“The Band was the ultimate rock & roll fantasy of friendship, with Robertson’s classic songs lighting the way.” Read Rob Sheffield on the musical genius and communal spirit of Robbie Robertson, who died yesterday at 80.
Robertson wrote some of the most indelible songs about America, yet he was a Canadian kid, with a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father. He was just 16 when he hit the road with Southern rockabilly veteran Ronnie Hawkins. He was an outsider, but he looked around at America and fell in love. “Everything gets flatter and flatter, and wetter, and swampier, and you smell the dirt,” he told Musician in 1991. “But the most noticeable thing was the rhythm of the place.
“I wrote songs before I ever met Levon,” Robertson insisted in the Helm profile. “I’m sorry, I just worked harder than anybody else. Somebody has to lead the charge, somebody has to draw the map. The guys were responsible for the arrangements, but that’s what being a band is, that’s your fucking job.”
Hawkins picked up more young kids—Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson. They were a handsome crew, which wasn’t accidental. Hawkins wanted the Hawks to be hot young lookers, to attract girls to the show. It’s one of the many wonderful paradoxes of The Band that they were assembled like a boy band, to live out an American fantasy that none of them but Levon knew from the inside.
To their surprise, the Hawks hit the big time on the road with Bob Dylan—the scruffy garage band who turned into an international scandal, playing his new electrified rock & roll. If you’re a Dylan freak, you can spend years obsessing over every night of the Dylan/Hawks 1966 tour, from Perth to Copenhagen from Dublin to Paris.
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