Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter who in such classics as “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” mined and helped reshape American music, has died at 80.
Robertson died surrounded by household, a press release from his supervisor mentioned.
From their years as Bob Dylan’s masterful backing group to their very own stardom as embodiments of old school group and virtuosity, The Band profoundly influenced well-liked music within the Sixties and ‘70s, first by literally amplifying Dylan’s polarizing transition from folks artist to rock star after which by absorbing the works of Dylan and Dylan’s influences as they common a brand new sound immersed within the American previous.
The Canadian-born Robertson was a highschool dropout and one-man melting pot — part-Jewish, part-Mohawk and Cayuga — who fell in love with the seemingly limitless sounds and byways of his adopted nation and wrote out of a way of amazement and discovery at a time when the Vietnam War had alienated thousands and thousands of younger Americans. His life had a “Candide”-like high quality as he discovered himself amongst most of the giants of the rock period — getting guitar ideas from Buddy Holly, taking in early performances by Aretha Franklin and by the Velvet Underground, smoking pot with the Beatles, watching the songwriting staff of Leiber and Stoller develop materials, chatting with Jimi Hendrix when he was a struggling musician calling himself Jimmy James.
The Band started as supporting gamers for rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins within the early Sixties and thru their years collectively in bars and juke joints solid a depth and flexibility that opened them to nearly any sort of music in any sort of setting. Besides Robertson, the group featured Arkansan drummer-singer Levon Helm and three different Canadians: bassist-singer-songwriter Rick Danko, keyboardist singer-songwriter Richard Manuel and all-around musical wizard Garth Hudson. They have been initially known as the Hawks, however ended up as The Band — a conceit their followers would say they earned — as a result of folks would level to them after they have been with Dylan and consult with them as “the band.”
They stay outlined by their first two albums, “Music from Big Pink” and “The Band,” each launched within the late Sixties. The rock scene was turning away from the psychedelic extravagances of the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and a wave of sound results, lengthy jams and lysergic lyrics. “Music from Big Pink,” named for the previous home close to Woodstock, New York, the place Band members lived and gathered, was for a lot of the sound of coming dwelling. The temper was intimate, the lyrics alternately playful, cryptic and craving, drawn from blues, gospel, folks and nation music. The Band itself appeared to face for selflessness and a shared and important historical past, with all 5 members making distinctive contributions and showing in publicity photographs in plain, darkish garments.
Through the “Basement Tapes” that they had made with Dylan in 1967 and thru their very own albums, The Band has been broadly credited as a founding supply for Americana or roots music. Fans and friends would converse of their lives being modified. Eric Clapton broke up together with his British supergroup Cream and journeyed to Woodstock in hopes he might be part of The Band, which influenced albums starting from The Grateful Dead’s “Workingman’s Dead” to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection.” The Band’s songs have been coated by Franklin, Joan Baez, the Staple Singers and plenty of others. During a tv efficiency by the Beatles of “Hey Jude,” Paul McCartney shouted out lyrics from “The Weight.”
Like Dylan, Robertson was a self-taught musicologist and storyteller who absorbed every thing American from the novels of William Faulkner to the scorching blues of Howlin’ Wolf to the gospel harmonies of the Swan Silvertones. At instances his songs sounded not simply created, however unearthed. In “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” he imagined the Civil War by means of the eyes of a defeated Confederate. In “The Weight,” with its lead vocals handed round amongst group members like a communal wine glass, he evoked a pilgrim’s arrival to a city the place nothing appears unimaginable:
“I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead / I just need some place where I can lay my head / Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed? / He just grinned and shook my hand, ‘No,’ was all he said.”
The Band performed on the 1969 Woodstock pageant, not removed from the place they lived, and have become newsworthy sufficient to look on the duvet of Time journal. But the spirit behind their finest work was already dissolving. Albums corresponding to “Stage Fright” and “Cahoots” have been disappointing even for Robertson, who would acknowledge that he was struggling to seek out contemporary concepts. While Manuel and Danko have been each frequent contributors to songs throughout their “Basement Tapes” days, by the point “Cahoots” was launched in 1971, Robertson was the dominant author.
They toured ceaselessly, recording the acclaimed stay album “Rock of Ages” at Madison Square Garden and becoming a member of Dylan for 1974 exhibits that led to a different extremely praised live performance launch, “Before the Flood.” But in 1976, after Manuel broke his neck in a boating accident, Robertson determined he wanted a break from the highway and arranged rock’s final sendoff, an all-star gathering at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom that included Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Muddy Waters and plenty of others. The live performance was filmed by Martin Scorsese and the premise for his celebrated documentary “The Last Waltz,” launched in 1978.
Robertson had supposed The Band to proceed recording collectively however “The Last Waltz” helped completely sever his friendship with Helm, whom he had as soon as appeared to as an older brother. In interviews and in his 1993 memoir “Wheel on Fire,” Helm accused of Robertson of greed and outsized ego, noting that Robertson had ended up proudly owning their musical catalog and calling “The Last Waltz” an arrogance undertaking designed to glorify Robertson. In response, Robertson contended that he had taken management of the group as a result of the others — excepting Hudson — have been too burdened by drug and alcohol issues to make selections on their very own.
“It hit me hard that in a band like ours, if we weren’t operating on all cylinders, it threw the whole machine off course,” Robertson wrote in his memoir “Testimony,” revealed in 2016.
The Band regrouped with out Robertson within the early Nineteen Eighties, and Robertson went on to an extended profession as a solo artist and soundtrack composer. His self-titled 1987 album was licensed gold and featured the hit single “Show Down at Big Sky” and the ballad “Fallen Angel,” a tribute to Manuel, who was discovered useless in 1986 in what was dominated a suicide (Danko died of coronary heart failure in 1999, and Helm of most cancers in 2012).
Robertson, who moved to Los Angeles within the Nineteen Seventies whereas the others stayed close to Woodstock, remained near Scorsese and helped oversee the soundtracks for “The Color of Money,” “The King of Comedy,” “The Departed” and “The Irishman” amongst others. He additionally produced the Neil Diamond album “Beautiful Noise” and explored his heritage by means of such albums as “Music for the Native Americans” and “Contact from the Underworld of Redboy.”
The Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994; Robertson attended, Helm didn’t. In 2020, Robertson appeared again and mourned within the documentary “Once Were Brothers” and within the title ballad, on which Robertson sang “When the light goes out and you can’t go on / You miss your brothers, but now they’re gone.”
Robertson married the Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois in 1967. They had three kids earlier than divorcing.
Jaime Royal Robertson was born in Toronto and spent summers on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve the place his mom Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler grew up. He by no means met his father, Alexander David Klegerman, who died earlier than he was born and whose existence Robertson solely discovered of years later. His mom had since married a manufacturing unit employee, James Robertson, whom Robbie Robertson at first believed was his organic father or mother.
Music was an escape from what he remembered as a violent and abusive family; his mother and father separated when he was in his early teenagers. He would watch family members play guitar and sing on the Six Nations reserve, and have become “mesmerized” by how absorbed they have been in their very own performances. Robertson was quickly practising guitar himself and was taking part in in bands and writing songs in his teenagers.
He had a knack for impressing his elders. When he was 15, his group opened for Hawkins at a membership in Toronto. After overhearing Hawkins say he was in want of recent materials, Robertson hurried dwelling, labored up a few songs and introduced them over to his resort. Hawkins recorded each of them, “Someone Like You,” and “Hey Boba Lu,” and Robertson would quickly discover himself on a prepare to Hawkins’ dwelling base in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Over the following few years, he toured with Hawkins within the U.S. and Canada as members left and the performers who finally turned The Band have been introduced in. By 1963, Robertson and the others had grown aside from Hawkins and have been able to work on their very own, recording a handful of singles because the Canadian Squires and getting into rock historical past when mutual acquaintances recommended they need to tour behind Dylan, then rebelling in opposition to his picture as folks troubadour and infuriating followers who thought he had offered out.
In 1965-66, they have been Dylan’s co-adventurers in a few of rock’s most momentous exhibits, with Dylan taking part in an acoustic opening set, then joined by the Hawks for an electrical set that was booed so fiercely, Helm dropped out and was changed on the highway by Mickey Jones. As captured in audio recordings and in footage by filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker seen many years later within the Dylan documentary “No Direction Home,” the music on stage for such Dylan songs as “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” greater than equaled the fury of its detractors, culminating in a May 1966 present at Manchester, England, when one fan screamed out “Judas!”
“I don’t belieeeeve you,” Dylan snarled in response. “You’re a liar!” Calling on the Hawks to ”play f——ing loud,” he led them by means of an all-out finale, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“A kind of madness was percolating,” Robertson wrote in his memoir. “The whole atmosphere was heightened. I adjusted the strap on my Telecaster so I could release it with a quick thumb movement and use the guitar as a weapon. The concerts were starting to feel that unpredictable.”
Later in 1966, Dylan was badly injured in a motorbike accident and recuperated within the Woodstock space, the place The Band additionally quickly settled. Under no contractual obligations or any kind of deadlines, Dylan and his fellow musicians stepped out of time altogether. They jammed on previous nation and Appalachian songs and labored on such originals as “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released” that have been initially supposed as demo recordings for different artists. “The Basement Tapes,” as they have been finally known as, have been amongst rock’s first bootlegs earlier than being launched formally — partially in 1975, and in a full six-CD set in 2014.
Working and writing with Dylan inspired The Band to strive an album of its personal. “Music from Big Pink” featured the Dylan-Danko collaboration “This Wheel’s On Fire” and Dylan-Manuel’s “Tears of Rage,” together with such Band originals as Manuel’s “In a Station” and Robertson’s “Caledonia Mission.”
In his memoir, Robertson remembered the primary time their previous boss listened to “Music from Big Pink.”
“After each song, Bob looked at ‘his’ band with proud eyes. When ‘The Weight’ came on, he said, ‘This is fantastic. Who wrote that song?’” he wrote. “‘Me,’ I answered. He shook his head, slapped me on the arm, and said, ‘Damn! You wrote that song?’”
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