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Bob Dylan is speaking out about the death of Robbie Robertson, lamenting the loss of his “lifelong friend.”
In a statement he issued to Billboard, the 82-year-old rock legend offered his first public statement on Robertson, who died at age 80 on Wednesday.
“This is shocking news,” Dylan said. “Robbie was a lifelong friend. His passing leaves a vacancy in the world.”
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Dylan’s association with Robertson dates back to 1966, when he tapped The Hawks (who would go on to renamed themselves The Band) as his backing band during his 1966 tour.
Now seen as groundbreaking, Dylan’s decision to “go electric” infuriated the folk-music purists at the heart of his fan base, creating controversy wherever they played.
“We got booed all over North America, Australia, Europe, and people were saying this isn’t working and we kept on and Bob didn’t budge,” Robertson told Mojo in a 2017 interview.
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Dylan’s musical association with Robertson and The Band would continue, on and off, in the years that followed.
While Dylan recuperated from a motorcycle accident in the late 1960s at his home in Woodstock, New York, Robertson and the other members of The Band lived nearby, and would regularly get together to work on new music; the result of these informal sessions came to be known as The Basement Tapes, a sought-after bootleg recording that was subsequently given an official release.
The Band reunited with Dylan to back him on his 1974 album Planet Waves, and also joined Dylan for a successful 40-show tour that same year.
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When The Band played its final show in 1976, documented in Martin Scorsese’s concert film “The Last Waltz”, the guest of honour was Dylan, who’d once described Robertson as “the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who doesn’t offend my intestinal nervousness with his rear-guard sound.”
In fact, Robertson was invited to work with Dylan on the latter’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, but had to turn it down.
“I was just slammed with work,” Robertson told Rolling Stone in 2020, explaining he was in the midst of working on Martin Scorsese’s film “The Irishman” along with his own album, Sinematic. “I said, ‘Right now, I’m in the middle of this stuff,’ and I think that he just felt like it was cooked and he needed to bring it out of the oven. So he went in and recorded this album.”
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Robertson also revealed that when he spoke with Dylan about the project, he showed him some lyrics he was working on at the time. “I thought, this is just terrific writing and something that only Bob could do,” Robertson added. “And I would have loved for us to work together on that. But I just couldn’t do it at that time. I was gonna check in with him and just say, ‘God, I’m sorry I wasn’t available then, but let’s see if we can cause some trouble down the line.’”
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