"In the course of doing The Basement Tapes, I started thinking there's something really valuable in not being on the clock in a studio," Robertson recalled. "What you're trying to do is create an atmosphere that complements your music to the best of your ability.

Now here we are in a basement, the worst sonic atmosphere according to what they tell you is supposed to be the best sonic situation. We have cinder block walls, a big metal furnace in the middle of the room, and a cement floor. And I came to the conclusion that you don't want to get fooled by all of this sonic stuff. You want to make it work in your favor. And we just started experimenting with these things, finding sounds that we didn't hear on other records. That's a good thing. That's character."

So when The Band finally got its own shot, Robertson knew which path to follow. "We thought that we were onto something, and I thought, 'God, these are the worst circumstances, and some of these songs really have a vibe to them,'" he recalled. "Can you imagine if we did something in even the medium circumstances? We might be in good shape there." The 'worst circumstances' merely produced Music from Big Pink, one of the most influential albums in rock history. For the follow-up to Big Pink, The Band's eponymous sophomore effort affectionately known as "The Brown Album," the group moved uptown, into Sammy Davis, Jr.'s pool house, and Robertson took a more active role in producing the sessions along with Simon.

"I thought rather than me explaining things, I could do them," he said. "I get this - this is bass, this is treble, this is volume, this isn't complicated. Here we have an analog machine. When I slam something onto the tape, on certain things it sounds really god. On other things, it doesn't sound very good. Learn the difference. John Simon was great because whatever we wanted to experiment with that seemed off the map that wasn't necessarily in the instruction manual, I think he accepted it and ran with it in the same way that George Martin would. George Martin never said to the Beatles, 'You want to play this backwards? That's stupid.' He just said, 'Let me figure out how to make that even better.'"