re: Robbie Robertson RIP

How was he a dickhead? Because he was the adult in the room who kept the thing afloat when one guy was off on a cloud and three Peter Pans were doping, whoring and wrecking cars all over the Catskills? If it hadn’t been for Robbie the thing would’ve imploded after the brown album.

He didn’t rip off his bandmates and Levon Helm got points off Robbie’s publishing until the day he died. But because Levon had high class tastes (running up thousand dollar room service sushi bills on the road even when he was playing dives) and a short wallet he tried to apply current-day rules, where people get songwriting credit for a drumbeat, to things that happened 40 years earlier and tried to claim he should’ve gotten songwriting credits and points, when John Simon who was in the studio for all those albums and had no particular dog in the fight said on the record that Robbie wrote all those songs, period, and Larry Campbell who played guitar for Levon and “co-wrote” songs with him is on the record as saying that Levon never really “wrote a song” in his life, he didn’t have patience for it.

But people take his side because he was the cool ol’ country boy who liked to party and jam, and Robbie was the slick city boy who sold out to the man and went Hollywood, even though he always wanted to be involved with the movies and never was locked into rock and roll and was BFF with Martin Scorsese for three times longer than he was in The Band.

The damnedest thing though is that Levon had Academy Award level acting chops and should’ve pursued that harder if he wanted money. People bitch about the closeups of Robbie in “The Last Waltz,” hell Levon owned the screen every time the camera was on him, and his short scene in “Shooter” was frickin’ electric.

Downvote away LOL …