2023-08-09 23:48:42
– Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, of The Band, is dead
Robbie Robertson, former collaborator of Bob Dylan and guitarist of the group The Band, died Wednesday at 80 years old. We owe him in particular the masterpiece “The Weight”.
Posted today at 01:48 Updated 2 hours ago
Robbie Robertson in Toronto on September 5, 2019.
AFP
Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, founder of American-Canadian folk and rock band The Band, died Wednesday at the age of 80, his manager announced to Variety magazine.
A collaborator of Bob Dylan, Robertson wrote the best known tracks 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.”
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 the 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 on 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”.
Typical group of folk and rock in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, The Band leaves anthology tracks 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 legendary 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 becomes close to Martin Scorsese, who hires him as a musician on his films “Casino” and “Gangs of New York”.
The guitarist did not go on tour once more, 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” regarding his masterpiece “The Weight”.
AFP
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