Thanks for the heads up, I hadn't heard of this title. Curious, and don't want to start a bashing, but why would anyone want to bash Robbie? Because it rhymes with Bobby?

I read Across the Great Divide years ago (looks like it was updated in 2006) and Levon's This Wheel's on Fire. I remember Divide being kind of boring read, and Levon's book was a little more entertaining, if a little more simple.

Let us know how Robbie's book is, I will probably skip it, just because I know the basic story well enough.

Brer, Robbie and his former band mates, specifically Levon and Rick, didn't get on well after The Band broke up in 1976. The usual band stuff - music writing royalties, money, creative control. Levon felt Robbie had gone Hollywood and taken too many songwriting credits. He became more vocal about it in later years when he and Rick both struggled financially. Right or wrong, you can see the heartbreak in Levon's eyes in The Last Waltz interviews.

And by the way The Complete Last Waltz returns to the CapitalTheater on Nov 23 for the 40th ann.I will be there as will my son who plays in the horn section.What an honor for me. I grew up listening to the Band.

Robbie was on Kimmel the other night to plug the book. Not much to see or learn, Kimmel is his usual reverent self, but worth watching for any Band fans.

http://www.jambase.com/article/robbie-robertson-talks-band-tonight-show

Robbie was on Kimmel the other night to plug the book. Not much to see or learn, Kimmel is his usual reverent self, but worth watching for any Band fans.

http://www.jambase.com/article/robbie-robertson-talks-band-tonight-show

Kimmel?

can't wait to read this book. huge fan of the band. I'm still waiting for the proof that helm and danko cowrote a bunch of those tunes though that they didn't get credit for. if you look the first 2 albums have credit in abundance for others. then it slowly dies out which is when the drugs started up.

helm did himself no favors by barely writing any material after Robertson was no longer part of his life. helm barely has enough credits spread out over like 10 releases from the late 70's until his death to make 1 album of tunes he wrote himself

Right or wrong, you can see the heartbreak in Levon's eyes in The Last Waltz interviews.

Amen...I have noticed that too ,the whole thing really got to him.

Robbie was on Kimmel the other night to plug the book. Not much to see or learn, Kimmel is his usual reverent self, but worth watching for any Band fans.

http://www.jambase.com/article/robbie-robertson-talks-band-tonight-show

Kimmel?

Whoops, meant Jimmy Fallon.

Kimmel? Yeah, he cool. Fallon? He a tool.

Just finishing Testimony, it is a great read. It ends with the Last Waltz, which left me wanting more.
It's pretty amazing that Robbie fell into the Hawks at 16 and is still creating music and writing today.

The questions I'm left with, since it wasn't really covered in the book so there are only bits and pieces out there in public
1) why songwriting credits were not challenged in the beginning, with Big Pink, if it was an issue
2) why there wasn't some $ credit given for arranging
3) why the rest of the band didn't sue RR? (or did they?)

Shades of the Eagles come to mind. At least the Band quit before they were all traveling in separate limos, staying in separate rooms, and only communicating through third party message relay.

Anway, book is a great read, and a fascinating window into the times. Lots of crazy backstage stories.
And of course there was so much, so very much, nobody had to grope to get any.

The questions I'm left with, since it wasn't really covered in the book so there are only bits and pieces out there in public
1) why songwriting credits were not challenged in the beginning, with Big Pink, if it was an issue
2) why there wasn't some $ credit given for arranging
3) why the rest of the band didn't sue RR? (or did they?)

I haven't read Testimony, but I've read a lot about The Band (and other bands), and there isn't a terrible amount of foresight when people are young and in a band making music, having a great time. Most young successful musicians think those waves will last forever. From what I've read, it sounds like there were a lot of drugs, and once the party was over, the only person who had money coming in was the song writer.

Regarding Levon, he was a performer, and that's what the Last Waltz took away from him. After The Last Waltz and The Band broke up, it's not like he wrote a whole lot of songs on later Band or his own solo albums - you can read from that what you will. Levon and Rick both had financial trouble, and to me it sounds like he saw Robbie in LA writing movie scores and living comfortably and that irked him. So either it wasn't an issue at the time because it didn't seem important, or it wasn't an issue until much later when they saw the benefits of song writing royalties when they needed the money (and also, drugs). Here's a good article on Levon and songwriting: http://americansongwriter.com/2012/09/levon-helm-and-songwriting-larry-campbell-and-robbie-robertson-weigh-in/

In the 1950s and 60s songwriters were low on the production totem pole, and guys like Gregg didn't even bother to look at the fine print for their own song writing and publishing deals. Paul McCartney is still trying to buy back the rights to his Beatles songs. Butch has gone on record saying how much arranging he did for Dickey's instrumentals, how much work it was just figuring out what time signature was. Derek and Susan have seen that hindsight, and gone on record saying they try to credit anyone who gives input on a song to avoid any sour grapes decades later. Music is a funny business, but often best friends in any industry don't stay best friends for long when they go into business together.

An old quote seems appropriate:

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
-Hunter S. Thompson

Bob and Heinekin, together: You NAILED it.

I offer 50/50 credit. (let the games begin!)

A nice quick write up on both Robbie CA book tour, and upcoming Amy Helm's bay-area show.

http://www.marinij.com/lifestyle/20161201/the-bands-robbie-robertson-levon-helms-daughter-come-to-marin

The Band’s Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm’s daughter come to Marin

What: Amy Helm and the Midnight Ramble Band
When: 8:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: The Fillmore, 1805 Geary Blvd., San Francisco
Admission: $125 to $1,000
Information: rexfoundation.org

In case you’ve been distracted by the holiday season and our recurring national political nightmare, you may not have noticed that this is unofficially Woodstock Week in Marin County.

It seems a bit random, but a bunch of folks associated with the Band, the Hall of Fame group that broke through with “Music from Big Pink” while famously living in Woodstock in 1968, just happen to be in these parts at the same time.

Robbie Robertson, the Band’s lead guitarist and main songwriter, appeared at Dominican University in San Rafael on Wednesday night on a book tour for his new memoir, “Testimony” (Crown Archetype, hardcover, $30).

Amy Helm, the 45-year-old daughter of the Band’s late drummer and singer, Levon Helm, and singer Libby Titus, is playing a Saturday night concert — a benefit for the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation — at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. They’ll perform with the Midnight Ramble Band, a group Helm’s dad started as the house band for the late night shows, called Rambles, he hosted in his Woodstock Barn until his death from throat cancer in 2012.

“I deeply fell in love with ‘Music from Big Pink’ when I was a teenager,” Helm says, speaking by phone from her home in Woodstock. “I used to listen to it on my Walkman walking to the bus and home every day.”

Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh played several Rambles, became pals with Levon and used that experience as the template for the revolving cast of musicians he performs with at his Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael.

On Sunday night, Larry Campbell, the singer-guitarist who co-founded the Midnight Ramble Band with Amy Helm and her dad, takes the stage at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, performing as a duo with his wife, singer-guitarist Teresa Williams. Campbell won three Grammys for producing Levon Helm’s final three CDs.

Robertson, who’s 73, charmed a full house in Dominican’s Angelico Hall, talking about what he called “the madness” of the Band’s hall of fame career, beginning at Bill Graham’s Winterland and ending there on Thanksgiving day 1976 with the Last Waltz, the Band’s star-studded farewell concert that Martin Scorsese captured on film. That legendary concert happened exactly 40 years ago this week.

“Can you imagine?” Robertson asked in disbelief. “Forty years ago. I think there’s been a mistake. It’s incredible.”

Interviewed on stage by Dan Stone, a journalist with the digital magazine Radio Silence, Robertson wore black slacks and a dark gray oversized shirt that hid a bit of a paunch. He’s gotten a bit jowly, but who hasn’t at his age? He has shortish dark hair and still wears the round glasses that were a big part of his look in his heyday as the leader of one of the greatest rock bands of all time.

Much of his book and his appearance at Dominican focused on the notorious world tour in 1965 and ’66, when the Band backed up Bob Dylan as he made his first hugely unpopular foray into electric rock ’n’ roll, earning the scorn of folk purists in the U.S., Australia and Europe. He had the crowd in stitches, recounting the first couple of shows at Forest Hills Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl, when he and his bandmates didn’t yet know what they were getting themselves into.

“People charged the stage, screaming and booing and throwing stuff,” he recalled. “They jumped on the stage and knocked people over. It was horrifying. We never had an experience like that in our lives. We were saying, ‘This is such a bad idea.’ After we did those two shows, Bob says, ‘Wasn’t that great? Let’s do a whole tour.’”

The audience roared with laughter at that, and again when he told them he learned how to play guitar without looking at his fingers by dodging all the projectiles outraged fans hurled in his direction on that tour.

Robertson is credited with writing most of the Band’s greatest hits, including “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Stage Fright,” “Chest Fever” and many others. Most of the considerable royalties from those songs became a bone of contention between Robertson and Levon Helm, a best friend who had been like a big brother to him.

In his book, “This Wheel’s on Fire,” Helm contended that the songs were a group effort, honed and recorded in collaboration with the other members of the band — Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. Only Robertson and Hudson are still living.

That issue didn’t come up during Robertson’s Dominican talk, and neither did the heroin addictions, alcoholism and drug abuse that forced the Band off the road. Robertson writes about it extensively in “Testimony.”

I asked Amy Helm about that, whether her dad and his onetime buddy made up before her father’s death.

“I think that they would have patched it up,” she says. “They were very close, but every relationship has its own circumstances.”

Her appearance here with the Ramble Band is a rare one. They don’t often venture out West, but they came out just to support the Rex Foundation and their old friends in the Dead.

But it isn’t like she hasn’t been here before. The family of a guitar player in her band lives in Marin, and they’ve showed her many of Marin’s special places.

“We’ve gotten hip to Comforts (in San Anselmo) and Scoop (in Fairfax) and all the good places to eat there,” she said. “I have my haunts in Marin that I like to go to. I’ve got all the inside local info.”

Since reading Testimony I've been playing the s out of Rock of Ages, always just loved the horns.

Wish Gregg covered Chest Fever, could be killer.

I'm not interested enough in The Band to read the book. But I did read an interesting excerpt in Rolling Stone recently.

In 1963 Robertson was with The Hawks featuring Ronnie Hawkins and they had a regular gig at a seedy club in Dallas. The owner, Jack Rubenstein, left the roof off the place after a fire and paid the band.............sometimes, when he felt like it. When they didn't get paid they took to stealing Wonder bread and bologna to survive.

Not long after President Kennedy was murdered, they heard that JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was also murdered...........by Jack Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby.