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"See, they're not saying anything much and this is killing me," Robbie says, "whereas you're rambling on for an hour and you're losing me."
Bob bristles, but not very fiercely. If Neuwirth had said that, it would've precipitated a loud and highly personal argument. Hearing it from Robbie, he just feels a vague sense of failure that Robbie's interest might ever flag while he was singing. "I'm not writing songs for people who don't pay attention," he says, with more petulance than anger.
It's winter and they're in a big hotel suite in Los Angeles, two shows down and one more to go, and there's a record player on the coffee table, and Robbie's moving the needle over the Impressions' Keep On Pushing to play "I've Been Trying" for the fourth time today. He'd been scandalized to discover that even though Keep On Pushing had showed up on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, Bob had never actually listened to it. "That was all just stuff Albert and Sally had in their house," he'd said weakly. So they'd gone out and found a copy and Robbie had held it in his hands with the kind of expression you'd see on the Jesus pamphleteers at Penn Station: Have you heard the good news?
"I'm standing five feet away from you when we do these shows and you sing loud, I don't know how I could pay more attention," Robbie says. "It's not--what I'm saying is... Look, the words move, they take me somewhere. The music just--" He gestures with his finger. "Plods around in a circle. We gotta figure out where these songs start and where they end, so we have a map and we don't get lost."
"They start when I start singing and they end when I stop, Robbie," Bob says, "it's not complicated--"
"Shh," Robbie says suddenly, "here it comes--"
Then there's the punch of horns and the conga drummer is reaching down low for the first time, and the voices, once in unison, are now trading and tossing lines between them, and everything is picking up momentum, tumbling into the moment when Sam Gooden drops the hammer--and Robbie's rolling onto his back on the carpet, stretched out long and loose and open, head tilting back and eyes falling shut and for a second Bob forgets whatever point Robbie was trying to make.
When the song returns to equilibrium Robbie's actually breathing a little heavier. He blinks a couple times, quickly, like he's trying to shake off the daze from a good joint, and then sits up and says, "Everything's gotta go somewhere. Everything. I mean--take 'Thin Man.' How many verses does that song have? Five and a bridge?"
"Seven," Bob says, a little self-consciously. "And a bridge."
"Yeah, man, remember, the first time we played it with you, by the time you finished the third verse we didn't know where we were, and if Levon hadn't kept count we never would've gotten to the bridge and we'd still be there playing the song. Forever. Sisyphus in Forest Hills."
At first, back in August, it gave Bob a little jolt of surprise to hear casual references to classical mythology and Faulkner and Zen come from a guitar player unearthed from a bar band down the Jersey shore, greased hair and tight jeans and all. But the second time Robbie came up to meet him in Albert's office Bob noticed the thick creased paperback in his inside jacket pocket. It was a different book every two or three days; idly Bob started tracking the titles, mentally cataloging which books Robbie had read, and then, after a while, which other books Robbie might like.
Right now Robbie's silence is beginning, slowly, to change color, becoming less of a pause for thought than a lack of breath. "Well, y'know, Sisyphus was the first rock'n'roller," Bob says. It's a pretty inexcusable joke but he's very disappointed when Robbie doesn't even smile.
Bob picks up the needle and drops it and "I've Been Trying" plays again, and this time he tries to just listen to the music instead of the words. He likes the milky sound of the guitar at the beginning, and then the soft stream of it flowing in and out of the little choppy fills, and he wonders if Robbie could play like that for him, although honestly he'd be more surprised if Robbie couldn't.
He's about to say something to that effect when Robbie shifts, faux-casually, turning his body a little and hunching his shoulders slightly so that Bob can't see his face anymore, a posture that makes him seem very young (even younger than he seems most of the time, which is to say he's twenty-two but barely looks twenty). Bob just watches him quietly as the song fades away, and thinks.
Levon Helm left just after they came back from DC, which makes it about two weeks ago; two weeks that he's been watching Robbie when Robbie thinks he isn't, noticing how fugitive Robbie's smile is, how it runs away in those private moments. When Robbie looks back at the drums for cues and it's Bobby Gregg behind them Bob can see Robbie jarred by a brief instant of shock, every time, and every time, Robbie gives his head an almost imperceptible shake. Then--every time--he looks at Bob, and goes on playing, as if that unsettled moment never happened.
Bob gets up from the couch and sits down on the floor, next to Robbie but not too close. "Okay," he says lightly, "I think I get you. But that song's only got about eight words in it, man, I can't write like that. I mean... 'Rolling Stone' started out fifteen pages long, you guys got the Reader's Digest edition."
That wins him a little sound--not a laugh, certainly, or even a chuckle, but at least it's an acknowledgement. After a moment Robbie rubs his forearm across his eyes. When he turns toward Bob again they're a little bit red, not from reefer, and the sadness in them has no bottom. Robbie just looks at him like that for a minute, and it's strange but it makes him feel--something (how does it feel?), that Robbie turned, and hasn't tried to force a smile--he wants to see Robbie smile but not to see him fake it.
And finally he does, a little, and says, "Well... we can compromise. Next song you write, you get sixteen words." And Bob says "fuck off" but he's laughing, and then Robbie laughs, and he could write a song about this but he'd have to get up and go over to his typewriter in the other room and it's not worth it, leaving Robbie alone, just to write another song.