Robbie Robertson, the revered songwriter who died last week aged 80, was an immensely important composer. Over six decades in the entertainment business, Robertson worked alongside a small galaxy of musicians and singers, most famously Bob Dylan, who probably spoke for many when he said the Toronto-born artist’s death came as ‘shocking news’ for those of them still left.
When he died, Robertson had just completed his fourteenth film composition for Scorsese
America’s ‘traditions, tragedies and joys’ were Robertson’s lyrical trade, according to his most frequent collaborator of the past 45 years, the film director Martin Scorsese. In a long conversation I had with Robertson in 1988, he told me that he thought of his recordings less as music and more as literature. His lyrics spoke of the deep history of his adopted American homeland. ‘What I’m really interested in is mythology,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in places and characters I haven’t met.’
He summoned a band – The Band – to assist him in the telling of these mythologies and it was Robertson’s great good fortune to have three smoking voices fit for the task – along with fellow Canadians Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, the Arkansas-born Levon Helm. And while Robertson occasionally sang along, his relatively ordinary range was no match for the others, also including a barrel-chested multi-instrumentalist, Garth Hudson. His literary imaginings, however, were of a distinctly higher order.
The Band first started weaving Americana together in the 1960s. But the focus of Robertson’s songwriting always felt closer to the 1860s. Poverty-stricken farmers from another era appeared and vanished in his lines, snake-hipped Southern belles and windswept early pilgrims, too. And oh, Virgil, quick come and see, there goes Robert E. Lee.
Out of this primitive stuff they formed a slew of once-heard-never-forgotten albums (Music from Big Pink, The Band and, arguably, Stage Fright), along with the phantom sessions recorded in 1967 with Dylan in upstate New York and released eight years later as The Basement Tapes – all polished off with an extraordinary feeling of ageless classicism. As the writer Greil Marcus noted on that latter recording’s sleeve notes, there was ‘an absolute commitment by the singers and musicians to their material’.
The Band eventually came unstuck with Robertson terminating their collaboration in 1976. The group’s final performance, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, is captured on the Martin Scorsese-directed concert film The Last Waltz. The rockumentary was produced by Robertson and in 2019 selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry for its cultural significance. Among the dozen guest performers were Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, the Staple Singers, and Muddy Waters, as well as a show-stopping appearance by Dylan toward the end, all artists with whom Robertson’s work had intersected.
Not everyone was entirely thrilled with the effort. ‘For two hours, we watched as the camera focussed almost exclusively on Robbie Robertson,’ former Band-mate Levon Helm later grizzled in his memoir, This Wheel’s On Fire, ‘long and loving close-ups of his heavily made-up face and expensive haircut.’
For Robertson, though, the new working relationship with Scorsese proved a boon. When he died, Robertson had just completed his fourteenth film composition for Scorsese on Killers of The Flower Moon.
Marshalling high-voltage talent around him was never really an optional extra for the father of Americana. His smattering of solo albums, virtuoso guitar riffs or no, sometimes faltered when he attempted to go it entirely alone or rely too heavily on his own voice, which only ever really alternated between a querulous murmur and a naked whisper. Working with ‘nothing but air’ had always been the starting point in his work, he told me, and he always knew how to find those who could help him.
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