A Sense of Doubt blog post #3097 - RIP Robbie Robertson Dead at 80 years old as of August 9th, 2023
I have been a fan of Robbie Robertson since his first solo album in 1987 with his big hit "Broken Arrow."
This is sad news.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/arts/music/robbie-robertson-dead.html
Robbie Robertson (1943-2023)
Robbie Robertson, 80, Dies; Canadian Songwriter Captured American Spirit
As the chief songwriter and guitarist for The Band, he offered a rustic vision of his adopted country that helped inspire the genre that came to be known as Americana.
Robbie Robertson, the chief composer and lead guitarist for the Band, whose work offered a rustic vision of America that seemed at once mythic and authentic, in the process helping to inspire the genre that came to be known as Americana, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.
His manager, Jared Levine, said he died after a long illness.
The songs that Mr. Robertson, a Canadian, wrote for the Band used enigmatic lyrics to evoke a hard and colorful America of yore, an especially amazing feat coming from someone not born in the United States. With uncommon conviction, they conjured a wild place, often centered in the South, peopled by rough-hewed characters, from the defeated Confederate soldier in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to the tough union worker of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” to the shady creatures in “Life Is a Carnival.”The music he matched to his passionate yarns mined the roots of every essential American genre, including folk, country, blues and gospel. Yet when his history-minded compositions first appeared on albums by the Band in the late 1960s, they felt vital as well as vintage.
“I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality,” Mr. Robertson said in a 1995 interview for the public television series “Shakespeares in the Alley.”
Speaking of the Band in the 2020 documentary “Once Were Brothers,” Bruce Springsteen said, “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there.”
In its day, the Band’s music also stood out by inverting the increasing volume and mania of psychedelic rock, and also by sidestepping its accent on youthful rebellion. “We just went completely left when everyone else went right,” Mr. Robertson said.
The ripple effect of that sound and image — unveiled on the Band’s first album, “Music From Big Pink,” released in 1968 — went wide on impact, landing the group on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 and inspiring a host of major artists to create their own homespun amalgams, from the Grateful Dead’s album “American Beauty” (1970) to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection,” released the next year.
Three of his fellow members — the drummer Levon Helm, the pianist Richard Manuel and the bassist Rick Danko — expressed those characters in distinctly aching vocals, Mr. Robertson rarely sang lead, instead finding his voice in the guitar.
A Southern Muse
While the texture of his playing was often flinty, his licks and leads were flush with feeling. In Mr. Helm, Mr. Robertson found a special muse, as well as a true link to the South; born in Arkansas, Mr. Helm was the only member of the Band not born in Canada.
In “Once Were Brothers,” Mr. Dylan called the group “gallant knights,” for sticking with him.
In the summer of 1967, the Band went to live with Mr. Dylan in Woodstock, N.Y., where together they recorded a trove of important songs, some of which later leaked out in the form of the first significant bootleg record, nicknamed “The Great White Wonder.” Key songs from those sessions, mainly written by Mr. Dylan but augmented by pieces written by members of The Band including Mr. Robertson, didn’t enjoy an official release until 1975, as the double album “The Basement Tapes.” It became a Top 10 hit and inspired the New York Times critic John Rockwell to call it “one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music.”
In 1974, the Band reunited with Mr. Dylan, backing him on the album “Planet Waves,” which became a No. 1 Billboard hit, and then launching a tour that yielded the gold concert recording “Before the Flood.”
Two years later, the Band gave what at the time was called its final concert, held in San Francisco and billed at the time as “The Last Waltz.” An all-star affair, it featured guest artists from Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison to Muddy Waters and Neil Young, as well as Mr. Dylan. A film of the show, released in 1978 and directed by Martin Scorsese, was lionized by Rolling Stone magazine in 2020 as “the greatest concert movie of all time.” The Band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Some years after the group’s demise, in 1987, Mr. Robertson began a solo career with an album simply titled “Robbie Robertson.” In the decades that followed, he released four more solo albums, though only the first one went gold.
Most of his post-Band professional efforts were devoted to work in film, often in collaboration with Mr. Scorsese, as either a music producer or supervisor or as a composer of scores. The two worked together on noted films like “Raging Bull” and “Casino.” Mr. Robertson also served as a music producer or composer on scores of soundtracks for film and television projects, and even did some acting, co-starring with Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in the 1980 film “Carny.”
‘The Guitar Looks Pretty Cool’
Jamie Royal Robertson was born on July 5, 1943, in Toronto. His mother, Rosemary Dolly Chrysler, was a Mohawk who had been raised on the Six Nations Reserve near Toronto. The man whom he believed to be his father and who raised him until he was in his early teens, James Robertson, was a factory worker.
When he was a child, his mother often took him to the Six Nations Reserve where, he told The Guardian, “it seemed to me that everyone played a musical instrument or sang or danced. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get into this club. I said, ‘I think the guitar looks pretty cool.’”
His mother bought him one.
“Rock ‘n’ roll suddenly hit me when I was 13 years old,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2019. “That was it for me. Within weeks I was in my first band.”
Around that time, his parents separated and his mother told him that his biological father was a Jewish professional gambler named Alexander David Klegerman who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident before she met James Robertson. In his memoir, “Testimony” (2016), Mr. Robertson wryly commented on his Indian and Jewish heritage.
“You could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution,” he wrote.
Enter Bob Dylan
That group recorded a few singles for Atco, all written by Mr. Robertson, and in 1965, he was contacted by Mr. Dylan’s management and invited to be part of his backing group. While he initially refused, he did perform with Mr. Dylan in New York and Los Angeles, bringing along Mr. Helm for those gigs. At the guitarist’s insistence, Mr. Dylan wound up hiring most of the other future members of the Band for the full tour.
He also invited Mr. Robertson to perform on a session in 1966 for his album “Blonde on Blonde.” The next year, he asked the Hawks to move to his new base in Woodstock, where they rented a house later known as Big Pink. It was there they recorded the music later released as “The Basement Tapes” as well as what became “Music from Big Pink.”
“It was like a clubhouse where we could shut out the outside world,” Mr. Robertson wrote in his memoir. “It was my belief something magical would happen. And some true magic did happen.”
When “Music From Big Pink” was released in the summer of 1968, it boasted seminal songs written by Mr. Robertson like “The Weight” and “Chest Fever,” along with strong pieces composed by other members of the Band and by Mr. Dylan. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” another close Dylan associate, Al Kooper, wrote in a review in Rolling Stone. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”
For the Band’s follow-up album, “The Band,” released in 1969, Mr. Robertson either wrote or co-wrote every song, including some of his most enduring creations, among them “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Rag Mama Rag,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which became a Top Five Billboard hit in a version recorded by Joan Baez. The album reached No. 9 on the magazine’s chart.
The Band’s next effort, “Stage Fright,” released in 1971, shot even higher, peaking at No. 5, buoyed by Robertson compositions like the title track and “The Shape I’m In.” Those songs, like many on the album, expressed deep anxiety and doubt, a theme that carried over to “Cahoots,” released in 1972. And while that album broke Billboard’s Top 20, it wasn’t as rapturously received as its predecessors.
A collection of blues and R&B covers, “Moondog Matinee,” was released in 1973, and Mr. Robertson’s muse fully returned in 1975 on the album “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” which included “Acadian Driftwood,” his first composition with a Canadian theme. The original group’s final release, “Islands” (1977), consisted of leftover pieces and was issued mainly to fulfill the group’s contract with its label, Capitol Records.
The same year as “The Last Waltz,” Mr. Robertson produced a Top Five platinum album for Neil Diamond, “Beautiful Noise,” and a double live album by Mr. Diamond, “Live at the Greek,” which made Billboard’s Top Ten and sold more than two million copies.
Mr. Robertson told Musician magazine that he broke up the Band because “we had done it for 16 years and there was really nothing else to learn from it.” Another strong factor was Mr. Robertson’s frustration over hard drug use by most of the other members.
Mr. Robertson’s final solo album appeared in 2019 with a title, “Sinematic,” that underscored his devotion to film work in the last four decades of his life. He recently completed the score for his 14th film project, Mr. Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is scheduled to be released this fall.
Mr. Robertson is survived by his wife, Janet; his children, Alexandra, Sebastian and Delphine; and five grandchildren.
Marveling over where life had taken him, Mr. Robertson mused to Classic Rock magazine, “People used to say to me, ‘You’re just a dreamer. You’re gonna end up working down the street, just like me.’ Part of that was crushing and the other part is, ‘Oh yeah? I’m on a mission. I’m moving on. And if you look for me, there’s only going to be dust.’”
A correction was made on
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of Mr. Robertson’s first band. It was Little Caesar and the Consuls, not Little Ceasar and the Consults.
The Band’s Classic Song, “The Weight,” Sung by Robbie Robertson (RIP) and Musicians Around the World
Yesterday Robbie Robertson, the Canadian songwriter and guitarist for The Band, passed away at age 80 after a long illness. As a tribute, we’re bringing back a video that pays homage to “The Weight,” a song Robertson wrote for The Band’s influential 1968 album, “Music from Big Pink.” The video features cameos of Robertson himself, and also Ringo Starr and other special guests. Enjoy…
Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” the Band’s most beloved song, has the quality of Dylan’s impressionistic narratives. Elliptical vignettes that seem to make very little sense at first listen, with a chorus that cuts right to the heart of the human predicament. “Robertson admits in his autobiography,” notes Patrick Doyle at Rolling Stone, “that he struggled to articulate to producer John Simon what the song was even about.” An artist needn’t understand a creation for it to resonate with listeners.
A read of “The Weight”’s lyrics make its poignant themes evident—each stanza introduces characters who illustrate some sorrow or small kindness. The chorus offers what so many people seem to crave these days: a promise of rest from ceaseless toil, freedom from constant transactions, a community that shoulders everyone’s burdens…. “It’s almost like it’s good medicine,” Robertson told Doyle, “and it’s so suitable right now.” He refers specifically to the song’s revival in a dominant musical form of our isolation days—the online sing-along.
The performances they captured are flawless, and mixed together seamlessly. If you want to know how this was achieved, watch the short behind-the-scenes video above with producer Sebastian Robertson, who happens to be Robbie’s son. He starts by praising the stellar contributions of Larkin Poe, two sisters whose rootsy country rock updates the Allman Brothers for the 21st century. But there are no slouches in the bunch (don’t be intimated out of your own group sing-alongs by the talent on display here). The song resonates in a way that connects, as “The Weight”’s chorus connects its non-sequitur stanzas, many disparate stories and voices.
Robertson was thrilled with the final product. “There’s a guy on a sitar!” he enthuses. “There’s a guy playing an oud, one of my favorite instruments.” The song suggests there’s “something spiritual, magical, unsuspecting” that can come from times of darkness, and that we’d all feel a whole lot better if we learned to take care of each other. The Playing for Change version “screams of unity,” he says, “and I hope it spreads.”
Related Content:
Jeff Bridges Narrates a Brief History of Bob Dylan’s and The Band’s Basement Tapes
Stream Marc Maron’s Excellent, Long Interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson
Watch The Band Play “The Weight,” “Up On Cripple Creek” and More in Rare 1970 Concert Footage
Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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