A Canadian took American folk tradition and history and transfigured it into a miraculously perfect summary of America’s own mythologized understanding of itself.
Yesterday afternoon, after 80 years, Robbie Robertson finally laid down his weary tune and passed away after a long illness. Robertson’s legacy — as the core songwriter and guitarist (but not singer) for The Band, spiking a tap alongside Bob Dylan during the mid to late Sixties into the root of American history and mystery — runs deeper than most eulogies will give him credit for.
Musically, what he achieved with The Band dominates his legacy (though he composed many movie soundtracks later in life, including the one for 1980’s Raging Bull) and was a key subsequent influence on the alt-country genre. But poetically, what Robertson achieved — with such studied craft, imbued with such intelligence and lived empathy that it transcended imitation and became the authentic article — was to touch the purest soul of American myth and legend and bring it to life in his deceptively folksy lyrics and subtle music with such delicacy and preternatural grace that it is only fitting that this most American of songwriters (along with most of his bandmates) was Canadian.
Robertson’s early story reads like a rock version of Kerouac’s On The Road: Raised on an Indian reservation outside of Toronto, working a few early summer-season stints as a carny, he took to rock music and eventually fell in with visiting musician Ronnie Hawkins and followed him down to his home state of Arkansas. (Hawkins’s drummer, a fellow Razorback by the name of Levon Helm, would jell with him musically almost instantly.) Touring around Canada during the early Sixties on the secondary markets with a fiery brand of rock music few in the area had ever heard before — critic Terry Teachout memorably described southern Ontario while discussing The Band’s early days as “the land of well-trimmed lawns” — this group acquired three other members (Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson) along the way. Soon enough “Levon and the Hawks” were their own little hot Canadian-circuit rock proposition, no longer working as Hawkins’s backing band. They branched out quickly from rockabilly into sweaty blues and soul music, a few failed attempts at chart success, and what seemed destined to be a career playing mid-level venues in Canada.
Enter Bob Dylan. The story of how Levon and the Hawks, gigging with little profile around Ontario, managed to become Bob Dylan’s backing band is itself the stuff of cosmic fortune. Dylan’s manager’s secretary (that’s thrice removed, mind you) happened to be from the Toronto area and familiar with the band, and her tip made its way to Dylan when he decided he wanted to go “electric” on tour and needed a working group. The rest is history: the stuff of rock legend, musical awe, and multiple award-winning documentaries (only one of which was directed by Martin Scorsese). The Hawks slowly transformed into The Band over the years 1965–1967; their association with Dylan during the freewheeling and controversial tours of his albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde led to their constantly being referred to in press accounts as “the band” behind him — as they were all absorbing reams of abuse for selling Bob out to amplified rock — and they embraced that corporate spirit, with its implications of fraternity and equality, but also quiet self-confidence.
Out on the road with Dylan, Robbie Robertson was just the lead guitarist catching nightly abuse from hecklers shrieking “Judas!” at Bob. (They developed a fairly solid response.) In private, however, he was studying intently. The critical years spent under Dylan’s tutelage — the so called “Big Pink” era, named for the amusingly painted rural New York practice space that resulted in Dylan’s own legendary Basement Tapes, but which properly began in terms of songwriting and mutual influence during late 1966 — transformed Robertson. The artistic leap he took during this period is almost shocking: The man last seen writing such fare as “Uh Uh Uh” would reemerge in late 1967 after two years of steeping in Bob Dylan’s sensibility and the deepest reaches of the American folk songbook with songs like the Buñuel-influenced “The Weight.”
Music From Big Pink (the legendary 1968 debut for The Band) has been the subject of multiple graduate theses, a couple of New York Times best sellers, and some of Greil Marcus’s most pretentious prose. There is little I can critically add to burnish its achievement, because the music sings for itself — communally, raggedly, beautifully, out of time but always in harmony. Its most famous songs (when not co-written with Dylan or shaken off some grand and mysterious old chestnut tree) were lyrically written by Robertson. Even in this early phase — working, as he freely acknowledged, as an explicit student of Dylan — he announces himself as a peer with songs such as “The Weight,” “To Kingdom Come,” and “Chest Fever.” (Richard Manuel contributed enormously to songwriting as well, and his diminishing output in later years would have repercussions.)
The Band was a group where everyone seemed to be effortlessly swapping one another’s primary instruments, or contributing on vocals, or adding a tuba overdub (just because they’d incidentally learned to play the tuba as a side hobby). It felt like a collective of individuals who may not have always sung in pitch-perfect unison but picked one another up musically in sixth-sense ways, and in revealing those rough-hewn and vulnerable individual voices and personalities cemented that sense of a deeper, more mystically collective bond. Music From Big Pink was an album so devastatingly great, so immediately meteor-strike in its impact in the musical world, that it contributed to breaking up not one but two of the biggest groups in the United Kingdom, simply by existing: Upon hearing it, both bands’ lead guitarists thought to themselves, “Why am I not in this group instead?” (Those two, as rock historians already know, are Cream and the Beatles.) And yet one of the reasons why is that The Band in its early days was not dominated by Robbie Robertson. That became so on their self-titled follow-up The Band, an album that represents their supreme triumph and also yet sowed the seeds of their inevitable decline.
It is difficult to fully convey how singular an album The Band is. From its brown and stark-toned cover photograph to its twelve songs, it uniquely exists both in and of its time and outside of chronological time altogether. This is an album from 1969 that massively affected the future course of popular music along multiple genres, yet could have just as easily been released in 1869 (look out, Cleveland!) — and I suppose that is the point. Robbie Robertson took the lessons he learned from diving alongside Dylan deep into American traditional song and transfigured them into what can only be described as a miraculously perfect summary of America’s own mythologized understanding of itself. (Reminder: Robbie Robertson was Canadian.)
From “Across the Great Divide” to “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” these songs — lyrics all written by Robertson, dashing off images with wild precocity at this point — tell an impressionistic story about America to us that perhaps in some ways could only have been narrated by an empathetic outsider, someone in love with the romance of the country’s darker, weirder, and more complicated past. The Band, singing Robertson’s words, scooped you up with zero fanfare and took you on a transporting journey into a shadowy country you knew about only from musty books and yellowed photographs, but whose reality and legacy you now felt, because Robertson’s boundlessly open vision in those years always homed in on the universal sentiments that bound different people across different times. “Rockin’ Chair” might nominally be about old Hampton Roads sailors singing about how great it’ll be to be back in “old Virginny,” but really it’s a tired lament about the longing for home and comfort, to be safe and loved among your friends after a life’s worth of toil. (Robertson was 25 when he wrote it.) “King Harvest” is about rural trade unionism and the Grange, yes, but more importantly it’s about a downtrodden man finally mustering the courage to stand up and querulously demand his earned measure of human dignity.
And “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is the most stunning act of them all, so bracingly successful in its attempt to put you inside the shoes of The Other that I can still remember, as a kid, catching my breath conflictedly over the gut twinge of empathy I felt for people whose defeat was absolutely necessary. Robertson turned to his bandmate Helm (the only American in the group) for some tonal advice and then wrote a song about a no-name dirt-farming soldier from southwestern Virginia who fought for the Confederacy because that’s just the thing you did back then — for family, for honor, for your state — and lost, hard. At every step of the way through this song we know that he had to lose, that it was good and just and proper that the Confederacy and slavery were extinguished. And yet the crushing reality of actual loss — loss of family, loss of pride, loss of self-understanding or any sense of where you will fit in the world to come — is at the forefront. Which is precisely why, when Robertson — with Levon Helm singing his words as only a southerner could — gets to the chorus (“where all the people were singing”) it is a transcendent act of empathy. No words are needed, only a wordless wail, both lullabye and lament, and all for American history’s most deserved losers. (Again, I remind you: Robbie Robertson was Canadian.)
The Band was a landmark of popular music and remains so to this day. (It is without hyperbole one of the ten or so greatest albums ever recorded.) But its perfection was a curious curse, because Robertson could never properly follow it up. What do you do when you, as an outsider, have given a better voice to the American past in one album than anyone ever will be able to again? Decline was inevitable, and not the least reason being that — codependently assisted by drink and drugs — the other members of The Band felt increasingly crowded out by Robertson’s lyrical vision.
The fact that Robertson often thought — or increasingly came to think — of his songs as art pieces taps into what ended up alienating him from the rest of The Band over time. Robertson has often played the villain in these accounts (Levon Helm’s mid-1990s memoir being one of them), but the rap is unfair in most respects: It was they who dissipated their energies, not he. The discographical evidence tells the tale: Whether the songwriting of Danko and Manuel dried up because of drug use or disaffection with Robertson’s overweening ego, it dried up regardless. (Robbie may have evolved into the leader of The Band, but he was not the sort of ego-drunk autocrat who would turn down “Tears Of Rage, Pt. 2.” Richard Manuel just wasn’t writing that sort of music anymore.)
Nevertheless, Robertson’s self-consciousness about The Band’s “legend” and their place in musical history — at least after the achievements of 1967–1971, and perhaps in consolation for the later disappointment — was noticeable enough that it not only grated on observant rock critics, but manifestly showed up in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1977), a rock documentary chronicling their celebratory “cast of thousands” farewell shows with more than a heavy dollop of self-impressed regard. (The interview segments that Scorsese cuts in between the — admittedly remarkable — live performances have been an inside joke among rock fans for decades, because it’s transparently obvious that Marty and Robbie are really vibing on a creative level, meanwhile the other four members of The Band are drunkenly, sarcastically indifferent.)
I used to mock him for that self-regard, but that was when I was younger. Now I have a better understanding of the weight he had to pull in The Band, and (regardless of whatever mistakes he might have made) the integrity with which he carried the load. We should all be grateful for the music Robbie Robertson created, songs that aimed for far more than just historical tourism, but dwelt in worlds of both youthful innocence and achingly personal heartbreak. The delicately childlike joy of a song like “When You Awake” is a miracle of intuitive grace: As a bucolic recollection of fond childhood memories in the country that shade into young adolescence, it speaks just as easily to my (completely unrelated, but happily remembered) suburban life as it would to yours. And then there are songs like “Whispering Pines,” which he co-wrote with Richard Manuel. To step into the world Robbie Robertson conjured lyrically alongside Manuel’s music is to travel to a place squarely in the heart, not of any specific time or place save the one where it resonates most with your own life’s experience.
If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream
Inside my lonely room, there is no in-between
Whispering pines, rising of the tide
If only one star shines, that’s just enough to get inside
I will wait until it all goes ’round
With you in sight — the lost are found
May flights of angels sing Robbie Robertson to his rest, through the whispering pines. The rest of us remain here, celebrating the music he and his bandmates gave to us during that brief, magical window of time. And for those of you who already know and treasure this music, go throw on The Band or The Last Waltz tonight and take consolation in the knowledge that tomorrow morning, when you awake, you will remember everything.
Postscript: This piece is dedicated to the memory of Wall Street Journal arts critic Terry Teachout (1956–2022), whose love for The Band and Robbie Robertson’s lyrical vision was so surpassingly eloquent that I no longer think of this music (or want to) without also fondly remembering the wit and warmth he brought into the world.