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Robbie Robertson  

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Robbie Robertson is a legend. I have been a fan of his for years, but had never had a chance to see him in person until last night. Though I miss his days with The Band, he certainly is great by himself. It is clear to me now who the real talent of The Band was, and that was certainly Robbie. I remember the first time he sang “Inside the Belly of the Whale” during We Don’t live here anymore. It gave me the chills, and then the guitar solo during the same song was simply great.

Even though he is like 70 now, he still has so much energy and compassion and simply love for music. So many bands today could take a lesson or two from him about stage presence and performance. He was large and in charge and cool as a cucumber despite being so old. It was a little awkward seeing some of the musicians on stage with him that were probably old enough to be his grandkids, but I’m super jealous that they get to tour with Robbie all the time. I’m sure not a day goes by that they do not learn something from him. Robbie’s show was great, I wish he toured more as I would go see him again in a heartbeat.

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Never seen The Band or Robbie in concert. My boyfriend uncle died last year and he was a music guru and we were helping clean out the house he lived in and came across an old VHS Written on it The Last Waltz, assuming by his uncle. My bf said My uncle had never watch this when I was like 9 so he just so happens to have a VCR still and we got done stopped at Chinese place got a To go dinner and made a movie night and WOW! LOVED IT! And no even gonna lie We have watched it like I lost count after 15 times. If we are home and just working around house we pop it in and let it play. So a week later we went to try finish up packing and getting house cleaned out and there it was The Last Waltz CD collection in mint condition. We were like WOW!! And We listen to the 4 CD pack like probably All the time Too. So We watch it in honor of Uncle Eddie Seabolt. And The late great Helm . Love, Candace Pack and Josh Boone Boone.2020.

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Robbie Robertson, driving force behind roots-rock icons the Band, dies at 80

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Robbie Robertson, the driving force behind the pioneering rock ’n’ roll group the Band, died on Wednesday. He was 80.

His death was confirmed by his longtime manager, Jared Levine.

In a statement, Levine said that Robertson died in Los Angeles after a long illness. “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,” the statement read. “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 Center.”

As the Band’s chief songwriter and grand conceptualist, Robertson turned old American folklore into modern myths, a knack that gave a timeless quality to such songs as “ The Weight ” and “ The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down ”; it was as if he had unearthed the songs, not written them. Robertson specialized in portraits of bygone figures and institutions, writing odes to Confederate soldiers, blacksmiths, medicine shows and whistle stops, his tall tales given weight and energy by the heft of the Band.

15 essential Robbie Robertson songs

A look back at the best of Robbie Robertson, the pioneering Band songwriter and guitarist who died on Wednesday at 80.

Aug. 9, 2023

“Music From Big Pink” and “The Band,” the group’s first two albums, arrived at the twilight of the 1960s, helping to shift rock away from the heady excesses of the psychedelic era and into something rugged and elemental, an evolution that had a seismic effect on the group’s peers.

“The Band has leapfrogged all its competitors,” The Times’ Robert Hilburn wrote in 1970, “and emerged as the chief challenger to the Beatles’ position of rock supremacy.”

Robertson rarely sang in the Band but he was unquestionably its leader, assuming control of the initially egalitarian outfit when his bandmates demonstrated they had no desire to take that position. He played that role with charismatic ease, a quality showcased in “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the Band’s 1976 farewell.

Flashing a wide smile and his knack for spinning yarns, Robertson acted as the ringleader in “The Last Waltz,” widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever made. By the time the film was released in 1978, Robertson had parted ways with the Band — they’d later reunite without him — and his bond with Scorsese deepened. Scorsese became Robertson’s lifelong collaborator, with the guitarist supervising music on the director’s films from “Raging Bull” in 1980 to “Killers of the Flower Moon” in 2022.

The Band’s Robbie Robertson: My life in 12 songs

With a new solo album, two collaborations with Martin Scorsese and a Band reissue, Robbie Robertson talks about songs crucial to his life and career.

Nov. 6, 2019

This regular cinematic work allowed Robertson to pursue an idiosyncratic career as a solo recording artist. After a decade’s absence from music, he returned in 1987 with a self-titled debut designed to sound at home alongside U2 and Peter Gabriel. Robertson gradually left the mainstream behind in the 1990s, as he explored his Native American musical roots and dabbled with electronica, yet he preserved the Band’s legacy by supervising deluxe reissues and a documentary, and by publishing his autobiography, “Testimony,” in 2016.

Robertson’s impact upon rock ’n’ roll was immense and immediate. George Harrison’s latter-day work with the Beatles bore signs of the Band’s influence and Eric Clapton wrote in his 2007 memoir, “It stopped me in my tracks. … Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz and rock, and writing great songs.” Decades later, the depth of the Band’s reach became clear, as the alt-country of the 1990s and the Americana of the 21st century all used its music as a blueprint.

Born Jaime Royal Robertson on the Six Nations Reserve outside of Toronto, Ontario, on July 5, 1943,the future musician was the son of Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler, who claimed Mohawk and Cayuga as her heritage. Rosemarie was married to James Robertson, an army man whom Robbie believed to be his father. But when his parents separated when Robbie was in his early teens, his mother revealed that his biological father was Alexander David Klegerman, a professional gambler she met while James was stationed in Newfoundland.

Robertson was drawn to characters like Klegerman — hucksters who operated on the fringes of society — and he spent some time as a teenager working with traveling carnivals before he felt the pull of rock ’n’ roll. He’d been fascinated with music as a child, listening to American radio broadcasts of rock ’n’ roll and R&B while learning how to play guitar.

In his teens, Robertson started gigging with local bands, then formed his own group, first called Thumper and the Trambones, then Robbie and the Robots as a salute to a central character in the classic 1956 sci-fi film “Forbidden Planet.” Robertson’s next outfit, the Suedes, shared a bill with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and the Arkansan rockabilly singer took a shine to Robertson, while the fledgling guitarist was infatuated with Levon Helm, the drummer of the Hawks.

Robertson worked his way into the inner circles of the Hawks, writing a pair of original tunes (“Hey Baba Lou” and “Someone Like You”) for Hawkins. Hawkins was so impressed that he sent Robertson to the Brill Building to choose the rest of the material for what became his 1959 LP, “Mr. Dynamo.” Robertson became the bassist in the Hawks shortly afterward. His adolescence at times could be a point of contention with club owners, who were reluctant to allow underage musicians in their venue; Hawkins had to sweet-talk the proprietors.

The teenage Robertson graduated to the lead guitar slot within a matter of months. “I was trying to do something with my playing that was like screaming at the sky,” he wrote in “Testimony,” developing a taut, penetrating style he’d sustain through the heyday of the Band. As the Hawks toured across North America, they acquired bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, the lineup that would become known as the Band later in the 1960s.

The Hawks broke away from Ronnie Hawkins in 1964, soon adopting the name Levon and the Hawks. The group played a similar circuit to Hawkins, landing residencies on the Jersey shore, but they also worked their way into the blues scene of New York City, playing on John Hammond Jr.’s 1965 album, “So Many Roads.” During this time, Levon and the Hawks recorded three Robertson originals that were released over two 45s on Atco.

Late in the summer of 1965, Albert Grossman contacted Robertson with the intention of setting up a meeting between his client Bob Dylan and the Hawks. Originally, Dylan planned to hire Robertson as a guitarist, an offer Robertson rejected, but he did sit in on two Dylan concerts, bringing Helm along as the drummer. Encouraged by the shows, Dylan rehearsed with the band as they closed out a Toronto residency, then hired the band for his fall tour of 1965.

Dylan opened these shows with an acoustic set, then unleashed the loud, electrified Hawks on his unprepared audience. Crowds didn’t embrace the full-throated roar of the Hawks but they plowed ahead, only without Helm, who decided he didn’t want to play to hostile listeners. The rest of the Hawks soldiered on with a rotating series of drummers into 1966. That tour’s emotional climax arrived at Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, when somebody in the audience cried out “Judas!” in response to Dylan’s rock ’n’ roll, a moment that was immortalized on bootlegs and later officially released. Between the U.S. and U.K. tours, Dylan recorded the single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” with the Band, then enlisted Robertson for part of the Nashville sessions for “Blonde on Blonde.”

Dylan’s wild years came to a sudden halt on July 29, 1966, when he suffered a neck injury in a motorcycle accident. As he headed to upstate New York to recover, the Hawks were kept on a retainer, with Dylan inviting the group to Woodstock in February 1967. Robertson headed upstate with his new girlfriend, Dominique Bourgeois; they’d marry that year and subsequently have three children together before divorcing in the mid-1970s. Danko, Manuel and Hudson followed in their footsteps, renting a house in West Saugerties, N.Y., they’d nickname “Big Pink.”

With a primitive recording studio installed in its basement, Big Pink became the creative center for Dylan and the Hawks. The five musicians would hunker down to play old folk, blues and country songs, then turn their attention to new tunes intended to be songwriting demos for Dylan. By the end of the summer, Helm returned to the fold and the group wound up with more than 130 recordings . These homemade, casual recordings were not designed for public consumption, yet interest was stoked when Jann Wenner published an editorial in Rolling Stone calling for their release, helping set the stage for 1969’s “The Great White Wonder,” an illicit collection of basement tape highlights commonly acknowledged as the first rock ’n’ roll bootleg.

Dylan gradually loosened his ties with the Band in early 1968 — they supported him at two Woody Guthrie memorial concerts at Carnegie Hall that January — while Albert Grossman, who was now their manager, secured a contract with Capitol Records. Working with producer John Simon, the group recorded “Music From Big Pink,” an album whose painterly, evocative production contained passing hints of the nervy energy of the Hawks. “Music From Big Pink” blended the intimacy of folk with the rollicking ramble of a juke joint, the mood shifting as often as the lead singers. Helm, Danko and Manuel traded leads, sometimes individual lines, over the course of the record, with Robertson singing just one tune: “To Kingdom Come,” one of his four originals on the 11-track album.

Indeed, the entire group had an air of mystery: Their name was intentionally generic; their photos were not visible on the outer artwork; the group didn’t tour or do interviews. Not long after the album’s release, Aretha Franklin and Jackie DeShannon each cut their own version of “The Weight,” the first step in the song becoming a modern-day standard.

The Band’s cultivated mystery started to lift with “The Band,” a sequel they swiftly cut at a pool house they leased from Sammy Davis Jr. Leaner and louder than their previous work, “The Band” ran the gamut from delicate, plaintive folk (“Whispering Pines”) to funky rock ’n’ roll (“Up on Cripple Creek”), with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — a Civil War tale told from the perspective of a Confederate soldier — anchoring the album. Like “The Weight,” “Old Dixie” was popularized through covers, with Joan Baez having a Top 10 hit with it in 1971. Unlike “Music From Big Pink,” “The Band” bore songwriting credits from Robertson on every track and no lead vocals from the guitarist at all (he’d not sing again on a Band album until their last, “Islands”).

“The Band” placed the Band squarely within the popular zeitgeist, earning enough attention to garner them a Time magazine cover in 1970. Robertson tentatively started to pursue projects outside of the group, producing the acclaimed eponymous 1970 debut by singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, but the Band remained his primary focus. Cracks began to develop within the group starting with “Stage Fright,” a 1970 album recorded with pop wunderkind Todd Rundgren. Robertson enjoyed the experimental energy Rundgren brought to the sessions but the engineer clashed with other Band members, many of whom started a slow slide into substance abuse. With Helm, Danko and Manuel all experiencing some form of debilitating toxicity, Robertson rallied the group forward through “Cahoots,” a 1971 album that showed signs of fatigue; of its 11 songs, only “Life Is a Carnival” — a song Robertson co-wrote with Helm and Danko — became a part of the Band’s canon.

Pulling back from the studio and the road, the Band bided their time for a while. Their New Year’s Eve stint at New York’s Academy of Music in 1971 became the 1972 double album “Rock of Ages.” The group stirred back to life in 1973, knocking out an amiable collection of rock ’n’ roll oldies called “Moondog Matinee” and headlining the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen alongside the Grateful Dead. At the end of the year, the Band reunited with Dylan to record “Planet Waves,” an album they supported with a blockbuster tour in 1974; the closing stint at Inglewood’s Forum was condensed into the double album “Before the Flood,” released in the summer of 1974. The following year, one last Bob Dylan & the Band project emerged when Robertson produced a double-LP set of “The Basement Tapes,” cleaning up the original 1967 recordings with some overdubs and adding a few Band outtakes to create the illusion they were equal partners to Dylan.

The Band reconnected with their past in another way: They sought to re-create the clubhouse atmosphere of Big Pink by renting a Malibu ranch called Shangri-La (previously the site where the talking-horse sitcom “Mr. Ed” was filmed) and converting it into a recording studio. Other musician friends spent time at Shangri-La — Eric Clapton cut his 1976 LP, “No Reason to Cry,” there, a record that featured all five members of the Band — while the Band recorded “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” a 1975 release that was their strongest, most cohesive album since their second record. Once Robertson wrapped up his production duties on Neil Diamond’s “Beautiful Noise,” the Band launched a supporting tour for “Northern Lights — Southern Cross” in the summer of 1976.

Things quickly fell apart. Richard Manuel sustained a neck injury in a boating accident, forcing the Band to cancel a portion of the tour and prompting Robertson to consider an escape route. He conceived “The Last Waltz,” a lavish farewell to the stage to be delivered at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day 1976. Robertson decided to preserve the event, so he asked Scorsese, fresh off the release of “Taxi Driver,” to direct a documentary. The pair formed an instant and deep bond, evident in the finished film, which portrays Robertson as a movie star in waiting.

Within the Band, there was discontent about whether the concert closed the curtain on their years as a touring act or on their career overall; Robertson claimed the former, Helm the latter. The drummer proved to be correct. Robertson spent much of 1977 working with Scorsese in postproduction on “The Last Waltz,” dreaming up ideas like shooting on-camera interviews with the group and filming the Band playing on a soundstage. “The Last Waltz” and its accompanying soundtrack appeared in 1978, helping stoke Robertson’s cinematic dreamsn. He secured a deal with MGM and developed a film based on his teenage experiences with a carnival. During preproduction, Robertson leapt from producer to star, appearing alongside Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in the 1980 film “Carny.”

Robertson didn’t prove to be a movie star but he found space in the film industry, working alongside Scorsese as a music advisor on “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy.” For the 1985 “The Hustler” sequel “The Color of Money,” Robertson co-wrote the theme song, “It’s in the Way That You Use It,” which Clapton recorded; it was the first time Robertson had a presence on rock radio in a decade.

Soon, Robertson launched his solo career, hiring Daniel Lanois to co-produce his self-titled debut. Robertson next released “Storyville,” a 1991 album inspired by the sounds and legends of New Orleans.

“Storyville” was the last conventional rock album Robertson would make for a while. “Music for the Native Americans” found him collaborating with the Red Road Ensemble, a group of Native Americans who helped him trace his heritage. Robertson moved further into the future with “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy,” an electronica fusion made in collaboration with Marius deVries and Howie B. After its release in 1998, Robertson slowed the pace of his solo projects, taking a full 13 years before returning in 2011 with “How to Become Clairvoyant,” a semiautobiographical record sporting cameos by Clapton, Steve Winwood, Tom Morello and Trent Reznor. His 2019 album, “Sinematic,” coincided with the appearance of Scorsese’s gangster epic “The Irishman”; the film’s quasi-theme song, “I Hear You Paint Houses,” was the centerpiece of the album.

Robertson was credited as executive music producer or music supervisor on every Scorsese feature from 2002’s “Gangs of New York” to 2022’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

He also did other movie work. He supervised the soundtrack to the John Travolta film “Phenomenon,” helping bring together Clapton and producer Babyface for the mellow soul of “Change the World,” which would take home Grammys for song of the year and record of the year in 1997. Robertson also worked on Oliver Stone’s NFL saga “Any Given Sunday.”

Robertson spent some time working as an A&R executive at DreamWorks Records in the early 2000s, helping the label sign Nelly Furtado. He also spent a considerable amount of time tending to thoughtful reissues of the Band’s catalog, shepherding the monumental 2005 box “The Band — A Musical History,” several anniversary editions of “The Last Waltz” and 50th-anniversary editions of their core catalog that offered fresh remixes. He also told his story through his 2016 memoir “Testimony” and the 2019 documentary “ Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band .”

Robertson sold his music publishing, recorded interests and rights to his name, image and likeness for a reported $25 million to Iconoclast in 2022.

Following the Band’s induction into the Canadian Hall of Fame in 1989, the Band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Robertson received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Songwriters in 1997. In 2008, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2011.

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Robbie Robertson Recalls Bob Dylan’s Boo-Filled World Tour That Sparked a Revolution

The Band co-founder passed away at 80.

Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson playing guitars at the Academy of Music on February 24, 1966. (Photo by Charlie Steiner – Highway 67/Getty Images)

During his later years, Robbie Robertson not only continued to release albums and make music for the movies, he also regaled his fans with timeless stories.

Watch: Robbie Robertson talks Dylan’s 1966 Tour and Martin Scorsese

Robertson, who sadly passed away today at 80 , was famously the guitarist, at one point, for Bob Dylan and, of course, unforgettably The Band. Back in 2019, he sat down with SiriusXM host John Fugelsang to look back at his days working with Dylan, including during the iconic songwriter’s legendary 1966 world tour when he (at the time controversially) used an electric band.

“People [were] booing and throwing stuff at you every night,” Robertson said. “And we’re just going along.”

However, despite the harsh treatment from fans, Dylan and his band kept at it. Robertson added:

“Usually in a case like this, you would say, ‘You know what? The audience isn’t really gravitating toward this. Maybe we should change some things.’ No! It was called just play louder and faster and everything. And it was kind of like a rebellion.”

Robertson died Wednesday in Los Angeles after a long illness, according to an announcement from his management. In a statement, Robertson’s manager of 34 years, Jared Levine, said:

“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 Center.”

Robertson is perhaps best remembered for the classics he wrote for The Band, including “The Weight,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “The Shape I’m In” and “It Makes No Difference.”

In addition to his time with The Band, Robertson also famously collaborated with Bob Dylan on a number of projects. He also worked on music for the big screen, teaming up with Martin Scorsese – who directed The Band’s 1976 classic documentary, The Last Waltz – on era-spanning films such as Raging Bull (1980), Casino (1996), The Departed (2006), The Irishman (2019), and most recently The Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

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Robbie Robertson Tells All: Dylan, the Band, Shattered Friendship With Levon Helm

By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

In June of 2020, with a pandemic raging, Robbie Robertson took some time to look back at his career with the Band , from writing their greatest hits to their work with Bob Dylan . The release of his documentary Once Were Brothers had him a reflective mood, ready to share new details about the music he made with Band-mates Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm. In the wake of Robertson’s death at age 80 this week, here’s a full text version of that interview, published here for the first time. You can also hear a new edit of the interview on the latest episode of our podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now . (To hear the whole podcast, go here to the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or just press play below.)

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And as time passed,  at one point it just felt like everybody forgot to come back. Everybody went on to do other things. And then, there was probably no way of actually finding our way back. The after-story that Rick, Richard, Garth, and myself had — there was no resentment ever. We had the greatest brotherhood, and we were thrilled about that. And when they decided some years later that they wanted to go and play some gigs together, it’s in their blood. I completely understood that.

And they called me and they said, “Do you wanna join us in this?” And I said, “No. What I am interested in is the creative process, and if we were gonna make some new music, I’m first in line for wanting to do that. But I don’t want to go back out on the road.” Then they said, “Is it OK that we use the name ‘the Band’?” I said, “Of course it is. I don’t wanna get in the way of somebody doing their thing and making a living or whatever.” So they did, and that’s my side of the story.

Now, all these complaints that Levon made in his book and in interviews are mostly based around his feeling that he should have gotten more songwriting credits for the arrangements of songs. Sometimes he would actually say he wrote the songs and sometimes not, in different cases. But overall, it sounds like he felt that he deserved songwriting credits for arrangements. Was that ever brought up in the moment versus years later? Never. It was never, ever talked about. Everybody knew how hard I worked on this, and it was way above and beyond the call of duty or what anybody else was doing, but I felt that was my job. That was what I was really able to bring to this thing. And that’s the way it is. Some people write songs and some people don’t. Like, Ringo Starr didn’t write [many] songs. Charlie Watts didn’t write songs, and I can guarantee you that those guys never shared publishing with those guys, which I did.

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And I understood that Levon was having a tough time later on, and that’s why I never said a thing. He was having a struggle, and he always was really good at finding someone else to blame for what was happening. He had gone down the whole list of everybody, and I was the only one left. And so, I wasn’t surprised no matter what he said or what he might’ve thought from his point of view, but he saw it from one angle. And I wrote the book and I saw it from my angle.

He says he worked with you on “The Night They Drove Dixie Down,” whereas in your book you say that he drove you to the library and that was basically it. Yes, he did. And he told me not to mention Abraham Lincoln in the song. That was it.

The sort of Biblical, magisterial, non-contemporary language that you used in many of these songs, the idiom that you were writing in, where did that come from? I just like great storytelling. I think a lot of the biblical stories are pretty terrific. And sometimes you just go in a certain direction and it gives it a stronger feeling. Whenever I would write a song that kind of pulled from that place, that biblical place, like “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,”  it just felt good. And I think that the Bible is some of the best stories ever told. Really quite a bestseller. I couldn’t help at some times but reach in there and pull from that inspiration. 

You’d be with Bob Dylan at Big Pink, and you’d see him typing lyrics on the typewriter. A lot of people in that position would say, “Bob Dylan’s right there. Who am I to write songs instead?” It seems to have pushed you quite the other way. Yeah. it didn’t feel intimidating at all. It felt like we were at the clubhouse and everybody was doing their thing and hanging out and we’re having a great time. And in the meantime, the reason we got the clubhouse was for the Band to make our first album. So that’s the reason we were there. Bob just jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak, and it felt so good that he wanted to come and hang too. It was just right, at the right time, and everybody felt really good being there. It just became a ritual. Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs, 

Musicians who were around when the Band’s debut came out universally say what a revelation the restraint, the dignity, the song-focused approaches were, versus, say Cream. It was a radical shift that was incredibly influential. How conscious were you of the almost oppositional nature of what you were doing? There might be something subconscious going on in something like this. You don’t wanna be a follower, you want to be at the front of this parade. So not once did any of the guys or me say, “Let’s do this because it’s different.” Never, ever. Really what happened was we found ourselves up in the mountains, in an atmosphere, in this clubhouse, and if you played in the basement too loud, it hurt your ears, and also you couldn’t hear the singer. So we adapted to where we were and what we were doing in that moment. And when we finished making Music From Big Pink , we had no idea what anybody was going to think about this. We knew what we thought about it, but we had no connection to the outside world in how it would be received. So all of that reaction was quite a surprise to us. What we did know, was that we had already been together for six or seven years before we made that record, and we had been out there and paid our dues and we had grown musically to a place that we didn’t have to be obvious. That we knew. 

Was it essentially because you’d gotten all your hot licks out on stage for years on end, and thus didn’t have anything to prove in the way that rock bands were proving stuff in 1969 with extended solos and a more superficial flashiness? It really was a maturing, a musical maturity that had set in. At that point, I had spent a lot of time doing everything on 11, as they say. [Laughs.] And that passion and that excitement, I appreciated. But I hadn’t yet learned about the subtleties, and I hadn’t learned about the soulfulness in the rhythm, the soulfulness in what the spaces could be too. And when you get to that place, that you have that kind of confidence or maturity or whatever it is that allows you something like that, it’s a really gratifying place. That’s what Eric Clapton was referring to: “Oh my God, you can do that. You can do this in such a delicate way, and it feels that powerful. Whoa.” It had nothing to do with anything other than the place that we had grown to.

You obviously famously retired from touring, but do you have any regrets about it? I’ve never considered that. I made a movie called The Last Waltz declaring myself on that. I did it for many years. I did it under the most incredible circumstances. The Hawks and the Band, we played joints that you couldn’t imagine. We were completely lucky that we were alive, and we played the biggest concerts in the world. So I had seen everything that I needed to see from that, and I got to a place after doing this for more than 16 years. I felt like I was in a play. I felt like Yul Brynner in The King and I , having been doing this for 50 years. I’m saying the same songs, the same words every night, and I just go out and I do that. I was really hungry for a challenge that I didn’t know how to meet.

I wanted to learn. I wanted to keep on growing, and it’s because I went on the road at such an early age. I’ve always had this hunger for just absorbing more and growing creatively. So that’s why I worked with Martin Scorsese on all these movies and other people as well. . There are so many times, in what I’ve worked on since the Band, that I woke up in the morning and thought, “Oh my God, I don’t know how to do this. I gotta figure this shit out.” And that is a feeling that is challenging and it’s exciting to me, rather than doing something over and over again. And then when I would feel like making a record, I’d make a record. I could go off in tangents and say, “I’m gonna revisit my [Native American] heritage on this and work with some artists nobody’s ever heard of that I think are extraordinary, and we’re gonna delve into something.” I thought, whether right or wrong, I had earned this. I had paid my dues in so many other ways that I can do something that really makes me feel like I’m growing.

There was an attempt at recording with the Hawks at the beginning of the process of the Blonde on Blonde album. Eventually Dylan went to Nashville and then just brought you out. But do you remember those initial sessions? We never thought about it as it being the beginning of that record. Bob hadn’t written those songs at all. I think he wrote two songs. One was called “Please Crawl Out Your Window.” I forget the name of the other one. And we went in and recorded “Crawl Out Your Window” and I think we recorded another one too. 

You did a bunch of takes of “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” according to studio records. And there also was an early, alternate version of “Visions of Johanna.” Yeah, it could be. But what we came to understand was that we thought of it like, “Oh, this guy is used to playing by himself a lot.” And when you go into a studio with studio musicians, that’s what they do. You go in, and they try to figure out in 15 minutes what you are trying to do and try to figure out some little parts in that. That’s not who we are.  So when we went into the studio with Bob for the first time, we really understood that he just plays a song and people try to catch up with him in the studio. And we were like, “No, we’re a band. There’s five of us, and the five of us need to figure out what to do.” We’re not hired studio musicians. We think of ourselves as the opposite of that.

It didn’t really appeal to us. And Bob knew that. Because I would say to him, “We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do here. Just scrambling along without knowing where this starts or ends isn’t good, because everybody needs to decide on the language that we’re playing together. We’re not all just looking at you trying to figure out what you’re doing.” When we were playing live, we had figured out the arrangements of the songs and what we were going to do. So that was fine, but this was a different thing. So that’s when he said, “I’m going to go down to Nashville, and I’d like you to come with me.” I’d been to Nashville before, and they weren’t very welcoming at all. They were a cult — a cult of guys that were just so good at what they did. But this club didn’t want any other members.

In ’74, you guys obviously toured with Bob again, as captured on the Before the Flood live abum. I think people heard perhaps the influence of stimulants in the energy of the arrangements. Is that apocryphal, or was that part of what was going on as far the absolutely hypercharged energy of some of those songs on that tour? When we played in 1966, Bob was going through a stage with amphetamines, of course, and it gave him a lot of go-power. We just thought, “Wow, some people do that, some people don’t.” We’d already seen that in the rockabilly world where everybody took bennies or dexy or something, and we’d already gone through that period. By the time the 1974 tour came up, Bob was in a completely different place, and he wasn’t using speed at all. What we were doing, and probably what contributed to the energy and power of that music, was that we were revisiting a place where we had been booed around the world. We’d been booed to death. Now, we were coming back, and everyone was acting like, “This is great. It’s always been great.” But we remembered what that was like, and there was a certain vengeance in the way we were playing. I think it had something to do with playing music with power and confidence in your face. It was more about our energy and excitement that we were living through. It wasn’t tremendously different from what we did years before. There was an eight-year gap, and the passion in the music wasn’t tremendously different. But now, we could play as hard as we wanted, and nobody could dare say anything.

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“It Makes No Difference” is one of my favorite songs you’ve ever written, and I know it’s Eddie Vedder’s favorite song that you wrote. What do you recall about the actual writing of that song? At that point, I wanted to write a song that Rick [Danko] could sing the hell out of, and I was trying to really find a powerful place for that voice of his to go. I was also wanting to write something that I wanted to play on. I wanted to write a song and do a particular kind of guitar playing, and do a thing with Garth on sax. I had this whole vision in my mind. It was again my thing of being in this group, in this club, and my job was to write material for these actors to play.

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Robbie Robertson

Robbie Robertson was born in Toronto, Ontario with roots in the Mohawk community at the Six Nations Reserve. At 15, he began his foray into rock and roll playing the Chitlin circuit and up through Canada with rockabilly star, Ronnie Hawkins. In 1965 he accompanied Bob Dylan on the groundbreaking “Going Electric,” tour followed by the recording of the infamous, “The Basement Tapes.” Robertson and his bandmates broke out on their own as The Band and Robertson penned some of the most timeless songs in rock and roll history including, “The Weight,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “It Makes No Difference.” Robertson’s compositions have been covered by hundreds of artists, thousands of times. As a farewell to their time together as The Band, Robertson produced the Martin Scorsese film documenting The Band’s final concert called, The Last Waltz which Rolling Stone magazine named the greatest concert film of all time.

Robertson’s career after The Band kept pace with work on the music for eight Martin Scorsese films from Raging Bull (1980) to the 2017 release of Silence. Robertson has also released five solo albums and worked as an executive at DreamWorks Records.

The Band was a first-ballot inductee into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall Of Fame. Robertson is the recipient of Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame Award, the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame Award as well as the highest honor in the arts to a Canadian citizen, the Order Of Canada. Robertson has also received two honorary doctorates from Queens University and York University.

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The Band’s Former Tour Manager Jonathan Taplin Remembers Robbie Robertson: ‘A Genuine Original’

Taplin served as The Band's tour manager from 1969 to 1976 and remained close with Robertson in later years.

By Steve Knopper

Steve Knopper

Mike Pinder, Moody Blues Founding Keyboardist, Dead At 82

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When it was all over — and they did an amazing job, they played three songs and it was really the best thing in the whole thing — Robbie said, “We’re going to go out on the road to support this album Music from Big Pink, would you want to be our tour manager?” I said, “Absolutely.” I was still at Princeton [University] at the time, and that didn’t stop me. Then [The Band’s] Rick Danko drove his car off the road into a ditch and broke his neck, so that tour never happened.

About six months later, Albert called me and said, “The Band is going to go to California to record their second album and Robbie would like you to be their tour manager, and after that they’re going to go on the road.” We moved all the stuff out to Sammy Davis Jr.’s house on Sunset Plaza and set up a recording studio in his poolhouse, and that was known as the brown album, or the second album. That was a huge breakthrough record for them.

Then we went and played Winterland [in San Francisco]. That’s the famous incident where [Robertson] was running a 104 [degree] temperature the day of the concert and Albert didn’t want to cancel and [promoter] Bill Graham got a hypnotist to come in and hypnotize Robbie to convince him he wasn’t sick. Somehow, we managed to get him on stage, and Robbie played, and we played two more nights at Winterland, and it was incredible. And we went to the Fillmore East and played there. Nobody had seen these guys. They were like a huge mystery because they hadn’t gone on the road to support Music From Big Pink. It was like, “Who are these people, these mountain men?” They wore suits onstage and they didn’t look like psychedelic rock stars. 

I was their tour manager for three more years. I graduated from Princeton, went on the road with them, and George Harrison asked me to produce The Concert for Bangladesh, so I left The Band, did that and came to California. The Band had stopped touring for a while and Bob didn’t want to tour and George Harrison didn’t want to tour. I came out here and met a young film director named Martin Scorsese and we made a film called Mean Streets.

Robbie moved out to California and the rest of The Band followed. When Robbie decided to call it a day and have The Last Waltz [The Band’s final concert], he said, “I’d like you to produce this with me” and “Who should direct it?” I said, “Marty would love to direct it, but there’s one problem: He’s doing a movie called New York, New York, and I’m sure he can’t do it.” Robbie said, “Let’s go talk to him about it.” Marty said, “Nobody’s going to do this but me.”

The concert was scheduled for Thanksgiving Day. … We were able to get away and fly Marty up to San Francisco and did the concert and the rest is history.

Other than the famous Neil Young cocaine incident , nobody was out of control at all. In fact, I would say everybody realized they had to be on their best behavior. If you look at that solo guitar battle between Robbie and Eric Clapton on “Further on Down the Road,” that’s the highest level of guitar-playing that you’ll ever see. There was some partying afterwards, but, man, when the thing was going on, everyone who wasn’t on stage was in the wings watching what was on stage, because it was so damn amazing.

Robbie was kind of a very contained person. He got up early in the morning and went to work, like you would do — in the sense of, like, a newspaperman. He would start writing at 9 in the morning in his little studio. The leadership position evolved. Remember, The Band originally was called Levon and the Hawks. Then Levon [Helm] quit the Dylan tours because he was tired of getting booed all the time. When Levon came back — because Albert got Robbie and the rest of the guys a record deal — something had shifted. It was now more Robbie’s deal, and Robbie was the one who dealt with Albert Grossman a lot. He was more business-oriented than the rest of the guys.

Over time, Robbie ended up being the only songwriter. That was just default. By Stage Fright, Richard [Manuel] and Rick [Danko] had stopped writing. [Manuel co-wrote two songs on that 1970 album.] So it wasn’t that Robbie wanted to be the only songwriter. It was kind of nobody else was showing up at the party. You become a kind of natural leader. To bring the songs into the studio, you play them for the other guys to figure out their part and then you record them.

I see Robbie as a friend all the time. I was involved with that film they did [in 2019], Once Were Brothers. We were going to get together two weeks ago. He’s been sick for a while, but I didn’t know he was that sick.

He was a genuine original. Not only in his guitar playing but in his songwriting. Here we are confronting this notion that a computer can write a song, and that’s not true. Great music comes from the heart of a genius, and there aren’t a lot of them around, and they aren’t going to come from artificial intelligence. He was one of those geniuses. “The Weight” will stand, and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” will stand. The Latin [quote] said, “Art is long and life is short.”

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Eric Clapton Plays Robbie Robertson Tribute to Open 2023 Tour

Eric Clapton paid tribute to Robbie Robertson by opening the first show of his 2023 U.S. tour with two songs by the Band .

As reported by JamBase , Clapton kicked off the concert at Pittsburgh's PPG Paints Arena Sunday night with "The Shape I'm In" from the Band's 1970 album Stage Fright .

After following that up with "It Makes No Difference" from 1975's Northern Lights - Southern Cross , Clapton simply said, "Robbie Robertson."

When Did Robbie Robertson Die?

Robertson, who was the guitarist and primary songwriter for the Band before they disbanded in 1977, died after battling an undisclosed illness at the age of 80  in August.

READ MORE: Robbie Robertson Dies: Rockers React

While inducting the Band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Clapton revealed that the Band had a huge influence on his music. When Cream was breaking up, he even briefly tried to join forces with Robertson and the Band.

"I went and told Jack [Bruce] and Ginger [Baker] that I couldn't go on anymore, there was something else happening," he explained. "I really sort of went there to ask if I could join the Band, only I didn't have the guts to say it, I didn't have the nerve. I just sort of sat there and watched these guys work. ... From that day, I spent the rest of my career, until The Last Waltz anyway, trying to imitate what they had."

Watch Eric Clapton Perform 'The Shape I'm In'

How Long Does Eric Clapton's 2023 U.S. Tour Last?

Five shows remain on Clapton's brief 2023 U.S. tour. After stops in St. Louis, Saint Paul and Denver, he'll headline the annual two-night Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, with support from Santana , ZZ Top and dozens of other artists.

Watch Eric Clapton Perform 'It Makes No Difference'

READ MORE: Why Robbie Robertson Never Reunited With the Band

Eric Clapton, 9/8/23, PPG Paints Arena, Pittsburgh 1. "The Shape I'm In" 2. "It Makes No Difference" 3. "Key to the Highway" 4. "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" 5. "I Shot the Sheriff" 6. "Driftin' Blues" 7. "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" 8. "Call Me the Breeze" 9. "Layla" 10. "Tears in Heaven" 11. "Tearing Us Apart" 12. "Wonderful Tonight" 13. "Cross Road Blues" 14. "Little Queen of Spades" 15. "Cocaine" 16. "High Time We Went"

Eric Clapton Albums Ranked

More from ultimate classic rock.

Classic interview: Robbie Robertson on The Last Waltz, his bronze Strat and playing in the eye of the storm with Dylan – "On that tour in 1965 and ’66… I have never heard of anybody going through something like that, ever, in music history"

A 2017 Guitarist magazine interview with the late guitarist found him looking back on making history

From backing Bob Dylan at the epochal moment when he ‘went electric’, to carving out woody, jagged guitar lines in The Band, the late Robbie Robertson's playing is part of the fabric of American rock. 

Guitarist magazine caught up with with him in 2017 to talk about the bronze-coated ’54 Strat that he used on the night that Dylan, Clapton and Muddy Waters joined him on stage for five straight hours - along with Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dr John, Van Morrison and, well, nearly everyone who mattered in '70s rock - the fabled Last Waltz…

 On 25 November 1976, Robbie Robertson and The Band performed a gig at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco that closed - but also crowned - an era. The gig marked the end of a touring career that had covered untold thousands of miles. He’d played guitar at Bob Dylan’s side in ’65 when irate fans stormed the stage in protest to their folk hero going electric. As a core member of The Band, he cut a legendary debut album at The Big Pink, a house in New York, and then carried The Weight all the way to Woodstock in ’69.

A terse but soulful player, Robbie favoured Teles throughout his early career, but later found his ideal match in a ’54 Strat and a Tweed Twin. We join Robbie to talk about the guitar’s role in that momentous gig, which was filmed by Martin Scorsese, the  Strat’s recent recreation  by Fender Custom Shop Master Builder Todd Krause, and Robertson’s memories of what went down during the greatest live show of the '70s.

Let’s start with the bronze Strat - where did you first come by it?

“I got the guitar from Norm’s Rare Guitars in Los Angeles. Norman Harris always had spectacular guitars. This was one that he brought me. It was originally red, which was kind of unusual, because the guitar is from 1954. The serial number is 0234. 

“Anyway, he brought me a bunch of guitars to try out. In that batch, there was a Telecaster with a V neck. It was beautiful. I had played Telecaster for years, starting back with Ronnie Hawkins, because we had to play long hours and it was one of the lighter guitars. It didn’t hurt your shoulder at the end of the night. Anyway, I was drawn to this Telecaster, and I played it and it felt really good. This V neck was great on it.

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There was something about the neck on it, the balance

“Then he brought out this Stratocaster. I had played a Stratocaster years earlier, but because of the tremolo bar on it, and the way that whole thing works, if you break a string it goes wildly out of tune. The tremolo bar also makes it hard to keep in tune as well. I just didn’t want to be bothered with that. 

“So I veered away from Stratocasters and went in the direction of the Teles. But when he gave me this guitar to try, it felt amazing. There was something about the neck on it, the balance. And when I plugged it in, the sound. It just completely swayed me in that direction. I said, ‘I am going to take this Stratocaster, and I want to show this Telecaster to Bob Dylan, because I think this would be great for him.’

“We were planning on doing this tour in the beginning of 1974 with Bob Dylan and The Band. I just said, ‘I loved this Telecaster.’ Anyway, Bob ended up getting that guitar and used it for that whole tour. I used the Stratocaster for that tour. I used the Strat almost exclusively after that. It had such a great feel to it.”

At what stage did it acquire its unique bronze finish?

“Well, in 1976 we decided to do this Last Waltz concert, because it was a culmination of something. It was the end of some era; it was the end of a relationship with the road that I had had since I was 16 years old. I was just trying to think of what to do in celebration of this.

“I didn’t know whether it would be a bad idea, but I decided to have the Stratocaster bronzed. It was a bit tricky, you know, finding somebody to do that. One of the road manager guys said, ‘There is a place where they bronze baby shoes’ - it was some kind of a tradition that people would take their baby shoes and dip them in this thing and bronze them. 

“He said, ‘I might be able to take it to this guy and see if it is too big, the body of the guitar.’ Anyway, he did some research, took it, brought it back and it was bronze. I thought, ‘Wow. It really does look beautiful.’ They put it all back together again. I played it and it sounded different. It sounded different and unlike any guitar that I had ever played before.

“Then, when I stood up – you know, I put on the strap – I realised it weighed more, too. I was trying to figure out whether this was an advantage or disadvantage, the different tone that the instrument was giving off.

“I tried it out in the rehearsals we were doing for the Last Waltz with the band and with some of the guest artists. It started to feel right to me, and I was quite drawn to the tonality of it. There was a little bit more… it was just a sharper tone, with more metal involved. I liked it. It grabbed right onto the notes and it made them sting, in a way, and have a nice sustain to it as well.”

What’s the tweed amp that you used in the background of the footage?

I have actually compared the new version and the original in the bronze that Todd Krause at Fender made. They are remarkably similar

“It is a Fender Twin. I still have that amp. I still have that guitar. There are some collectors that are trying to buy it from me, as we speak. But it is kind of priceless, do you know what I mean? The guitar has lived.

“I have actually compared the new version and the original in the bronze that [Master Builder] Todd Krause at Fender made. They are remarkably similar. My son, Sebastian, who is kind of a guitar aficionado, was trying out the instrument. He was comparing it to other Stratocasters and guitars and said it is the best-sounding guitar he has ever heard in his life. He said it is truly remarkable.”

You mentioned earlier that it’s quite unusual in that it is a ’54 that didn’t appear to be a sunburst but came to you finished red. Was that a flat red, or more like the Candy Apple metallics that came later?

“You know what? It seemed to me that it was somewhere in the middle. That it wasn’t high glossy gloss and it wasn’t flat. It was just right. It didn’t look too shiny and it didn’t look dull. It looked sexy.”

Well, that is what a guitar should be, right?

“We hope.”

In the film, you brought out a modded sunburst Strat when you were trading solos with Eric Clapton on Further On Up The Road. That also looked interesting…

“Yes, it was one of those [two-tone] sunbursts with no red in it, which I always preferred. It was just brown and yellow. It inspired a guitar, this Robbie signature that Fender has made, which is called a Moonburst, because it has a different look and a different tone to it. It is more nocturnal. 

I ended up giving it to Martin Scorsese as a gift for doing The Last Waltz. He has it in a glass case in his house in New York

“I got that guitar because it didn’t have a tremolo bar on it. The back bridge there was flat [hard tail], so it didn’t go out of tune. I can’t remember if I broke a string, or I did something on the bronze one that just made it go extremely out of tune, so I just switched it out for this guitar, which I had as a backup. But it was also an amazing guitar.

“I ended up giving it to Martin Scorsese as a gift for doing The Last Waltz. He has it in a glass case in his house in New York.”

The bronze Strat has quite an unusual pickup layout. How is it wired up differently to standard?

“On most of my guitars I have had the middle pickup moved and wired in with the rear pickup to make the back pickup be a little fuller. On some of them, the two pickups became like a humbucking pickup and it just had a thicker tone to it. 

“I tried it without them being wired together, too: the middle pickup was just moved to the back and there were still these other positions on the toggle switch. Now, the toggle switch in the front is the same. In the middle, it is all of the pickups. In the back, it is just the back two pickups. I did that because I found the middle pickup would get in my way. 

“Some years ago I used to use a flatpick and two metal fingerpicks, and for that it really got in the way. I thought, ‘God, I don’t know. Maybe this doesn’t bother anybody else,’ but for whatever I was doing, it got in the way a little bit. Then I thought, ‘I could accomplish two things here. I could get it so it isn’t in the way, and also so the back pickup is fuller sounding.’”

You get a lovely sort of drive sound or a crunch sound through most of the gig. Is that just off driving the amp naturally with the volume? Or did you have any pedals in the signal chain?

Buddy Holly me, he said, ‘I have got this Fender Twin amp. I blew one of the speakers and it sounded better so I didn’t fix it. That is how I get this sound’

“Well, when I was very young, 12, 13 years old, I met Buddy Holly. And I asked him how he got that sound: he played a Stratocaster into a Fender amp. And he told me, he said, ‘I have got this Fender Twin amp. I blew one of the speakers and it sounded better so I didn’t fix it. That is how I get this sound.’ 

“He said, ‘Down in Texas, and some places in the South, people actually will cut one of their speakers to get that sound. Or, sometimes, they will put paper in the back of the speaker so it would vibrate and rattle and give more of a distorted sound.’

“I thought he’d just told me the Holy Grail. Anyway, eventually, I got a Twin amp with the two 12-inch speakers in it and just from use, my speakers got worn. They got broken in, almost broke. It made that sound. Like I said, I still have that amp in my studio and it still has that sound. When somebody else would think, ‘Oh my goodness, maybe I need new speakers,’ I just thought, ‘They’re now sounding the way they should.’

To what degree were you conscious of Scorsese filming the gig while you were playing?

The film was the last thing we were thinking about

“Well, for the most part we were so busy trying to get it right, trying to play our songs as good as we have ever played them - not wanting to let down all of these different artists, these guest artists we had. When you have to go from playing with Muddy Waters to Joni Mitchell , it is quite a spectrum. 

“The film was the last thing we were thinking about. We played over 20 songs with all these artists that we had barely any time to run over. People don’t realise that, because you don’t want to make it look like you’re struggling with this kind of thing. 

“To me, it was Guinness Book Of Records. The fact that we could play with all of these different artists, from Dr John to Neil Diamond… We never screwed up once the whole night. We did the whole thing and aced it. But it was because of focus and concentration. There was no time to be thinking about filming.”

What moments stand out in your mind most from the gig?

“I certainly got a thrill with Van Morrison. He raised the bar and we played that song, Caravan, with all our heart. I can’t remember much of it that wasn’t a thrill, actually. Playing Such A Night with Dr John was just a big grin. Muddy Waters was another one of the highlights. 

“Of course, with Eric Clapton , who to this day is still a dear old friend, you know what I mean? I don’t know if there was any downside. Joni was as cool as can be, and Neil Young, oh my God, doing that song Helpless, what a moment that was. He did it so well.

“Of course, there was also Bob Dylan or Ronnie Hawkins, who were the guys we started out with - the entire band did. It was always challenging with Bob: that night we weren’t even sure that the songs that we had said we were going to do were the songs that we would end up doing. That was always keeping you on your toes. But playing with Bob was like second nature to us at that point.”

The Band backed Dylan during the transition from being a folk icon to a rock ’n’ roll artist, which was very controversial at the time. What mark did that leave on your own musical personality?

I thought, ‘If Bob can do it, I can do it

“Well, on that tour in 1965 and ’66… I have never heard of anybody going through something like that, ever, in music history. The idea that we played all over North America, all over Australia, all over Europe, and people booed us every night, sometimes threw stuff, sometimes charged the stage. 

“It was challenging. To be able to do that and go through it… But I thought, ‘If Bob can do it, I can do it,’ you know, so it was an extraordinary experience to be playing music and thinking, ‘We are right and the world is wrong.’ 

“It was a phenomenon. Somewhere in the middle of that tour I realised that we were in the midst of a musical revolution. Because you start out, people boo you every night - normally, a group would say, ‘Maybe we are doing something wrong.’ But we never budged. Bob didn’t take one step back. I admire him so much for standing his ground.”

You could have faced anything after that, presumably?

“That’s how I felt. When The Band made Music From Big Pink and went on as The Band, people said, ‘What the hell is this? Where did this come from?’ But we had been together for like six or seven years before we made it. It was because we’d already done our woodshedding. We had paid some dues, to say the least.” 

• "I said, ‘Well, it’ll just be a back-up song in case some other things don’t work out’" – How Robbie Robertson wrote The Band's classic song, The Weight

Jamie Dickson is Editor-in-Chief of  Guitarist  magazine, Britain's best-selling and longest-running monthly for guitar players. He started his career at the  Daily Telegraph  in London, where his first assignment was interviewing blue-eyed soul legend Robert Palmer, going on to become a full-time author on music, writing for benchmark references such as  1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die  and Dorling Kindersley's  How To Play Guitar Step By Step . He joined  Guitarist  in 2011 and since then it has been his privilege to interview everyone from B.B. King to St. Vincent for  Guitarist 's readers, while sharing insights into scores of historic guitars, from Rory Gallagher's '61 Strat to the first Martin D-28 ever made.

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Eric Clapton Opens Tour With Tribute to Robbie Robertson

Eric Clapton and his band performing “The Shape I’m In,” Pittsburgh, PA, Sept. 8, 2023

Eric Clapton began his brief 2023 North American tour on Friday night (September 8) with a pair of songs in tribute to his friend, Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter who died August 9 at age 80. The two classic rock legends had a long mutual admiration and respect for each other. When The Band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, it was Clapton who gave the induction speech. When Clapton first discovered the group’s music, he was in awe. “When I went to visit The Band in Woodstock, and I really sort of went there to ask if I could join The Band, and I didn’t have the guts to say it!” In the 2019 documentary film, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band , Clapton said, “ Music From Big Pink changed my life,” later adding, “I was in great awe of their brotherhood.”

At the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, PA—the first of five concerts he’s doing this month, Clapton opened with The Band’s “The Shape I’m In” that included a spirited solo, with the house lights on, and followed it with “It Makes No Difference.” As the latter ended, Clapton said, simply, “Robbie Robertson.”

Clapton then turned to more familiar territory, offering “Key to the Highway” and “I Shot the Sheriff.” A five-song acoustic, seated set followed with such tracks as “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and “Call Me the Breeze,” followed by “Layla” and “Tears in Heaven.”

The 16-song concert continued with another electric set that included “Cross Road Blues,” “Little Queen of Spades” and “Cocaine.”

Clapton, who turned 78 on March 30, did a residency at the Budokan in Tokyo, Japan in April and organized a pair of tribute concerts for Jeff Beck that were held on May 22-23 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Tickets for most of other September shows are available here . Clapton will be hosting a Crossroads Guitar Festival later this month, his first since 2019. Robertson was an occasional guest performer at some of the earlier festivals.

Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson, following their performance of “I Shall Be Released” at the 2013 Crossroads Guitar Festival

2023 marks Clapton’s 60th year as a professional musician. The legendary guitarist joined The Yardbirds in 1963 and the following years saw him join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, and Derek and the Dominos along with a solo career spanning five decades.

Watch Clapton induct The Band into the Rock Hall in 1994

Watch a performance clip of The Band from Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band that also includes an interview with Clapton.

Watch Clapton perform “Further On Up the Road” with The Band during the concert, The Last Waltz

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Robbie Robertson’s 10 best recordings – from Bob Dylan to the Band

The heart of the Band, an integral player in Dylan’s rise, and a stunning solo artist, the Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist has died aged 80

Ronnie Hawkins – Who Do You Love? (1963)

Robbie Robertson’s early career is distinguished by his tenure in the Hawks, the group of musicians that would later evolve into the Band. In the early 1960s, the Hawks backed the Arkansas-born frontman Ronnie Hawkins, touring the US and Canada and cutting a few studio singles. One of these records, a cover of Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love?, reveals Robertson to be a lithe blues guitarist with a smouldering tone and a knack for shaping his livewire riffs around Hawkins’ wildfire vocals and the rest of the band. The Last Waltz version of this song , featuring an exuberant reunion of Hawkins with the now-veteran players, is just as good.

Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4, Bob Dylan Live 1966)

Robertson was a crucial part of multiple Bob Dylan career peaks: integral to the sound on 1966’s Blonde on Blonde, a core member of The Basement Tapes jam sessions, and his usual driving presence on 1974’s live album Before the Flood. However, Robertson and the Hawks were also on tour with Dylan for the songwriter’s legendary 1966 performance at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Right before Like a Rolling Stone, a fan heckled Dylan with a cry of “Judas!”. Dylan lobbed back his own insults (“You’re a liar!”), and launched into a howling, sprawling electric version of the hit. Equal parts confrontational and languid – at times, Dylan and the Hawks sound like they’re luxuriating in their defiance – the song showed off the chemistry that would soon make the Band stars in their own right.

The Band – The Weight (Music from Big Pink, 1968)

The live version of The Weight from The Last Waltz might be more famous, thanks to vocal contributions from the Staple Singers. But the original studio version of Robertson’s mischievous signature song was a blueprint for much of the Band’s best work. Inspired by Robertson’s viewing of Luis Buñuel movies, the soulful roots-rock tune feels more like a short story: the song muses about life’s vicissitudes through the lens of vibrant characters and the use of biblical imagery. With its swinging grooves, bar-band piano and keening vocals from Levon Helm and Rick Danko, The Weight is wistfully nostalgic but spiritually uplifting.

The Band – This Wheel’s on Fire (Music from Big Pink, 1968)

A highlight of 1975’s The Basement Tapes, This Wheel’s on Fire actually surfaced first as a Band song. Freckled with psychedelic flourishes, Danko’s slightly alarmed vocals, and Garth Hudson’s mad-scientist-in-a-lab keyboard effects, This Wheel’s on Fire demonstrated the forward-thinking approach of the Band at this stage of their career. Fittingly, This Wheel’s on Fire has remained a pop culture staple for decades; Brian Auger and the Trinity with Julie Driscoll, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Kylie Minogue have all covered the song.

The Band – King Harvest (Has Surely Come) (The Band, 1969)

With their 1969 self-titled album, the Band not only avoided a sophomore slump – they perhaps even eclipsed their debut. Robertson certainly exhibited sharp songwriting on the LP, with one highlight being the album-closing King Harvest (Has Surely Come). A funky slice of Americana boogie, the tune is a cautionary tale centring on the saga of a farmer yearning for a healthy harvest. He’s thwarted both by poor weather conditions and a union boss that doesn’t have his best interests at heart. Robertson deftly juxtaposes these themes, revealing illuminating truths about power and oppression.

The Band – Ophelia (Northern Lights – Southern Cross, 1975)

As their career progressed, the Band fell prey to the same foibles that other groups experienced, mainly creative dissension and substance use issues. That didn’t always diminish their creative powers, going by a jaunty Robertson tune like Ophelia. Garnished with warm orchestration like horns and woodwinds, the strutting song has a sunny vibe despite downtrodden lyrics: it laments the disappearance of a woman named Ophelia, who seems to have left town for reasons unknown (“Was it something that somebody said? / Mama, I know we broke the rules / Was somebody up against the law?”). Although Ophelia’s character is never fleshed out, Robertson’s pleading tone and enigmatic hints make listeners care about her whereabouts – and want to learn more about who she is.

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The Band – Up on Cripple Creek (The Last Waltz, 1978)

Farewell concerts rarely sound this fired up. But when you’re a barnstorming live act like the Band – and bring along friends such as Bob Dylan , the Staple Singers, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and more – you’re bound to throw a raucous party. Recorded in 1976 but released two years later, the live album contains an incendiary version of one of the Band’s signature tunes, the self-titled album’s Up on Cripple Creek. The performance demonstrates the Band’s live chemistry and ability of the members to feed off of one another – but is especially a vibrant showcase for Robertson’s white-hot guitar flourishes and jubilant vocal harmonies.

Robbie Robertson – Fallen Angel (Robbie Robertson, 1987)

Robertson didn’t rush into making a solo record after parting ways with the Band. But when he did emerge more than a decade later, he went all-out, teaming up with producer Daniel Lanois and collaborating with artists such as U2, Maria McKee, and Ivan Neville. The resulting self-titled album is ambitious and cinematic, distinguished by the gauzy highlight Fallen Angel. Co-written with Martin Page and featuring guest vocals from Peter Gabriel, the single is a heartfelt, aching tribute to Robertson’s one-time bandmate Richard Manuel, who died by suicide in 1986. The lyrics brim with grief, anger and resignation, but maintain a moving emotional tenderness.

Robbie Robertson – Breakin’ the Rules (Storyville, 1991)

For his second solo album, Robertson worked with dozens of musicians, including the Rebirth Brass Band and multiple horn sections, to craft a collection of songs indebted to jazz and the music of New Orleans. Breakin’ the Rules skews minimalist, for good reason: it’s a gorgeous, crestfallen collaboration with The Blue Nile – Paul Buchanan contributes vocals and guitar, while Robert Bell chimes in with bass and drum programming – that meditates on an unhealthy relationship which needs to end. Breakin’ the Rules also appeared in the 1991 Wim Wenders movie Until the End of the World.

Robbie Robertson, Ghost Dance (Music for the Native Americans, 1994)

Robertson weaved references to his Mohawk and Cayuga heritage into his art on his 1994 solo album, which he recorded with a collective of musicians called the Red Road Ensemble for a TV documentary the Native Americans. Ghost Dance is particularly stunning. Although sonically an echo of his gorgeous, glacial solo work with Daniel Lanois, thematically the song is a powerful statement on reclaiming – and preserving – identity, tradition and heritage in the face of violent oppression: “They outlawed the Ghost Dance / But we shall live again, we shall live again.”

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