Ronnie Hawkins wanted to fire him when he caught him reading. He killed the long dull stretches of the road with Faulkner and Steinbeck and Camus. Robertson stood out as a studious-looking type, fussy and bookish. 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. Hawkins wanted the Hawks to be hot young lookers, to attract girls to the show. They were a handsome crew, which wasn’t accidental.
Hawkins picked up more young kids-Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson. As Robertson recalled, “He was my best friend, my big brother. He taught me the tricks of the trade.” Helm was his mentor, teaching him the guitar parts. So Robbie took the train to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where his new bandmates laughed at his winter clothes. When Levon got a gig with Ronnie Hawkins, he told his new boss about this Canadian kid who could play. Robertson grew up playing in bands, crossing paths with a cocky Southern drummer named Levon Helm, three years older. The guys were responsible for the arrangements, but that’s what being a band is, that’s your fucking job.” Somebody has to lead the charge, somebody has to draw the map. “I’m sorry, I just worked harder than anybody else. “I wrote songs before I ever met Levon,” Robertson insisted in the Helm profile. The article notes that there’s a ripple when he says, “I wrote the words you sang.” Levon gives up and bails on Rick’s funeral, while Robbie gives the eulogy. Helm sits in the Chinese restaurant next door, unable to make himself go in, knowing that Robertson will be there. In a poignant 2000 Rolling Stone profile of Helm by Scott Spencer, there’s a scene on the day of Rick Danko’s funeral. As everyone knows, Levon Helm felt burned by Robertson, and complained about him to his dying day. (People just assumed they slept in those.) They summed up that spirit in one of their Seventies album titles: Cahoots.īut as with so many bands, this brotherhood turned bitter over money.
They’ve got their backs to the camera, wearing their old-man suits. Landy in a classic image: the five of them squeezed together on a bench, by the riverside, looking out at the snow-covered woods. For the cover of Rolling Stone, in 1968, they posed for Elliot M. They even posed with their families, with the line, “Next of Kin,” This was unheard-of in an era of generational warfare. It was a shock for rock fans to see these guys in the photos of their 1968 debut album Music From Big Pink. People around the world fell in love with The Band’s friendship. People walked in rhythm and talked this sing-song talk when I’d go down by the river at Helena, the river seemed to be in rhythm, and I thought, ‘No wonder this music comes from here-the rhythm is already there.’ I’d hear something at night and not know whether it was an animal or a harmonica or a train, but it sounded like music to me, everything sounded like music.” “But the most noticeable thing was the rhythm of the place. “Everything gets flatter and flatter, and wetter, and swampier, and you smell the dirt,” he told Musician in 1991. He was an outsider, but he looked around at America and fell in love. He was just 16 when he hit the road with Southern rockabilly veteran Ronnie Hawkins.
Robertson wrote some of the most indelible songs about America, yet he was a Canadian kid, with a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father.
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