2023-08-10 02:12:00
A close collaborator of Bob Dylan, the Canadian guitarist is known for having written the most famous songs of his group founded in the 1960s.
By QM with AFP Robbie Robertson, guitarist and founder of The Band, died Wednesday at age 80. © BRYAN SMITH / MAXPPP / UPI/MAXPPP Published on 08/10/2023 at 02:12
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He is a great name in world rock who has passed away. 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 the magazine. Variety.
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 Old Dixie Down” and “Up On Cripple Creek”. According to his agent, quoted by VarietyRobertson 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 once told the magazine. Rolling Stone. “I imagine that I got into rock like everyone else,” he said with humility.
Garth Hudson, last survivor of the group
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. Garth Hudson is the last survivor of the group, which collaborated in force with Bob Dylan in particular on the album Blonde on Blonde.
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A typical group of folk and rock in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, The Band leaves anthology songs like “The Weight”, a mixture of folk, country and gospel, evoking the great wild spaces and the south. from 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.
Several solo albums
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, a film that paved the way for feature films on rock. Robbie Robertson then becomes close to Martin Scorsese, who hires him as a musician on his films Casino et Gangs of New York.
READ ALSOThe Scorsese mockumentary for true Bob Dylan fansThe 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 was thinking of a few words that led me to others,” he told Rolling Stone about his masterpiece “The Weight”.
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