It seems that Robbie Robertson was destined to be a songwriter. He was raised by his Cayuga/Mohawk mother on a First Nations Reserve near Toronto, Canada, in a culture rich with oral tradition and storytelling. He showed interest in the guitar at an early age and was encouraged by his family, playing with several bands as a young teenager.
Robertson was confident enough that at age 15, he approached rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins with two of his original songs. The audacious approach worked. He was not only hired as guitarist but was introduced to New York City’s songwriting culture, centered at the Brill Building, where songwriters like Lieber and Stoller and Carole King worked.
Here’s Hawkins with one of those first songs from 1959, “Hey Boba Lou” with a 16-year-old Robertson:
For about four years, Robertson played guitar with Hawkins in a band that, over time, would come to recruit the players who would go on to be The Band. After leaving Hawkins in 1964, they continued to play as Levon and the Hawks, leaving behind rockabilly in favor of blues and soul music.
In 1965, Robertson was approached by Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and Hawks members were soon backing up Dylan on his nine month international tour. At this point, Dylan’s fans felt betrayed by his rejection of acoustic folk music in favor of loud, electric rock and roll. As a result, for months, their shows were booed night after night.
Robertson and Dylan became close during this time, with Robertson becoming an integral part of creating Dylan’s visionary 1965 double album Blonde on Blonde. With a 22-year-old Robertson overseeing production, the album is widely considered one of Dylan’s defining masterpieces.
In 1966, Dylan had a motorcycle accident. To recover, he moved from Manhattan to Woodstock, a sleepy town a couple of hours north of the city. Robertson and the Hawks soon followed him up there with intending to build their own recording studio. Since in 1967, there were no other famous rock musicians living in Woodstock, the members of the Hawks became known to the locals as the guys that played with Bob Dylan, or simply ‘The Band.'
With Robertson as the primary songwriter, The Band became a music factory, recording 10 albums in the next 10 years. And they sounded like no other rock group of their time. They were young men who often played old-time instruments, like accordion or fiddle, and sang songs about the Civil War and America’s pioneer days.
The Band’s best-known song is probably “The Weight,” which was a Top 20 hit for Aretha Franklin in 1969. An example of Robertson’s song-crafting, “The Weight,” tells a literal story yet can be interpreted a number of different ways.
Outside of The Band, Robertson played or produced music with Jesse Winchester, Ringo Starr, Carly Simon and Eric Clapton. Robertson made a total of six solo albums starting with 1987’s Robbie Robertson, with several singles on the Billboard charts, including “Showdown at Big Sky,” “Sweet Fire of Love” and “Somewhere Down the Crazy River."
As Dylan’s traveling companion, Robertson was exposed to a wide range of culture and became a huge fan of movies, notably foreign art films by directors like Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. He collected screenplays, and in his 2016 autobiography Testimony, he said that they helped him to tap into the cinematic with his characters and stories.
Starting with The Last Waltz in 1976, Robertson became a close collaborator with filmmaker Martin Scorsese, working on 11 soundtracks for movies such as Raging Bull, Casino, Gangs of New York and The Wolf of Wall Street. Shortly before his death, he completed the score for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Along with members of The Band, Robertson has been inducted into the Canadian Juno Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he received eight Grammy nominations for his solo work. In 2017, Robertson received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the community of Six Nations.
As he told Apple Music in 2019, “If I hadn’t become addicted to music at such a young age, I would have ended up in movieland."
An ace guitarist who rarely took solos and a prolific songwriter who didn’t do much singing, Robbie Robertson will be remembered for his ability to create vivid stories with memorable characters.
