Robbie Robertson, who died Wednesday (Aug. 9) on the age of 80, was a street warrior, songwriter and guitar hero who helped form rock’s late-sixties golden age in The Band, offered or curated music for a lot of of Martin Scorsese’s movies and made a number of vital solo albums. Over time, he additionally emerged as certainly one of rock’s most influential storytellers — myth-maker is likely to be a greater phrase, though he instructed true tales with dramatic resonance — first in Scorsese’s live performance movie The Final Waltz, later within the e book Testimony: A Memoir and the Band documentary As soon as Had been Brothers, and all through his profession as probably the most compelling raconteurs within the historical past of common music.
Robertson spent the primary a part of his profession backing up Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan after which, with The Band, writing and taking part in songs rooted in American mythology. The tales had been his, however the characters appeared so entrenched within the panorama that it seemed like they’d been ready for him to sing about them — Carmen and the Satan, Virgil Caine, the person with the stage fright. Many of those songs sketch out complete tales in small particulars — if it is advisable to ask why Carmen and the Satan are strolling aspect by aspect, you’re lacking the purpose, however you possibly can see it’s dangerous information from a mile away.
Over the course of his time in The Band, Robertson appeared to age right into a form of mythic character in his personal proper, and in The Final Waltz, made about The Band’s farewell to the touring life and the star-studded live performance they performed to commemorate it, he began to look at rock’s personal myths. “The street has taken a variety of the nice ones,” he says within the film. “It’s a goddamn not possible lifestyle.” Alongside along with his bandmates, Robertson turned barstool tales about freeway lodges and dodgy dive bars into widescreen epics. “Sixteen years on the street is lengthy sufficient,” he says elsewhere within the film, all of 33 on the time. “Twenty years is unthinkable.”
Greater than another work of the time, The Final Waltz provides the primary characters of rock’s second chapter the possibility to take a bow simply as punk and disco took the stage. The live performance, famously held on the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 — full with a turkey dinner and an orchestra for formal dancing — featured not solely Band collaborator Bob Dylan, but in addition a Beatle (Ringo Starr), a Rolling Stone (Ron Wooden), a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter (Joni Mitchell), a New Orleans pianist (Dr. John), a blues nice (Muddy Waters) and a rock star who might have been celebrating the seventies in an eighties fashion (Neil Younger, who in line with unconfirmed legend had a visual particle of cocaine in his nostril that needed to be edited out). The movie recounted the story of rock, proper as much as the purpose when it splintered into sub-genres.
Robertson understood this imaginative and prescient higher than his bandmates, who appeared to have discovered his idea pretentious. (The truth that he had a magnetic onscreen charisma that they lacked most likely didn’t assist, both.) “We had been within the second — we had been taking part in songs we had hardly performed earlier than with individuals from Joni Mitchell to Muddy Waters — and all we may take into consideration was making an attempt to rise to the event,” Robertson instructed me in a 2016 interview. Over time, the film grew to become its personal fable, to the purpose that there have been tribute live shows commemorating what was basically meant to be its personal form of tribute live performance. (The movie resonated a lot with me that in 1998 I purchased the film poster, which has adopted me to each residence or workplace I’ve had since — a reminder of the music I grew up listening to that by then had come to look a bit old style.)
Robertson’s first solo album, launched in 1987, additionally appeared shrouded in fable — each figuratively in songs like “Someplace Down that Loopy River” and actually in co-producer Daniel Lanois’ haunted, reverb-heavy manufacturing. At a time when mainstream rock was rising slicker, Robertson discovered a approach to preserve some thriller, partly due to an inventory of visitor musicians that included U2, Peter Gabriel, Maria McKee and two former members of The Band. He adopted that with the New Orleans-themed Storyville (in 1991), initiatives that explored Native American music and what was then referred to as electronica (Music for The Native Individuals in 1994 and Contact from the Underworld of Redboy in 1998), and far later two extra solo albums ( Change into Clairvoyant in 2011 and Sinematic in 2019).
In between these final two solo albums, Robertson revealed one of many best-ever music memoirs, Testimony, partly as a result of he was there greater than anybody else who remembers and he remembered greater than anybody else who was there. Even this determination he forged in phrases that loomed bigger than life. “I simply couldn’t carry round all of those tales anymore,” he instructed me within the 2016 interview. “There have been too many they usually acquired too heavy.” This sounds true sufficient, but it surely’s an unusually dramatic approach to discuss — you possibly can virtually image the person weighed down by his recollections, like a personality out of one of many Scorsese motion pictures for which he offered music.
Within the e book, Robertson tells his story with the identical eye for element and epic sweep he utilized in his songwriting. “It’s a cinematic piece of labor and I needed to construction the scenes in order that they fold into each other; versus, then in February this occurred, and in March that occurred,” he mentioned in 2016. Once we spoke, he talked about writing a second e book, dedicated to his later profession — and it’s onerous to not want he had lived to finish it.
Robertson had an unbelievable reminiscence, and it says lots about who he was that he even had a mythic — and true — rationalization for it. In Testimony, he writes about how his start father’s mom was a bootlegger who stored addresses and cellphone numbers in her head for security. “My start father,” he instructed me, “went on to turn into a gambler and received as a result of he was a card counter.” You couldn’t make these items up when you tried — and Robertson by no means wanted to.
