Robbie Robertson, the frontman of the classic rock group The Band, died at the age of 80 in Los Angeles this Wednesday.
His manager of 34 years Jared Levine released a statement in Variety revealing Robertson’s demise came at the end of a long illness. Sources have informed TMZ that the musician succumbed to prostate cancer.
Some of the most beloved songs he wrote for The Band include The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up On Ripple Creek and The Weight.
When Robertson’s lifelong pal Bob Dylan controversially went electric in the 1960s, it was The Band that provided his backing onstage.
Robertson also enjoyed a long professional relationship with Martin Scorsese, first with The Band and then as a solo composer on a string of the filmmaker’s classics.
Dearly departed: Robbie Robertson, the frontman of the classic rock group The Band, died at the age of 80 in Los Angeles this Wednesday
Icon: Some of the most beloved songs he wrote for The Band include The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Up On Ripple Creek and The Weight; pictured 1971
‘Robbie was surrounded by his family at the time of his death, including his wife, Janet, his ex-wife, Dominique, her partner Nicholas, and his children Alexandra, Sebastian, Delphine, and Delphine’s partner Kenny,’ said his manager’s statement.
‘He is also survived by his grandchildren Angelica, Donovan, Dominic, Gabriel, and Seraphina,’ Levine added. ‘Robertson recently completed his fourteenth film music project with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon.’
With a top-flight cast including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Killers Of The Flower Moon follows a scheme by white Americans to seize oil that has been discovered by the Osage Indians on their land.
‘In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to support the building of their new cultural center,’ said Levine.
Robertson was born in Toronto in 1943 to a mother who grew up on Canada’s Six Nations Reserve, being of Mohawk and Cayuga descent.
During his own childhood visits to his maternal family on the reserve, Robertson quickly acquired an enduring taste for music.
‘It seemed to me that everybody played a musical instrument or sang or danced. I thought: “I’ve got to get in on this club!”‘ he told the Guardian.
His instrument of choice was the guitar, which he thought looked ‘pretty cool,’ and his mother gave him one featuring a painting of a cowboy.
‘I thought it was very ironic that Indians would teach me to play guitar with a picture of a cowboy on,’ Robertson drily recalled.
During his teenage years, he started jobbing around on the fringes of the entertainment industry, working traveling carnivals and even a freakshow.
By the age of 15 he had joined the burgeoning rock scene in Toronto – and in 1958, he helped formed the group that became The Band.
Under their original name The Hawks, they provided backup for Ronnie Hawkins, the rockabilly stalwart who himself died last year at the age of 87.
They turned into The Band in 1967, after they had already provided backup for Bob Dylan on his furiously polarizing electric tour.
An abiding friendship formed between Dylan and Robertson, as recounted in the latter’s memoir Testimony, in which he writes about them getting stoned together and mingling with an artistic social circle ranging from the Beatles to Salvador Dali.
Robertson even had to save Dylan’s life once – the folk legend was once so dead to the world that he nearly drowned in the bath, only for Robertson to fish him out.
After the divisive Dylan tour, the Hawks became The Band, releasing their groundbreaking debut album Music From Big Pink in 1968.
Dylan helped write multiple songs on the album, including Tears Of Rage, This Wheel’s On Fire and I Shall Be Released.
With its blend of genres like soul, country and rock, Music From Big Pink had a profound influence on such top-flight artists as Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd.
One year after Music From Big Pink, The Band released a self-titled album that contained some of their best-known songs to this day.
Although he was no stranger to drugs, Robertson managed to avoid the heroin problem that plagued his bandmates as their rise to fame continued.
However he was unable to evade a bitter feud with The Band’s drummer Levon Helm, arising from a dispute over copyright issues and songwriting credits.
Ultimately, the tensions that broke out between the musicians over the drugs and the business side of their relationship became insurmountable.
Robertson noted in his memoir that as The Band skidded towards disintegration ‘Self-destructiveness had become the power that ruled us.’
In 1976, six years after they landed on the cover of Time magazine, the band played their iconic farewell show The Last Waltz at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom.
It was this famed concert that marked the birth of Robertson’s relationship with Martin Scorsese, who filmed the gig for a wildly acclaimed rock documentary.
According to Helm, Robertson – whose decision it was to break up the band – was so pale from tiredness that his wife had to slather him with makeup for the camera.
Robertson ultimately broke away from the band but retained his professional connection to Scorsese as the composer for several of his movies.
Fan favorites like Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy and The Wolf Of Wall Street featured original music by Robertson, as did lesser-known features like Silence.
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