Robbie Robertson
Robbie Robertson
Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson, OC, is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist best known for his work as lead guitarist and primary songwriter for The Band. As a songwriter, he is credited for "The Weight", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", "Up on Cripple Creek", "Broken Arrow", "Somewhere Down the Crazy River", and many others. He has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and was ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth5 July 1943
CityToronto, Canada
CountryCanada
It made me look like I all of a sudden stumbled upon my heritage. It's not like that. You don't stumble upon your heritage. It's there, just waiting to be explored and shared. But what you need is a sign that somebody wants to share this with you.
I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.
I think the most important thing here is... paying homage to other artists. Everybody (is) passing the baton because there are many people who are going to be in this show. If it wasn't for them, a lot of the rest of us wouldn't be doing this.
I thought of a lot of people from the same era when I was making a lot of records that had continued making a lot of records. A lot of it didn't seem terribly inspired.
It all added up to something that's making me feel proud,
My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.
My mother is extraordinary. She understood me and never tried to hold me back.
My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.
When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.
The previous collections that have been done on The Band were OK,
I always like to keep one hand in the tepee and the other hand in the synagogue. Wouldn't it be great if there was a combination of the two? You could go to synagogue, and it would be really hot in there.
Sixteen years on the road is long enough. Twenty years is unthinkable.
I remember from my earliest years people speaking, you know, in a certain kind of rhythm and telling stories and sharing experiences in a way that was different in Indian country than it was other places. And I was really struck by this and obviously very affected by it, because it's always come out in my songs.
Music isn't necessarily made to last, and there's always been disposable music.