re: Robbie Robertson RIP

It’s hard to believe that Garth outlived them all. RIP RR.

richard manuel i think does most of the piano piano parts

idk man i feel like they probably weren't getting that much money back in the day and then the weight was used in a verizon commercial in the early 2000s and brought them back to prominence

bob dylan was broke in the 80s until traveling wilburys took him in


Music is basically the nfl where you're a hero if you played in the 60's and 70's but you're still kinda broke as an old man unless you can get some kind of nostalgia money going


ETA: I just googled and i see diet coke used the weight for a commercial in 1994 but that's too young for me to remember


it was definitely a commercial where a lot of cars are parked on a hilly street with houses on either side. Not sure if it was verizon but i saw it at my maw maws house and my friend was there and my mom showed us some of the band's other stuff

quote:

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RIP to a fricking legend, dickhead though he may have been

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Yes, he was a Don Henley-level dickhead. At least he outlived that b-tch Cathy Smith. Lightfoot did, too (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 …

somebody watched “once were brothers” LOL. It’s ok I watched it too, it gives robbie’s side of the story which is fine and I can see his point.

the songwriting thing I feel completely different about than you do, or he did. Look at a band like REM for the alternative. Every REM song is credited to all four guys. All five Band members composed those songs regardless of who wrote the lyrics. the Band was a miracle and drugs and money killed it. At various times all of the other four guys have said they felt betrayed. The truth is in the middle

I’ll retract my dickhead statement in light of that and I’ll thank you for your post

Thank you. Robbie Robertson has been one of the most mistreated figures in music because people don’t stop to find out the real story of the dynamics of that group, they just bought Levon’s ranting in that book that was ghostwritten for him. (Robbie wrote every word of his autobiography himself, no ghostwriter).

Robbie didn’t want to break up The Band, he just wanted off the damn road, he never really went back to it, and thought the others should get off it too before they ended up dead. They actually had studio time booked after “The Last Waltz” but Robbie is the only one who showed up, the others wanted the rock and roll life and he didn’t.

His solo albums which are marvelous get dissed because “they weren’t like The Band” when he was deliberately trying not to “be like The Band” because he’d outgrown and moved on from the “Americana” niche.

There's a lot of crappy human beings that are incredibly talented.

However, I really loved The Band, personalities aside.

But he sang very well on his solo albums, his first one being the equal of anything The Band ever did, and Storyville and Clairvoyant were damn close.

They were absolutely, stupendously great but let’s not go overboard here …

No argument from me whatsoever; I just thought you got a little overheated in your rhetoric LOL.

I actually prefer the brown album to Big Pink.

And the true tragedy of the group IMO is that Richard crawled into a liquor bottle and stopped writing after the first two albums; Robbie would not have had to write all the songs if that hadn’t happened and we can only speculate on how things might have been different.