Robbie Robertson, Co-Founding father of The Band, Useless at 80

Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and co-founder of The Band who penned timeless classics like “The Weight,” “The Evening They Drove Outdated Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” has reportedly handed away on the age of 80. No particular reason for loss of life has been introduced, although the musician’s longtime supervisor Jared Levine stated Robertson died after “an extended sickness.”

 “Robbie was surrounded by his household on the time of his loss of life, together with his spouse, Janet, his ex-wife, Dominique, her companion Nicholas, and his youngsters Alexandra, Sebastian, Delphine, and Delphine’s companion Kenny,” Levine stated in an announcement. “In lieu of flowers, the household has requested that donations be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to assist the constructing of their new cultural middle.”

Robertson was a rock ‘n’ roll lifer, becoming a member of Ronnie Hawkins’s backing band The Hawks when he was simply 16 years previous. That’s the place he first met and commenced taking part in with Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. Finally, that group would break off on their very own — dubbed merely The Band — and put out among the twentieth century’s most beloved albums, together with their 1968 debut Music From Large Pink, their 1969 self-titled effort and 1970’s Stage Fright. Finally, in-fighting and substance abuse took their toll on the group, they usually determined to go their separate methods after one final hurrah — the star-studded 1976 farewell live performance documented in Martin Scorsese’s The Final Waltz.

Robertson’s friendship and collaboration with Scorsese would each show to be enduring, and the musician served as a soundtrack producer and composer on most of the director’s movies, together with Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), On line casino (1995), The Departed (2006), The Wolf of Wall Avenue (2013), The Irishman (2019) and the forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.

After I spoke to Robertson a decade in the past and requested him to think about The Band’s legacy, he responded by saying, “The Band might be the last word instance of individuals taking every kind of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folks music to on and on and on and on and placing all of them on this huge pot and mixing up a brand new gumbo. And The Band is someone who collected all of those musicalities…We had been collectively for seven years earlier than we made Music From Large Pink, and we actually studied music, actually studied being nearly as good as we might on our devices and on our vocals and learning writing songs and all of those totally different components. We actually put that collectively, and when our first document got here out, individuals acted like, ‘What planet did this come from? Wow! What’s up with this?’ And we had been like, ‘What do you imply?’ As a result of it’s about gathering the gorgeous issues about music and having inspiration that basically raised the bar, and it has its depth to it. It has a historical past to it. It has a soul to it. It isn’t nearly a flowery efficiency, , it goes again, and it goes on this huge circle of shifting issues ahead and gathering from the previous.”