Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm’s near miss careers as armed criminals
It’s an unremarkable night in New York City when an unassuming man takes to the stage, unaware he’s just started a journey that will see him change the landscape of art forever; Bob Dylan starts to speak.
“[I’ve] been travellin’ the country,” he said, taking in the New York folk bar, arriving in ‘The Big Apple’ after leaving his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, “Followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps”. The people who saw Dylan that night likely thought they were seeing a good singer who might have a career in music, but little did they know they were standing in the presence of a man who would revolutionise literature and music as the world knew it.
He started out doing exactly what he said on that stage, “Followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps”, playing an acoustic guitar and singing heartwarming covers of folk music that people liked. Even though he was still in the early stages of his career, he had always had that unique vocal tone and unique approach to rhythm, so there weren’t many folk fans who heard his music and weren’t drawn to it.
These initial performances were enough to get him a pretty decent platform, as people were excited by this new mysterious artist who seemed to have swooped into New York under the cover of night and was now playing beautiful music to anybody who would listen. There was momentum, but it wouldn’t truly be realised until he started writing his own music, and then, more importantly, when he went electric.
When Dylan decided to put down the acoustic guitar and swap it out for a solid-bodied electric, it was a decision which would completely take the musical world by storm. Some people booed, some cheered: there was inconsistency in reactions, and all that remained consistent was that everybody had something to say about it.
With the power of hindsight, we can now recognise this as a good career move by Dylan, one that saw him step out from the boundaries of just being a folk artist and into the realm of an innovator. Of course, with all the controversy, he had to be sure that he was making the right decision, and one of the biggest driving factors behind it was the quality of the band he played with when he went electric. Despite calls of “Judas” it was hard for Dylan to hear his music and think it was anything other than superb when he had The Band in tow.
One of the most pivotal members of The Band was Robbie Robertson, a guitar player who Dylan described as being a “Mathematical guitar genius”, and what he meant by this was once explained by Robertson.
“It’s having a structure [that’s] improvised and at the same time you have a sense of dynamics: when to rise, when to fall, when to shimmer, when to growl,” he said, “When The Hawks hooked up with Dylan, he found this explosive, dynamic thing. Because of his intensity, it raised everything up, and we didn’t come down enough, and people were saying this music is so loud we can’t hear the words. Part of that was he wanted that raging spirit on these songs.”
Had it not been for the strength of The Band, it could well have been the case that Dylan would have given in to the criticism and not pursued the electric sound. Call it the musical Gods who brought such a group together, as, were it not for some instances of chance, each individual member could have had a very different life.
In the case of Robertston and band percussionist Levon Helm, that alternative life could have been one riddled with crime. The two grew up in crime-infested areas, where bending the long arm of the law was the easiest way to make a quick buck in an economy that seemed reluctant to give them away. Who knows how close the two were to committing to a life of thievery, as Robertson has confessed that the two of them did consider becoming robbers before their music careers started to show promise.
“In the world that we ran in, we knew so many people from dark places, criminals that were really good at it, thieves [who] took great pride in their gift,” he said, “They were friends of ours, they came to where we played. Now this is big cities up north. In the South was a different kind of criminal.”
It’s a good job the two decided to focus on their sound, as depriving the world of their music would certainly be the worst crime they could have committed.
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