Robbie Robertson, The Band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, died Wednesday at age 80.
In early 1966, during a break from the tour, Dylan brought Robertson down to Nashville to play guitar on his landmark double album. “We’d go into the studio, and he’d be finishing up the lyrics to the songs we were going to do,” Robertson said. “I could hear his typewriter —The tour came to a sudden end in the summer of 1966 when Dylan crashed his motorcycle in Woodstock, New York.
When they began writing songs for their first LP, Robertson stepped forward as the leader in the process. In a 1969 interview with, the guitarist attempted to explain how he wrote “The Weight.” “I thought of a couple of words that led to a couple more,” he said. “The next thing I know I wrote the song. We just figured it was a simple song, and when it came up, we gave it a try and recorded it three or four times. We didn’t even know if we were going to use it.
By 1976, the Band bassist Rick Danko and keyboardist Richard Manuel developed severe substance abuse issues, and Robertson – who had effectively been on the road since 1959 – was burned out. “The road turns you into a meaningless piece of dribble that will complain about shit that doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” he said in 1987. “It got to the point where I couldn’t see the upside.”
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