The late musician’s recordings with Bob Dylan as part of the Band stand as a testament to unrealized promise.
Save this storyThe wounded sense of what might have been that’s hovered over the story of the Band since Robbie Robertson walked away from the group in 1976 swelled miserably this month with the surprising news that Robertson had died, at age eighty. It was a sombre moment even for those who had long since come to resent the guitarist-songwriter for his role in dissolving what some believe was one of the greatest ensembles of the rock era, a kind of North American Beatles.
That original group was never going to get back together. The pianist Richard Manuel hanged himself in a Quality Inn bathroom after the Robertson-less Band played the Cheek to Cheek Lounge, outside of Orlando, in 1986. Thirteen years later, the bassist Rick Danko’s heart gave out at age fifty-five, and, in 2012, the drummer Levon Helm succumbed to throat cancer. The multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, eighty-six, is the lone surviving member.
That sense of unfulfilled promise is perhaps at its most acute when one is cueing up the informal recordings that Bob Dylan made with the group in upstate New York in 1967. This is the mysterious, ineffable music that inspired Greil Marcus to coin the term “the old, weird America” in his attempt to describe the disparate strains and influences that seem to percolate beneath its opaque surface.
Listen to more of these songs. A few, like “I Shall Be Released,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” and “Quinn the Eskimo ” have become ubiquitous, but check out tracks like “
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