ON A warm spring afternoon in London in 1971, when the five members of The Band assembled to talk to the British press about their forthcoming concerts at the Albert Hall, a conversation with Robbie Robertson began with a question about whether, since his songs sounded so old, he had consciously sought traditional materials on which to build them.
“No,” he told me. “The only thing that consciously I’m trying to do is write songs that if you listen to them in a couple of years, they’re not going to go down. A lot of people’s records that I really liked a couple of years ago, I listen to them now and I can’t understand how come I liked them so much… Timelessness is what I’m trying for, most of the time when it’s possible.”
If that was what Robertson wanted, it was certainly what he got. More than half a century later, the news of his death from prostate cancer at the age of 80 prompted a widespread sadness, followed by an instinctive reaching for comfort in a favourite track from among the many whose power had not been diminished by familiarity over the decades.
For those who were around to have a first encounter with The Band when they made their public debut in 1968, the most likely choice was the cryptic, multi-voiced parablefoppishness, to have sprung from the previous century.
