Guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson, co-founder of the group the band, is dead. He died on Wednesday in Los Angeles after a long illness surrounded by his family, his manager said according to US media reports. Robertson was 80 years old.
Formed back in Canada, the name of his country-folk-rock ‘n’ roll group was unmistakable. The four musicians from the band became known in the 1960s as Bob Dylan’s wild backing band, but then shaped American pop music as a solo band with their own powerful soul songs. Their songs were so powerful that they were covered by artists like Aretha Franklin and Frank Sinatra.
Robertson and his bandmates mixed blues with rock, folk and country. Songs like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek” were among their hits. Two years later, director Martin Scorsese documented the group’s legendary final concert in San Francisco in 1976 in his concert film “The Last Waltz”.
Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson and Bob Dylan (from left) in ‘The Last Waltz’.
(Photo: imago images/Everett Collection)
From then on, Robertson took part in numerous projects for the director, not entirely coincidentally. “I admired people who made film music from an early age. But I was even more interested in screenwriting, in directing. Then I got curious, but I didn’t want to do traditional film music. And when I made Raging Bull with Marty, it was it’s a fantastic experience, very experimental,” Robertson said in one SZ-Interview about his own film. In 2019, the documentary “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band” about the life and work of the musician premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Director Martin Scorsese, left, and Robbie Robertson at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978.
(Photo: AP)
He made many other films with Scorsese over the course of his career, such as “Shutter Island” or “The Irishman”. According to his manager Jared Levine, Robertson recently worked with the director on the soundtrack for his new film “Killers of the Flower Moon”.
Luckily he got a guitar as a kid. As the son of a Mohican mother, Robertson learned to play on the Six Nations reservation – and was later involved in one or two musical revolutions, as he says himself. “It all created such a tremendous vibration in the evolution of music. And we know how important timing is to be in the right place at the right time. It’s not a perfect science, but I’ve been really lucky.”
the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – a hall of fame for influential musicians – in 1994. Robertson continued his work to the end.