Review: Testimony: A Memoir

Testimony: A Memoir by Robbie Robertson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Robbie Robertson has an incredible story to tell. It’s not enough that his mother is a Choctaw Native-American or that his father was a Canadian Jewish gangster who died in an accident (possibly an “accident”) before he was born. And it’s not enough that he was on the road as a member of Ronnie Hawkins band when he was only 17, that he provided some of the most important electric guitar in Bob Dylan’s first electric period, or that he was on the scene for most of the rock excess of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.

Above all, it should have been enough that he was an integral part of The Band – its lead guitarist and chief songwriter – which is, arguably, one of the handful of the greatest rock bands in American history.

That last point needs a little defending, but hear me out. British rock is mostly about great bands: Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Oasis, and name your favorites. It’s rarely about major solo artists; even Brit rockers like Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton worked to create new bands before abandoning their band success and going out as individual front men. American rock tends to go the other way. Our stars, from the start, have been front men: Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and, again, name your favorites.

When it comes to American bands, though, there are only a handful that have endured without splitting off lead singers or guitarists somewhere else. (I recognize I’m oversimplifying, but still…) At first blush, I can think of only a few American bands that have reshaped mainstream music, have been balanced rosters without a clear front man/woman, and have endured: The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, R.E.M., maybe Pearl Jam, and The Band.

And if you don’t think The Band have endured, give a listen to their music, and then try on something by the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst, the Felice Brothers, the Lumineers, or any of a dozen bands working in the Americana vein right now. Dylan and Neil Young may be the grandfathers of Americana, but the genre runs right through The Band. They are the fathers of this new sound, and – since I’m biased in thinking it’s the richest source of contemporary rock going – I think they still matter.

So, digression ended, this ought to be a great story. It ought to be an account of how this group of disparate musicians – four were from Canada and one an Arkansan – came and stayed together. It ought to be the story of how drummer Levon Helm mentored Robertson into a musician capable of hanging with Dylan and how time with Dylan matured him into one of the great songwriters of his era. (“The Weight,” anyone? And there are 12-15 more great ones where that came from.) It ought to be about the full story behind the way Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Helm had as rich a trio of singers as any band this side of Fleetwood Mac in their prime.

And then it ought to be an answer to the complaint levied by Helm and some of his supporters that Robertson sold out The Band by acquiring all the publishing rights to their songs, leaving himself a playboy pal of David Geffen and relegating the rest of them to the lives of working musicians.

But this book is barely any of that. I hung on throughout it because, as I expect I’ve implied, I’m a big fan of The Band. Instead, this is a succession of things that happened to Robertson, a sometimes mixed up account of his life leading up to The Band and culminating in their memorable Last Waltz break-up concert.

It opens in awkward fashion, starting with the day he took a train south from Canada to join Ronnie Hawkins band in the U.S., but immediately flashing back to a disorganized series of anecdotes about learning the guitar and getting to know Hawkins.

After Robertson straightens out his account – which also doubles back to, and then makes overly complicated, the story of his Jewish gangster uncle’s involvement with the Toronto mafia – it becomes a series of scenes that never quite culminate in a larger narrative.

He must know that there are Levon Helm fans (and likely Danko and Manuel too, with the many fans of Garth Hudson blissfully disinterested in the business side of it all) who resent him, who see him as the guy who made millions off their shared work. Instead, we get perhaps a paragraph in which he reports that the other band members asked to sell him their song rights – even Levon – even after he triple-checked to make sure they knew what they were doing. So they were all strung out on heroin and booze at the time; he was the sober one who thought to take out a loan to buy the rights and give them ready cash.

And all of this ends surprisingly. For a memoir that gives only surface reports of the character of the other Band members, it ends with The Last Waltz. I’d have liked to see more; Robertson did go on to a commercially successful (though, to my ears, largely unlistenable) solo career, and he did become an important soundtrack composer. And the other Band members, the wonderfully unruffled Hudson aside, have all died in ways that I’d like to see him reflect upon. Throughout the second half of this, he expresses concern for Manuel’s substance abuse; I’d like to have heard what it was like to see that deeply talented man kill himself years later – or to have him reflect on Danko’s later, also sad death – or on Helm’s late-life renaissance as a wise man of the Americana scene.

As if those absences aren’t enough, this is just badly written. There’s a flatness throughout, a tendency for Robertson – whose lyrics show a capacity for real poetry – to depend on inert adjectives rather than sustained insight. By way of two examples among many, far too many: there’s his description of his wedding night, “On that special night, we got pregnant.” Or, as he contemplated the L.A. drug scene around David Crosby and Stephen Stills, “Trouble was brewing, and we couldn’t wait to get a hold of it.”

Not every music memoir will rise to the level of Patti Smith’s. Despite its dodging certain difficult topics, I enjoyed Willie Nelson’s very much for the way he managed to show a consistent self from his wannabe songwriter days, through his Outlaw country, to his standing as one of the major figures of American popular music.

But this one, which could be so much more, seems flat. There’s little about the artistry behind this still-terrific music (though there are moments when Robertson gets interesting as he talks about harmonies, arrangements, and guitar parts). Instead, it seems the report of a fascinating man, not so much giving testimony, as contentedly smoothing out the rough parts to make it seem all more pleasant, a far more benign, than it must have been.


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