Robbie Robertson died yesterday. Y'all have only heard one example of my playing, unless you did a deep search on YouTube and found some old acoustic videos, and those examples won't much suggest that Robbie Robertson is the guitarist that I identify with the most.
Robertson was a songwriter and an ensemble player. There are no Robertson guitar solos out there that will come to your mind, the way solos by Hendrix, Joe Walsh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Eddie Van Halen will. He wasn't a shredder. He never had a monster guitar rig like other famous guitarists.
But he was enormously influential. While Buddy Holly was the first famous guitarist to use a Fender Stratocaster for rock and roll, and Jimi Hendrix legitimized it for hard rock, it was Robbie Robertson's influence, not Hendrix's, that got players like Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Dave Gilmour, and others to embrace that instrument.
And Robertson always embodied the role I preferred to play in a band - songwriter and supporting guitarist. I can put together complicated guitar parts, and I can quickly learn about anything you want to throw at me. I can play lead guitar and I have a distinct style. But that's not what I prefer to focus on. I want to write songs.
If you younger whippersnappers for whatever reason don't get what the big deal was about The Band, then watch Scorsese's documentary of their farewell concert, "The Last Waltz." But when you do, start by remembering that they began as a backing band, first for Ronnie Hawkins, and then for Bob Dylan. As you watch the film, and the parade of heavy-hitters that sit in with them throughout the movie, note how The Band drew those stars into what they did, and not the other way round. The Band could play with anybody, but they never faded into the background, rather whoever they backed became part of their sound. That's what the big deal was.
Well, part of it. The other part was that they defined a new genre of popular music, which has come to be known as "Americana." They didn't invent it, you can't invent a genre that draws from old American pop forms and reimagines them. But they defined it. It's not Blues Rock, or Folk Rock, or Country Rock. It draws from overlooked nooks and crannies of all these forms, and distills them into a brew that seems familiar, and yet, when you dig into it and break it down, it's completely different from anything that came before it.
So yesterday was a sad day for me.
