INTERVIEW:Tim Robbins is best known as an award-winning actor, but he's soon to release his first album, and he and his band appear in Dublin this month, writes SINEAD GLEESON
ACTORS, LIKE ALL of us, have their comfort zones. You’re ridiculously famous and after three decades in one field, you decide to take a leap and propel yourself down a different creative alley. Tim Robbins, the tallest actor ever to win an Oscar, sounds as if he’s not long awake and is pottering around his kitchen in California. Next week, though, he is Dublin-bound, not for a film premiere, but for a gig with his Rogues Gallery Band. Their new self-titled album is released next Friday and I confess to Robbins that as a fan of his acting work, I had “the fear” about listening to his music in case, well, it just wasn’t any good. “I knew it was something I had to do sooner or later, but was always wary of it. The reaction you just described is similar to the way I’ve felt about it for years, too. Because I’d become famous in one discipline, it seemed as if I didn’t have the right to be famous in another, or use that fame to get a record deal. I resisted it for a long time. I thought it didn’t feel right, it felt exploitative.”
Exploitative is an interesting choice of word, given that Robbins is almost as well known for his political views and championing of various causes as he is as an actor. From a young age, his family instilled a love of music, acting and politics in him. His mother Mary was an actress and sang with the New York Choral Society, while his father Gilbert owned a nightclub and was a folk singer. Folk music has its own social connotations, but there were frequent discussions about politics at home, too. “There was always music in house growing up and my parents were socially progressive, artist bohemians with a Catholic sensibility, too. From all of that, you don’t lose the idea that you have a responsibility in the world. From that, you get a certain moral upbringing . . . that need to be religious. I suppose it was my dad who taught me that if there’s an injustice in the world, you should speak about it, fight against it and try to reverse that injustice.”
Given the crossover between music and politics in his parents’ house, I guess there was a lot of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. “Oh yeah, we listened to a lot of Guthrie. You know, everyone in music is influenced by him, but only the smart ones know it.”
Robbins is also a big fan of the work of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose 1947 documentary To Hear Your Banjo Playincludes interviews with Guthrie, Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. "Those really old work songs represent the indomitable spirit of America to me."
I mention Billy Bragg, who was asked by Guthrie’s daughter to write music for lyrics the legendary singer had left behind. “Oh, Billy’s great. I did a Woody Guthrie tribute show with him in Europe, with Steve Earle and Tom Morello. The organisers asked me if my son wanted to play too, so he had to listen to a lot of Woody Guthrie and learn the songs. It was like an education for him.” Robbins has two sons, Jack and Miles (whose middle name is Guthrie) and a step-daughter, Eva. His own father wanted him to “get a real education”, even though Robbins wanted to go to a performing-arts high school. After leaving a Catholic school, he says he went from “best to worst student”, but it was around this time that he discovered theatre and his love of acting. Has he tried to discourage his children from going down the artistic route? “I’ve encouraged them to find something to do in life that brings them great joy. If they can make a living at it, even better. I’ve been really lucky because it’s something I’ve managed to do.”
One of the songs on the album, Dreams, was written long before his roles in Robert Altman's The Playerand Bob Roberts. "When Bob Robertscame out, there were whisperings about whether I wanted to make a record. If you do something like that you have to give time to it and at that point I was an actor. I was writing and directing, running a theatre company, and I had a family. Music would have pushed me over the cliff." Looking back, it seems prudent that Robbins didn't get distracted by music, given that the biggest film role of his career was just around the corner. In 1994 The Shawshank Redemption ("I knew that film was a gift") made Robbins a bona fide A-lister.
Concurrent with his career has been his relationship with fellow actor Susan Sarandon. They were touted as one of Hollywood’s happiest couples in an industry where lengthy marriages are the exception rather than rule. Given that the album is released now, and much of it is very personal, many assumptions have been made about the content. “This album was pretty much finished by the time that stuff happened.” There is a silence, and I take this to be all Robbins has to say on the subject. “That stuff” is a euphemistic reference to the end of his 23-year relationship with Sarandon. The pair separated in the summer of 2009, but it wasn’t revealed publicly until the end of the year.
"I did Desert Island Discs for the BBC, which was a lot of fun, but I joked during the interview – and you can clearly here me laughing – that I thought about calling the album Songs of Loveor Miseryor The Midlife CrisisAlbum. Then a tabloid newspaper in London picked up on the story and said that I admitted that I was going through a mid-life crisis . Not only that, but they ran a side article next to it, written by a psychiatrist, talking about the things one goes through at this age, comparing me to a comedian who was institutionalised. That's where a joke goes these days. I did another telephone interview and afterwards the journalist said that I wrote these songs as 'a response to recent events in my life', which is not true, so it's almost a game the way things end up sometimes."
Robbins hasn't ventured much information in public about the end of his relationship. This is the ultimatum faced by high-profile figures, keep your private life just that and be hounded, or give the tabloids what they want in the hope they'll back off. He is happy to talk about his songs and film work, but is aware that in today's celebrity culture, that's often not what the public want to hear. "I try not to live my life in public. I stay pretty private. If people recognise me and want to say nice things, that's fine – 99 per cent of the time it's really positive; the other one per cent is just drunken. I don't stress on it too much. I like playing band shows, and doing theatre and talking to students, but I don't like public situations where I'm the star. I don't like going to an event and being the famous person there." In 2007, he was just that, when he won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River. A hard-to-describe moment if ever there was one. "Oh it feels great, when you win. It was also great that my buddy won because he might have been grumpy afterwards . It's nice though, because it's your peers honouring you for something."
Robbins might not have made the ceremony had he not been nominated, after being banned from the Oscars in 1993. He and Sarandon presented an award and used the stage (in an oddly prophetic way) to call for the closure of an internment camp at Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of Haitian patients who had tested positive for HIV were being held. “We saw this sea of red ribbons on tuxedos and gowns and figured we should point out what was happening because no one was reporting it or asking questions. So we took 23 seconds to call attention to it, and even though there was a shit storm and they banned us, the truth is they closed down that internment camp within a week. To me, the Oscars have become very safe and boring because no one will do anything like that. It’s like a bunch of very well-trained artists, but we want our artists to be rude and unpredictable.”
Robbins is far from rude. He is relaxed, politically engaged and keen to push himself creatively. There is no cast, director or script to stand behind when making music, so with the album’s release he’s arguably more exposed. “In some ways, it is more personal, but you always put something personal into your work. You have to go there, to allow yourself the freedom to express what inspires you and use whatever conduits – songs, film – are available to you.”
Tim Robbins and the Rogues Galleryis released on Friday. They play the Academy, Dublin on Thursday as part of the Arthur's Day festivities. He will also perform a surprise pub show on the same night. They also play Whelan's on Sunday, September 26th
