Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guide guitarist and songwriter who in these classics as “The Fat,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Evening They Drove Outdated Dixie Down” mined and helped reshape American music, has died at 80.
Robertson died surrounded by spouse and children, a assertion from his supervisor claimed.
From their several years as Bob Dylan’s masterful backing team to their own stardom as embodiments of aged-fashioned group and virtuosity, The Band profoundly motivated well-known tunes in the 1960s and ’70s, initially by actually amplifying Dylan’s polarizing transition from people artist to rock star and then by absorbing the functions of Dylan and Dylan’s influences as they fashioned a new seem immersed in the American previous.
The Canadian-born Robertson was a significant faculty dropout and a single-male melting pot — component-Jewish, component-Mohawk and Cayuga — who fell in enjoy with the seemingly limitless sounds and byways of his adopted country and wrote out of a sense of amazement and discovery at a time when the Vietnam War experienced alienated thousands and thousands of young People. His lifetime had a “Candide”-like quality as he found himself amid quite a few of the giants of the rock period — finding guitar guidelines from Buddy Holly, using in early performances by Aretha Franklin and by the Velvet Underground, smoking cigarettes pot with the Beatles, watching the songwriting staff of Leiber and Stoller establish material, chatting with Jimi Hendrix when he was a battling musician contacting himself Jimmy James.
The Band began as supporting players for rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins in the early 1960s and as a result of their many years collectively in bars and juke joints forged a depth and versatility that opened them to virtually any type of music in any form of setting. In addition to Robertson, the group highlighted Arkansan drummer-singer Levon Helm and three other Canadians: bassist-singer-songwriter Rick Danko, keyboardist singer-songwriter Richard Manuel and all-close to musical wizard Garth Hudson. They had been at first named the Hawks, but ended up as The Band — a conceit their admirers would say they earned — because people would stage to them when they were being with Dylan and refer to them as “the band.”
They keep on being described by their first two albums, “Music from Big Pink” and “The Band,” equally introduced in the late 1960s. The rock scene was turning absent from the psychedelic extravagances of the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and a wave of audio outcomes, very long jams and lysergic lyrics. “Audio from Massive Pink,” named for the previous household in the vicinity of Woodstock, New York, wherever Band associates lived and gathered, was for a lot of the seem of coming property. The mood was personal, the lyrics alternately playful, cryptic and yearning, drawn from blues, gospel, people and nation music. The Band by itself seemed to stand for selflessness and a shared and crucial history, with all 5 members generating exclusive contributions and showing in publicity shots in plain, dark dresses.
As a result of the “Basement Tapes” they experienced produced with Dylan in 1967 and by means of their very own albums, The Band has been widely credited as a founding resource for Americana or roots songs. Supporters and peers would discuss of their lives being improved. Eric Clapton broke up with his British supergroup Cream and journeyed to Woodstock in hopes he could sign up for The Band, which affected albums ranging from The Grateful Dead’s “Workingman’s Dead” to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection.” The Band’s tunes have been protected by Franklin, Joan Baez, the Staple Singers and a lot of some others. In the course of a tv effectiveness by the Beatles of “Hey Jude,” Paul McCartney shouted out lyrics from “The Excess weight.”
Like Dylan, Robertson was a self-taught musicologist and storyteller who absorbed anything American from the novels of William Faulkner to the scorching blues of Howlin’ Wolf to the gospel harmonies of the Swan Silvertones. At moments his songs sounded not just produced, but unearthed. In “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” he imagined the Civil War as a result of the eyes of a defeated Accomplice. In “The Fat,” with its lead vocals handed all over among the group associates like a communal wine glass, he evoked a pilgrim’s arrival to a town the place practically nothing would seem not possible:
“I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about 50 % earlier dead / I just require some location where I can lay my head / Hey, mister, can you explain to me where a gentleman could possibly discover a bed? / He just grinned and shook my hand, ‘No,’ was all he explained.”
The Band played at the 1969 Woodstock competition, not much from where they lived, and turned newsworthy ample to surface on the include of Time journal. But the spirit driving their finest do the job was already dissolving. Albums these kinds of as “Stage Fright” and “Cahoots” ended up disappointing even for Robertson, who would accept that he was battling to find refreshing thoughts. Although Manuel and Danko were being both equally repeated contributors to tracks throughout their “Basement Tapes” days, by the time “Cahoots” was unveiled in 1971, Robertson was the dominant writer.
They toured commonly, recording the acclaimed live album “Rock of Ages” at Madison Sq. Yard and joining Dylan for 1974 demonstrates that led to one more very praised live performance release, “Before the Flood.” But in 1976, just after Manuel broke his neck in a boating incident, Robertson determined he required a break from the street and organized rock’s best sendoff, an all-star collecting at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom that incorporated Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Muddy Waters and several other folks. The concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and the foundation for his celebrated documentary “The Past Waltz,” produced in 1978.
Robertson had supposed The Band to proceed recording jointly but “The Final Waltz” helped completely sever his friendship with Helm, whom he had after seemed 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 finished up owning their musical catalog and calling “The Previous Waltz” a vanity task built to glorify Robertson. In response, Robertson contended that he experienced taken regulate of the group due to the fact the other individuals — excepting Hudson — ended up too burdened by drug and alcoholic beverages challenges to make choices on their have.
“It strike me hard that in a band like ours, if we were not running on all cylinders, it threw the complete equipment off course,” Robertson wrote in his memoir “Testimony,” posted in 2016.
The Band regrouped with no Robertson in the early 1980s, and Robertson went on to a lengthy career as a solo artist and soundtrack composer. His self-titled 1987 album was certified gold and featured the hit single “Show Down at Massive Sky” and the ballad “Fallen Angel,” a tribute to Manuel, who was found lifeless in 1986 in what was dominated a suicide (Danko died of coronary heart failure in 1999, and Helm of cancer in 2012).
Robertson, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s though the other people stayed near Woodstock, remained close to Scorsese and assisted oversee the soundtracks for “The Color of Money,” “The King of Comedy,” “The Departed” and “The Irishman” among the other people. He also made the Neil Diamond album “Beautiful Noise” and explored his heritage by means of this kind of albums as “Music for the Indigenous 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 did not. In 2020, Robertson appeared back and mourned in the documentary “Once Were Brothers” and in the title ballad, on which Robertson sang “When the mild goes out and you simply cannot go on / You pass up your brothers, but now they are long gone.”
Robertson married the Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois in 1967. They experienced 3 little ones before divorcing.
Jaime Royal Robertson was born in Toronto and put in summers at the 6 Nations of the Grand River reserve the place his mother Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler grew up. He never satisfied his father, Alexander David Klegerman, who died in advance of he was born and whose existence Robertson only figured out of many years later. His mother experienced given that married a manufacturing facility employee, James Robertson, whom Robbie Robertson at first thought was his organic guardian.
New music was an escape from what he remembered as a violent and abusive domestic his mothers and fathers divided when he was in his early teens. He would enjoy relatives enjoy guitar and sing at the 6 Nations reserve, and became “mesmerized” by how absorbed they ended up in their individual performances. Robertson was quickly practicing guitar himself and was participating in in bands and composing songs in his teens.
He had a knack for impressing his elders. When he was 15, his group opened for Hawkins at a club in Toronto. Immediately after overhearing Hawkins say he was in require of new materials, Robertson hurried property, labored up a couple of tracks and brought them in excess of to his hotel. Hawkins recorded each of them, “Someone Like You,” and “Hey Boba Lu,” and Robertson would quickly locate himself on a prepare to Hawkins’ household base in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Over the next number of years, he toured with Hawkins in the U.S. and Canada as associates remaining and the performers who sooner or later turned The Band ended up introduced in. By 1963, Robertson and the many others experienced grown apart from Hawkins and ended up ready to operate on their very own, recording a handful of singles as the Canadian Squires and stepping into rock heritage when mutual acquaintances recommended they need to tour powering Dylan, then rebelling towards his image as folk troubadour and infuriating fans who believed he experienced marketed out.
In 1965-66, they were Dylan’s co-adventurers in some of rock’s most momentous exhibits, with Dylan participating in an acoustic opening set, then joined by the Hawks for an electric established that was booed so fiercely, Helm dropped out and was replaced on the street by Mickey Jones. As captured in audio recordings and in footage by filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker noticed decades later in the Dylan documentary “No Way House,” the audio on stage for this sort of Dylan songs as “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Ballad of a Slender Man” a lot more than equaled the fury of its detractors, culminating in a Could 1966 display at Manchester, England, when just one lover screamed out “Judas!”
“I never belieeeeve you,” Dylan snarled in reaction. “You’re a liar!” Contacting on the Hawks to ”play f—-ing loud,” he led them through an all-out finale, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“A form of madness was percolating,” Robertson wrote in his memoir. “The full environment was heightened. I adjusted the strap on my Telecaster so I could launch it with a brief thumb movement and use the guitar as a weapon. The live shows have been starting off to sense that unpredictable.”
Later on in 1966, Dylan was badly injured in a motorbike incident and recuperated in the Woodstock space, exactly where The Band also quickly settled. Beneath no contractual obligations or any sort of deadlines, Dylan and his fellow musicians stepped out of time completely. They jammed on old place and Appalachian music and labored on this kind of originals as “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall Be Released” that ended up originally intended as demo recordings for other artists. “The Basement Tapes,” as they ended up at some point called, were among rock’s 1st bootlegs in advance of currently being released officially — in part in 1975, and in a entire 6-CD set in 2014.
Doing work and writing with Dylan inspired The Band to test an album of its possess. “Music from Major Pink” highlighted the Dylan-Danko collaboration “This Wheel’s On Fire” and Dylan-Manuel’s “Tears of Rage,” together with these types of Band originals as Manuel’s “In a Station” and Robertson’s “Caledonia Mission.”
In his memoir, Robertson remembered the initial time their aged boss listened to “Music from Huge Pink.”
“After just about every track, Bob appeared at ‘his’ band with proud eyes. When ‘The Weight’ arrived on, he mentioned, ‘This is great. Who wrote that tune?’” he wrote. “‘Me,’ I answered. He shook his head, slapped me on the arm, and stated, ‘Damn! You wrote that music?’”
