Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, founder of American-Canadian folk and rock band The Band, died on Wednesday August 9 at the age of 80, his manager announced to Variety magazine. According to his agent, Robertson died surrounded by his family but without knowing the precise cause of his death.
A collaborator of Bob Dylan, Robertson wrote the most famous songs of his group The Band, active from the late 1960s to the middle of the following decade: The Weight, The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down and Up On Cripple Creek. 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 once told Rolling Stone magazine. “I imagine that I entered rock like everyone else,” he said with humility.
This guitarist and composer then founded a group in the 1960s – which he would eventually baptize 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. Hudson is the last survivor of the group, which collaborated in force with Dylan in particular on the album Blonde on Blonde. A typical group of folk and rock in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, The Band leaves anthology pieces like The Weight, a mixture of folk, country and gospel, evoking the great wild spaces 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 and Cahoots. The Band’s farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976 was immortalized on screen two years later in filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz, a film that paved the way for rock feature films. Robertson then became close to Martin Scorsese, who hired him as a musician on his films Casino and 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.
