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By Stuart Mitchner
After we recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” and “Across the Great Divide,” I felt we were making some kind of magic.
—Robbie Robertson (1943-2023), from Testimony
In a 1995 interview, the Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter Jaime “Robbie” Robertson, who died August 9, said that he wanted to write music “that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality.”
Halfway through his memoir Testimony (Crown Archetype 2016), Robertson refers to his interest in writing lyrics about the Civil War “from a southern family’s point of view” — “there was a chord progression and melody rumbling through my head, but I didn’t know what the song was about.” When he played the sequence for the Band’s only American member, drummer and singer Levon Helm, the Arkansas native “liked the way it stopped and started, free of tempo.”
After a visit to the local library to do “a little research on the Confederacy” (“They didn’t teach that stuff in Canadian schools”), Robertson “conjured up a story about Virgil Caine and his kin against this historical backdrop, and the song came to life,” the only catch being could he get away with it? Could you call this rock ‘n’ roll?
“Tomorrow, Yesterday”
What do you call a song that sounds at once excitingly new and as old as the hills — a song that leaves you shaking your head in wonder. Like other first time listeners to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” I was moved and amazed by the lyrics, the stirring arrangement, and Levon Helm’s inspired performance of a piece of music that, in the words of critic Ralph Gleason, brought home this song’s “overwhelming human sense of history.” Writing in the October 1969 Rolling Stone, Gleason compared the experience to hearing “some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today,” such was its “aura of authenticity.”
Walking Into History
In the summer of 1965, Robertson’s book comes to life as “human history” when he describes meeting Bob Dylan in Columbia Records Studio A. After a quick introduction by record producer John Hammond (“Hey Bob this is my guitar player friend from Canada”), Dylan has them listen to the playback of a song he’d just recorded — a piece of music called “Like a Rolling Stone.” Though Robertson wasn’t familiar with Dylan’s recorded work at the time except for folk songs like “Oxford Town,” he knew he’d just been witness to something momentous: “I’d never heard anything like this before. The studio lit up with the sound of toughness, humor, and originality. It was hard to take it all in on one listen.”
I know the feeling. It took me years to recognize the ground-breaking significance of “Like a Rolling Stone” while “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” hit me immediately, like the “lightning bolt” that was Bob Dylan the next time Robertson met him, Dylan “puffing a cigarette harder than Bette Davis, one knee bobbing in time to a shotgun monologue. He was dressed in a dark red polka-dot shirt and blue striped pants. Electricity seemed to be shooting up through his hair. His dark prescription sunglasses accented his nocturnally pale skin and wiry build. This wasn’t the folk traditionalist Dylan; this was the emergence of a new species.” Robertson seemed to know that he had just walked into an era of rock and roll history in which he and his band would play a central role.
“New Heights”
One of rock’s first and finest writer-historians-of-the-moment, Greil Marcus, gives a vivid account of what happened after Dylan hired Robertson and the Band (still called the Hawks at that time). Ready to tour the country and then the world, Dylan wanted a rock and roll force powerful enough to play through the fury of hostile crowds unwilling to forgive him for betraying folk music by going electric. Writing in April 1969, Marcus recalls the Hawks “barnstorming” the U.S. and Canada in the early sixties “like a baseball team during the off-season, playing, says organist Garth Hudson, ‘for pimps, whores, rounders, and flakeouts.’” The Hawks didn’t know Dylan’s music “but they listened to his records … and understood what he was doing and it worked. The combination was magnificent. Guitarist Robbie Robertson pushed Dylan to heights of musical fantasy that haven’t been touched since…. ‘They’re the greatest band in the world,’ Dylan told Keith Richards of the Stones.”
“The Loudest Thing”
Having just experienced a jolt of early Marcus, I realize that while Robertson may be no match for the author of Mystery Train (1975), he tells the story of his time in the spotlight effectively, with a songwriter-storyteller’s gift for nailing the most expressive details while driving the narrative. Consider the quote he draws from Marlon Brando, who was in the front row when Dylan and the Hawks played Santa Monica, where the acoustic first half of the concert was followed by the super amplified second half pitting Dylan and the Hawks against the catcalls and boos of purists. Afterward, Brando’s response was to go back to the day in his teens when he stood just a few feet away from a railroad track as a long freight train went roaring by: “I made myself just stand there until it passed. That was the loudest thing I have ever witnessed until tonight.”
“Hard and Painful”
In a November 24, 2016 interview with the Canadian Press, Robertson, then 73, explained why he wrote Testimony without the help of a ghostwriter: “I went through two or three biographers that were writing books on me and I didn’t like it. I thought I was cheating. It made me uncomfortable that somebody else was trying to find my voice. So I thought: I’m going to have to do it myself. When I got to that place, I was glad. I really enjoyed writing this book. Not to say that some of it wasn’t really hard and painful, but for the most part, I just got into it.”
I can imagine the words “hard and painful” behind the cover photo Robertson picked. The most positive thing to be said about his expression is that it’s tough, stoic, ready and waiting for life’s next blow. Choosing that image, he had to be thinking about the three members of the Band who had died too soon, Richard Manuel by his own hand, Rick Danko and Levon Helm after classically ravaged rock and roll lives. The only survivors in 2016 were Robertson and organist Garth Hudson, who had both steered clear of heroin and other hard drugs.
“Stage Fright”
Right now I’m thinking of the virulent stomach flu that laid Robertson low when the Band were about to make their debut at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in 1969. In Testimony, Robertson writes: “I felt like I was dying … I couldn’t move … I couldn’t hold any food down … Is this stage fright? Is this all in my head?” Greil Marcus provides a view from the audience: “Robertson looked weak and miserable, on the verge of collapse, and the band, his friends, couldn’t pretend he was alright. They were worried about him. Off to one side of the stage stood a big white-haired man in a dark suit, the man who had hypnotized Robertson into ‘forgetting’ the pains in his stomach. It was all very weird and uncomfortable, Robertson leaning against the piano and looking as if he could not last another minute, playing minimal rhythm guitar, his only attempt at a solo a shambles.”
Securing the Song
Robertson’s Testimony doesn’t suggest a redemptive link between the 1969 catastrophe at Winterland and the Band’s triumphant farewell concert there on Thanksgiving Day 1976, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed documentary The Last Waltz. Out of the “shambles” of that catastrophic debut, Robertson salvaged “Stage Fright,” movingly sung by Rick Danko on the Band’s eponymous third album and greeted by Ralph Gleason as “the best song ever written about performing.” In the second verse, “the doctor warned me I might catch a death, said ‘You can make it in your disguise, just never show the fear that’s in your eyes.” The chorus delivers the message: “See the man with the stage fright, just standin’ up there to give it all his might, and he got caught in the spotlight, but when we get to the end, he wants to start all over again.”
“The Last Waltz”
Robertson is in his element in Scorsese’s film. Readers of Testimony will know that he’s a film buff who channeled Buñuel when writing the Band’s most famous song, “The Weight,” and who was thrilled when Michelangelo Antonioni visited him in Woodstock. The filming of the Band’s farewell performance at Winterland is the subject of the book’s long final chapter. Having recently watched the film, I can report that Robertson seems to be having the time of his life at the center of the show.
Watching The Last Waltz the other night, I kept thinking of Dylan’s song “Too Much of Nothing,” which “can make a man feel ill at ease / One man’s temper might rise, while the other man’s temper might freeze.” Of course the film’s “too much” was a galaxy of guest celebrities, so many that the Band and their signature songs seemed crowded even as they were being celebrated. It was a problem Robertson was all too aware of, writing in Testimony: “It weighed heavy on me whether or not the guys and I would be able to remember the arrangements for all our guests’ songs. With our limited rehearsal time, this was an overwhelming challenge.”
Testimony was published almost 40 years to the day of the Winterland farewell and the face staring out at you on the cover belongs to a man who found much of the story “hard and painful,” but for the most part, “just got into it.”
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