The bandleader who didn’t front his band, who was never as celebrated as Bob Dylan or their peers, was the glue keeping the Band together
Robbie Robertson existed in a world of his own: a bandleader who didn’t front his band; a songwriter who needed the voice of others to bring his creations to life; someone who was intimately involved as first Bob Dylan and then the Band reached the zenith of their artistry, helping to reconfigure the possibilities of rock’n’roll twice within three years, without ever being quite as celebrated as artists who plainly regarded him as their peer.
His legacy will endure as a songwriter, above all. Robertson was fortunate to have Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson to interpret the songs he wrote for the Band, especially across their stellar opening trio of albums: Music from Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright. Robertson, a Canadian, captured in both his musical and lyrical choices an imagined American South – one that could have been captured only by someone besotted with, but not born of, the complications of history.
Would anyone from the US have dared to write The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down? Perhaps it was only Robertson’s status as both a non-American and within the countercultural aristocracy that meant he could get away with writing from the point of view of a Confederate soldier surveying a defeated land. It’s not that the lyric was necessarily brilliant, but it was specific and perfectly suited to the music, to the melody and to the voice of Helm, the one actual Southerner in the group.
“I remember when I would come down here and I’d find something I really liked, and people would say, in a joking way, ‘Yeah, the South’s gonna rise again!’” Robertson told Q magazine in 1991. “And they’d be kidding around, but I’d hear a little crack in their voice. Things like this, coming in, gave me the opportunity to storytell, because I was at just the ripe age. They didn’t write The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down because they were just too used to it – it’s too close to see. But coming in, you’d feel these things.”
Robertson’s other gift was one that is rarely celebrated in the rock histories, because they celebrate those who reached too far, who suffered for their art: he was really very good at getting things done. He was a child guitarist – obsessed by both the rock’n’roll records he heard on the radio in Toronto from across the border, and by the country they came from – and joined the backing band of rock’n’roll singer Ronnie Hawkins at the age of 16 in 1959, first as bassist, before swapping to lead guitar of the Hawks. Robertson learned his trade not in the folk clubs of the East Village or the underground ballrooms of Detroit and San Francisco, but in the roadhouses and bars of a touring group playing to eat and live. Which meant that in due course it seemed as though there was no challenge to which Robertson could not rise.
Being on the road with Hawkins turned the Hawks into such a sharp band they became too good for him – a “crackerjack band”, Robertson later noted – and parted ways in 1963. Two years later they were recruited by Dylan to be his backing band on his first electric tour. Rather than remembering how people reacted, think of what made them react that way: a band more road-hardened than the Beatles had been when they came back from Hamburg, capable of turning on a dime and of following Dylan deep down his amphetamine tunnels – the live recordings from 1966 capture a band exploding, finally given the full leash by their employer. They sound feral.
And then Dylan’s motorcycle crash, the retreat to upstate New York, and the house in West Saugerties called Big Pink. At first, Dylan and the Band were working out who they were, a process documented on The Basement Tapes, By the time Dylan returned to circulation in 1968, the Hawks had discovered who they were: they were the Band, and they were singing songs – largely written by Robertson – that captured a dream of what America was, is and might be, songs that sounded less written than collected. Even the titles – The Weight, Up on Cripple Creek – spoke of things that had been extant forever.
It couldn’t last. Robertson became the Band’s leader not just because he wrote the songs but because he could get things done (the group was beset by heroin addiction, to which Robertson did not succumb). And, like Mick Jagger in the Stones, the man who gets things done, who steers the group, who does the talking, stirs up resentments against him. Throw in the fact that Robertson earned much more than his bandmates because he was the songwriter, and ruptures appeared that never mended – Helm had not reconciled with Robertson before he died in 2012.
Robertson eventually let the Band fall apart, departing with one last piece of brilliance – The Last Waltz, an incredible live album and film that started his long association as supplier of high-end film scores to director Martin Scorsese. While it was traditional for the bandleader departing a beloved group to do so for a massive solo career, that wasn’t Robertson’s path. A decade had passed after the Band’s messy demise in 1977 before Robertson released his first solo album, also chalking up an unlikely hit single in Belgium, Holland and the UK with the spooky but sleek Somewhere Down the Crazy River, whose lush synths and popping bass were starkly removed from the Band.
That was the last time anyone had hopes Robertson might crossover. Most of his work after 1977 was in film, usually on the musical side, and when he released solo albums they followed his own path – no one listening to the Canadian Aboriginal singing of Peyote Healing from 1998’s Contact from the Underworld of Redboy would have associated it with the bloke who made Somewhere Down the Crazy River, let alone The Weight.
As the years crept on, though, there were signs he wanted to revive his part of the past. Though his last recorded work was the soundtrack to Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon, Robertson’s last solo album, 2019’s Sinematic, came paired with a documentary, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band. The film shared its title with the second track of Sinematic, making it plain who the brothers Robertson was singing about. “When the light goes out / We’ll go our own way / Nothing here but darkness / No reason to stay,” he sang, unsentimental to the last.