Robbie Robertson: 20 Essential Songs

Before he was a master of restraint and taste, Robertson was a downright nasty teenage beast of a lead guitarist. On this Bo Diddley cover, he’s backing up Canadian rockabilly journeyman Ronnie Hawkins with his future Band-mates in the Hawks, playing some deeply authentic blues licks, with his guitar snarling and snapping like a garage version of Howlin’ Wolf’s lead guitarist, Hubert Sumlin. They nailed the song in just one take.  —B.H.

For decades, the only officially released track from Bob Dylan and the Band’s epochal 1966 tour was a loping live performance of this track, from a show in Liverpool, England, which dropped as the B-side to “I Want You.” In that version Robertson unleashes a gloriously unhinged, funky squawking solo that at one point has to compete with a simultaneous Dylan harmonica solo, and then an even funkier outro.  Even better was the version from Free Trade Hall in Manchester, released decades later , which has a smoother take on both lead breaks. —B.H.

It takes a lot to outshine Bob Dylan, but Robertson managed to do it for four whole minutes on Blonde on Blonde‘s track two, making his own mark on one of the greatest albums of all time. His screeching blues guitar is the focal point of “Pledging My Time,” with Dylan backing the lead guitar instead of vice versa and making everyone in the room feel higher than a hobo. Listen to 2015’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966, and you’ll be glad Dylan didn’t stick with an earlier take. —A.M.

Dylan flirts and leers through the funniest track on Blonde on Blonde, tossing out a string of double entendres about hats (“Honey, can I jump on it sometime?/I just wanna see if it’s really the expensive kind”) over a 12-bar blues that owes something to Lightnin’ Hopkins. He tried a few ways to get that humor across in the studio, including one take featuring car-honk sound effects and an arrangement that one Dylan scholar described as “a sort of knock-knock joke.” For the final version, he tapped Robertson, whose brash, flashy guitar solo is the perfect punchline — and a riotous highlight on the album. —S.V.L.

The Band was still chiefly known as Dylan’s touring group when it retreated to a pink house in Woodstock, New York, to record its debut, Music From Big Pink. The album was centered by “The Weight,” an oddball fable of debt and burden driven by an indelible singalong chorus. Robertson said he was inspired to write the song after watching director Luis Bunuel’s films about “the impossibility of sainthood,” but characters such as Crazy Chester (who tries to pawn his dog off on the narrator) could have walked straight out of an old folk song. As for the biblical-sounding line “pulled into Nazareth,” it refers at least on one level to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar factory.

Recorded during the Big Pink sessions, “Yazoo Street Scandal” was ultimately left off of the album, perhaps because its frenetic nature didn’t jibe with the other songs’ largely laid-back vibes. Need proof? Listen to Levon Helm’s hooting-and-hollering delivery, a haunting, seedy vocal that evokes the scandal of the title. But these are Robertson’s lyrics — an early indicator of how the Canadian-born songwriter would find his greatest inspiration in the foreign corners of the American South. “Then the cotton king came in chokin’,” he writes. “And the widow laughed and said, I ain’t jokin’.’” —J.H.

Funky, goofy, horny, harmlessly delinquent: These are the qualities that make “Up On Cripple Creek” one of the great American road songs. Robertson weaves a long, winding, shaggy story of a long-haul trucker, who always makes his way back to the same place and the same woman, his one-and-only Bessie. Levon Helm, with his rough Arkansas drawl, gives the narrator the perfect voice to accentuate all the little details Robertson works into the lyrics — from the delightful innuendo of “dips her donut in my tea” to Bessie’s hot take on the music of Spike Jones (“Can’t take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk”). “Up on Cripple Creek” is ultimately timeless because it tells a tale as old as the Odyssey: No matter how far you travel, you’re always traveling towards home, and the people you love. —J.Blistein

Levon Helm, the only member of the Band actually born in the South, may have sung this polarizing tale of a bitter Southerner — bitter over the death of his brother at the hands of a Union soldier and the fall of the Confederacy — but it was the brainchild of Robertson, a Canadian. Still, Robertson paints a vivid picture of Civil War fallout from the perspective of the song’s narrator, the poverty-stricken Tennessee farmer Virgil Kane. While “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” may sound like an unfortunate Lost Cause relic today when viewed through the lens of Black Lives Matter protests and the overdue removal of Confederate monuments, its attention to detail underscores Robertson’s reputation as one of the era’s great songwriters. “I was trying to write a song that I thought Levon could sing better than anybody in the world,” Robertson said to SiriusXM in 2020, downplaying the less comfortable implications of the song. “That’s all it was. A little movie, and the perfect thing for him.” —J.H.

The tracklist to the Band’s second album places this tender lullaby right between the landmark hits “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” making it greatly overshadowed. Rick Danko’s gorgeous harmonies reveal the story of a boy who receives life advice from an elder. Robertson’s songwriting was so powerful it made an impression on Father John Misty, who spoke to us about it in 2015. “It’s got all these minutiae of an imaginary agrarian life,” he said. “This one is for those days where I’m in my bathrobe doing a crossword puzzle sporadically for six or seven hours.” —A.M.

“King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” is the story of a farmer who loses his land and livelihood, ends up in poverty, and finds a new sense of resilient hope in the promise of joining a labor union. “Just don’t judge me by my shoes,” the narrator pleads in a moment of rich realism. The way the the Band’s buoyant, incisive groove (capped off with a funky, hard-driving guitar solo from Robertson) seems to offer a balm against the desperation in the lyrics makes it one of the Band’s most striking achievements, and a prime example of Robertson’s ability to reach beyond mere rural mythologizing to find a deeper moral meaning. “I was just a kid and it made such a huge impression on me that I wanted to write about it,” he said years later of his first trips from Canada to the South. “I was so overwhelmed at that age by the South. It had a profound effect on me.” —J.D.

Three albums into their career, a note of discord had begun to disturb the Band’s harmony, as hard drugs and disagreements over songwriting credit entered the mix. All of that made it onto 1970’s Stage Fright in various veiled forms, but for the title track, Robertson opted for honesty, writing about a “lonely kid” overwhelmed by success: “They gave this ploughboy his fortune and fame/Since that day, he ain’t been the same.” It’s often thought that he was writing about the Band’s debut live performance at San Francisco’s Winterland the prior year, when he required a hypnotist’s help before going onstage. In later years, Robertson told the Toronto Globe and Mail that his worst jitters actually came before the Band’s Woodstock performance, and, more surprisingly, at the Last Waltz: “Before you get out there, you feel something crawling down your spine. You tell yourself that you’ve got to do great, that I can’t forget anything. It’s real.” —S.V.L.

“The Shape I’m In” is an exercise in songwriting as intervention. It’s a hard-driving tune about a hard-driving man, who doesn’t seem to care, or notice, that he’s about to drive off the road (“Oh out of nine lives, I spent seven/Now how in the world do you get to Heaven?”). Famously, Robertson didn’t write “The Shape I’m In” about just any man. He wrote it about his bandmate Richard Manuel, and had him sing it, too. (Manuel lived for another 16 years after its release in 1970, but his struggles with addiction never abated; he died by suicide in 1986.) “The Shape I’m In” is a song that feels like it’s hurtling towards a tragic inevitability, as if Robertson always knew how it would end. “Save your neck or save your brother,” he wrote, “Looks like it’s one or the other.” —J.Blistein

Co-written with Levon Helm and Rick Danko, “Life Is a Carnival” takes the Band’s Americana funk to new heights, with Allen Toussaint contributing nimble, inventive horn arrangements. Robertson adds a deceptively simple, chugging acoustic part that pushes and pulls against the horns, and unleashes tight little barrages of lead riffs. As he wrote in his memoir, Robertson got the song’s theme from his “time working at a ragtime carnival and midway sideshow in Toronto.” —B.H.

When the Band reunited with Dylan for Planet Waves in 1974, Robertson demonstrated yet again what he brought to Dylan’s songs — the doomy acoustic lead on “Dirge,” the exposed-nerve picking on ”Going Going Gone,” the gutbucket notes on “Tough Mama.” On their subsequent joint tour, Robertson brought it even more. Next to the original recording of this song, on Blonde on Blonde, this live take on “Most Likely” has hellhounds on its trail. Dylan sang with a throaty aggression he hadn’t shown on record in years. And in his fills and solo, Robertson matched the venom in the boss’ voice with his own screeches and wails, as if unleashing all the pent-up notes he wasn’t able to play when Dylan stepped away from the road for eight years. —D.B.

The sputtering, Curtis Mayfield-like, 17-second-long guitar lead from Robertson that opens the Band’s most beautiful ballad manages to capture all of the song’s elegiac pathos before it even gets started. And then there’s Robertson’s song itself: simple, gorgeous, heart-wrenching, with Rick Danko’s wrenching vocal only made more lonesome by the company of his bandmates’ harmonies on the chorus. “I wanted to write a song that Rick could sing the hell out of,” Robertson told the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, “and I was trying to really find a powerful place for that voice of his to go.”  —B.H.

Robbie Robertson was far away from both his native Canada and from Cajun country when he wrote this nearly seven-minute (and only partially historically accurate) opus at his Malibu home in 1975. The song, which told the story of the 18th-century expulsion of French Acadians and their troubled migration to Louisiana, was one of Robertson’s finest narratives and a signal of his expanding vision in the mid-Seventies. “It was as if Robbie had finally lived outside Canada for long enough,” Barney Hoskyns wrote in his book on the Band, “to see it through the same romantic lens he’d used to view the American South a decade before.” —J.Bernstein

One of The Band’s most boisterous recordings — Garth Hudson’s horns! Richard Manuel’s Hammond! Levon Helm’s rowdy vocal! — once again sprang from Robertson’s mind. It also features one of Robbie’s most exquisite guitar solos, both on the studio version from 1975’s Northern Lights – Southern Cross and in the quintessential live recording from The Last Waltz. During Helm’s comeback tour decades later, the drummer made it a staple of his live shows, stirring the masses with that yearning plea for the titular “Ophelia” to “come back home.” Since then, it’s been covered by everyone from My Morning Jacket to Eric Church, a true genre-crossing classic. —J.H.

The jaunty theme to The Last Waltz motion picture in 1978 was a hint of the relationship that was to come between Robbie Robertson and cinematic scores. It’s also the perfect capper to the best rock & roll concert film of all time, with Robertson plucking an acoustic guitar to close the film’s credits while his Band-mates fall in behind him. Robertson would go on to compose the title theme for Scorsese’s The Color of Money in 1986 and eventually become the director’s go-to musical supervisor, overseeing the music for movies like Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Irishman. (He also cut a song inspired by the hitmen of the The Irishman, the Van Morrison collab “I Hear You Paint Houses,” which appeared on Robertson’s final album, 2019’s Sinematic.) —J.H.

On this gorgeous moment from Robertson’s first post-Band solo record, there are no characters or fictional narratives, no mythic Americana, no guitar showcasing. Just feelings of deep connections and promises of eternal devotion (“I want to come when you call/And I’ll get to you if I have to crawl”), set to one of his most beautiful and sensual melodies. With former bandmate Rick Danko guesting on the chorus, “Broken Arrow” glanced back at the past while, with its bed of synths, making a case for Robertson’s own creative future. Rod Stewart also did the song justice in a later cover. —D.B.

Robertson was never known for his singing, but, wow, could he summon a vibe. Listen to “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” a spoken-word number so dark, steamy, and humid that it sounds as if it were recorded on a Mississippi riverboat. It’s also the highlight of Robertson’s self-titled 1987 solo debut and, to hear co-producer Daniel Lanois tell it, the song happened by accident. “I had presented him with this toy instrument…like an electric autoharp. He found a little chord sequence with it that was sweet and wonderful. As he was developing his chord sequence I recorded him and superimposed his storytelling, which I was secretly recording, on top,” Lanois told the Canadian music site Exclaim in 2007. “It’s kind of like a guy with a deep voice telling you about steaming nights in Arkansas. So I presented it to him and he went, ‘Whoa, how did this happen?’” Or as Robertson dramatically utters near the song’s end: “Wait, did you hear that?” —J.H.