Members / Robbie Robertson

Robbie Robertson

Robertson's mother was born and raised on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario, and he spent childhood summers there, watching relatives play guitar and mandolin at family gatherings. That's where he actually learned the instrument, not in Toronto, where he grew up. He liked to point out the irony later: his first guitar came from a catalog with a cowboy printed on it, and it was Mohawk and Cayuga relatives who taught him how to play it.

He was fifteen when his own band opened for Ronnie Hawkins at the Dixie Arena in Toronto, and Hawkins, always hunting for better musicians than the ones he already had, put him on the road crew first and discovered his songwriting second. Robertson was writing songs for Hawkins's 1959 album before he'd played a single show with the group. He pawned his Stratocaster for a bus ticket to Arkansas in 1960 to audition properly, played bass for a year, then settled into lead guitar in 1961, the seat he'd hold for the next fifteen years.

He became the group's primary songwriter almost by accident, or so he told it. Everyone was supposed to write when the Band started making its own records, and when the others mostly didn't, Robertson kept going. He ended up credited as writer or co-writer on the large majority of the catalog, despite singing lead on only three released studio tracks in the group's entire history. That imbalance, credit without a lead vocal to match, became the central grievance that split the band apart from the inside for decades after they'd stopped playing together, particularly with Levon Helm, who argued for years that Robertson's credits didn't reflect how the songs actually got written.

After the Band's 1976 farewell show, Robertson didn't go quiet. He moved into film, working as music supervisor and eventually composer for Martin Scorsese starting with instrumental cues for Raging Bull in 1980, and the collaboration ran for decades, through Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon. His solo career got going properly in 1987 with a self-titled album produced by Daniel Lanois, followed by Storyville, two records exploring his Indigenous heritage more directly (Music for the Native Americans, Contact from the Underworld of Redboy), and later How to Become Clairvoyant and Sinematic. In 2016 he published a memoir, Testimony, which became the basis for the 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers.

The rift with Helm never fully closed, but it softened. Robertson said in a 2020 interview that he still shared songwriting and publishing credit with Helm on the Band's catalog, decades after the other members had sold off their shares. When Helm was dying of cancer in 2012, Robertson visited him at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York. He later wrote that he'd thought of "the incredible and beautiful times we had together," and called Helm very much like an older brother. Robertson died on August 9, 2023, at eighty, the second-to-last of the five to go.