2023-08-10 00:11:09
Robbie Robertson during a press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada in 2019. CHRIS PIZZELLO / CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP
Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, founder of American-Canadian folk and rock band The Band, died Wednesday at the age of 80, his manager told the magazine. Variety. A collaborator of Bob Dylan, Robertson wrote the best-known songs of his group The Band, active from the late 1960s to the middle of the following decade: The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down et Up On Cripple Creek.
According to his agent, quoted by Variety, Robertson died surrounded by his family but without knowing the precise cause of his death. He was born on July 5, 1943 in Toronto, Canada to a Native American mother. As a teenager, he went on the roads of itinerant music festivals, before joining a number of small music groups. “I’ve been playing guitar for so long that I can’t remember when I started”he confided in 1968 to the magazine Rolling Stone. “I guess I got into rock like everyone else”he said with humility.
This guitarist and composer then founded a group in the 1960s, which he ended up baptizing The Band, with Levon Helm on vocals and drums, Garth Hudson on keyboards and saxophone, Richard Manuel on piano, drums and vocals. vocals and Rick Danko on bass.
From Woodstock to the movies
Hudson is the last survivor of the group, which collaborated in force with Dylan in particular on the album Blonde on Blonde. Typical group of folk and rock in the United States in the years 1960-1970, The Band leaves pieces of anthology like The Weight, a mix of folk, country and gospel, evoking the great wilderness and the south of the country. The group was also at the mythical Woodstock festival in 1969 and produced the albums Music from Big Pink, The Band et Cahoots.
The Band’s farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976 was immortalized on screen two years later in a documentary by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz (The last Waltz), a film that paved the way for feature films on rock. Robertson then becomes close to Martin Scorsese, who hires him as a musician on his films Casino et Gangs of New York.
The guitarist did not go on tour again, but he then released a number of solo albums and cultivated a character appreciated by rock and folk audiences and the small circle of American poetry. “I thought of a few words that led me to others”he told Rolling Stone about his masterpiece The Weight.
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