Scorsese's Remarkable Tribute to Robbie Robertson

A portrait of his late friend and collaborator in words and Polaroids, with "Tupelo Honey" on the soundtrack.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films for PBS. He was also the longtime executive editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. His film “Atomic Cover-up” became free via Kanopy this month.

Back in August, with the death of one of my favorite writers and guitarists, Robbie Robertson, I posted here ten of his songs: with Dylan, with The Band, solo. And, of course, three from “The Last Waltz.” (Re-assembled below.)

Today I came upon a remarkable memoir in Rolling Stone, plus Polaroids, re: Robbie by the director of that film, Martin Scorsese. He had a nearly half-century run as Robbie friend, roommate, party-goer, traveler, and collaborator on the music for so many of his films, going back to Raging Bull and to next month’s opening of Killers of the Flower Moon. So here are a few excerpts from that—since it’s behind a pay wall—along with those ten songs posted previously. Subscribe if you wish, it’s still free.

Those first Band records, that aggregate sound — organ, guitar, the different voices, all coming out of a mysterious place called Big Pink … the songs — the world of tricksters and rogues, unfaithful servants and vigilantes, hardship and deliverance, hymns and murder ballads, Shenandoah and Cripple Creek, Daniel and the sacred harp, Carmen and the devil walking side by side, the flying Dutchman’s on the reef … it was as vast as the continent, it was influenced by everything and nothing, it was completely original, and it came right out of the soil, the beauty and the tragedy of this place called North America.

_____

TRACKING SHOT past masterpieces in the Uffizi Gallery. Utrillo, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. One after another after another. Overwhelming. Such greatness … am I getting annoyed?

We’re taking in the museum. He goes one way, I go another.

We lose each other.

Eventually, I leave the building. I see him sitting on the stoop, dejected. He looks up, quiet-like: “We’re bums.”

“Yeah, we’re bums,” I said.

____

More films, more music.

Alida Valli running down purple streets of Venice screaming “Franz! Franz!” — the sky above her is mauve and rose — Bruckner’s seventh symphony surges. Visconti’s Senso ends. Faded print.

We get up, drift outside.

The sky above us is mauve and rose. We’re still in the Visconti film. Inside and outside.

The sun is coming up. The only thing left to do was to put on “Tupelo Honey.” That’s what always happened. Van and “Tupelo Honey.” It was sort of our sign off.

____

Every year at Thanksgiving, remembering the Last Waltz, we would have a phone call to check in. It was a ritual.

_____

It wasn’t always Bruckner and Praetorious. Most of it was blues, rock, gospel, folk, country, Gil Evans and Miles Davis, Nass El-Ghiwane, Willie Dixon, the American Songbook.

I put on the Sex Pistols. It always irritated him. “Turn it down. They have no musicianship.”

Listening. Years of listening. Songs. Mixes. Sounds. And words. His words, about the music that he was hearing in his head. Words that themselves embodied music and became music. Words that communicated sensual states that made me anticipate what the music would sound like.

I listened to him. We found a common language.

Listening to cicadas, for Silence. Cicadas in early September in Kyushu, cicadas in late August in Hokkaido, all different kinds of sounds of cicadas in different parts of Japan and at different times of year.

They even made their way into Killers of the Flower Moon.

I wanted a harmonica for The Irishman. The feeling of the music for Touchez pas au Grisbi. I slipped Robbie a copy of the soundtrack. He found a great French harmonica player, Frederic Yonnet — and they got it.

_____

My 80th-birthday party. A big affair, but nice feeling in the room.

Robbie walks up to the microphone. There’s a surprise.

He starts talking about our friendship. “There were certain artists that we were drawn to in a cinematic way, in just an incredible, soulful, musical way. We connected on these things. Sometimes these artists just kept coming back, circling around, and we could never resist them.”

Then he introduced Van Morrison.

_____

At the end of the night he said, “Sorry I was a little slow on the draw.”

He never talked much about being sick.

Now I’m mad again. I’m mad he didn’t get the blessing of seeing people experience his work on the score of Killers of the Flower Moon.

But still, he got the grace to create it.

I don’t think I’m going to listen to “Tupelo Honey” anymore.

(But you can, below.)

Ten by Robbie

But let the music speak for itself. All songs by him below, except for Bob’s.

No music clip found yet, but Robbie getting his start with Ronnie Hawkins’s Hawks, about age 16.

Backing Bob in 1966 on “Rolling Stone,” when I first saw him live, in Buffalo.

Carrying “The Weight” at Woodstock (not in the movie and unseen for years).

Wild guitar stylings on long-unreleased “Basement Tapes” song, ‘Under Control”

Recording the great “King Harvest” in California, 1969. Only Garth is left.

Rehearsing “Up on Cripple Creek”

Backing Bob again at Isle of Wight on his “Highway 61 Revisited.”

“It Makes No Difference” at The Last Waltz

Also at the Waltz, “The Shape I’m In”

A song that meant a lot to Robbie, as he revealed to us at Crawdaddy, “Acadian Driftwood,” and here again from the Last Waltz concert but not in the film….with Joni and Neil Young, fellow Canadians, on harmony.

As solo, 1987, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River”

My photo, on visit to Big Pink:

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