In the autumn of 1968, when rock music seemed in imminent danger of succumbing to excess of all kinds, a single album – the Band’s Music from Big Pink – provoked a wholesale reconsideration of its priorities. As well as implying a claim to special status, the group’s name was chosen to suggest the ego-less collective endeavour of five individuals, four Canadians and one American. By the time the Band made the cover of Time magazine in 1970, however, Robbie Robertson had emerged not just as their guitarist and chief songwriter but as their musical architect and the engine of their ambition.
Robertson, who has died aged 80, was a superlative guitarist who restored a sense of economy to a craft that had become obsessed with empty virtuosity. As a songwriter, he created small masterpieces of mood, character and narrative, tailored to the expressive voices of Levon Helm, the Arkansas-born drummer who delivered The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down as if the civil war were a personal memory, of Rick Danko, the bassist, who invested It Makes No Difference with ineffable sadness, or of Richard Manuel, the pianist, who evoked a lost world of backporch comfort and joy in Rockin’ Chair.
