Robbie Robertson, Canadian music legend, dead at 80 | 24CA News
Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and essential songwriter in The Band, the Canadian-American group recognized for songs together with The Weight and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, has died on the age of 80, his supervisor stated on Wednesday.
Robertson, who left his Toronto residence at age 16 to pursue his rock’n’roll goals, died Wednesday in Los Angeles after a protracted sickness, Robertson’s supervisor of 34 years, Jared Levine, stated in an announcement.
“Robbie was surrounded by his family at the time of his death,” the assertion added.
The Band included 4 Canadians – Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel – and was anchored by an Arkansas drummer, Levon Helm. Originally dubbed The Hawks because the backing band for rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins, they gained consideration supporting Bob Dylan on his Going Electric excursions of 1965-1966.
After altering their identify to The Band and rebasing in Woodstock, New York, they turned one of the revered teams in rock. Their 1976 farewell live performance in San Francisco was the idea of Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film The Last Waltz.
The Band had a singular chemistry. Known for his or her vocal harmonies, that they had three glorious singers in Helm, bassist Danko and pianist Manuel. Organist and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson was additionally essential.
“They were the goods,” Robertson wrote of his 4 band mates in his 2016 autobiography, Testimony. “This band was a real band. No slack in the high wire here. Everybody held up his end with plenty to spare.”
“The impact of The Band’s first album can’t be exaggerated,” critic Greil Marcus wrote in 2000, referring to their 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. It contained The Weight and Dylan’s I Shall Be Released, amongst others.
Their 1969 sophomore album, titled merely The Band, was even higher. With their frontiersman look and distinctive mix of folks, rock, nation, soul and gospel, The Band influenced the likes of Eric Clapton, Elton John, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and generations of later musicians who performed music that was by then referred to as “Americana.”
Their music harked again to an earlier America, mirrored in such tune titles as Across the Great Divide, King Harvest (Has Surely Come), Up on Cripple Creek and The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show.
INDIGENOUS ROOTS
Jaime Royal Robertson was born in Toronto on July 5, 1943. His mom, Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler, was an Indigenous Canadian of Mohawk and Cayuga descent. She married a Canadian Army enlistee named Jim Robertson. Robbie Robertson later realized that his organic father was a person he described as a “card shark” of Jewish heritage named Alex Klegerman, who was killed in a freeway hit-and-run accident earlier than Robertson was born.
As a boy, Robertson was impressed by his visits with family on the Six Nations Indian Reserve in southwestern Ontario. It struck him that “everybody there could play or sing or dance or do something with music,” he instructed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Metro Morning in 2017. “To see somebody sitting beside you in a chair and hear their fingers moving on the instrument, and hear them breathing when they were singing, all of that, it gave me chills.”
Robertson turned infatuated with the guitar early on and gained a repute as a guitar scorching shot throughout his time with the Hawks. Rolling Stone journal ultimately ranked him No. 59 on its 2015 listing of “100 Greatest Guitarists.” His distinctive guitar model was exhibited to nice impact on such Band songs as Jawbone and Smoke Signal.
After hovering to the very best heights on their first two albums, The Band continued to supply good work within the Seventies however a sure lethargy and lack of path set in, not helped by the substance abuse issues of Danko, Helm and Manuel. They determined to pack it in by holding a star-studded live performance in 1976 with such company as Dylan, Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison and Muddy Waters.
After The Band’s breakup, Robertson created soundtracks for Scorsese movies, together with Raging Bull. He made a foray into performing in 1980 with the movie Carny, starring Jodie Foster. He launched a number of solo albums, exploring new sonic territory relatively than making an attempt to recapture the distinctive sound of The Band.
DARK TIMES
In the Nineties, acrimony emerged when Helm accused Robertson of failing to present co-credits to the opposite members on songs he claimed that they had co-written. Robertson denied he had unfairly withheld credit score.
Helm painted a scathing image of Robertson in his 1993 autobiography. Robertson reacted extra in sorrow than anger, typically saying in interviews that Helm, within the early days, was “the closest thing I had to a brother.”
The Band’s members reunited in numerous configurations within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties and even made a couple of albums below The Band identify, however Robertson by no means took half.
After The Band’s breakup, a lifetime of arduous residing took its toll on the members. Manuel hanged himself in a Florida resort room at age 42 in 1986. Danko died at age 55 in 1999. Helm died of throat most cancers in 2012. Hudson is the remaining member nonetheless alive.
In February 2022, Variety reported, citing sources, that Robertson offered his music publishing catalog to a agency referred to as Iconoclast for about $25 million.
After all of the highs and lows, Robertson seemed again at his Band mates with love and affection. “Through all the turbulence, I am left with such a deep appreciation for my journey,” he wrote in his autobiography. “This shining path I’ve traveled being part of the Band – there will never be another like it. Such a gift, such talent, such pain, such madness … I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
— Reporting by Matthew Lewis in Chicago; further reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; modifying by Diane Craft and Rosalba O’Brien
