Robbie Robertson, the principal songwriter for pioneering Canadian-American rock outfit The Band, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles after a long illness. He was 80 years old.
Robertson’s manager, Jared Levine, confirmed the news in a statement: “Robbie was surrounded by his family at the time of his death, including his wife, Janet, his ex-wife, Dominique, her partner Nicholas, and his children Alexandra, Sebastian, Delphine, and Delphine’s partner Kenny. He is also survived by his grandchildren Angelica, Donovan, Dominic, Gabriel, and Seraphina. Robertson recently completed his fourteenth film music project with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to support a new Woodland Cultural Centre.”
Robbie Robertson, born Jaime Royal Robertson, took up the guitar at age 10 in his native Toronto, Ontario. As a young child, he would often travel with his mother to Ontario’s Six Nations Reserve, where he was mentored on his instrument by various family members. After spending a brief time working the traveling carnival circuit in his area—an experience that would later inspire The Band’s “Life is a Carnival” and his 1980 film, Carny—he joined a series of local groups that eventually led him to meet Ronnie Hawkins. Over time, the bombastic frontman’s backing band known as The Hawks came to feature Robertson as well as Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, the lineup that would become The Band.
The Hawks split with Hawkins in 1964 and briefly toured as Levon and the Hawks. In 1965, Robertson was called upon by a recently electrified Bob Dylan to join his backing band. While he declined to join full-time, he agreed to play shows at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and convinced Dylan to hire Helm on drums, as well. Dylan later hired Levon and the Hawks as his backing band, touring internationally beginning in 1965 up until Dylan’s famous 1966 motorcycle crash. By all accounts, Dylan and the band were booed every night across the globe as the audience grappled with the folk hero’s transition to electric instruments and rock n’ roll.
Dylan and the members of Levon and the Hawks recorded their seminal “basement tapes” at the group’s West Saugerties, NY home in 1967 and in 1968 released their debut album as The Band, Music From Big Pink. The album featured several Robertson-penned songs that would go on to be hailed as classics, including “The Weight” and “Chest Fever”. The Band performed at Woodstock a year later and continued to record hit songs and gain notoriety throughout the ensuing years, cementing its place as one of the biggest rock acts of that time.
In 1976, after eight years, Robbie Robertson decided it was time for The Band to call it quits. The group celebrated its retirement with a guest-filled Thanksgiving Day concert at San Francisco, CA’s Winterland Ballroom. The concert was documented by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and later released as The Last Waltz, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest concert films of all time, though it was later criticized by Levon Helm and others for its portrayal of Robertson as The Band’s leader and the rest of the group’s members as sidemen.
The Band – “Don’t Do It” (Live) – The Last Waltz
Per Billboard, “Robertson was the sole writer of The Band’s first four hits on the Billboard Hot 100 — ‘The Weight’ (peaked at No. 63), ‘Up on Cripple Creek’ (No. 25), ‘Rag Mama Rag’ (No. 57), and ‘Time to Kill’ (No. 77). He was also the sole writer of the biggest hit Joan Baez ever had, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ which reached No. 3 in 1971.”
“I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality,” Robertson said in a 1995 interview for the public television series Shakespeare in the Alley.