Five songs to prove Robbie Robertson is an underrated guitar genius
With his golden guitar, pink silk scarf and every hair in place, Robbie Robertson is coolness personified all through The Band’s legendary farewell concert film, The Last Waltz. That night, as they had so many times through their career, The Band came together to make a wonderful mess of music with everyone from Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to Muddy Waters and The Staples Singers, Bob Dylan, Dr John, Van Morrison, Ronnie Hawkins and even Neil Diamond.
They were sharing the spotlight that night, as they so often did, but each member of The Band shone by themselves on stage at Winterland as well, as they also so often did. The fact that they were such a cohesive unit, an honest and true band of brothers, makes it hard to think about one without thinking about the others, so it can be easy to forget that they were not just one genius band, but five individual geniuses, too.
Levon Helm was a master of rhythm and a multitude of instruments, from the drums to the mandolin, and could sing it with the best of them. Rick Danko and Richard Manuel had the voices of angels, as well, and could soothe you with their singing and playing, while Garth Hudson had the spirit and freedom of the land in his hands when he sat down at the keys.
Robbie Robertson, so often the focal point and bandleader, was the lynchpin of the group and the most driven of all its members, and was a master in a multitude of styles. He could cut it with the greatest guitar gods of his time or serenade and lullaby like anybody. He was an inventive, edgy, challenging and pioneering guitarist at the frontier of a new sound. He soaked up the influence of the singers that the group had worked with, chiefly Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan, and went on to write and arrange some of their most enduring and iconic songs.
Having backed Dylan on his infamous electric world tour in 1966, the group retreated into his teachings in a basement at a house they called Big Pink in Woodstock, upstate New York. There, they fused together the roots of the past with the musical magic of the moment and came up with a whole new sound which killed off the psychedelic trip almost overnight.
Americana music was really born in that basement, and fused together traditional folk, country and blues ballads with funk, and rock, and soul and whatever else was in the air and in the water at the time. Everyone from George Harrison and Elton John to the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, Loretta Lynne and on through to Wilco, My Morning Jacket and Dr. Dog has been influenced by the music of The Band.
But because they are so synonymous with each other as a group, so fused together by blood and by music, it’s easy to forget that they were not only a great band but great individual players and that Robbie Robertson was one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Five songs which prove Robbie Robertson is an underrated guitarist
‘Go Back to Your Woods’
The Band brought the curtain down on their career with one of the most legendary gatherings of musicians ever at The Last Waltz concert in 1976. The idea was that the show would be the end of the line for the group and that they’d get off the road and rest up after almost 20 years of hard travelling. Maybe they’d even go on to solo careers, but before long, The Band were getting back together. Or, most of them were, anyway. Robbie Robertson never rejoined the group and would go on to have the most successful solo career out of any of its members, working on albums under his own name and devoting an ever-increasing amount of time to movie scores and soundtracks.
In most of his work, including on his best songs like ‘Further Down the Crazy River’, he continued to explore the soul and the sounds of the American heartland, but did so in his own style, and his own rugged Tom Waits-esque voice. Another of his best solo songs, ‘Go Back to Your Woods’, could have been a Dr John boogie.
When you listen to the song, you can imagine some of the guitar parts being played by Albert King or, at other times, Nile Rogers. There’s a river of funk flowing through the bends and turns of this song and a burst of the blues to boot. The brass work is all parts Southern soul, and Robbie Robertson never sounded more like he was back with The Band in their heyday than he did on ‘Go Back to Your Woods’. He also never demonstrated his full range of playing styles and mastery of his instrument better in his solo work than he does here.
‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’
When Dylan outraged the folk music world and his adoring crowds around the globe by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he had the frightening, lightning talents of Michael Bloomfield howling behind him, but when he took the show on the road The Band backed him.
Robbie Robertson and Mike Bloomfield are two supremely talented guitarists, but both have a completely unique sound from one another. Bloomfield’s playing was much livelier, more floriforous and energetic, whilst Robertson’s sound is more biting, angular and dynamic. The pair played together at some sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, and both are highly underrated despite their enormous impact and influence on the scene, but they are both likely best remembered for their work with Dylan.
The Band backed Dylan on his explosive, combative 1966 world tour where they played to boos and riots and violence everywhere they went. They met fire with fire, though, and retaliated with everything they had. Dylan led the charge with his sardonic, sneering war-cry singing, and he was backed to the hilt by Robbie Robertson’s super-charged guitar. Robertson cut through the crowds with heavy Southern licks, tore up the old way of playing the songs with spiky and aggressive shapes around the fretboard and burst the sound barrier with his extra amplification.
He was capable of adding much more intimate and intricate colour to Dylan’s songs, as evidenced by their playing together in hotel room rehearsals on acoustic renditions of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and I Can’t Leave Her Behind, or of adding more quietly cutting and gutting guitar work on songs like ‘Dirge’ from Planet Waves, Robertson was back in electric lead guitar mode when The Band backed Dylan on his comeback Tour ’74.
Robertson later made a brief appearance on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, while Dylan returned the favour by headlining the band’s farewell show, The Last Waltz. Though Dylan reunited with various other members of the band over the years, he never publicly played with Robertson again. He did reach out to his old friend and guitarist to record some parts for his 2020 masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways, but Robertson was too busy working on a film score at the time, and passed away before the pair could finally reconnect.
‘Osage Oil Bloom’
The Band may have been a famous Canadian group—all the members but Levon Helm were born north of the North American border—but Robbie Robertson felt and held his Native American heritage deep down inside. He spent much of his childhood ranging at the Six Nations Reservation, an hour outside Toronto, and traced his ancestors back to the Cayuga and Mohawk tribes. In 1994, he released an album exploring the indigenous music of the land, Music for The Native Americans.
Following The Last Waltz, the concert film of which was directed by the now-legendary Martin Scorsese, Robertson struck up a life-long friendship with the film-maker, and went on to provide scores, supervision and music production for films like Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, and, one that would have likely meant the most to him, The Killers of the Flower Moon.
Returning to the sounds he first explored on his 1994 album, Robertson crafted a score for this film right at the end of his life, which encapsulated all of the treachery, double-crossing, exploitation and deception that plague not only the film but all of America’s dark history with its native peoples. Oil runs like blood in the movie, but in the scene setting ‘Osage Oil Bloom’, Robertson’s guitar cuts right straight through the both of them. With a drifting dobro behind his chunky and churning electric lead, his biting guitar parts are heavy with history and tension, both of which echo all throughout the movie. Flutes flash across the top of his playing and native rhythms rumble underneath it to give a fitting end and farewell to his life, and career.
‘It Makes No Difference’
No performance at The Last Waltz so perfectly represented the magical connection that The Band had together better than ‘It Makes No Difference’. Levon Helm somehow infused his drumming with more heart and spirit than almost any other player ever has, and he leads the charge and swings through the south here. Rick Danko’s aching and yearning vocals are enough to reduce you to a puddle of tears, whilst Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson fill in the spaces with beautiful piano and organ parts alongside the additional horn section orchestrated by Allen Toussaint.
On top of all that, Robbie Robertson’s guitar playing pushes everything even higher, and even harder up against your emotions. As much as a focal point as Danko’s vocal with his shading in between lyrics, Robertson makes his guitar wail and cry in a solo towards the end. Just when you think the song can’t get any more devastating, Garth Hudson switches to saxophone and eases into the shot. For the rest of the song, Robertson and Hudson trade solos which rock you and resound inside you through the ages.
‘Further on Up the Road’
While The Last Waltz was all about The Band, it boasted one of the most iconic line-ups of any concert in history. The Band alternately played by themselves that night and backed performances by Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, The Staple Singers, Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, Muddy Waters and Neil Young. It was a musical murderer row of legendary talents.
Eric Clapton had publicly sung the praises of the revolutionary Music From Big Pink plenty of times, but his appearance here was supposed to put him in the spotlight for the next five or six minutes. Halfway through his introductory solo, though, Clapton’s guitar strap pops off his shoulder and loosens his grip on his instrument. Without missing a beat, Robertson picks up the rhythm and takes off on a guitar solo of his own. His playing is less fluid and dexterous than Clapton’s had been, but it’s much more earthy and honest. It sounds more real, and is more charged with the true spirit of rock and roll, or the blues, than Clapton can get close to. Clapton might be the more technically proficient, but Robbie Robertson made you feel what he was playing far more than Clapton could, and that is what really matters.
Robertson’s solo here might not technically be the best in the world—or even technically the best solo in the song—but the way he stops the whole thing from falling apart, takes the lead and leads the song into a new direction, sums up exactly why he was such a genius and a great bandleader in the first place.
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