The first true “guitar god”, according to Robbie Robertson
“The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.” – Robbie Robertson (1943 – 2023)
The Canadian music scene of the late 1950s was difficult for aspiring rockers to traverse. With only small pockets of bands in the most prominent cities, rock music largely relied on American import records in order for fans to hear what was going on in the emerging genre. A young Robbie Robertson had little more than Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley records to keep his love of rock music going, but as a teenager, that was enough.
He wanted to be like these sacred souls he herd on the radio. Yet, he also wanted to be unlike them, too. As he put it himself, “I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.”
Alas, these heroes had not yet arose on his horizon, and it took a while before he heard a sound that truck him as divine originality. And when it arrived it zapped him. “Well, Chuck Berry was the first guitar god, I guess, and did he have a sound!” Robertson told Guitar in 2020.
He continued, “It wasn’t just his playing. It was a special sound out of his Gibson ES-350. In fact, just recently, Gibson made me one exactly like Chuck’s, which had a very unique tonality, and I’d even talked with Chuck about this.”
“In those early days, those hollow body electric guitars were a kind of hand-me-down from jazz in some ways from guys like Charlie Christian,” Robertson added. “Chuck told me when he started that all you could get was these semi-hollow body guitars. It wasn’t until later on that they had those little scrawny solid-body electrics.”
Even though Robertson admired the semi-hollow body sound that Berry could produce with his Gibson guitars, it would be solid-body Fenders that he became known for playing. With Bob Dylan, Robertson favoured a Fender Telecaster and passed on his knowledge of the instrument to Dylan.
Once The Band began to record on their own, Robertson’s most famous guitar was a Fender Stratocaster, the likes of which he would play for The Last Waltz. Robertson was even playing Fenders in the late 1950s, largely thanks to Buddy Holly’s influence.
“Buddy Holly played an electric guitar. I knew it was louder and smaller-looking and cooler. So getting one became the mission I was going to go on,” Robertson explained. “Even at that age, I had the idea that someday I’m going to go out in the world and write my own songs and do all that stuff. The idea of being 13 years old, reaching puberty, and I’m already standing at the crossroads. I was already good on the guitar. It was like a setup that my destiny had already been written.”
“At the time, I had this little group in Toronto, Robbie And The Robots, and I was also bouncing around with some other groups like Little Caesar And The Consuls that played mostly songs by Huey Smith and Fats Domino, New Orleans music,” Robertson explained.
“So we got booked to open a small arena that Ronnie [Hawkins] was playing at,” he continued. “People were saying that he and his band, The Hawks, were the most bad-assed rockabilly band around. That they were wilder, faster than Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash… any of them! And we were the opening act.”
“We went out and played and tried to be pretty good, so hopefully we would impress Ronnie, but then as soon as he and the band came on, everybody had been right,” Robertson feverishly concluded. “It was the most raucous rock ’n’ roll I’d ever heard.” And it was full of the same pop and fizz that Chuck Berry endeavoured to endow his records with rather than being note perfect.
