Robbie Robertson (1943 - 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pretty sure a full-skeleton x-ray would reveal traces of the Band in my bones.  Their music and something of each member’s musical personality is braided into my ribs and spine. If Aristotle hadn’t said of tragedy that it

is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions,

I would’ve said it about the Band. The trajectory of their individual and collective lives arced from Olympian heights to the grey liquid layer at the bottom of the dumpster. A loneliness haunts their music and their biographies, pulsing with the indolence of an out-of-breath EKG. Richard Manuel hanged himself in a Florida motel room after a downer gig. He was 42. Rick Danko spent time in a Japanese prison for possession and died of a heart attack at 55. Levon Helm died after a long struggle with throat cancer. Now Robbie Robertson is gone, leaving only Garth Hudson.

Where to start? I guess with that faux-alligator cassette case that my dad kept in the cabinet in the den. It held ten or twelve cassettes. A few of them never caught my eye. But a few of them did. I remember finding an incongruous Black Sabbath tape in there. I know for a fact that my dad was not into Sabbath or anything like it. Maybe he thought it was a Friday night jam for the lost tribe of Jews in Ethiopia? More likely it was given to him by one of his younger drug buddies. There was Neil Young’s Harvest which got play in the car with some frequency and which I promptly made my own. I bought the vinyl shortly thereafter. I treat my vinyl with kid gloves. But Harvest I wore out. At some point in the 90s, I bought another copy and inserted it into the original gatefold sleeve. That’s the one I still listen to.

And there was The Best of the Band. This too got play in the car. And this, too, I ran off with. But I never bought it on vinyl. I needed to go back to the sources. First, The Band, which I learned only later – I was thirteen, there was no internet – was their second album. Then their first, the epochal, majestic, otherworldly, and wholly-of-this-world, Music From Big Pink. It is one of the three or four greatest rock albums ever made. I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Before college I had the Band’s complete catalogue on vinyl and I’d seen The Last Waltz at least five times. Our Aunt Pamela painted the cover on the back of a denim jacket for my brother Matt and I’m jealous to this day.

The tragedy that is the Band casts Robbie in the role of villain. But real life doesn’t have roles. Time and circumstance change people. They make people weak. They make people do things they wouldn’t have/couldn’t have done at other times, in other circumstances. Time and circumstance can force an ordinary person to do and make extraordinary things. But they can also wring the talent from a person like blood from a workshop rag.

This can’t simply be a eulogy for Robbie. It must also be a requiem for the Band.

At the beginning, the Band was a collective. Look at the photograph in the gatefold of Music From Big Pink. Really look at it. Totally confounding. A group of thirty-three people – six of them children – gathered for a portrait in front of a barn. In the foreground, planted at the children’s feet, two oversized plastic mushrooms, red with white polka dots. The adults range in age from their twenties to their seventies. The men wear mostly plaid shirts and dungarees. A few wear suits. The women are in their rural Sunday-best. Printed on the photo, to the left of the group, in black, all-caps, serif font, are the words, “NEXT OF KIN.” They’re hard to make out because they’re printed atop a picnic bench and partially on top of the trunk of a tree. At the upper left corner of the photo is a smaller – roughly one inch by one inch – inset photo of a middle-aged couple. One must assume they couldn’t make the group shoot, but that someone deemed it important to include them. It’s like the missing members of the Latin Club cropped into the high school yearbook page. Amongst the large group of thirty-three, the five members of the Band. They are not out front like the Beatles on Sergeant Peppers’. They don’t stand out from this crowd. They’re mixed in, dressed like the rest of the gathering in farm hats and work shirts. The image tells us something. As an ardent fan at Bob Dylan’s 1965 press conference said, “that’s an equivalent photograph it means something it’s got a philosophy in it.”

The philosophy of the photo is “we.” The band, the family, the families. Not the hedonistic selfishness of hippie sex, hippie drugs, hippie music. The Band put their backs into it. They pull as a group, ten hands on the frayed rope, hauling the past up out of the well. In the history of rock and roll, few bands – very few bands – have worked as cooperatively as the Band. Each member is more interested in making nooks and crannies than in filling them with jam. It is the irregular contours of each player’s part that fit together with the others’ like the grooves of a key in a lock, like the unexpected joinings of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Here is one of Robbie Robertson’s great gifts: chipping away at the surface of the song – his guitar quite recognizably the sound of stone directed at flint – leaving excavations, indentations, evacuations, and abdications; small, rhythmically sporadic gaps and crevices where Manuel, Danko, Helm, and Hudson can gain purchase, place flourishes, or further abrade the smooth swellings of the odd constructions they called songs. Together, the five of them each scatter fragments that somehow coalesce as music. This little miracle is why so many of their contemporaries took a big step back when first they heard the Band. So many who thought they knew what a song was, how its little machinery worked. So many who retreated and doubted what they thought they knew.

J. Royal “Robbie” Robertson (the J is for Jaime) was plucked from relative obscurity by Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly howler who made his living performing north of the border. Hawkins’ music demanded that the singer regularly hand off to the hotshot guitarist who would fan the song’s flames with a solo. (Witness Hawkins return the favor as he opens the proceedings of The Last Waltz, the Band’s farewell concert filmed my Martin Scorcese.) Yet, despite his hotshot bona fides, Robertson rarely took a proper solo in the Band’s songs. He preferred to make those little jigsaw shapes than to slash through the song with samurai flash. When he does take a solo they tend to be brief. And rather than grabbing the song by the throat, they prick its belly, they force it to convulse ever so slightly, to change shape ever so briefly. Listen, for example, to the solo in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Robertson enters at 2:52. His guitar is miniscule, a gnat buzzing in the ear of the field ox. He chokes the neck of the guitar, forcing it to fight its way out of his grip. Harmonic shards squeeze out of the song like little metallic bubbles. The solo almost recedes back into the song. It trips itself like a Catskills comedian. Resting a moment to allow the audience to fill the gap where a “real” solo would have made hay, it then starts to tighten the line, tauter and tauter, while the Band catches its balance and slithers across the canyon on the solo’s tense vibrations.

On Music From Big Pink, Robertson wrote only four of eleven songs. Most people, even fans of the Band, miss that. Richard Manuel wrote three and co-wrote one with Bob Dylan. Rick Danko and Dylan collaborated on another. They also include a cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and the 1959 country ballad “Long Black Veil.” The following year, for their self-titled second album, Robertson wrote or co-wrote all twelve songs. There’s a very reasonable argument to be made that Robertson became the leader of the Band because he had to; because the Band could no longer function as a cooperative. It’s the same old rock and roll story: the drugs, the alcohol, the sex. The trappings of fame interfering with the reasons that fame arrived in the first place. Robbie was ambitious. Robbie wanted more. He learned the nuts and bolts of recording during the second album so that he wouldn’t have to trust others with those crucial tasks. Robbie is cast as the villain in the Band’s bio. But without Robbie it’s likely there wouldn’t have been a Band bio to speak of.

I do think, however, that it is fair to say that Robbie wasn’t, at heart, a songwriter.  He was a great guitarist, an inventive arranger, an accomplished bandleader. But he lacked anything like the lyrical gifts of Dylan, under whom the Band apprenticed, and many of his songs are weighed down by rigid perspective-taking: “Stagefright” written in the voice of an anxious performer, and (ugh) “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the first-person account of a bereaved Confederate soldier. Other songs – think for instance of “Life is a Carnival” – are hogtied by barbed-wire conceits that trap the song in the constraints of all-encompassing metaphors. For a while, though, he had enough musical tricks up his sleeve to keep the songs lively, often surprising. “Jawbone,” from the second album, is a musical obstacle course, careening from syncopated waltz time to drunken-sailor shanty, to a thorny, hiccupping chorus riff as off-kilter as King Crimson at their proggiest. But the Band was nimble enough to navigate the song gingerly, making it feel casual. The five of them had the kind of instrumental and vocal charisma that could start a fire even with waterlogged kindling. In the Band’s early days, the weary, yet ethereal voice of Richard Manuel could break your heart singing the contents of a soup can.

I saw the band only once. I was a little too young, born too late. It was after the Last Waltz breakup and the subsequent reunion, without Robbie. I’ve seen other bands past their prime, sometimes missing key members. But without Robbie, the Band was merely a cover band of themselves. The Band was precisely the sum of their parts. More than any other band, subtracting even one member reduced it to a one-wheeled Schwinn. It might still go, but you couldn’t call it a bicycle anymore. Still, the evening ended in glorious Dylanesque fashion when, peaking on mushrooms, I spilled from the theater with the crowd onto the still-light summer evening streets of Boston, directly into the midst of a Shriner’s parade, dodging fez-topped men in miniature cars weaving synchronized patterns down Tremont Street. Maybe life is a carnival after all.

It's hard to know what other people hear when they listen to music. But reading tributes and reviews of the Band, one comes continually across descriptions which emphasize their “homespun” sound, their rejection of the acid-inflected electric music of the late-60s, their attachment to a relaxed, back porch American musical mood. Rarely does anyone mention how physical this band was. There is so much feel, so much body in their music. Consider their radical reworking of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” a staple of their live sets. Watch their bodies in the encore version performed in The Last Waltz. Try to sit still through the 3:05 mark of this 1971 version at New York’s Academy of Music. Robbie’s fiery guitar solo drains into a mournful horn figure and it sounds as if the song has run out of gas, as if it’s gonna have to pull over to the shoulder. Levon confesses “my biggest mistake was loving you too much” while stumbling down his drumset stairs in his clumsily tied emotional bathrobe and the Band kicks back in with the renewed vigor of desperate bodily love. The Band extracts the funky unconscious of Gaye’s version, nudging the horn section punctuations into rhythmically vicious positions. The Band’s version is testament to their skill as listeners, as bodily feelers of a song. It’s as if they’ve dug down deep into Gaye’s version and excavated the devastating funk buried deep within.

I think that way back when, watching the Band on the big screen in Scorcese’s film, I was subliminally hooked by their bodies. Rick Danko’s bass playing is not about the notes, it’s all about how they fall in time. He drops brackets, allowing the phrases and riffs of the song to make sense as units of thought, units of feeling. When you watch Danko play, his body is a conduit. The song pulses through him, distending, extending. He lopes like he’s riding a horse, easing out of the saddle and back down again. You could turn off the sound and just watch Danko and you’d still be able to feel the song. Levon Helm is spindly and sly, like a back-alley assassin who rejects the revolver as too ostentatious, opting instead for a short blade that can get the job done with minimal exertion or attention. He’s in and out before anyone knows they’ve been done. Watch his hands in “Up On Cripple Creek.” His grip is lethal, halfway up his drumsticks. He’s stabbing more than stroking the drums. Watching his shoulders, you might conclude that this is where the song really resides. In his shoulders the rhythm of his drumming meets the phrasing of his singing, sometimes at odds. But they both live there, in some kind of harmony. And, returning to Robbie, in the darkness of whatever theaters I sat in back then as a thirteen or fourteen year old – you couldn’t rent The Last Waltz yet, the technology hadn’t arrived – I watched Robbie’s body infected by the songs, dancing along to Saint Vitus’ palpitations. His right arm flying up as if he’s just touched a live wire, as it does here at 1:34 of “Ophelia.” With his hand he stirs the air, vibrating the already-vibrating molecules, insuring that they continue shivering until every last oscillation is exhausted. This is what it means to inhabit and be inhabited by a song. In Robbie’s body, in the collective body that was the Band, the songs quiver like the hum of cosmic background radiation, the energy that surrounds all matter, of which we are a part. This energy, this vibration, coursed through the Band. Its intensity has reduced by increments. Now, Robbie’s gone and the light is almost out...but for those songs. 

I’m putting on “Tears of Rage” right now.