The Hot Docs Theatre in Toronto has four showings of The Last Waltz Restoration in honour of Robbie. I will be going.
He was the Band’s main songwriter and sang on his solo albums, but did Robbie ever sang lead on a Band song?
Interesting question. I liked his singing in his solo stuff, but I guess when you’re in a band with Levon Helm you get relegated to mostly backup singer. I looked it up, and Wikipedia says:
He sang lead vocal on the track “To Kingdom Come”; he did not sing on another Band song released to the public until “Knockin’ Lost John” on 1977’s Islands.
Interesting. I’ve always thought that Rick Danko sang “To Kingdom Come”. I’ve never listened to the “Islands” album.
“Showdown At Big Sky” is one of my favorite songs of all time.
And Rick Danko and Richard Manuel.
I loved the Storyville album the most, but it always struck me as strange that such a roots-based artist enlisted Stephen Hague as a producer. Hague has worked with folks like new Order, Pet Shop Boys and PiL; he was the original producer of R.E.M.'s Murmur but it wasn’t working and they went with Don Dixon. My favorite tracks of his solo career are almost all on that record: “Night Parade,” “Shake This Town” and “Breaking The Rules,” that last one of which just shatters me every time I get to the climax of Until the End of the World.
Robertson’s relationship with Scorsese is really interesting. I think they were roommates around the time of Raging Bull, around when Scorsese had a pretty bad coke problem. And Robertson assembled the soundtrack for The King of Comedy, which apparently wasn’t so much a soundtrack, as just a mix tape of what he liked at the time (I remember the review in Rolling Stone saying something like “I couldn’t hear half of this in the movie and I was listening for it.”)
Why do the best things always disappear?
… Because we love music made by people who are old now.
.
And Robbie ain’t the last genius whose absence we’re going to have to deal with.
Robbie… where have you gone?
Ophelia f’rinstance.
And while I don’t think the family/publicist has released cause of death, I googled and got a reference to Robertson possibly dealing with prostate cancer for a year or so.
When my daughter was 2 to 5 years old I’d read her a bedtime story, and sometimes finish off with a lullaby. I don’t know many, and would alternative among Sweet Baby James, Goodnight (Beatles), and All La Glory — which is a pretty song Robertson wrote for his own child.
A great loss; two of my favourite albums when they came out were Music for the Native Americans and Contact from the Underworld of Redboy, which was a bit of a departure from anything he had done before.
I was just blasting this in the car. One of my favourite albums, especially Take Your Partner By the Hand and Unbound.
Strange that I checked out his autobiography from the library a day or so before the announcement of his passing.
I saw Springsteen in Chicago this weekend – pretty meh overall – and was kind of hoping he’d sneak in a Band cover (“Across the Great Divide,” maybe?) to acknowledge Robertson’s memory and impact.
But alas, Bruce never strays from the script anymore.