Hawk who helped Dylan soar
Halfway through this elegant, evocative memoir, Robbie Robertson recalls a furtive phone call requesting that he bear witness at Bob Dylan’s secret marriage in 1965. ‘I don’t know about “best man”,’ Dylan tells him. ‘That’s quite a commitment. Maybe “good man” or “very good man”. How would that be?’ As Dylan’s mid-Sixties wingman, and the guitarist and principal songwriter in influential roots rockers The Band, Robertson was particularly suited to a supporting role, happiest pulling strings in the background. It’s the perfect vantage point for a memoirist, and he makes the most of it. It helps that he has a compelling tale to tell. Raised in Toronto by a hard-drinking mother and a man he later discovered wasn’t his father, Robertson’s lineage is part Jewish, part Mohawk. His paternal family line included Natie, a gangster who embroiled Robertson in his diamond-smuggling escapades, recounted here in a terrific subplot worthy of Damon Runyon. At the same time, he’s serving an apprenticeship in The Hawks, the backing group to one-man rockabilly riot Ronnie Hawkins. The first half of the book is a hugely atmospheric song of the road. Robertson zips around the blues clubs, cheap motels and dive bars of early Sixties America, having a high old time in low company. At one point Bo Diddley sits on the edge of his bed and tries to seduce his girlfriend. Midway, Dylan hits the narrative like a firework tossed through a window. Entering his orbit at the point of his controversial transformation from folk prophet to wired electric guru, The Hawks become Dylan’s backing band throughout 1965 and 1966. Robertson brings the chaos vividly to life. Each night, ‘people throw stuff at us, hooting and trying to boo us off stage’, he recalls. In London, The Beatles come courting after Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall show, only to be left waiting awkwardly in an adjoining hotel room while Dylan succumbs to the effects of drugs and exhaustion in the bath next door: ‘He had sunk down into the water and was starting to bubble,’ recalls Robertson, who is dispatched to inform the Fabs that Dylan won’t be receiving guests tonight. During the same period, he enjoys fleeting romantic encounters with Carly Simon (‘our connection felt almost dreamlike’) and Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, and meets with Marlon Brando, who threatens to cannibalise him in a fit of jealous pique. Retreating to the mountains of Woodstock, The Hawks become The Band, and Robertson writes their classic albums, Music From Big Pink and The Band. George Harrison and Eric Clapton drop in. Later, he begins a cocainefuelled working relationship with Martin Scorsese, who films The Band’s 1976 swansong for the legendary movie, The Last Waltz. By this point drugs and squabbles have taken their toll, and Robertson discreetly wraps up his story. He tells it with style and affection, showing a keen eye for detail. All it lacks is a wider sense of the times. Little of the outside world seeps into his bubble, but perhaps that’s the price one pays.
At one point Bo Diddley sits on the edge of his bed and tries to seduce his girlfriend