July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023
We remember an architect of two world-changing musical revolutions; a Canadian songwriter and lead guitarist whose highly influential group The Band gave birth to Americana.
On July 1, 1968, the arrival of the debut album from a curious new group hit the music community with a resounding impact, its waves of influence felt almost immediately. Music From Big Pink was an enigma, sounding rawer and more rustic than the lysergically layered, overblown rock of the day, and feeling entirely out of step with the current fashion.
Its exotic blend of country, gospel and R&B would prove explosively consequential. An enamoured Eric Clapton broke up the virtuosic power trio Cream to pursue similarly down-home ambitions. George Harrison, evangelical with his love for the authenticity of the songs, steered The Beatles back to live studio performances. The Rolling Stones ditched their psychedelic posturing to re-embrace their blues roots. The Who considered its authors bona-fide geniuses. “Music From Big Pink,” Roger Daltrey told this writer, “was one of the best albums ever made.”
From their mountain retreat in upstate New York, this inscrutable collective of four Canadians and one American had inadvertently re-channelled the course of music history. And they didn’t even have a name.
"It came out looking like we were rebelling against the rebellion,” the band’s former guitarist Robbie Robertson told me in 2005. “And perhaps that’s true, but I don’t remember anybody saying: ‘Let’s rebel against the rebellion.’”
At that time, Robertson was one of three surviving members of the group, which would come to be known as The Band, and the sole curator of their legacy, having just produced the comprehensive career-spanning box-set A Musical History. It was a role he’d got used to – as the group’s main songwriter and spokesman, Robertson had, in his attempts to harness the potential and power of his increasingly disorderly comrades, become their de facto leader. But it was something of a poisoned chalice; after initiating the group’s split in the mid-70s, Robertson was later unfairly vilified in some quarters, accused of short-changing his bandmates.
It was an unreasonable charge, amplified by the stinging criticism in drummer Levon Helm’s 1993 autobiography, and one that Robertson was repeatedly impelled to answer to. For the few who overlooked his subsequent success both as a solo artist and a renowned film composer, it was only his unexpected death, and the flood of tributes it incited, that allowed them to fully recognise his unerring commitment to preserving the sanctity of the timeless music they created together.
Robbie Robertson died after a long illness, one month after his 80th birthday. He didn’t live to see the release of Killers Of The Flower Moon, his
