The Band member Robbie Robertson called a musical “brother”
There are many different kinds of musicians. You have some technically proficient artists who can assemble complex pieces and are no stranger to flexing their creative muscles. Then, you have other more intuitive artists who thrive on feeling instead of technical ability. Good musicians play toward one of these styles, but the best musicians can do both. Bob Dylan is a great example, as while he was an excellent songwriter and vocalist, he also put songs together based on feeling, which is why they resonated so much.
We’ve all experienced emotions such as love and loss, and we’ve also felt at times like the world is against us, like an outcast, but that doesn’t mean we can put it to music in a succinct way. You need to be able to write in a way that does those emotions justice while still making them accessible, and that means being a technically gifted songwriter and a dynamic one, too. Bob Dylan was excellent when it came to writing like this.
His intuition trickled down into his live show, too. He didn’t sit there and play one song after the other. His setlists blurred lines; one track ran into the next, and they sounded like shadows of the studio versions. Leonard Cohen once spoke in detail about the profound nature of a Bob Dylan show, calling it a “Strange event”.
“Something else was going on,” he said, “Which was a celebration of some kind of genius that is so apparent and so clear and has touched people so deeply that all they need is some kind of symbolic unfolding of the event. It doesn’t have to be the songs. All it has to be is: remember that song and what it did to you. It’s a very strange event.”
In order to pull these kinds of gigs off, Dylan needed to have access to an excellent backing band, which he got in the form of Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm. There were others involved, too, but these two had a knack for musicianship that meant they could tap into emotions and feelings and play the song that Bob Dylan was presenting to his audience.
Again, these two are examples of musicians who could play by leaning deep into intuition. Bob Dylan and his backing band weren’t just individual musicians but a unit who were able to come together and deliver a live performance unlike anything people were used to.
This went on beyond working with Bob Dylan. Robertson and Helm ended up starting The Band, which was a musical outfit made up of most of Dylan’s backing band. They were both chief songwriters in the group, bouncing off one another to create excellent, exciting music that people weren’t accustomed to yet. Helm significantly added another layer to proceedings thanks to his intricate percussion work, which can be heard clearly on tracks such as ‘Cripple Creek’, ‘The Weight’ and ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’.
The connection they formed when playing for Dylan lasted to the point that Robertson described Helm as a brother. When discussing a documentary that followed their musical lives, he said, “He was the closest thing in my life I’ve ever had to a brother. And in this documentary, Once Were Brothers, it ends up focusing on the brotherhood of The Band.”
Robertson continued, “And it was such an extraordinary relationship. The personal part of it equalled the music, and the music equalled the relationship and brotherhood. Because everything was that close, we were able to do something unlike anybody else. And I just, I hold it precious.”
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