Sympathy for the Devil: In Defense of Robbie Robertson

Robertson was an egomaniac - but does he deserve to be slandered in his obituary?

Robbie Robertson, guitarist for The Band, died last week age 80 in Los Angeles. The writer of “The Weight,” “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down,” “It Makes No Difference,” and a number of other classic songs, his very survival in the music business - a vicious industry by any metric - has often courted controversy, thanks in no small part to allegations made by his bandmate, drummer/vocalist Levon Helm, in his autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire. In it, Helm claims, among other things, that Robertson credited himself as the sole songwriter on tracks that were rightly band co-writes, that he broke up The Band prematurely, that he focused The Last Waltz on himself (true), and finally, that he stole all the remaining rights from his bandmates at the band’s breakup (they were voluntarily signed over for a price under coercion; you make your own judgments). Helm not-so-subtly implies Robertson’s culpability, too, in both Rick Danko’s premature death and Richard Manuel’s suicide. Many of these claims made it into some of Robertson’s obits last week, and here they are making it into mine.

Seeing as the main concern when these claims have been parroted has to do with stolen songwriting credit, let’s turn to John Simon, co-producer of the band’s first two albums and more-or-less sixth member of The Band. He was there, and he’s also quoted extensively in Helm’s book. Here’s a sentiment that didn’t make that volume. While acknowledging that “a good deal of the inspiration on the songs that Robbie wrote came from Levon's personal experience,” Simon said:

The old system of contributing songwriting credits was very distinct - there were people who wrote songs and people who performed songs. And they were different people. You know, Frank Sinatra on very few occasions wrote a song, he was the singer. Sammy Cahn and Johnny Mercer were the writers and not the performers. So, that kind of thing. Like the Gershwins and the Rogers & Hart. All of those people were just songwriters. And that's the system under which Robbie determined that he would be songwriter of those songs. And it’s true, Robbie was the one who wrote the lyrics and wrote the music. Wrote the lyrics on legal paper, or whatever he wrote it on, and figured out the chords to the song and dictated the melody and chords to the other players. Okay. But in the new system you'll see that when a song is written, it’s a much more co-operative thing in a band. You'll see five or six writers on a song that'll say, on a band song on an album, it'll list everybody who's in the band on the song, you know. And you know that, or you may suspect that the bass player and the drummer or somebody - the keyboard player, one of them just had nothing to do with the song. But they're on it because its a sort of democracy and they just happened to be around. Or the band decided ahead of time that that's the way its going to be. Sort of like the Lennon and McCartney deal when they never really divided... Well, 27% of this song is yours and 73% of it is mine. They all just say Lennon & McCartney and you can only figure out by the style of the song who wrote it. So, Robbie was working in the old system. And he's absolutely right in working with the old system. Levon is pissed about that and wishes that Robbie had been working in the new system. But if they hadn't agreed on that ahead of time, you know….

Keep in mind this is someone who also said Robertson “totally fucked” him on producer’s royalties for the first two Band albums. It must be added, too, that in the track-by-track analyses of Band albums in Helm’s autobiography, there are few real contradictions of the writing credits as stated on the albums themselves.

In fact, much of what would refute Helm’s claims are, ironically, contained in his own book, as well as the excellent documentary made toward the end of his life, Ain’t in It for My Health. In the latter, he’s given the opportunity to complete an unfinished Hank Williams’ song, and guitarist Larry Campbell, eager to see the project through, presses the drummer to collaborate on a songwriting session. But Helm, as first, simply goes blank and wanders away. The editing of these documentaries makes it impossible to get a sense of an actual timeline - but, spoiler alert, it takes the entire documentary for the drummer, with Campbell’s assistance, to fill in the gaps in Hank’s tune by the film’s end. At no point does one get the sense that Levon had a predilection for songwriting.

I highly suggest any fan of The Band open This Wheel’s on Fire - there are amazing stories and a genuine folkiness to Helm’s storytelling. It’s not hard to see how his yarns inspired Robertson’s best work. However, it’s also not hard to see - from Helm’s own account - why Robertson might have wanted to walk away from The Band in the mid-70s. His three singers - Helm, Manuel, and Danko - struggled with addiction to varying degrees. By 1970’s Stage Fright, Helm was hooked on heroin, which he mentions but quickly brushes off as something he quickly overcame. Danko, flush with cash from co-writing “This Wheel’s on Fire” with Bob Dylan, was involved in a drug and alcohol-fueled near-fatal car crash soon after the completion of Music From Big Pink that almost left the bassist paralyzed, putting him in chronic pain for the rest of his life – which he mitigated with painkillers and stimulants. Manuel, a shy, retiring man who possessed a heartbreaking alacrity for blue-eyed soul singing, was by all accounts – even Helm’s – a derelict alcoholic who generally let things slide as all became subsumed beneath his usage. By the time of The Last Waltz, he was living in a small structure on property The Band owned, cooking himself one meal a day: a steak fried in butter on an electric clothing iron eaten “right off the grill, so to speak,” supplemented with countless bottles of Grand Marnier, the empties of which he never bothered to dispose of up to his eviction from the premises. He had a visibly enlarged liver. Not surprisingly, Manuel struggled to perform as his addiction worsened, which several moments in Helm’s book are devoted to - a nigh-heroic depiction of Manuel attempting to rise to the occasion at high profile gigs. But Levon’s sympathy and admiration for his brother-in-arms belies the fact that the pianist had become a liability:

“Everyone was watching Richard carefully, and he had good nights and bad. Sometimes he shouted and spat out the lyrics to ‘Tears of Rage’ with biblical fervor; other times he sounded painful to hear, but still drenched you in the conviction that Richard brought to a song. Richard could hurt you with that voice of his.”

“I remember that Richard could barely sing at that show. His voice was so hoarse that he faltered, but he struggled so hard with ‘In A Station’ that once again everybody’s heart went out to him. Despite all the self-destructive behavior, you just couldn’t be mad at Richard.”

“…[J]ust when we really started to play with some real fire, we were forced to cancel ten dates – a quarter of the tour – when Richard injured his neck in a boating accident near Austin, Texas.”

Anyone who has loved, lived with, or worked in close quarters with someone suffering from a major addiction can understand both Helm’s, and Robertson’s, reactions to Manuel’s problems. Addiction puts up a barrier of varying opaqueness between the addict and their cohort. Once its seeming permanence takes root, doubts of all kinds abound for those interacting with the addict: the limits of forgiveness, the possibility (or lack thereof) of intervention, the ethics of continuing the relationship, how beneficial it may be for you personally to continue the relationship, how much you’re lying to yourself about the addict’s health and well being, and even how much remains of the person (their personality, talents, their very soul) behind the dark veil of overuse. At least in hindsight, Levon held to his vision of Richard as the brilliant performer he had once been and still occasionally could be, allowing him to forgive his bandmate’s faltering to keep The Band together. For Robertson, confronted not only by Manuel’s nadir but the ongoing habits of the rest of the group at the height of 1970’s decadence, his pianist’s downfall haunted him sufficiently to the point of discontinuing The Band. On a personal level, he had been a married father for the entirety of The Band’s existence. He had always had other goals – in his self-produced puff piece documentary Once Were Brothers, an early associate of the Band’s remembers how Robbie wanted to write music for Ingmar Bergman films. By this time, too, Robertson had been wooed to the West Coast by David Geffen, as carnivorous a businessman as they come, the latter having termed The Band’s Woodstock home base a “shithole.” Suddenly, the guitar player found himself among power players, and his ambitions moved far beyond the rough-and-tumble triumphs of road life. But even absent Robbie’s business aspirations, it’s easy to understand his position on a human level: try having a good time being sober – or at least, not totally fucked up – among a group of very drunk friends. It’s not easy. Now, try that every day for months at a time.

Telling was Helm’s response when Robertson told him he’d tired of life on the road: “I’m not in this for my health. I’m a musician, and I wanna live the way I do.”

Consider this sentence. Then, consider that Helm passed after his second bout with throat cancer. Consider that Rick Danko passed in 1999, overweight and struggling with addictions, having been arrested for possession of heroin in Japan some years previous. And consider, most tragically, Manuel’s death by his own hand after he’d relapsed in the middle of a Robertson-less Band reunion tour. As ridiculous as Robertson bemoaning the travails of “the road” in the human interest segments of The Last Waltz is, one can not deny there being some wisdom in his weariness, in retrospect. And frankly, one can not blame the man for not wanting to have his income and reputation tied to unreliable, and indeed, sick, partners-in-crime.

However, Robertson’s departure from The Band seemed to coincide with his own burgeoning megalomania. My bandmate recently termed The Last Waltz as Robbie’s “love letter to himself,” and the assessment holds true. Onstage, Robbie’s the band’s central figure, leader and conductor; swathed in a pink scarf, his winning smile persisting throughout, the camera is always eager to capture his every wince, the final mix pushing any little guitar lead. Contrast Scorsese’s film with the SNL performance from a month before, where you see….a band. Following the release of Last Waltz, Robertson, blown away by his own on-screen charisma, made an ill-fated, and blessedly short, stab at an acting career with 1980’s Carny.

Not only that, in the years that followed, Robertson never seemed content with the credit he’d accrued from his time with The Band. With the record company’s blessing, he overhauled Barney Hoskyns’ liner notes for the group’s 2000 CD reissues when he felt they didn’t properly give him his due. In the redone liners for Music from Big Pink, the guitarist took credit for the way Levon Helm tuned his drums. Robertson never hesitated to pat himself on the back for The Last Waltz in any number of interviews. In the link below, he describes how he set up the recording of The Basement Tapes at Big Pink – which in fact, was by all other accounts, the work of keyboardist Garth Hudson, who goes unmentioned in this clip (In fact, Robertson didn’t even live at Big Pink):

And so on. The great irony here, is, of course, that all this fallout came from former members of a band that chose to not even name themselves on the first record – and in fact, gained their bland, confusing (and annoyingly difficult to write an article about) name from a misprision on the part of many reading the back cover of their debut LP. “The Band” - a decentralized name, one that spoke of a unified front, a team effort and a lack of competing egos. It was a beautiful dream, but it ended in the reality of bruised relationships, tarnished careers, addictions and slander.

But the wisdom of the nomenclature is borne out by the facts: following their breakup, none of the former Band members were able to produce the same level of work. Robbie Robertson couldn’t sing during his time with the group – notoriously, he would belt into a switched-off microphone on stage – and he couldn’t sing afterwards, either. Not only that, without Helm & co. around for inspiration/psychic vampirism/whatever, his songwriting gifts seemed to have left him, as well. The purported “success” of his Daniel Lanois-produced debut album Robbie Robertson only speaks to the efficacy of music industry bullshit of the time. It’s terrible.

For their part, The Band, reformed after recovering from the trauma of Manuel’s suicide, only managed a couple worthwhile performances spread across their three reunion albums, neither of which they wrote: Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” and Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell.”

Helm, having lost his voice to his first round of cancer sometime in the late 90’s, regrouped in the mid-aughts to turn in two albums, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt, both Grammy winners; a richly deserved recognition of his continued talent as a singer and performer. It’s notable, however, that he retains a single co-writing credit across the two releases, the rest filled out with covers and traditional numbers. And as strong as the work is, neither album will replace Stage Fright, The Band or Music from Big Pink in any serious music collection.

The story of The Band’s end is a twisted one, due to the viciousness of Helm’s claims (and their subsequent parroting as solid fact) against Robertson’s unchecked ego. But when the two musicians cooperated, they crafted some of the most vital rock music ever made, albums that completely changed the very genre they explored. Rock music was simply not the same following Music From Big Pink, a statement of fact backed up by the albums the major stars of the time made before and after its release. (Contrast Magical Mystery Tour with The White Album or Get Back, Satanic Majesties Request with Beggars Banquet, Disraeli Gears with Blind Faith, etc., etc.). And if you doubt The Band’s lasting influence on American pop culture (DESPITE THE FACT THAT FOUR OF THE FIVE MEMBERS WERE FUCKING CANADIANS!), check out how many people at your local hip dive bar still dress like these guys did in The Last Waltz.