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Robbie Robertson finds release with new memoir, Testimony

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For Robbie Robertson, memories can carry a considerable amount of weight.

Among the musician’s many gifts is his ability to recall moments of his past with minute detail. But, as his new memoir reveals, there’s just so much to remember.

The former guitarist and principal songwriter of The Band had been carrying his colourful recollections around for more than half a century. Over the years, he had tried to document them with various co-writers, but it never felt quite right.

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The memories lived on. They became cumbersome. It was starting to get exhausting, he says.

“At this point, I just couldn’t carry this many stories around with me,” Robertson says, in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “It was too heavy and it was wearing me down. I thought, OK I’ve got to unload these stories and I’ve got to set them free.”

So the 73-year-old put that remarkable memory to good use by writing Testimony, a rollicking, detailed memoir that covers the near-mythical beginnings and dynamic final chapter of one of modern music’s most beloved and enigmatic acts.

Robertson is known for penning literary songs with cinematic scope such as The Weight and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. So it’s not surprising that he gives readers a beautifully rendered story arc, starting with his upbringing in Toronto and on the Six Nations Reserve and ending with an intimate, first-person account of The Band’s star-studded 1976 farewell concert, The Last Waltz. Robertson was only 33 when he and director Martin Scorsese oversaw what is now widely regarded as the best concert film/music documentary of all time.

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So clearly, the story wasn’t over for a songwriter who would go on to release five solo records, compose film scores and even dabble in acting. The remaining members of the Band, meanwhile, would eventually continue on without him. For years, drummer and one-time best friend Levon Helm accused Robertson of taking too much songwriting credit and attempting to hijack the act’s legacy.

But, for now, this was the story Robertson wanted to tell. It had a humble beginning, a wild-hearted middle, and an elegant end.

“It was enough,” he says with a laugh. “It goes up to this beautiful conclusion of the Band. When I wrote this, it came out to be 800 pages. So I cut 300 pages out of it. That’s enough and that’s Vol. 1.”

Robertson confirms there will eventually be a Vol. 2. But he’s right, Testimony contains enough anecdotes for 20 lifetimes, taking readers from the wild rockabilly barroom circuit where Robertson cut his teeth as a teenage guitarist for Ronnie Hawkins to the heady, drug and alcohol-fuelled days of the Band’s top-of-the-world success.

Throughout it all, Robertson uses that fine-tuned memory to put readers in the middle of pivotal chapters in pop-culture history. He’s like a rock-star Zelig, appearing during monumental moments in the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and, of course, Bob Dylan. The latter had the Band back him on relentlessly hostile “electric” tours in the mid-1960s, where the songwriter and his new cohorts were booed and pelted with debris on a nightly basis.

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Everyone from The Beatles, to Marlon Brando, to Tiny Tim, John Belushi, Allen Ginsberg and even Salvador Dali drift through Testimony at one point or another. In one surreal snippet, Robertson and Rick Danko rescue Keith Moon from the ocean, where the Who drummer had passed out while wearing a Nazi uniform.

“That was a big reason why I had to write the book,” Robertson says. “It was like: Holy moly, what a ride! I just seemed to be turning up when the magic was in the air.”

But the heart of Testimony is Robertson’s friendship with his four bandmates. The earliest began in 1960 with the Hawks, where he fell under the tutelage of twangy-voiced Arkansas-born drummer-vocalist Levon Helm. Ronnie Hawkins would eventually hire the remaining members of what would  become the Band: bassist and singer Rick Danko, pianist-vocalist Richard Manuel and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. Bristling under Hawkins’ heavy-handed leadership, all five left him in 1963 to pursue a more adventurous type of music.

The book chronicles this development, and also follows Robertson’s steady evolution as a songwriter. He was only 15 when his crude, early compositions were recorded by Hawkins. Initially, he wrote songs for practical purposes, largely because no one else wanted to. It wasn’t until the Hawks stopped their relentless touring and decamped to the famous “Big Pink” house near Woodstock, New York that he had time to concentrate on writing the sort of epic, multi-layered story songs found on the Band’s classic albums. Still, a recurring theme in the book is Robertson’s reluctance to take on a leadership role, particularly when it came to  songwriting. He didn’t want to dominate, he wanted the other guys to do their share.

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“I was quite foolish in the sense that I thought ‘Oh these guys are just being lazy, they’re not trying,'” Robertson says. “Finally you get to a place and think ‘Some people write, some people don’t.’ I looked at our past and it all made perfect sense, that the evolution was leading up to this point.”

Robertson’s songwriting credits, and the subsequent royalties they earned, were a major bone of contention between him and Helm, who remained bitter with his friend for decades after the Last Waltz. Tragically, only Robertson and Hudson remain from the original lineup. Manuel, who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction his entire life, committed suicide in 1986. Danko died of a heart attack in 1999. Helm succumbed to throat cancer in 2012.

None of this is chronicled in Testimony. But in the last days of Helm’s life, Robertson visited him in the hospital and held his hand by his bedside. Whether Helm’s anger toward his friend dissipated before he died is unclear. He wasn’t conscious for most of the visit. 

Robertson says the deaths of his three bandmates still don’t feel real to him.

“It’s difficult to accept,” he says. “I know it’s true, but in a fantasy I just imagine them always being there … Because the music has such a strength, such a power to it in a certain kind of way, they live on to me.”

WordFest presents Robbie Robertson at the Bella Concert Hall, Mount Royal University Conservatory on Dec. 7 at 7 p.m. Testimony is now available.

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