A Conversation with Bruce Robison (continued)

PM: Are The Sopranos big down here?

BR: Oh, yeah, all my friends watch it, but I haven't watched the show.

PM: Never ever?

BR: My brother watches it. I don't even think I've seen one episode of it. I've been on an anti-TV kick for a while.

PM: Even HBO, the whole thing.

BR: It's pretty much that I don't--and this is going to sound lame--I don't want to get hooked on anything, because I don't want to be trying to watch it. I hear from everybody that The Sopranos is great, that The Office is great, that this or that--my brother watched Arrested Development before it was cancelled. And so I purposefully never watched any of it so I wouldn't be like, "Hey, I got to watch that again," because I get my magazines and my books, and I can't even keep up with them.

PM: Yeah.

BR: So it's been a purposeful thing that I've tried to do, to not get hooked on TV.

PM: Yeah. Some of my friends are that way, no doubt about it. So what about books? You read anything lately that turned you on?

BR: Man, I did, yeah. One I'd mention, and a lot of people know about it already--Richard Ford wrote these books, one called Independence Day, and the one before that, I think, was called Sports Writer, it was two in a row. He won the Pulitzer for one of them. And so I had never heard of the guy before, and picked up one of those books and loved it, and read the other one real fast. And that was the last thing that I really liked. And then I read some kind of trashy stuff that Peter Bogdanovich wrote, too, that I really enjoyed, it's all kind of kiss and tell sort of thing.

PM: Oh, really? Bogdanovich wrote some trashy stuff?

BR: He wrote a couple of books just about, "And here are my friends."

PM: And speak of The Sopranos, he's in the cast.

BR: Yeah, exactly. And so he's written these books where he was just--and he's known everybody, and it's just got a section on Orson Welles, or Marlene Dietrich, or Cary Grant, or any of these people--

PM: Oh, I want to read this trashy stuff now. [laughs]

BR: --and he just tells about what being friends with them was like, and that was kind of in between the stuff that keeps it from being too heavy, so that was cool, too.

PM: What magazines are you into?

BR: I can't even keep up with The New Yorker. I've been reading it for, golly, twenty years now. And I love it, it makes--

PM: So you're a literate Texan, for sure.

BR: I've always liked to call myself a reader, ever since I was a little kid. And I still do. I like to identify myself as someone who is a reader as much as I do being a music person.

PM: Do you like music mags, like Mojo, or any of them?

BR: I do when I pick it up, but I don't get them.

PM: Some of them are damned expensive.

BR: They are. And I have a problem--it's a real struggle for me, anyway, to be part of the music business and not--Mojo and the people overseas, I feel like, are a little bit better at not just quantifying everybody against each other. That stuff is really kind of hard. If you read music magazines, it's just everybody who's doing better than you are, pretty much.

PM: Yeah, that does really blow.

BR: It kind of does. What I want--all the writers need to say, "Hey, let's figure out how many people read every one of your stories, and let's put them up"--because everybody now, they know how many records everybody sells, and what chart position it all got to. And it's just as twisted as the whole movie thing where people used to--you know, nobody knew what the grosses were.

PM: Yeah, it's like batting averages. Or you drop a ground ball and everybody knows it.

BR: Yeah. You shouldn't know so much about quantifying. Especially with art, if it's like movies or books or music--I mean, not just talking about myself, but the stuff that I like--how many millions it sells is not a good way to judge the worth of something. That's a pretty easy thing to say, but it's just everywhere. And then it's real easy to see that a lot of the stuff that we all love just didn't sell much when it came out.

PM: How many copies did Music From Big Pink sell, actually? I don't know. [Big Pink is the first album by The Band.]

BR: Even down to what did some of the Rolling Stones records sell, I mean, people would be surprised. I don't think it's in the millions. I mean, a Gold Record used to be a big thing.

PM: Right. And now it's a failure in some contexts.

BR: Yeah. So there are a lot of things. Yeah, Big Pink, that'd be interesting to see how many copies that sold.

PM: Did that ever go gold?

BR: I'd be surprised if it sold 50,000 copies when it came out. Maybe I'm completely wrong.

And again, that's what the studio is about, too, is that I think people back then were taken a little bit more seriously, or they were able to be given some support, you know, the acts, where the label was going to pay them later on or not, there were some real music people around, and they had real producers, and real engineers. And now it's only the tops of the tops who get any of that support. I hope this doesn't sound like sour grapes.

PM: I don't think it does.

BR: I wish I had a producer. I wish I had my George Martin. All great records that I love had a great producer.

PM: Well, who produced Eleven Stories?

BR: I did. Yeah, I've done it for years, just because--

PM: Well, there are some great producers in Texas. In your family, even.

BR: I know, I know.

PM: So what's the deal with that?

BR: I'm unproduceable, probably.

PM: [laughs] Unmanageable, unproduceable.

BR: Probably. But anyway, I think it takes--

PM: I don't know, it seems like you're hell of a lot nicer guy than you're painting yourself to be.

BR: I don't know. I do think that people need producers, and they need help. Writers need editors, and all that.   continue

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