feel the freeze down in my knees

been in a tent for quite a bit of the last week so seem to have missed that #RobbieRobertson has died. this is a nice version of his most famous song https://t.co/Oampfee74p

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 14, 2023

A few thoughts on the recent death of Robbie Robertson, principal songwriter and guitarist with The Band and occasional previous featuree on this blog. Just as with Arnold Palmer there's a contrarian HOT TAKE that one might offer among all the people queueing up to offer praise and adulation, so let's put that out there first and then we can poke it around a bit.

So The Band's principal claim to fame is by association, specifically by association with Bob Dylan, whose backing band they were for a year or two around 1965/1966, just when he was at his peak of popularity and notoriety. Once they were a band in their own right (and their name, The Band, has a bit of faux-humble arrogance about it) their recording career as a group of significance lasted, at a push, a little over two years and three albums. Always a tight and compelling live band, they were mainly a touring entity for the remainder of their career until their farewell concert in San Francisco in December 1976, which, in a colossal act of cocaine-fuelled vanity and hubris, Robertson got his new showbiz chum Martin Scorsese to film and release as The Last Waltz. Having, as a consequence of his friendship with Scorsese, some control over the edit, Robertson made sure he came out of the film in the best light and got enough camera time on stage to ensure the rest of the band came across as his sidemen, even the vocalists, and buffed up some of his own performances (in particular the famous guitar duel with Eric Clapton) with judicious overdubbing. A shrewd businessman and a man of more ruthless self-control regarding drink and drug intake than most of his bandmates, Robertson also took a stranglehold on the songwriting credits, ensuring he came out of The Band's career considerably richer than all the others. A few solo projects and some lucrative film scoring work (much of it in collaboration with Scorsese) aside Robertson has spent much of the intervening 45 years or so buffing and re-telling his own legend, studiously ignoring his erstwhile bandmates' reformation without him, a venture only curtailed by their various premature demises. 

Whoa, you might say, that's a bit harsh, to which I would say: yes, of course it is, that was the whole point. My personal and slightly dimly-remembered experience with Robertson and The Band's music goes something like this: at some point during the late 1980s, almost certainly as a result of reading an article in Q magazine around the time of Robertson's debut solo album (which came out in 1987) I checked out a VHS copy of The Last Waltz from our local video shop and watched it. Around the same time I started at Bristol University and acquired a copy of The Band's 1968 debut album Music From Big Pink from the Fry Haldane record library (mentioned in relation to REM here). That remains a fabulously strange and unique work, largely out of step with the prevailing direction of rock music in 1968, and is, in my opinion, the best thing they ever did. One of the reasons for that is that Robertson's own songs - including The Weight, probably their most famous song - were augmented with some songs by, or co-written with, their erstwhile collaborator Bob Dylan, but also several by pianist and vocalist Richard Manuel (Tears Of Rage, In A Station, We Can Talk, and the admittedly dreary Lonesome Suzie). Arguably, it was the drop-off in Manuel's songwriting contributions hereafter that enabled Robertson to take control of things - Manuel was a more diffident character and a ferocious drug addict and alcoholic, none of which would have helped. His near-invisibility in the film of The Last Waltz is apparently largely a consequence of his pitiful drunkenness for the entirety of the concert. 

I retain something of a soft spot for Robertson's eponymous 1987 solo album - one of the first CDs I ever bought - but a clear-eyed re-assessment must point out two glaring flaws: firstly Robertson's own vocals, which AllMusic describe as "dry" and "reedy", which is probably fair, and secondly the quintessentially late-1980s feel of Daniel Lanois' production. This album came out within a year or so of Lanois' other two big late-80s albums, Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Joshua Tree, and HOO BOY you can hear it. Robertson's vocal limitations probably explain why the album's best-known track and unexpected hit single is Somewhere Down The Crazy River, which is largely spoken rather than sung.

The point here is that Robertson and The Band, along with REM, Dylan, Beefheart and others, played a key role in my formative mind-expanding years in terms of music, which basically means listening to stuff that neither my Dad nor my school contemporaries were into. 

Anyway, you want the first two Band albums, definitely, and probably the third, Stage Fright. If you want a live album, 1972's Rock Of Ages is the one, much better than The Last Waltz - alternatively you might go for 1974's Before The Flood which documents The Band's American tour with Dylan that year and gives a high-energy shouty kicking to their collective back catalogue. The Last Waltz movie is well worth a watch as a historical document, though, although its portentous self-regard is a bit grating at times. Oddly, Robertson's death means that the Band's oldest member, Garth Hudson, is now its sole survivor.