Robbie Robertson: The Leader of the Band

To attempt to grasp the full scope of the professional life of Robbie Robertson is to engage in an exercise in futility. Few artists in the history of music have had such a unique and varied career. From the ‘50s and into the current decade, Robertson has produced work after work that has become essential to the vocabulary of popular music. 

Born in Toronto to a mother who was half-Mohawk and half-Cayuga Indian and a Canadian father, Robertson was raised on the Six Nations of the Grand River Reservation. His indigenous ancestral background would come to play a significant part in his music, particularly his later work. 

Robertson’s first break in the world of professional music came when Arkansas rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins recorded two of Robertson’s songs in 1959. Robertson soon became an integral part of Hawkins’ band, known simply as the Hawks. After a couple of lineup changes, Hawkins settled on his backing band which included Robertson on guitar, Rick Danko on bass, Garth Hudson on organ, Richard Manuel on piano, and the great Levon Helm behind the drum kit. The group soon outgrew Hawkins and became the backing band for Bob Dylan. The group toured with Dylan for most of 1966 and then recorded the legendary “Basement Tapes” with him in 1967.

And then they outgrew Bob Dylan.

Settling quite simply on the name “The Band,” the group recorded both one of the greatest debut and sophomore albums in the history of rock and roll: “Music From Big Pink” from 1968 and their self-titled follow up, released just one year later. Combining folk, rock, blues, gospel, R&B, and country to create a genre of their own that would one day be called “Americana,” The Band were out of the box legends after just two albums. Over the course of those two records they produced songs like “The Weight,” “Tears of Rage,” their wondrous version of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” and “King Harvest.” In the annals of rock history, it’s hard to think of two more perfect albums. The Band sounded like everything and the only thing all at once. Both familiar and transcendent, reverent and yet somehow wholly original, there were parts of their music all throughout history, but no group ever combined the elements like The Band did. “The Weight,” in particular, supplanted “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” as the rustic sing-a-long that seemed to define the end of any great night, be it covered on a stage by a band you were familiar with, or friends just messing about around the campfire. 

Their third album “Stage Fright: was terrific, and yet still fell short of their triumphant first two albums. The group’s final four recorded albums were often maddeningly inconsistent, although “Northern Lights-Southern Cross” nearly scaled the same heights as their first two records. After their disappointing album “Islands” in 1977, the group decided to film and record their farewell, the now legendary concert film/documentary hybrid, The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, released in 1978. Typically seen as the greatest concert film ever made (although Stop Making Sense and Sign O’ the Times might like a word), The Last Waltz was an all-star jamboree that included the likes of Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, The Staples Singers, and more great artists than you can count with all your fingers and toes. I don’t know if Neil Diamond has ever had a better moment on stage than when performing “Dry Your Eyes” with The Band, and as great as Van Morrison has always been, it’s hard to think of any single performance of his that could possibly top his version of “Caravan” in the film. 

As a sort of last will and testament of the original version of The Band (the other members would later reform without Robertson in the ‘90s), it is nearly impossible to think of a finer document of a legendary group parting ways with some level of acrimony (Robertson’s ascendancy as the leader of the group became a sticking point), but also with a revelatory level of joy. Scorsese’s almost giddy interviews are well-matched to his electric direction and Jan Roblee and Yeu-Bun Yee’s vibrant editing. Whatever pain the group was going through internally did not translate to the stage. All that was left was their alchemic interplay that was not overshadowed in the slightest by their fancy guests. It is a breathtaking film.

Somewhat adrift after The Band’s breakup, Robertson stepped into the world of film by producing, writing, and starring in Carny, a 1980 oddity about carnival hustlers that co-starred Jodie Foster and Gary Busey. Fondly remembered by a significant minority, reviews at the time were modest and the film made back only a third of its small budget of $5.5 million. Robertson would act only once more on film, giving a poignant cameo in Sean Penn’s criminally undervalued The Crossing Guard starring Jack Nicholson from 1995.

With no clear musical direction of his own, Robertson reconnected with Scorsese as the music producer and uncredited composer for The King of Comedy, before taking full credit for the excellent score for Scorsese’s Oscar-winning sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money. Creating a smokey, subtle mood that played soulfully against the more raucous needle drops in the film (particularly Eric Clapton’s “It’s In The Way That You Use It” and most famously Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”), the Paul Newman/Tom Cruise hit seemed to reignite Robertson’s love of music, and after a decade away from the pop scene, Robertson recorded his first solo album in 1987, the self-titled “Robbie Robertson.” 

Robertson only sang lead twice with The Band, and perhaps that played a part in him taking so long to step out on his own. While his vocals may not have been as elastic as Danko’s, as eccentric as Helm’s, or as beautiful as Manuel’s (The Band truly had an embarrassment of riches in the instrumental and vocal areas), it was a very distinctive instrument. There was a husk and a break in his voice that sounded like experience. Robertson called in some heady special guests for his first solo record: U2, Gil Evans, Peter Gabriel, Maria McKee, and the Bodeans all figure prominently on the album, and all accentuate Robertson’s compositions to great effect.

Better still was Robertson’s 1991 follow up record “Storyville,” a song-cycle of sorts focused on the famous section of New Orleans that the album is named after. While guests like The Neville Brothers, Neil Young, and Bruce Hornsby can be found on the album, Robertson is more out front, singing more confidently, and the songwriting is the strongest of his solo career, and at least the best he had produced since “Northern Lights-Southern Cross.” Unfortunately, “Storyville” did not sell as well as his first solo album, and Robertson would take a seven-year break before recording another solo album, 1998’s highly experimental “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy,” a wildly ambitious record that combined traditional Aboriginal Canadian music with trip-hop and electronica. It’s a marvelous album, but unsurprisingly, it sold even fewer copies than its predecessors.

In between his second and third albums, Robertson continued to dabble in film and TV, composing the theme for The Whoopi Goldberg Show, scoring Jimmy Hollywood and the mini-series The Native Americans, earning two Emmy nominations for the documentary Robbie Robertson: Going Home, while also consulting on Scorsese’s Casino, and serving as the Executive Producer for the soundtrack to the John Travolta hit, Phenomenon. 

From there, Robertson’s work in film was almost exclusively for Scorsese. Robertson filled the role of Executive Music Producer for Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, and The Irishman (for which he also composed the score), as well as working on Shutter Island as the Music Supervisor. 

Robertson produced two more solo albums, 2011’s autobiographical “How To Become Clairvoyant” and “Sinematic” (which includes two songs that can be heard in The Irishman) in 2019. His final work in music has yet to be fully heard by the masses: the score of Scorsese’s 2023 Oscar contender, Killers of the Flower Moon, the true story of the murders of Osage tribe members during the 1920s that resulted in an investigation spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers is an epic film about a dark moment in our country’s history that surely connected with Robertson in a deeply personal way. 

While Robertson’s epitaph will mostly focus on his decade with The Band (and by all means, do see the fine 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson & The Band), I find his post-Band years to be equally fascinating. Robertson was an artist who never stopped searching, always looking for new sounds and fresh modes of expression. His work touched on (a nearly impossible to grasp) eight decades. He wrote unshakable standards, played a magnificent guitar, created a small but significant body of work for film and television, and produced five solo albums that are worthy of rediscovery and reconsideration. 

He was a genre unto himself.

Take a load off, Robbie. You gave us so much. 

Robbie Robertson died on August 9, 2023. He was 80 years old.