I’m not sure what to make of Robbie Robertson’s memoir, Testimony.
Jaime Royal Robertson, who died in 2023, was lead guitarist for The Band from its 1959 beginning as The Hawks backing Canadian singer Ronnie Hawkins in Canada, through their time as Bob Dylan’s backing band (when they became The Band), followed by six albums of their own, and until their breakup in 1976.
In that year, Martin Scorsese filmed their farewell concert, The Last Waltz, and that closes the book.
Robertson is generally acknowledged as the primary songwriter for the band, but this is not without some controversy. For example, he gets sole credit for one of their most enduring, popular, and influential songs, The Weight but this was later disputed by several band members, most notably drummer Levon Helm, who claimed in his memoir that Robertson either finagled or outright stole the credit from other band members.
In Testimony, Robertson does not address this even though Helm died in 2012, some four years before Robertson’s book came out. It’s possible Robertson doesn’t discuss because his book only goes up to the 1976 post-The Last Waltz breakup and most of the acrimony by his band mates was expressed in ensuing years. Maybe.
In fact, Robertson doesn’t talk about the well known problems within The Band much at all, other than to say he was concerned about the heavy drug use by some members. The impression Robertson gives is that he didn’t have a drug problem, but this is contradicted by the recent TV series Mr Scorsese, in which the director talks candidly about his excessive cocaine use for several years, mostly in the company of the equally indulgent Robbie Robertson.
What Robertson projects in Testimony is that The Band was a close knit “band of brothers”, with whom he took great pains to ensure songwriting credits, and whose drug use concerned him greatly. He talks of Helm as his closest “brother”, even though Helm and several other band members expressed their dissatisfaction with Robertson’s overbearing manner and claiming of too much credit for the group’s success.
Aside from that, Testimony is really easy to read, well structured (it bounces between his childhood and the band’s early history), and on the whole very well written. A bonus was that, as I’ve seen quite a few clips of Robbie talking – in The Last Waltz and Mr Scorsese, especially – that it was easy to “hear” the book in his distinctive voice.
I was a bit disappointed , though, that it stopped before Robertson’s solo career even started as I’m as much a fan of his solo albums as that of The Band.
I was also a bit nagged that such an articulate writer, consummate songwriter and extremely gifted country / blues / rock guitarist has very little to say about the songs and music, other than in very broad, exalted terms. When he describes his exposure to musical greats, he writes of ecstatic, sometimes slightly hysterical experiences, but without much technical detail.
He doesn’t even explain how he crafted the lyrics to some of his classic songs, just “the words came to me”. It’s a relief when Jimi Hendrix shows him how to string a guitar so it’ll stay in tune even through excessive use of the tremolo bar. OK, maybe that’s not the content that everyone reads books like this for, but I do.
I should add that the section of the book that is the most interesting – indeed, thrilling (with the possible exception of the convert filmed as The Last Waltz) – is when the band is ensconced in the Big Pink house in Woodstock, working out their first album and crafting their sound.
This is also where Robertson’s accounts sits least comfortably with other’s recollections. When Robbie says of The Weight, “I wrote it all in one go”, that’s not what other band members have said.
It’s also there that, having decided they can’t be The Hawks any more, they pick up on the local townspeople referring to them as “the band” and go with that as their new name.
Robertson is also a terrible (or perhaps, to be fair, an excellent) name dropper. And yes, that is also what I read music bios for, but he does go a bit over the top.
Still, 500 pages passes very quickly, and Testimony is mostly very enjoyable (his uncle’s shady business dealings aside). I just felt it was not the whole story and a bit too self-aggrandising. My impression of one of my rock heroes was left a little tarnished.