Robbie Robertson knew how to spin a yarn. The songs he penned with The Band – scrapbooks of folkloric Americana designed by a Canadian in an age of psychedelia – served as glorious proof. Then again, as referenced in “The Last Waltz,” he had a lot to draw on “physically, spiritually and psychotically.”
Case in point, this observation from the guitarist/songwriter’s 2016 memoir “Testimony,” which recalled one of the less glamourous venues Robertson played during his pre-Band days on the road with Ronnie Hawkins.
“Inside, we learned why the place was called the Skyline Lounge: there was no roof. A fire had burned it up and the owner either had decided to go with it or couldn’t afford to fix it. You could still smell the singed wood. Dubiously, we set up our gear and checked out the PA system. Our voices sounded like barkers at an amusement park. Ronnie turned to us and said, ‘Well, boys, you live and you learn. If we can get through this alive, we can do anything.’”
Robertson, who died Tuesday at the age of 80, went on to do “anything” and then some. From his performance years with Hawkins and, later, Bob Dylan, through the original decade-long incarnation of The Band, he helped invest rock ‘n’ roll with an earthiness that went against almost every pop trend of the day. The Band’s first three albums, “Music from Big Pink” (1968), “The Band” (1969) and “Stage Fright” (1970) veered so far off the rock freeway that they seemed to defy time. The songs were alternately historical, spiritual and wildly fanciful in nature – be it in the characters that inhabited them (Crazy Chester from “The Weight,” Virgil Caine from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) or the music that giddily shifted from roots-driven rock ‘n’ roll (“Rag Mama Rag”) to carnival style fancy (“The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show”).
Robertson was also a distinctive guitarist with a wiry spitfire sound that was often scattered around his songs like gunshot. But The Band, already designed to downplay soloing and instrumental grandstanding, utilized his guitar colors mostly for a leveling effect within a hearty ensemble musical framework.
The Band’s reach would quickly become enormous. At its creative peak, the ensemble could count Eric Clapton and Roger Waters as vocal admirers while bands generations younger – Wilco and My Morning Jacket, among others – would eventually reflect the ripple effect of The Band’s influence.
Such a sound was very much a cumulative work, colored by three lead vocalists of rustic intensity and soulfulness (Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel) with a mad scientist-of-sorts keyboardist (Garth Hudson). But it was Robertson’s songs – and ultimately, Robertson himself – that became the focal fixture of the group. That seemingly led to an uncomfortable parting of the ways with “The Last Waltz” and The Band’s eventual reassembly without the guitarist in 1983.
Robertson essentially gave up live performance after “The Last Waltz,” maintaining a working relationship with the film’s director, Martin Scorsese, that continued through this year with music for the latter’s upcoming Western crime saga “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
The discord of The Band’s initial split was apparently considerable. Helm’s 1993 autobiography “This Wheel’s on Fire” dishes the dirt liberally, but we will leave such divisions for others to sift through. What we have, with Hudson now the only surviving Band member, is a catalog of profound, rootsy beauty. In performance, though, that music took on a muscular immediacy even The Band’s sterling studio works couldn’t fully reveal.
To a degree, “The Last Waltz” is a chronicle of such combustion, despite the bloated guest list it carries. A personal preference, though, remains the extraordinary 1972 live album “Rock of Ages,” where The Band augments both its own antique accented material and a smattering of chestnut R&B covers with horn arrangements by New Orleans maestro Allen Toussaint. A half-century on, the album still sounds sublime.
Robertson’s post Band music didn’t start to emerge until a full decade and change after “The Last Waltz.” His first three solo albums – “Robbie Robertson” (1987), “Storyville” (1991) and the underrated ambient/ethnic mash-up “Music for ‘The Native Americans’” (1994) were solid efforts, despite Robertson’s limited strength as a vocalist. They earned considerable critical praise, but couldn’t fully escape the shadow of The Band’s epic work. Robertson never engaged in extensive concert support for any of his solo records.
Yet with his passing, Robertson’s music stands as a cornerstone component of American rock ‘n’ roll. In terms of lasting influence and inspiration, The Band will, most assuredly, play on.
The Musical Box 
Thanks Walter, a wonderful remembrance of Robbie
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