In different circumstances he might well have pursued a career as a musician from the outset. He was raised in Greenwich Village during the protest era when people like Dave Van Ronk, Eric Andersen, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Tim Hardin and even Cat Stevens would stop by. That was when his dad Gil Robbins was a member of


the Highwaymen, who had a No.1 hit both in the US and UK in 1961 with Michael, an update of the old spiritual Michael Row The Boat Ashore. A picture on the back sleeve of the album shows him as a boy playing guitar backstage at the Gaslight Café, one of the Village’s most celebrated folk venues, which his dad helped run.


“I never met Dylan but I played soft- ball in the park right across from his house on MacDougal St. I have this fantasy that at some point in 1963 or 1964 I’d be walk- ing down the street with my baseball bat and glove heading to Washington Square Park and passing him…”


s a kid in the mid-sixties he also recalls his dad hauling him and his brother and sisters on stage to sing with him at Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs and around the same time the whole fam- ily set off on a station wagon across the eastern states of the US on a bizarre pro- motional tour for Ever Ready batteries. “It was like the Von Trapps without Nazis chasing us…” he says, following it with a wondrous bellow.


A


Yet acting was also in the blood (his mother Mary was an actress) and, appear- ing on stage from the age of 12, he was quickly consumed by the theatre. Yet his


passion for music never left him – he start- ed writing songs in his early 20s and one of his earliest, Dreams, now duly appears on his album. Even when he became a major star in the baseball movie Bull Durham in 1988 – followed by more hit roles in The Player and Shawshank Redemption – he was writing songs with his brother David. Some of them saw the light of day when he played a right-wing folk-singing sena- torial candidate while making his directo- rial and screenwriting debut in the 1992 movie Bob Roberts. It led to offers then of making a record but Robbins declined.


“The opportunity was there to put out a soundtrack album but I didn’t want those songs to be heard out of context. And then because of whatever fame was happening at that point there was a possi- bility of doing something else but it felt disingenuous, it didn’t feel natural or organic. And I didn’t feel I had anything to say. Coming from a musical family I viewed music as something you should take seri- ously and not do in an offhand way.”


There’s nothing offhand or disingenu- ous about the songs on Tim Robbins. Dis- cussion about the tracks leads us into heavy territory. Mention of Book Of Josie invokes an involved discussion about his friend Sister Helen Prejean, writer of the


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