RIP Robbie Robertson

*sigh*

RIP, R.R.  and thanks. 👍

...meanwhile...

73, and well aware the clocks' winding it away.

And determined to not go quietly... ;)

Yeah the Band when i first heard it ,i thought wth did i just hear .I was,into Led Zeppelin, Beatles,Stones. I was 17 back in 1969...i thought what a crazy hillbilly album.But then i heard the Bands music and RR music and they were great.i listened to all of there albums .RIP Robbie .

Robbie was also a sideman on a couple of early albums by John Hammond Jr….So Many Roads has him on lead guitar with Mike Bloomfield on piano!  I met JH Jr. years later and asked him how he could pass on Bloomer as lead, and he said “At that time Robbie was the better player”(!).  He also was on I Can Tell, which has him playing the signature Elmore James riff on Strat, no slide, but to devastating effect, on ‘Coming Home’.  No one ever did it better. 
As a songwriter, if he only wrote ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ he’d be a star.  But he penned dozens of gems.  R.I.P., a Native American treasure.

I met Levon once, around 2002 or so, at the groundbreaking for Bethel Woods, the outdoor concert venue that sits next to the original 1969 Woodstock site. I’ve gone to some shows at his Barn between Woodstock and Saugerties, not far from Big Pink, that his wife runs.

While I have their early LPs in my collection, I must confess that I don’t play them very often. In hindsight, it may be because I may be one of the few who was put off from the beginning by The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Odly, I actually liked the melody of the song quite a bit, but the lyrics … well, best that can be said is that you can take them in a couple of ways. I know that it was written during the height of the Vietnam War protests, and the song has more in common with Creedence Clearwater’s Fortunate Son than it does with Gone With the Wind, and that was possibly its intent, but in retrospect it turns out that I was right, good old boys from the south have treated it as a sort of anthem, Joan Baez stopped performing it even though it was her biggest hit, and Robbie’s halfhearted attempt at explaining the issues away never satisfied me.

To the extent that I still listen to them, it’s more out of nostalgia due to heavy exposure during my youth.

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