Appreciation: Robbie Robertson, former leader of The Band, is dead at 80. Revisit our 2002 interview with the rock legend (2024)

Robbie Robertson, the leader and co-founder of Rock & Roll Hall of Famers The Band died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80. No cause of death has been disclosed, but he had been battling a long illness, according to his manager, Jared Levine.

Robertson’s songwriting credits with The Band included such classics as “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” He was the group’s lead guitarist, and — while he rarely sang lead vocals — a prime architect of its sound and genre-blurring approach.

The Band teamed Robertson with American drummer/singer Levon Helm and three fellow Canadian musicians: bassist/singer Rick Danko, keyboardist/singer Richard Manuel and keyboardist Garth Hudson. Hudson, 86, is now The Band’s only surviving member.

Together, the five musicians created the rootsy blend of styles now known as Americana music in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The Band’s continuing musical influence can be heard in the work of such diverse artists as Bob Dylan — with whom the group toured and recorded in the 1960s — Elton John, Wilco, Norah Jones and Eric Clapton.

Clapton visited and jammed with The Band at its upstate New York home in Woodstock in the late 1960s. The English rock star was politely rebuffed when he attempted to become The Band’s sixth member.

“Well, we already had a guitarist,” Robertson slyly noted in a 2002 San Diego Union-Tribune interview.

Here is that interview in full.

Band’s music ‘gumbo’ retains power

BY GEORGE VARGA, MUSIC CRITIC

April 21, 2002, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Ryan Adams, Wilco and the Jayhawks are just a few of the Americana and alt-country acts who owe a profound musical debt to The Band, a group that defined and transcended roots-rock in the late-1960s and early ‘70s.

But that’s hardly the extent of the influence of The Band, whose all-star 1976 farewell concert is lovingly chronicled in Martin Scorsese’s newly re-released film, “The Last Waltz,” which opened nationally earlier this month (though not in San Diego, where its April 19 opening fell through).

Regardless, the film is so good that it’s worth a drive to Hollywood’s Arclight and Cinerama Dome, where it’s now showing. (A DVD version with additional footage is due May 6. And Rhino Records’ four-CD boxed set with 24 previously unreleased songs hit the shelves last week.)

Eclectic jazz diva Cassandra Wilson starts her new album, “Belly of the Sun,” with a sultry version of The Band’s 1968 classic “The Weight.” On her current concert tour, rising young troubadour Norah Jones performs a heartfelt rendition of “Bessie Smith,” a bluesy gem from The Band’s “Basem*nt Tapes” album with Bob Dylan.

And don’t overlook the many others who have recorded songs by The Band. They include such disparate artists as Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Marty Stuart, Giant Sand and two veterans featured in “The Last Waltz” — Emmylou Harris and Eric Clapton.

Other artists who perform alongside The Band in the film -- which was shot Thanksgiving night, 1976, at Winterland in San Francisco — include Dylan, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison and roadhouse rocker Ronnie Hawkins, who in 1959 gave The Band its start as his backing group, the Hawks.

“I do feel really proud of the gumbo of music we made,” said Robbie Robertson, 57, The Band’s former lead guitarist and principal songwriter.

“And the fact that, to this day, there are a lot of bands out there that say, ‘You guys influenced us so much’ —- whether it’s Train or Travis or Counting Crows — is a real compliment. I never, ever thought that somebody is trying to steal my thunder. I always thought that for somebody to be influenced by you or to copy you, either way, was very complimentary.”

Featuring Arkansas-born drummer Levon Helm and four Canadians (Robertson, bassist Rick Danko and keyboardists Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel), The Band made refreshingly earthy music that provided a welcome tonic to the self-indulgent psychedelic-rock of the day. Drawing from rockabilly, country, blues, folk, ragtime, New Orleans-styled R&B and more, the group’s unpretentious sound was quintessentially American and completely free of affectation.

“The Last Waltz” is a fitting tribute to The Band, which emerged with its landmark debut, “Music From Big Pink,” in 1968. The album was recorded at the quintet’s home studio in the woodsy, upstate New York town of Woodstock.

Frequent musical partner Dylan lived nearby, and it was during this period that he and The Band recorded their now-fabled “The Basem*nt Tapes” sessions, which yielded such classic songs as Dylan and Danko’s “This Wheel’s on Fire” and Dylan’s “Lo and Behold.” Clapton, George Harrison and other pals regularly dropped by The Band’s Woodstock abode to jam and hang out.

The Band was the only Woodstock-based act to perform at the legendary 1969 festival of the same name, though it did not appear in the subsequent “Woodstock” movie. The film crew included a gifted young talent named Martin Scorsese, who seven years later would direct “The Last Waltz.”

“There was pouring rain at Woodstock, and people fainting and having babies, and going mad on LSD,” Robertson recalled.

And that was just backstage.

“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “Woodstock was much more than the music. That’s what Martin said: ‘Woodstock was about the audience; “The Last Waltz” was about the music.’ ”

A special salute

The Band’s legacy is warmly saluted in “The Last Waltz,” which was originally released in 1978 and is still one of the finest and most imaginatively made rock-concert films. It was the first such film ever shot in 35mm, and the lighting and camera angles were meticulously planned out.

“Our criteria was just to judge what was the best at the time,” said Robertson, who worked closely with director Scorsese in assembling the film in both its original and revamped versions. “For the most part, it was right.”

What “The Last Waltz” does not do is address the fact that it was solely Robertson’s decision for The Band to break up. The other members would have been happy to continue, and they eventually reunited — sans Robertson — in 1986. Manuel hanged himself later that year, and a bloated, sickly Danko died in 1999 after years of hard living.

In his 1993 autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire,” Helm took repeated potshots at Robertson and the film. “As far as I was concerned, the movie was a disaster,” Helm wrote of “The Last Waltz.” “The muscles on (Robertson’s) neck stood out like cords when he sang so powerfully into his switched-off microphone.”

Robertson, who has claimed not to have read Helm’s book, downplayed their differences.

Asked to explain why he consistently stands back from his microphone while apparently singing harmony vocals in “The Last Waltz,” the guitarist said: “It was just a matter of trying to get the blend right . . . and not drowning out the guy singing the main melody.”

Is it bittersweet for Robertson to watch the film now, in the wake of the deaths of Manuel and Danko?

“No, I don’t get any bittersweet feelings,” he said. “Sometimes I get a little ‘sad sweet’ when I watch it and see Richard or Rick. It saddens my heart to think I won’t talk with them or play music with them again.”

The Band’s bitter disintegration notwithstanding, “The Last Waltz” demonstrates how vital its music still sounds. Ditto the stellar lineup of guest artists, who -- with one notable exception — all turn in memorable performances.

That exception is the sorely out-of-place Neil Diamond, who was included solely because Robertson had produced Diamond’s most recent album. At the other end of the performance spectrum, though, is Morrison belting out “Caravan,” replete with clumsy but endearing leg kicks; Waters, who gets his mojo workin’ on the raucous “Mannish Boy”; and the other guests.

“I felt at the time,” Robertson recalled, “that somehow or other the gods had blessed us to have all these wonderful music people come together with Martin Scorsese and these great cinematographers. It’s easy to say now, ‘Yeah, that worked out pretty good.’ But there were a lot of risks taken.

“But I did not know that, 26 years later, this movie would still be the milestone of rock films, and that all these artists still would be completely as valid. I mean, that’s a pretty tremendous achievement on everybody’s part. The film really was a cross-section of all the musical influences at the time, by the people I thought best represented it, whether Chicago blues with Muddy (Waters), or gospel with the Staple Singers, or Tin Pan Alley with Neil Diamond, or British blues with Clapton.

“All these things are the poetry of rock ‘n’ roll being represented as spokes in the wheel. We had great respect for them, and these (guests) were people who had great respect for The Band. It was a way to unify through music.”

Speaking of Clapton, the English guitar hero made no secret in interviews that he’d visited The Band in Woodstock with the express hope he’d be invited to become a member.

“We didn’t know that’s what he was thinking,” Robertson said.

And if they had?

“Well,” Robertson said slyly, “we already had a guitarist.”