Robbie Robertson was a lightning rod in the tempest of rock’s centrifuge, a 1960s poet noir with an anachronistic streak that drove him to capture the flipside of his manic life in song. His mouthpiece, his collaborative framework, his scuffle-brothers-forever was the Band. For one summer in 1968 they imploded the entire psychedelic merry prankster tune-in-drop-out Sgt. Pet Sounds zeitgeist with ancient music from the woods. Reverberations in Big Pink – basement booze noodling during Bob Dylan’s self-banishment from hipsville as he morphed into a country bumpkin troubadour. From that spark came his own songs that twisted a generation and struck a chord of Americana emanating from this otherwise reserved Canadian songsmith and his boys on the prayer-wing.
Robertson was a guitar player first. He played it as if it might leap from his hands and never return. A prodigy that was exploited as a teenager and blossomed as a songwriter, he never lost this obsession that bordered on dangerous. Watching the seminal rock and roll film of all time again recently, as I introduced my 20-year-old uber-talented singer-songwriter niece, Sydney Leigh to The Last Waltz, I am/was/always will be mesmerized by his trenchant fury on the instrument shining within his band’s framework – boogie-woogie to plantation blues and twangy country to folk-rock. The Band, upon Robertson’s request, worked in service of song, all of which he composed with their able assistance. You could see it when they played – all looks and listening and eye contact and compromise.
All of it began and wrapped up in the circle of his guitar.
When you think of Robertson, darkly handsome with Jewish-Native American blood, he is withdrawn and hyper-focused, and you think of those songs, and their borderline atavistic romanticism about the deep South (“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”), the epic struggle of the nineteenth century farmer (“King Harvest [Has Surely Come]”), down-on-their luck carnies (“Life is a Carnaval”), or the Biblical wanderers of arguably his best and definitely his most known composition, “The Weight.” Character-driven morality tales of lost souls emersed in cheap temptations of the demimonde.
He learned about these vagabonds and charlatans, sad sacks and high rollers from the Band’s only American; a pistol-amped Arkansan drummer and the ensemble’s first boss, Levon Helm, who had a voice awash in moonshine molasses and lent a languid bordello backbeat to the affair. But he mastered the storytelling vehicle from Dylan when the Band first agreed to back his mercurial nether ride on the infamous mid-sixties “electric tours” of Britain and the U.S., with all the booing and catcalls and death threats and the brutal fury pouring from those performances.
You want to know about Robbie Robertson musically? You listen to the most famous of all bootlegs, The Great White Wonder – released in 2017 as The Royal Albert Hall Concert and his work with Dylan in 1966 during those tours – especially “Like a Rolling Stone,” which at once made my wife tear-up and boiled something in me that is difficult to describe as mere anger (closer to a crushing disappointment in humanity and a rare empathy for the then spiteful and speed-addled Dylan). Then go find the clip of Robertson’s dueling guitar solos in The Last Waltz with Eric Clapton, which, for my money, is won by Robbie on pure grit and force. It is well documented that Clapton not only dreamed of one-day joining the Band, but completely restructured his musical journey and professional career on their oeuvre.
A road dog from his teen years, most infamously as part of the legendary Hawks that backed a feral lunatic named Ronnie Hawkins (who took performance to alarming levels of spastic eruptions), earned Robertson lead-guitar duties and later as the right-hand of Levon Helm (who took the name and the band and moved it out of Canada and into the heartland). That is precisely why the Band became a touring machine, something Robertson at times barely endured and oft abhorred. Suffering from severe panic attacks – one in which a hypnotist had to be called in to get him to the stage – was well depicted in perhaps the best song written about the pangs of a traveling performer, “Stage Fright.”
The revisionist history of the Band and Robertson’s sense of entitlement as its sole songwriter and de facto leader in documentaries and his memoir has taken some of his self-aggrandized autonomy away. Of course, in that “basement” – although it was more a downstairs garage space – in Saugerties, New York, the five members, all brilliant musicians and arguably (and I argue) the best Caucasian singing rock group ever, was deep collaboration. But one thing that never changed was Robertson’s retreat from the darkness that enveloped its sheepishly lovable bass player, Rick Danko and his near-death drug-fueled car wrecks, or Helm’s descent into heroin fogs, or the gin-drenched peril of multi-instrumentalist, Richard Manuel, who had a voice that sounded as achingly fragile as the man who eventually committed suicide by hanging.
No teetotaler, Robertson, an only child who understood the duality of independent solidarity, kept himself centered inside the tumult of his times and his band and remained true to his adoration of the music that moved him as a shy kid steeped in the golden age of rockabilly meets swamp-stomp, a world away from tepid suburbia. His dreams of the mystical Beale Street and its bawdy Black rebels, pool-hall hustlers, and barroom fisticuffs melded seamlessly into his story-songs. He lived vicariously through the voices of these songs, usually sung by others, except for his later solo albums, and always with a mask of truth.
Robertson broke up the Band in 1976 with the Last Waltz concert that his friend Martin Scorsese turned into a visual masterpiece, and then the two worked together on several of his films and other projects, including Robertson’s scoring of the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon about the genocide of the Osage Nation in the early part of the 20th century. Robertson told everyone the separation was mutual, but the rest of the musicians in the group disagreed and went on touring and making records without him – none of them as good, but that would have been understandable when considering the last few Band records were not as good as their time with Dylan or immediately thereafter. It’s as if they missed the outrageous turmoil of their times, the best marriage of art and chaos.
Later in life, Robertson produced Neil Diamond and played behind Ringo Starr and Carly Simon and James Taylor, and his old sparring partner, Eric Clapton. He played the part of elder statesman for bands like my friends in Counting Crows, tutoring them on recording in houses not studios, and helping to stage many of the early Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies. However, his legacy was created in those rooms with those musicians.
Together they formed the final bridge between the jump-jive-swing / blue grass / downhome blues and the pop / rock / soul that sounds today as fresh as it did when it was played in that basement. They ushered in the singer-songwriter, country-rock fusion of the 1970s that still reverberates in clubs and bars in kids with mandolins and fiddles and washboards and drums and hearts filled with song.
Robbie Robertson played guitar.
He wrote songs.
He defined the last pathway to rock and roll.
