Robbie Robertson’s last waltz
As front man for the Band, he spent his life jamming with Dylan, schmoozing with Dalí, partying with Scorsese. The amazing adventures of Toronto’s greatest songwriter
when robbie robertson
was a kid, growing up in the Annex, his mother, who was born and raised on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, often took him back home to visit her family. Three or four times a year, they sat on a bus for two hours, and for Robbie, each trip was like a voyage to another dimension. There, far from the city, he could pick wild strawberries, fish for trout, swim in a rock quarry. His relatives had a profound understanding of the natural world, uncanny athletic ability and, most important to him, a great love of music. Everyone played an instrument or danced or sang, and Six Nations jam sessions, often held around a roaring campfire, were like small festivals of sound and light and colour.
Something even more transporting— and transformative—happened when he was nine. After lunch one day, his relatives set off into the bush, and Robbie followed them for half a mile until they arrived at a narrow, one-room building his mother told him was called a longhouse. A few minutes later, an elderly man entered the longhouse and sat down in a large pine and birch chair, draped in animal pelts. Everyone gathered, the kids cross-legged at his feet. The elder tapped his walking stick on the floor and proceeded to recount, with vivid imagery and riveting suspense, the tale of the Great Peacemaker who founded the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Robbie was mesmerized. He told his mother that one day, he was going to tell stories like that.
It didn’t take long. Robertson began telling stories—or writing songs, same thing—when he was a teenager, then kept on telling them. There were the gentle puppy-love melodies he wrote for the rockabilly supernova Ronnie Hawkins, then the later hits, sometimes slinky, sometimes anthemic, that he wrote for himself. There were the experimental albums that drew on his memories of those Six Nations jam sessions, and the soundtracks, mainly for Martin Scorsese, that anchored so many cinematic worlds. But Robertson’s life story is something else, the story of rock music itself, its ups and downs, its evolutions and revolutions, its undeniable ascent and arguable decline. He was a one-man zeitgeist, a player, both major and minor, in some of popular music’s most defining moments.
He’s still best known, of course, for the groundbreaking songs he created with the Band, the wildly influential roots rock group, songs like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The Band was renowned for its democratic spirit and its industry-defying lack of a front man. Eventually, and enthusiastically, Robertson took on that central role, to the enduring ire of his bandmates. And while his career with the Band lasted only about a decade—1968 to 1978—his position as the group’s self-appointed chronicler has lasted about four times as long.
It’s a tricky role, one that hasn’t always endeared him to fans and critics. But it’s one that he has carefully constructed and has strenuously protected. This September, he was in Toronto for the premiere of a new documentary about him and the group, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band. (It’s now streaming on Crave.) It was a vivid reminder that Robertson has at last become the elder he dreamed of becoming—of rock music and also, in his own refracted and Hollywoodish way, of the Indigenous cultural renaissance. Unlike the elder he first encountered as a child, the myth he’s recounting is all his own.
i met robertson
the day after Once Were Brothers premiered at TIFF. It was both a starstudded and family affair: executive producers Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer were there, as were Ronnie Hawkins, Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique, their daughter, Delphine, and Robertson’s current girlfriend, the restaurateur and Top Chef Canada judge Janet Zuccarini. A couple of hours after that screening, Robertson and Scorsese also introduced a screening of Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, the canonical 1978 rockumentary that chronicled the Band’s final performance with their original lineup.
It had been a long night, but Robertson looked like he might have just stepped off David Geffen’s yacht. He was tanned and tall and relaxed, his eyes hidden behind signature tinted glasses. His hair is of an indeterminate hue, somewhere between taupe and hazel, but still unreasonably luxuriant. Age diminishes us all, even Robbie Robertson—his once-notorious cheekbones are now buried in a fleshier face, and he walks with a pronounced, grandfatherly shuffle—but he’s still ridiculously handsome. He smiles easily, his teeth as straight and gleaming as piano keys. He talks easily, too, and slowly, his voice an almost voluptuous rasp. In conversation, he is as courteous as a courtesan, or as winkingly elusive as his long-time comrade, Bob Dylan. Asked how old his three kids are, he said, smiling, “The same age as me. I don’t get older, they do.”
Robertson was born and raised in Toronto but left when he was a teenager, and he’s lived in Los Angeles for the past 50 years, give or take. He returns frequently, though— it helps that Zuccarini’s here—and in setting up our meeting we tried to find somewhere that might have personal resonance, maybe a venue that he’d headlined, a bar he might have played. But except for Massey Hall, which is under renovation, all those places are gone. So we ended up in the Neil Young Room, a private dining room at One, the Mark McEwan restaurant in Yorkville, so named because of the framed black-andwhite photographs of the rock stars that hang on the wall.
Robertson never played in Yorkville—his early musical years were set in the much rougher honky-tonks that once lined Yonge Street—but he grew up nearby, at Bloor and Palmerston. He was born Jaime Royal Robertson; Robbie was a neighbourhood nickname, derived, not so originally, from his last name. An only child, he referred to himself as a “half-breed.” His mother, Dolly, was Mohawk and Cayuga, and his Jewish father, who was killed in a hit and run before Robertson was born, was a professional gambler. “You could say I’m an expert in persecution,” Robertson writes, half-jokingly, in Testimony, his memoir. He was raised by Dolly and his stepfather, Jim Robertson, a factory worker and war vet, and spent his first few years living with Jim’s parents in an apartment before he and Dolly and Jim moved to Scarborough and a house of their own. Robertson’s home life wasn’t easy—his parents drank, and fought, a lot. Jim would beat up Dolly then turn his violent attention to his son. Once, he hit Robertson for the crime of leaving a fan running when he wasn’t in the room.
Other places provided solace. Robertson spent every weekend afternoon he could at the Majestic Theatre, where a quarter would buy him popcorn and a drink and a long program of cartoons, newsreels and double features. He adored movies. Once his relatives at Six Nations introduced him to another, greater love— music—he devoted himself to the guitar, and by 13 he had formed his first band, Robbie Robertson and the Rhythm Chords. Rock and roll had arrived: the radio was alive with Chuck Berry, Elvis, Buddy Holly and Little Richard. Robertson, who describes the discovery as his “personal Big Bang,” was completely in its thrall. Everything changed: the way he dressed and talked and moved, the way he combed his hair, the way he strummed his Fender. Like it was for millions of teenagers, rock was an escape hatch that could propel him into an unknown future.
For Robertson, rock also looked like it could be a job, one where he could make some good money and have a lot of fun doing it. Yonge and Dundas was quickly becoming one of North America’s great musical crossroads, a mash-up of Beale Street and Times Square, where on any given weekend night you could catch Carl Perkins, Charlie Mingus or Cannonball Adderley. There was the Blue Note, an after-hours R&B dance hall that hosted Jackie Shane and, later, Little Stevie Wonder and the Supremes. To the northwest, up on Bloor Street, where Long and McQuade now stands, there was the Concord Tavern, divided into its drinking and non-drinking sections, where underage teenage rockers like future Guess Who guitarist Domenic Troiano and David ClaytonThomas of Blood, Sweat and Tears would hang out, dazzled by Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy and Ronnie Hawkins.
Hawkins had Kirk Douglas looks and James Brown moves. He was renowned for his acrobatic stage antics, including backflips and a proto-moonwalk he called the camel walk. He opened shows by yelling, in his Ozark accent, “It’s orgy time!” He was nicknamed Mr. Dynamo and the Hawk and, of course, his band was called the Hawks. With the competition largely out of the picture—Elvis was in the army, Jerry Lee Lewis was blackballed for marrying his underage cousin, Buddy Holly was dead— Hawkins was poised for big things and, had he stayed in the U.S., his career might have exploded. But on the advice of country musician Conway Twitty, he started touring Canada and promptly fell in love with Toronto. He loved its wild freedom. He could play engagements here, at the Concord or Le Coq d’Or on Yonge, for weeks or months on end, and get paid well for it. He could be the biggest fish in a small, increasingly debauched pond. For Hawkins, mid-century Toronto wasn’t a pallid, Presbyterian place but something closer to New York in the Roaring Twenties.
When Robertson was 15, as part of a different band, the Suedes, he was invited to open for the man himself at the Dixie Arena in Mississauga. Robertson had never seen anything like the Hawk, and Hawkins was likewise impressed by Robertson. He told his drummer, Levon Helm, “He’s got so much talent it makes me sick.” When Robertson heard that Hawkins needed new songs, he wrote a couple overnight, and Hawkins ended up recording them. Hawkins took him to New York and the Brill Building, hoping Robertson’s teenage ears would help him find songs that other teenagers would like. While there, he introduced Robertson to Morris Levy, the mobster owner of Roulette Records, who said to Hawkins, “Nicelooking kid. I bet you don’t know whether to hire him or fuck him.”
When a spot for a bass player opened up in the Hawks, Robertson dropped out of high school, quickly taught himself the bass, and took a bus down to Arkansas to audition. He knew it was crazy. He was just a kid. A kid from Toronto. So he did the only thing he could do: he worked as hard as he could, which was 10 times harder than everybody else. He learned the set list inside out—the bass and the guitar parts—and studied how each of the Hawks’ guitarists worked their magic. He spent all the money he had on Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters records and studied those. He took the raunchy licks that Ray Charles played on piano and transcribed them to guitar. He rarely slept, and when he did, he slept with his instruments.
“What I was trying to do was impossible,” Robertson told me, still somewhat awed by his own audacity. “I’m 16 years old,